Hagia Sophia, Church of the Holy Wisdom
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
It is as familiar to the world as the Mona Lisa or the Coca-Cola sign. It would be presumptuous to pretend to be able to sum up Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, in a thousand words. Its history, at the hands of hasty contractors, iconoclasts, remodelers, Crusaders, Islamists, and the Turkish government, not to mention earthquakes, would fill volumes. Analysis of its geometry has filled volumes. Instead, a more modest proposal: let us walk, in our imaginations, through the church as it might have appeared in the Emperor Justinian's time, to see how it might have been perceived and understood in its own era.
Hagia Sophia was the ambitious project of an ambitious emperor. Justinian I, successful politician, codifier of law, military and diplomatic genius, and rich beyond imagining, set his hand to architecture after the cathedral church of Constantinople burned to the ground in the riots of 532. The designers he chose were not architects, but two theoretical scientists. Isidore of Miletus was a physicist, a theoretical commentator on vaulting methods, and Anthemius of Tralles was a geometer and specialist in statics and kinetics. Both were associated with the Neo-Platonist Ammonius of Alexandria, to whom the manifestation of deity was light and the sun; it is impossible to think of Hagia Sophia apart from its light.
The Earthbound
Some of our imaginative journey will be based on what remains of Hagia Sophia today, and some of it must be speculation drawn from scholarly investigation. Let us begin our hypothetical walk by assembling with the liturgical procession in the narthex, a relatively narrow entrance hall, vaulted and rather dimly lit. From remains of the decoration in the narthex, archaeologists surmise that the decoration of Hagia Sophia was rather sparse. The walls were inlaid with panels of marble, with mosaic decoration limited to the vaults. The mosaic color palette itself was limited, though rich: blue and silver geometric designs alternating with vines, leaves, flowers, and birds; there were also gold crosses set with red and green jewels—overall rather modest.
Standing in the narthex, we can catch a glimpse through the doors of the main body of the church. Writers in Antiquity always mentioned the floor: it was of alternating bands of white and green marble, and was often described as a shimmering sea, out of which rose islands (the ambo, the stone of coronation), and which led in the end to the safe harbor of the sanctuary.
The previous churches on this spot were built on the Roman basilica plan, with one central and two flanking aisles, often with arcaded galleries above. The longitudinal space was considered proper to the liturgical movement from the entrance toward the sanctuary. Justinian's church, which is nearly square, is similarly divided into three longitudinal aisles, two side aisles with galleries divided into rectangular bays, and a long central rectangle leading to the sanctuary apse. To Anthemius and the geometers of the ancient world, the rectangle, with its flat base and square corners, represented stasis, the stable and unmoving, the earthbound, as it were.
The Heavenly
But once we leave the dim light of the narthex and enter into the main body of the church, all thought of the earthbound disappears. Anthemius's stasis gives way to kinesis, and all of Isidore's genius for vaulting is called into play. The central space of the church rises up in a series of vaults pierced with openings for light. Arched walls of windows rise above the side galleries. Four half-domed exedra at the ends of these walls open out into larger half-domes at either end of the center aisle, forming a square bay. Triangular pendentives spring up from this bay and are crowned with an enormous central dome, which rises more than 180 feet above the floor. The sheer immensity is staggering: this was at the time the largest church ever built, and it remained the largest for a thousand years.
It is as if the upper part of the church has grown organically from its rectangular base in a blossoming of spherical sections. To the Ancients, the circle and the sphere, the action of a point in perpetual motion around a fixed center, represented perfect kinesis or movement, that is to say, perfect action, and were thus a perfect representation of the divine. If the lower story of the church represents the earthly, then here in the upper level we have moved into the realm of the heavenly.
A Heaven Above the Heavens
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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