Hagia Sophia

Fülszöveg

HAGIA SOPHIA
Architecture, Structure and Liturgy of Justinian's Great Church

RowlandJ. Mainstone
Justinian's Great Church in Constantinople was the culminating architectural achievement of late antiquity and the first great masterpiece of the Byzantine world. Structurally, it was an unparalleled tourdeforce. For over nine hundred years it was Christendom's grandest place of worship and, for most of this time, the seat of the Orthodox patriarch and a principal setting for imperial ceremonial. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, for almost five hundred years more it was one of the principal mosques of Istanbul. Its influence was widespread and lasting, both architecturally and hturgically.
Rowland Mainstone fell under its spell almost thirty years ago. In the 1960s he was closely associated with the major study of the church then being undertaken by Dumbarton Oaks. He resumed his researches in 1980, bringing to them the expertise of a leading expert on the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

HAGIA SOPHIA
Architecture, Structure and Liturgy of Justinian's Great Church

RowlandJ. Mainstone
Justinian's Great Church in Constantinople was the culminating architectural achievement of late antiquity and the first great masterpiece of the Byzantine world. Structurally, it was an unparalleled tourdeforce. For over nine hundred years it was Christendom's grandest place of worship and, for most of this time, the seat of the Orthodox patriarch and a principal setting for imperial ceremonial. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, for almost five hundred years more it was one of the principal mosques of Istanbul. Its influence was widespread and lasting, both architecturally and hturgically.
Rowland Mainstone fell under its spell almost thirty years ago. In the 1960s he was closely associated with the major study of the church then being undertaken by Dumbarton Oaks. He resumed his researches in 1980, bringing to them the expertise of a leading expert on the practical problems of design and construction that would have confronted Justinian's architects. Drawing on the survey of the church by Robert Van Nice for Dumbarton Oaks as well as on his own detailed observations and critical reading of the historical source material, he presents here the first authoritative account of the genesis and development of the design, of the church's building, and of the principal subsequent changes. His descriptions bring alive the achievement of an unprecedentedly ambitious project in a way that has never before been attempted for a structure for which there are no drawings, building accounts or similar records. He looks also, more briefly, at the church's predecessors and, finally, at its use as a setting for the liturgy and for imperial ceremonial, and at its character and influence, both in the Byzantine era and beyond.
Dr Mainstone's specially prepared plans and drawings and his superb photographs perfectly complement the text as well as providing, in themselves, a unique new record.
With 305 illustrations, including 56 plans and drawings. Vissza