PreviousDays✦THE WIKI
← All historyTHE ARCHIVE · 3 STORIES

Before 1500

Ancient worlds, enduring ideas.

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History doesn’t stand still.

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MOMENTS FROM THIS ERA

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3 illustrated stories · growing daily
Clergy gather beneath a vast unpainted masonry dome in an imagined fifteenth-century cathedral ceremony.Places & travel

Florence Cathedral’s Consecration in 1436 and Brunelleschi’s Dome

Pope Eugene IV consecrated Santa Maria del Fiore on 25 March 1436. Its immense dome embodied an engineering achievement: masonry constructed without the full timber centering normally required to support a rising vault.

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Early fourteenth-century visitors look at narrative frescoes beneath the blue starry vault of the Scrovegni Chapel.Places & travel

Consecration of the Scrovegni Chapel and Giotto’s frescoes

Consecrated on March 25, 1305, Padua's Scrovegni Chapel joined religious devotion and family patronage with a new approach to painted space and human emotion.

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An imagined sixth-century Hagia Sophia interior shows its broad dome, great arches, curved supports and small worshippers.Places & travel

Hagia Sophia's dedication and the engineering of its dome

Hagia Sophia was inaugurated in Constantinople on 27 December 537. Its architects combined a vast domed space with a basilican plan, using curved pendentives and massive supports to create one of late antiquity's most influential interiors.

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