Landmarks of Saint Petersburg obtained in 1869 from the Tsar Alexander II. The Small Synagogue was opened in 1886. On 5 Tamuz 5761 (June 26, 2001), the greater hall ("Bolshoi Zal" in Russian) was reopened after reconstruction. Two small churches in the early Gothic Revival style, both designed by Yuri Felten, are the St John the Baptist (1776–1781) and the Chesmenskaya (1777–1780). The late 19th-century and early 20th-century temples are designed in the Russian Revival or Byzantine Revival styles. Saint Petersburg Mosque (1909–1920), once the largest in Europe, is modeled after the Gur-e Amir Mosque in Samarkand. St Petersburg Buddhist temple was the first
History of aesthetics before the 20th century refers to Greek philosophers as the earliest source of formal aesthetic considerations. Plato believed in beauty as a "form" in which beautiful objects partake and which causes them to be beautiful. He felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the "Metaphysics", Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness. From the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics underwent a slow revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British thinkers emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and