Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture

Richard Krautheimer was a leading architectural historian and this is the standard volume in the Pelican History of Art series on early Christian and Byzantine church building, completed with Slobodan Curcic and working directly from the surviving buildings and archaeological remains to trace how church architecture actually developed from the early Church through the Byzantine period. That direct engagement with the physical structures is the volume's real evidentiary basis. Use it for established facts about the architectural form and historical development of early Christian and Byzantine churches; it addresses building form specifically, not liturgy or doctrine beyond how each shaped construction, so a claim about liturgical practice needs a separate liturgical source.