The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (25 page)

The grandest of Justinian’s buildings survives for us to see. The Great Church, as it came to be called, known in Greek as Hagia Sophia—Church
of the Holy Wisdom—combined as never before the novel features of the revolutionary Roman architecture, and on a scale never before thought possible. To place a Dome of the World over the largest basilica ever made would require the utmost expertise of the geometer-mathematician-engineer. The result would be a mystifying new feeling of interior space, and of the relation between this world and the next.

The need for this new grandeur was not so much theological as ecclestiastical. For the worship of the early Christians a simple hall (or even a cave or catacomb) had served. But by the fourth century, when Christianity was in the care of a Roman emperor, the Church began to mimic the ceremony and the splendor of the state. The simple barnlike interior of the basilica would not do. What was needed was a domed basilica, but this raised new architectural problems. In the Pantheon, a dome over a rotunda, the rotunda walls had provided an unbroken uniform support. But how place a dome over a square? How preserve the rotund elegance and yet keep the whole open for assembly?

Here was a problem in both solid geometry and engineering. One solution was pendentives, spherical triangular pieces of vaulting reaching up from each corner of the supporting structure to hold up the base of the dome. The first large dome to be so supported was this dome of Justinian’s Great Church of the Holy Wisdom, a monument to Anthemius’s mastery of geometry as much as to his engineering skill. Another less elegant device was the squinch, a corner filler of diagonal masonry that transformed the square, step by step into a round shape to support the dome. Some of these squinches would be added to Hagia Sophia in later years. The “secret” of how to balance a dome over a square was the great contribution of Byzantium to architecture. It was a symbol, too, of Byzantine efforts to borrow the panoply of this world to embellish the next. Procopius described the product:

Incidentally, the dome atop a basilica at its central point would suggest a cruciform plan for both the Roman cross and the Greek cross in future churches.

The Great Church, after the Pantheon, is the largest dome surviving from antiquity and the largest vaulting space of any building before modern times. The present dome rises to 184 feet in a building 252 feet long and 234 feet wide. Some of its construction problems came from the fact that the art of casting concrete, which produced the Pantheon, had by Justinian’s time been lost or neglected, making it harder to provide a rigid structure to carry down the enormous thrusts. The main structural materials were cut stone and marble, baked brick, wrought iron, and lead. Stone was used on the piers and other points of greatest stress; bricks served for walls, arches, and vaults. The joints of the stone were held together by iron clamps and dowels, rods, and bars. To prevent future fires, Justinian had forbidden any use of wood. The stone courses were held together, not by lime or asphalt but by lead poured in the interstices.

Since money was no object, Justinian used his imperial powers to bring materials from everywhere. In his verse epic Paul the Silentiary, of Justinian’s court, sang of marbles of every color and texture—black with white streaks from the Bosporus, green from Carystus or Sparta in Greece, polychrome from Phrygia, silver-flecked porphyry from Egypt, red-and-white veined from the Taurus Mountains in Asia Minor, yellow from Libya, with an effect like meadows of fantastic flowers. Justinian, according to Procopius, had “gathered together all skilled workmen from the whole earth.” A hundred foremen, each with a hundred under him, made ten thousand in all. “And fifty foremen with their folk built up the right half of the church and fifty likewise the left, so that through their emulation and zeal the structure was speedily raised.”

Their spectacular creation was a vast interior of tantalizing complexity. The wide nave extending east and west was terminated at each end by hemicycles crowned by semidomes, while each semidome was flanked by two semicircular exedras (alcoves) carrying still smaller semidomes. Over all rose the central dome, which gained the impression of self-suspension from the ring of forty-two arched windows side by side around the points where it rose from the base on the basilica. The dome seemed not to rest on stone but to be suspended by a golden chain from heaven, which made the building “marvellous in its grace, but by reason of the seeming insecurity of its composition altogether terrifying.” Not only was it miraculous to set a dome so gracefully over a rectangle, but the dome seemed to rest on a ring of light—something the Romans themselves never achieved.

The interior seemed “not illuminated from without by the sun, but … the radiance comes into being within,” glistening from the spectrum of the world’s marbles and the scintillating mosaics. Miscellaneous objects of gold, silver, and brass filled countless niches. The two aisles were separated from the nave by colonnades with gilded capitals. From the rim of the dome brass chains suspended, holding oil lamps of silver with flickering wicks.
The gold-plated silver iconostasis, the screen separating the sanctuary, depicted Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Apostles, and the gates were ornamented with the monogram of Justinian and Theodora. Paul the Silentiary was dazzled by the red curtains around the altar showing Christ in “a garment shimmering with gold, like the rays of the rosy-fingered dawn, which flashes down to the divine knees, and a chiton, a deep red from the Tyrian shell dye.”

As a place of worship could the Great Church ever be excelled? “And whenever anyone enters this church to pray,” Procopius reported, “he understands at once that it is not by any human power or skill, but by the influence of God, that this work has been so finely turned.… And this does not happen only to one who sees the church for the first time, but … on each successive occasion, as though the sight were new each time.” From the first moment when he entered the completed building Justinian felt this exhilaration.

On December 27, 537, the interior was cleansed of scaffolding and finally visible in its whole glittering glory. To dedicate the Great Church Justinian emerged from his palace in state in a four-horse chariot. He oversaw the sacrifice of a thousand oxen, six thousand sheep, six hundred stags, one thousand swine, and ten thousand birds and fowl, and gave thirty thousand bushels of meal to the poor and needy. “Thereupon the Emperor Justinian continued on his way with the Cross and the Patriarch; but within the Royal Gates [at the entrance to the nave] he let fall the hand of the Patriarch and hastened on alone into the ambo, and, extending his arms toward heaven, he cried, ‘Glory to God, Who has deemed me worthy of fulfilling such a work. O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!’ ”

To build the Great Church in five years, ten months, and four days was a feat. But later events suggested that the dome may have been erected in undue haste. Perhaps the bold design was more a monument to Anthemius’s geometric speculations than to his architectural experience. Uncharitable historians say he proved to be a mere amateur. The dome built by Anthemius exerted a dangerous, outward thrust. Within twenty years, in August 553 and December 557, earthquakes cracked the dome, and on May 7, 558, a large piece of the dome and the adjacent half-dome and the eastern arch collapsed. Luckily the rest of the structure remained. Justinian ordered the dome to be speedily rebuilt. And so it was, by Isidorus the Younger, nephew of the Isidorus who had helped Anthemius. It is this second dome, higher and more stable, that has survived. Isidorus should probably take credit for another first in architectural creation. To support this second dome he built “true” pendentives, independent members with a different curve from the dome that they supported. And he supplied
additional support with a new course of heavy masonry outside at the base of the dome.

The building suffered and survived millennial ravages of nature and of man. Earthquakes in 989 and 1344 left cracks and collapsed some of the arches and half-domes, which were duly repaired. When Constantinople fell to the Crusaders in 1204, they stripped the gold and silver treasures. The changing winds of Christian orthodoxy also took their toll. The Iconoclasts who condemned religious images and icon worship were championed by Emperor Leo III in 726. Icon worshipers were persecuted and Hagia Sophia was piously redecorated to cover up the diabolic images.

The Great Church also lived an eventful modern afterlife. First it became the unpredicted symbol of the conquest of Christianity by Islam. After one of the decisive battles of history, Sultan Mohammed II, undaunted by the defensive chain across the Golden Horn, hauled his fleet overland from the Bosporus. Constantinople fell on May 29, 1453. The Muslim conqueror entered the city, Gibbon recounts, “attended by his vizirs, bashaws, and guards, each of whom … was robust as Hercules, dexterous as Apollo, and equal in battle to any ten of the race of ordinary mortals.… By his command the metropolis of the Eastern church was transformed into a mosque; the rich and portable instruments of superstition had been removed; the crosses were thrown down; and the walls, which were covered with images and mosaics, were washed and purified and restored to a state of naked simplicity.” As a consequence, “the dome of St. Sophia itself, the earthly heaven, the second firmament, the vehicle of the cherubim, the throne of the glory of God, was despoiled of the oblations of ages; and the gold and silver, the pearls and jewels, the vases and sacerdotal ornaments, were most wickedly converted to the service of mankind.” Minarets and a great chandelier were added and, in place of the scintillating mosaics, chaste calligraphic disks of Arabic letters extolled Allah and the Koran.

For five hundred years the Great Church remained a mosque and never since has it seen Christian worship. In 1921 the Byzantine Institute of America was permitted to begin uncovering and cleaning the mosaics. Then in 1935 Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938), first president of the Turkish Republic, made the Great Church, the Great Mosque, into a museum. And so it became a grand symbol of the power of stone, the transcendence of art over politics and also, perhaps, over religion.

W
ESTERN
belief in a Creator-God and creator man has carried with it belief that nature is to be mastered. But the Japanese, for example, who did not have a Creator-God or a myth of beginnings like ours in the West, found another path and have made nature their ally. Their world, like Hesiod’s, is a product of procreation. The male and female deities, Izanagi and Izanami, stood on the Floating Bridge of Heaven and thrust down the Heavenly Jeweled Spear into the ocean below. Brine dripping from the spear coagulated into an island on which they lay together. Then Izanami gave birth to the islands of Japan along with the deities of nature—mountains, rivers, trees, and crops.

Their reverent, friendly, and intimate Japanese feelings toward nature have been expressed in an attitude to mountains very different from ours in the West. Japanese country folk have viewed mountain peaks and even smoking volcanoes as collaborating spirits. Hunters revered the mountain
kami
, whom farmers saw protecting them and supplying the water to make their rice grow. It is in the mountains, says Shinto myth, that the purified ancestral spirits dwell after thirty-three or fifty years of waiting in the nearby cemetery. Eventually these ancestral mountain spirits themselves became helpful
kami
, coming down to the rice paddies in spring and returning to their high habitats in the fall.

Cults of the mountain
kami
as early as the Nara period (710–794) nourished the supernatural powers by mountain asceticism and bred belief in mountain magic. The flourishing cult of Mount Fuji (now with more than thirteen hundred shrines) made its majestic volcanic cone the nation’s symbol. An ancient folktale reports the contest between Japan’s three sacred mountains.

Loyal pilgrims to Mount Fuji, who wanted to see their favorite mountain win, used to leave their sandals at the top to raise its height.

The European fear of mountains delayed the climbing of Mont Blanc, western Europe’s highest mountain, till 1786. But there is no period of recorded history when the Japanese were not climbing Mount Fuji. Its symmetrical cone was one of the oldest subjects of their art and poetry. The ascent of Mount Fuji with its ten stations early became a ritual, and the circuit of the crater’s rocky peaks carried a high ceremonial meaning of Japanese affinity with nature.

Surprisingly, this feeling has not been shaken by frequent earthquakes. Every year nearly 10 percent of the energy released in the world by earthquakes is concentrated around Japan. In the last century Japan has suffered twenty-three destructive earthquakes. The most disastrous, in 1923, left one hundred thousand dead. Still, the myth of Shinto—the indigenous Japanese religion with its cultic devotion to the deities of nature and its veneration of the emperor as a descendant of the sun goddess—managed even to make earthquakes a token of good cheer. In the very beginning, we are told, when the sun goddess, sister of Susanowo, came out of her cave and brightened the earth, the eight million dancing deities of nature were so delighted that they shook the earth with their shouts of joy, as they still do from time to time.