Why Is There a Pagan Column in That Church? Somebody Took It

The practice covers any architectural or sculptural element taken from an existing building and incorporated into a new one, and the range is wide. Columns with their capitals and bases were the commonest, being valuable, portable and immediately useful. Carved panels, inscriptions and statues were set into walls. Plain blocks were reused as ordinary masonry, sometimes with the carved face turned inward. Bronze fittings and roof tiles were stripped. Whole structures were quarried systematically over generations, with the Colosseum supplying stone for churches and palaces across Rome for centuries.

Reuse made obvious sense under the conditions of the time:

• •Quarrying, cutting and transporting new stone was enormously expensive
• •Columns in particular required skill and material no longer available
• •Large monolithic shafts were effectively impossible to produce anew
• •The material was lying available and unclaimed
• •Reused elements were already finished and needed no carving
• •Building quickly mattered to patrons who wanted to see it done

Art historians divide over whether the practice carried a message beyond economy, and the evidence supports both readings in different cases. Where reused columns are carefully matched in height and material, the intent looks aesthetic. Where they are conspicuously mismatched, with different stones and capitals in one row, the older reading was decline and incompetence and the current one is frequently that variety was valued. Where elements from a defeated or superseded culture are placed in a position of subordination, as at the base of a Christian structure, a statement of triumph is hard to avoid. And an arch of 315 in Rome reuses sculpture from three earlier emperors, which has been read as poverty of resources and as a claim to inherit their virtues.

Certain buildings are effectively museums of the practice and reward looking closely. The Great Mosque of Cordoba stands on rows of columns and capitals taken from Roman and Visigothic buildings, of varying heights, which the builders equalised by adjusting the bases and by adding a second tier of arches above. San Lorenzo in Milan reuses a colonnade of Roman columns standing outside it. Numerous Italian churches carry classical inscriptions built into their walls at odd angles, some upside down. Byzantine and Ottoman buildings in Istanbul reuse material continuously across a millennium. And ordinary field walls and farm buildings across the former Roman world contain dressed blocks that came from something grander.

The practice creates a specific trap for anybody trying to date a building, and it has caught people. A carved element in a wall dates the carving and not the wall, so an inscription of the second century set into a church says nothing about when the church was built. Multiple reuse compounds this, since an element can be moved twice or three times over a millennium. Reused material also carries the marks of its earlier setting, including clamp holes and weathering patterns that do not match its current position, and reading those marks is how archaeologists reconstruct what a lost building looked like from the pieces scattered through later ones.

Columns, carvings and blocks taken from older buildings and set into new ones saved the enormous cost of quarrying and the skill of carving, and supplied monolithic shafts nobody could produce any more. Whether mismatched assemblies signal decline or a taste for variety is argued case by case. A carved element dates its own carving and not the wall holding it, which has misled people repeatedly.