History of medieval Arabic and Western European domes

Fictional Arab people South Arabian deities The early domes of the Middle Ages, particularly in those areas recently under Byzantine control, were an extension of earlier Roman architecture.

Domes on pendentives, apparently based upon Byzantine models, appear in the Aquitaine region of France after the beginning of the Crusades in 1095, such as the abbey church of Fontevrault, where Richard the Lionheart was buried.

[6] The Syria and Palestine area has a long tradition of domical architecture, including wooden domes in shapes described as "conoid", or similar to pine cones.

When the Arab Muslim forces conquered the region, they employed local craftsmen for their buildings and, by the end of the 7th century, the dome had begun to become an architectural symbol of Islam.

The rapidity of this adoption was likely aided by the Arab religious traditions, which predate Islam, of both domed structures to cover the burial places of ancestors and the use of a round tabernacle tent with a dome-like top made of red leather for housing idols.

[20][21] The green dome at the center of the Round city of Baghdad covered the throne room of al-Mansur's palace and was topped by a statue of a horseman holding a lance.

[31] That southern Italy was reconquered and ruled by a Byzantine governor from about 970 to 1071 explains the relatively large number of small and rustic Middle Byzantine-style churches found there, including the Cattolica in Stilo and S. Marco in Rossano.

[34] With the crowning of Charlemagne as a new Roman Emperor, Byzantine influences were largely replaced in a revival of earlier Western building traditions, but occasional exceptions include examples of early quincunx churches at Milan and near Cassino.

[43] Although customarily a qadi would hear cases within the chief mosque, Abbasid Caliph al-Muhtadi reportedly built a domed hall with four doors for his role in administering justice.

The Corbera church may not have been intended to have a dome when the foundations were laid and the crossing bay was narrowed to create a square by the insertion of additional arches on the north and south sides.

[67] In Italy, the frequency, quality, and scope of dome construction increased beginning in the 11th century (although not in the city of Rome) and they were used in baptisteries, princely chapels, cathedrals, bell towers, and pieve churches.

[72] At the Church of San Salvatore [it] in Barzanò, a third phase of construction added a hemispherical dome on squinches over the existing central bay of the building, possibly in the late 11th century.

[108] The Mausoleum of Bohemond (c. 1111–18), a Norman leader of the First Crusade, was built next to the Basilica of San Sabino in the southern Italian province of Apulia and has a hemispherical dome in a Byzantine style over a square building with a Greek cross plan.

[114] The French Romanesque addition replaced the eastern apse of the rotunda and a courtyard marking the center of the world and was consecrated on July 15, 1149, the fiftieth anniversary of the capture of the city.

[120] Churches in northern Italy after 1100 were designed with vaulting from the outset, rather than as colonnaded basilicas with timber roofs and, like the Rhenish imperial cathedrals, many have octagonal domes with squinches over their crossings or choirs.

[124] Documentary evidence indicates that the Romanesque dome of San Lorenzo was a thin hemisphere of light material over a cube of space about 23.8 meters (40 Milanese braccia) on each side.

[142] Originally designed as a three-aisled hall church with barrel vaults, after the choir was completed the nave was redesigned with piers to support the line of domes spanning the full width.

[149] The architectural influences at work here have been much debated, with proposed origins ranging from Jerusalem, Islamic Spain, or the Limousin region in western France to a mixture of sources.

The three domes on squinches of Santa Maria in Mili San Pietro [it], one of the first Norman buildings, are close together in a row above the prothesis, presbytery, and diaconicon, with the largest and tallest in the middle.

Domes were used over single room structures as well as more complex assemblies, with the differences in building traditions and preferred materials in north and south Syria disappearing over time.

[185] The domed "Decagon" nave of St. Gereon's Basilica in Cologne, Germany, a ten-sided space in an oval shape, was built between 1219 and 1227 upon the remaining low walls of a 4th-century Roman mausoleum.

[179] In the mudéjar style of Seville after the Christian reconquest of the city, a kind of dome made of intricately interlaced pieces of painted and gilded wood was known as a media naranja, or "half orange".

Most of the smooth domes are brick, but two stone examples are in the narthex of the Tomb of Salar and Sangar al-Gawli, believed to be built for Bäštāk [ar] in 1348, and the Mausoleum of Qurqumas (1511).

[209] The stone domes were generally single shells except at the conical crown, where there is a gap between inner and outer layers filled with earth and rubble and which contains the bases of the metal spires.

[212] The architectural rules for dome transitional zones established by the Fatimids and Ayyubids were not continued by the Bahri Mamluks, who innovated in structural, decorative, and constructive techniques.

[216] The traditional stepped treatment continued to be used for the exterior transition zones, but new "prismatic triangles, undulating mouldings, and chamfering" patterns were introduced from earlier use in the bases of stone minarets.

[234] Rapid progress on a radical expansion of Siena Cathedral, which would have involved replacing the existing dome with a larger one, was halted not long after the city was struck with an outbreak of the Black Death in 1348.

[254] The combination of dome, drum, pendentives, and barrel vaults developed as the characteristic structural forms of large Renaissance churches following a period of innovation in the later fifteenth century.

However, the smooth, almost-hemispherical dome without ribs and the sixteen-sided timburio with two galleries and a pitched roof are clearly modeled on the earlier Church of San Lorenzo in Milan, called the "Milanese Pantheon", and the interior arrangement is similar to that of the Portinari Chapel.

[268] De re aedificatoria, written by Leon Battista Alberti and dedicated to Pope Nicholas V around 1452, recommends vaults with coffering for churches, as in the Pantheon, and the first design for a dome at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is usually attributed to him, although the recorded architect is Bernardo Rossellino.