Justinian's Hagia Sophia, angels and restlessness (original) (raw)
2018, Radical Marble
I cannot help but recognize, in the first awestruck commentators on the Megale Ekklesia, the great sixth-century church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, kindred spirits of a deep and special sort. I refer, of course, to Procopius, historian of Justinian, who wrote a long description of Hagia Sophia in his book on the emperor's buildings, and Paul the Silentiary, a court official and poet, who penned a comparably lengthy account, the Description of Hagia Sophia. 1 It is not just the excitement that they convey in putting into words the miracle that is this building. It is their sense of the experience and what attracts their attention that is striking, prominent being the marbles and other colored stones that transform the surfaces of the church into a glistening array (Figure 2.1).
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Diegeseis on Hagia Sophia from Late Antiquity to Tenth-Century Byzantium, Byzantinoslavica 73 (2015)
In the Byzantine era, Hagia Sophia was mentioned and extolled in a large number of texts, ranging from the rhetorical to the historiographical and hagiographical. This article provides an overview and discussion of the relatively few early and middle Byzantine narratives about Hagia Sophia, which attest to the various roles it could assume in imagination and ideology. It concentrates on narrations dating from the ninth and tenth centuries and argues that their writing was dictated by such different considerations as the clash between the emperor and the patriarch, intra-ecclesiastical conflicts, and the idea that the age of holiness and piety had not ended. Particular attention is paid to the Narrative about the Construction of the Temple of the Great Church of God which is called Hagia Sophia and the circumstances of its creation. This must be placed in the last decades of the ninth century and should be associated with the opposition of the supporters of the Patriarch Ignatios to Patriarch Photios and his circle.
Byzantion, 2017
Summary: The Ekphrasis of the Hagia Sophia by Paul the Silentiary gives a 6th century impression of a building that still exists today. The poem has been eagerly studied by archaeologists and art historians, focusing mostly on its central part (vv. 354-920): the ekphrasis proper. But Paul’s introductory verses are essential for the appreciation of the description of the church, since they carefully prepare his audience for his virtual guided tour through the building. The present literary analysis shows how during the recitation of his poem the poet compellingly leads his audience towards the ekphrasis proper, aiming at a maximum effect of enargeia (vividness) and phantasia (looking with the mind’s eye) to make us feel as if we were actually approaching the church. He creates a dramatic framework full of suspense: slowing down and speeding up his narrative, using flash-backs (analepseis) and flash-forwards (prolepseis), mixing reality and rhetoric, until we finally stand as participants of a procession before the closed doors of the Hagia Sophia, on the threshold of his rhetorical building. The impact on the audience of the ekphrasis proper cannot be fully grasped without this preparatory framework. A companion piece to this article can be found in the volume I edited, Emilie van Opstall (ed.), Sacred Thresholds: The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 185 (Leiden, Brill 2018)
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