Hagia Sophia from the age of Justinian to the present (review)

204 Reviews This volume deserves to be in ah collections supporting theteachingof Reformation history. Bruce E. Mansfield Department of History University of Sydney Mark, Robert, and Ahmet S. Cakmak, eds, Hagia Sophia from the age of Justinian to the present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993; cloth; pp. xhi, 255; 141 plates and Ulustrations; R.R.P. AUS$185.00. Justinian's great church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), built between 532 and 537 in the aftermath of a savageriotthat had seen large stretches of Constantinople burnt, amazed his contemporaries for its breathtaking size, the speed of its construction, and the magnificence of its decorations. It inspired official panegyrics and became the stuff of legend. It amazes even today, though shorn of its glittering mosaics and the bejewelled encrustations so lavishly praised at its dedication by Paul the Silentiary. Not the least element in today's amazement is that, in a seismically troubled area, the building, despite two major and several minor collapses of the dome over the centuries, is still standing, the immense dome apparendy hovering over massive piers which are visibly out of true. This book is largely a reaction to that amazement. It is most unlikely that the next half century will pass without an earthquake in the region of Istanbul and concerned art historians would welcome forewarning of the building's possible reactions. Thus in 1989 schools of engineering, architecture, Hellenic studies, and archaeology in Princeton university convened a colloquium to examine the state of the building and also to provide expert advice for the development of the computer-generated model of Hagia Sophia being devised in Princeton's civU engineering department and the Earthquake research institute of Istanbul. This book is a collection of papers from that colloquium. The architectural context for the building is provided by William MacDonald, who emphasizes its roots in Roman design and brickwork, and Slobadan Curcic, who examines its place in the development of domed structures. Both show that the innovations of Hagia Sophia's plan grew organically out of previous techniques. Cyril Mango gives a useful annotated chronological list of the Byzantine sources on Hagia Sophia and discusses the undisputedly historical kernel of the semi-legendary Diegesis Reviews 205 on the building of the church. Lawrence Buder discusses the nave cornices as evidence for, and elements in, the church's construction. The technical core of the book comes in the five papers that follow. Two look at related structures in Thessaloniki, both affected by the earthquake there in 1978. Kalliope Theocharidou examines the domed basilica of that city's Hagia Sophia, discussing both its constructional history and the nature of its building materials. A group led by George Penelis gives a rather depressing account of the Rotunda of St George, which is sttil swathed in scaffolding and closed to the public, and makes detailed suggestions for the major structural interventions necessary to enable this and similar buildings to survive future shocks. They make the point that pre-modern buildings that are still standing today 'have undergone a kind of natural selection, so that only those that were well designed and constructed have survived' (p. 155). Repairs should not upset the building's original structural behaviour. The papers by O m u r Giirkan and others on photogrammetric studies of the dome, by Shiro Kato and others on finiteelement modelling of the lostfirstand existing second dome and Robert Mark and others on the computer-generated integrated study of the entire buUding planned at Princeton may lose readers in then technicalities. They may surface for the conclusion that m o d e m computer technology enables structural analyses to be made that can be correlated with archaeological observations (p. 131). Confirmation from the latter wUl eventually enable the former to be trusted. The present generation of computer modelling clearly provides many insights into the nature and extent of the stresses in massive pre-modern buildings, but seems as yet to do litde to solve the mystery of then continuing stability. A cautionary plea is made by Rowland Mainstone who argues for minimalist intervention at any stage in any building but especially in Hagia Sophia, given that m o d e m...