الجمعة، 17 نوفمبر 2023

Download PDF | Nadine Schibille Hagia Sophia And The Byzantine Aesthetic Experience Ashgate ( 2014)

Download PDF | Nadine Schibille Hagia Sophia And The Byzantine Aesthetic Experience Ashgate (2014)

321 Pages





Paramount in the shaping of early Byzantine identity was the construction of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (532-537 CE). This book examines the edifice from the perspective of aesthetics to define the concept of beauty and the meaning of art in early Byzantium. Byzantine aesthetic thought is re-evaluated against late antique Neoplatonism and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius that offer fundamental paradigms for the late antique attitude towards art and beauty. These metaphysical concepts of aesthetics are ultimately grounded in experiences of sensation and perception, and reflect the ways in which the world and reality were perceived and grasped, signifying the cultural identity of early Byzantium.


























There are different types of aesthetic data, those present in the aesthetic object and those found in aesthetic responses to the object. This study looks at the aesthetic data embodied in the sixth-century architectural structure and interior decoration of Hagia Sophia as well as in literary responses (ekphrasis) to the building. The purpose of the Byzantine ekphrasis was to convey by verbal means the same effects that the artefact itself would have caused. A literary analysis of these rhetorical descriptions recaptures the Byzantine perception and expectations, and at the same time reveals the cognitive processes triggered by the Great Church.
























The central aesthetic feature that emerges from sixth-century ekphraseis of Hagia Sophia is that of light. Light is described as the decisive element in the experience of the sacred space and light is simultaneously associated with the notion of wisdom. It is argued that the concepts of light and wisdom are interwoven programmatic elements that underlie the unique architecture and non-figurative decoration of Hagia Sophia. A similar concern for the phenomenon of light and its epistemological dimension is reflected in other contemporary monuments, testifying to the pervasiveness of these aesthetic values in early Byzantium.

Dr Nadine Schibille is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex, UK















Acknowledgements

This book has its origin in my doctoral dissertation ‘Light in Early Byzantium: The Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople’ (University of Sussex, 2004). It evolved over many years, and progress was slow and often interrupted. In the intervening years, aesthetic approaches to ancient and Byzantine art have been salvaged from years of scholarly neglect, impacting on how we now interpret the art of the ancient and medieval worlds. This means that although ‘light’ as a central feature in the art and architecture of early Byzantium remains the underlying theme of this book, the focus has changed to that of aesthetic experience. In short, my dissertation has been utterly and repeatedly revised, and I hope that this has become a better book than what it would have been otherwise.




















As the manuscript evolved over a long period of time, I have amassed great debts to many individuals and institutions that have continuously encouraged and supported me. My deepest gratitude is due to the two people who suffered most: my doctoral dissertation supervisor Professor Liz James who has supported this project throughout, read through various drafts and provided lots of ideas over the years — although she may very well not agree with some of the conclusions and the philosophical focus of this book; and Christian G. Specht, who painstakingly read the manuscript several times, contributing his invaluable scientific way of thinking and enthusiasm. He is also responsible for getting all the illustrations into publishable shape. This book would simply not have been possible without his constant help and encouragement; he kept me sane throughout the entire process.




















Special thanks must be given to Jas Elsner who read an earlier version of the manuscript and whose advice and constructive criticism are greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Image Collection for permission to reproduce one of the photos on the study of light, and my colleagues from the Technische Universitat Darmstadt, who granted me permission to use two of their digital reconstructions of Hagia Sophia: Lars Grobe, Oliver Hauck, Andreas Noback, Professor Rudolf Stichel and Helge Svenshon. I would also like to thank a number of colleagues and friends whose expertise has helped to resolve specific issues, including Vassiliki Dimitropoulou, Scott Vanderbilt, Francesco Ventrella and Gabriel Wolfenstein.



















This study would not have been possible without substantial financial support from the Getty Institute that provided a post-doctoral research fellowship for a year to get this project off the ground. Finally, Iam grateful to the School of History, Art History and Philosophy at the University of Sussex for contributing funding for the book's colour reproductions.














Introduction: Byzantine Aesthetics

... to deny aesthetics is to deny art because no work of art can be produced, experienced, or judged without some kind of aesthetics. Aesthetics is critical thinking about the affective, cognitive, moral, political, technological, and other historical conditions constitutive of the production, experience, and judgement of art.



















Michael Kelly (2012), A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art, xviii

The focus of this book is the conceptual dimension of the sixth-century church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople as a work of art and as the result of a specific early Byzantine aesthetics. In acknowledging the link between aesthetics, by what I mean the sensation of art both in terms of its beauty and function and ‘affective, cognitive, moral, political, technological, and other historical conditions’, this study argues that multiple and interrelated aesthetic choices were constitutive of the sixth-century architecture and interior design of Hagia Sophia. 
































Its unprecedented architectural structure and the unconventional interior decoration acquire meaning only within the particular aesthetic framework of late antique Byzantium. The architects created an ecclesiastical space within which the concept of divine immanence and transcendence could be apprehended in the material form of colour and light. In late antiquity, the perennial question of divine transcendence was necessarily identified with philosophical ontology and epistemology and embodied in the double-notion of datiopdc, the at once physical and spiritual illumination. In other words, late antique Neoplatonic philosophy formulated an epistemology that was grounded in sense-perception (ato@notc) but that had as its goal the intelligible realm (vonots), specifically aiming at knowledge about being, truth and ultimately about the divine itself.














In viewing the sixth-century building of Hagia Sophia from the perspective of aesthetics, this study attempts to reconstruct the concepts of beauty and the function of art in late antique Byzantium. At a more fundamental level, it focuses on the perception of art and materiality in late antiquity. Insights into the concepts of visual perception and attitudes towards matter and materiality may provide clues to the nature and processes of artistic production and its motivating factors in the historical and cultural setting of sixth-century Byzantium. The principal aim must be to understand the artistic practices of late antique Byzantium on its own terms. By exploring the early Byzantine ways of looking at the material world and at works of art, the investigation of aesthetics touches upon the very foundations of social and cultural norms and values. Aesthetics in this sense do not merely constitute the visuality of a culture but reflect the cultural identity of its people and contribute to maintaining or indeed transforming society.’



















There exist three types of aesthetic data that are dealt with in this study: the material evidence present in the aesthetic object itself, the aesthetic values expressed in the responses to and evaluation of this object, and the ideas represented in pertinent philosophical and theological treatises.* In this book, I explore the aesthetic data enshrined in the sixth-century architecture and decoration of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, in literary (ekphrastic) responses to the edifice, and in contemporary theological and philosophical debates about the material world as a manifestation of the transcendent divine. The church of Hagia Sophia (532-537 CE) is taken as a case study for the simple reason that the Great Church is undoubtedly one of the most influential buildings in world architecture. Its architectural structure and conceptual design may be unique in many respects, but Hagia Sophia is above all perhaps the most outstanding expression of early Byzantine aesthetics and, by implication, early Byzantine identity.° I examine how Hagia Sophia’s architectural and interior design is the result of a particular, metaphysical notion of aesthetics. 





























It is an aesthetics that was in a way specific to the church of Hagia Sophia, but at the same time one that satisfied the sensibilities and expectations of sixth-century Byzantium at large. Numerous impressions of Hagia Sophia as expressed by Byzantine writers testify to its universal visual appeal. To corroborate that the aesthetic values of which Hagia Sophia is reflective was integral to artistic practices in the sixth-century world more generally, this study also draws on other contemporary monumental works of art and architecture such as the church of Hagios Polyeuktos, the monastery of Saint Catherine at Sinai and the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. These artistic examples reveal a similar taste for light and colour and, to a certain extent at least, a concern for spiritual epistemology.


















Recent years have seen a renewed surge in scholarly interest in the aesthetics of the ancient world, trying to capture the aesthetic experience and perception of works of art from the viewpoint of its inhabitants, and thus to reinstate aesthetics as a valuable approach especially to late antique and Byzantine art.° Sensory experience was given particular emphasis in Bissera Pentcheva’s recent phenomenological analysis of the Byzantine icon, in which she draws attention to the performative aspect of Byzantine art and the central role of animation in its aesthetic appreciation.’ Pentcheva’s book advocates a multi-sensory aesthetics of the Byzantine icon and thereby developed new ground in the study of Byzantine aesthetics. While following along similar lines of argument, in this study I concentrate on the primacy of the faculty of sight in the aesthetic experience of early Byzantine art and on vision as the locus of religious epistemology.



















The reason for this approach is that the aesthetic experience of early Byzantine ecclesiastical interiors was very much grounded in the perception and sensation of light both in physical as well as spiritual terms. This is what emerges from, for instance, sixth-century literary descriptions of Hagia Sophia that constantly draw attention to the phenomena of light. Light was highlighted as the quintessential object of aesthetic experience and the decisive element that established and shaped the visual and spatial impression of Hagia Sophia’s ecclesiastical space.




















 The ekphrastic images of light and material splendour control and condition the perception of Hagia Sophia in terms of its aesthetic value, but also in terms of its theological underpinnings. Sight, by extension, can be considered the medium of aesthetic experience par excellence. The purpose of the Byzantine ekphrasis, a literary device defined as a description of an event or object, was to evoke by verbal means the same effects that the actual visual experience would have elicited and to thus communicate meaning.’




















 The ekphrasis is a re-enactment of the aesthetic reaction to the thing described, and because of the rhetorical nature of the ekphrasis the features that the author singles out can be considered the objects of aesthetic experience. This means that even though light may be a literary topos that reflects literary traditions as much as the subjective assignment of value, these ekphraseis give insights into late antique responses to the Great Church and disclose the aesthetic expectations and the cognitive processes involved in the assessment of the edifice as a work of art and its meaning at the time.’ Whether real or present only in the author’s mind, the aspects that stand out are those that have earned the author’s attention for a good reason. Rhetorical conventions became conventions because they reflect cultural values.'” Therefore, ekphraseis that describe works of art or architecture are vital sources for the reconstruction of the visual experience and responses to works of art, the assignment of aesthetic value, as well as for understanding the performative nature and Byzantine perception of art.



















Under normal circumstances, light is merely an agent that illuminates objects and renders them visible. This property would appear to exclude light itself from any conscious aesthetic perception, if an aesthetic judgement were to be defined in the post-Enlightenment Kantian sense as pure and disinterested, thatis to say devoid of all other interests and purposes.” Prior to the eighteenth century, however, aesthetics had not been an independent philosophical discipline in its own right and with the criticism of art at its centre. 























Instead, aesthetic qualities had been intimately entwined with other philosophical and religious values such as moral, practical, intellectual or ontological and the sublime.” If therefore aisthesis is treated in the original sense of the word as sensation and perception, we arrive at the very core of the human visual experience. Then the significance of light as an object of aesthetic experience becomes clear. Light belongs first and foremost to the phenomenology of vision by bestowing colour and form onto matter and thus making it visible and comprehensible. In antiquity this capacity of light was closely linked with the acquisition of knowledge and cognitive processes more generally.’*

















 Entwined with this epistemological interpretation of light was a spiritual or religious symbolism that developed in different cultural and religious traditions.'* In early Byzantium, light was connected to the notion of wisdom, while it simultaneously served as a very potent visual method that reconciled the paradox of divine immanence and transcendence. In the specific case of Hagia Sophia, light was instrumental in the representational construction of its ecclesiastical space by way of what Robert Nelson called the ‘ancient logic of implication’ without depending on figurative representations.”





















Iargue that it is not coincidental that the church dedicated to Holy Wisdom was praised for its extraordinary luminosity, and that by emphasising the phenomena of light, a range of mental processes were encouraged that relate to the spiritual and epistemological content of Justinian’s Great Church. Light, beauty and wisdom are interwoven programmatic elements that can provide a conceptual framework for the interpretation and comprehension of the architectural structure and interior decoration of Hagia Sophia. A greater understanding of those components will not only clarify the conceptual content of the edifice, but also give new insights into the building’s artistic uniqueness that derives ultimately from its dedication. The artistic application and underlying concepts of light in context of Hagia Sophia thus offer an ideal scope to explore the fundamental patterns of an emerging Byzantine aesthetic."




















What is the material evidence that light was indeed a defining constitutive feature in the design of Hagia Sophia? Although scholarly literature on Hagia Sophia usually does not fail to mention the impression of light and the visual effects within the church in one way or another,” the architectural and decorative features responsible for the spectacle of light that stimulated these aesthetic responses has up until now not been elucidated in detail.




















 This book explores how light was artistically implemented in the design of Hagia Sophia by analysing the architectural and decorative components that contributed to or defined the illumination and luminosity of the building’s interior. The traditional assumption that the church of Hagia Sophia was characterised by a conspicuous hierarchical distribution of light is challenged.'* Hierarchical structures are what scholars were looking for in dependence on the late antique writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who described the world in terms of ecclesiastical and celestial hierarchies. This interpretation, however, cannot be upheld based on the material evidence.















While the Corpus Areopagiticum, in which light and analogies of light feature prominently, is indeed an important contestant in the formulation of a Byzantine aesthetic, its interpretation is more complex than the simple postulation of a hierarchy. The aesthetic theory that the Pseudo-Dionysian treatises offer is very intricate and cannot be isolated from the Pseudo-Dionysian ontology and metaphysics. As part of his metaphysical and ontological system, PseudoDionysius considered light more in transcendental than in empirical terms.

















 For Pseudo-Dionysius, the physical properties of light lent themselves perfectly to signify the divine immanence and transcendence and to exemplify spiritual enlightenment (:bwttopoc) and the ascent and assimilation to the divine. Sensible light came to be viewed as a medium to convey absolute divine paradigms and as an agent of religious epistemology because it lay at the limits between the physical and spiritual. Pseudo-Dionysius’ aesthetics owed much to the Greek patristic writings of the fourth century and especially the works of Gregory of Nyssa, while being deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition of late antique Platonism.”” Hence, the early Byzantine aesthetic as formulated by PseudoDionysius can be fully comprehended only against the Greco-Roman and JudeoChristian background from which it developed and to which it responded. Pseudo-Dionysius appropriated the Platonic and Neoplatonic notions of beauty and art and transformed them into an aesthetic that accommodated a profoundly Christian (mystical) understanding of epistemology.

















Pseudo-Dionysius frequently equates divine beauty with light, which when applied to the material world would seem to imply that luminous objects were considered more beautiful than objects that were less luminous. This was certainly true for the Byzantine perception of colour, which placed an emphasis on the brightness and purity of a colour rather than its specific hue.” The identification of light with beauty begs the question about its artistic implications. On answering this question, the focus must shift from the concept of beauty to that of art and its materiality. Although the Corpus Areopagiticum is quite explicit about beauty, it does not contain any specific discourse on the concept of art. Pseudo-Dionysius’ principles of affirmative and negative theology, however, deal with issues of representation that offer a significant contribution to aesthetic thought.*! 














Pseudo-Dionysius maintains that it is better to use negations instead of positive affirmations when talking about the divine. It is easier and more suitable to say what the divine is not than what the divine is, due to its ineffable nature. This negative theology and the Pseudo-Dionysian re-assessment of the material world as a manifestation and reflection of the divine are key for his aesthetic theory, which reveals the potential relationship between a work of art and a transcendental reality. The imitation (mimesis) of this transcendental reality in the broadest possible sense was a fundamental criterion in antique reflections on artistic value and truth. Interesting in this context is Aristotle’s view on the autonomy of art, granting art the capacity to imitate ‘things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be’.”














 This Aristotelian attitude towards mimesis is ultimately not so different from Plato’s concept of the mimetic arts, and both were maintained and, in fact, merged in the Neoplatonic tradition, granting art a degree of autonomy as regards its representational functioning. Neoplatonic writings on art and the material world in terms of its ontological status and meaning in relation to an intelligible reality underlie the artistic practices in late antique Byzantium. In late antiquity, works of art functioned as paradigms for how things are or ought to be, representing the essence of things and universal values rather than individual qualities and outward appearances. The logical artistic consequence was a significant transformation in the representational arts from naturalism towards stylistically more abstract forms and symbolism.”














The question whether an architectural structure consistent with the PseudoDionysian system of thought ought to be a ‘cave of light’ or a ‘cave of darkness’ has exercised art historians since Erwin Panofsky’s seminal inquiry into the abbey church of Saint Denis and its dependence on Neoplatonic philosophy and scholasticism.*
















 The approach endorsed in my study, in contrast, is not to impose a dualistic divide on the Pseudo-Dionysian philosophy and the art of early Byzantium, but to treat the seemingly contradictory evidence as unity that can be resolved into a complex, yet consistent aesthetic. This aesthetic is intimately connected with light, because light is both physical and could express visual beauty as well spiritual/cognitive and convey complex theologies. It is a metaphysical aesthetic of light that resolves the divine contradictions and intricacies that Pseudo-Dionysius expounded on in his apophatic (negative) and cataphatic (positive) theologies. Light offered an ideal paradigm to exemplify the conceptual properties of the divine, the beauty of Christian truth and reality, and the spiritual ascent of the soul. In the end, aesthetic values (beauty) converged on and were identified with the functional value of art and vice versa.




























Jas Elsner has noted that by the fifth and sixth centuries CE the religious way of looking at art became divorced from and predominated over the aesthetic appreciation of art.* In my book a somewhat alternative viewpoint is adopted, arguing that this was not so much a shift away from the aesthetic to a religious attitude towards art, but rather a redefinition of the concept of beauty and the physical world in line with the Neoplatonic metaphysical system and ontology, what Patricia Cox-Miller termed ‘the material turn’ of the fourth century.” This novel understanding of matter and beauty resulted in an aesthetic experience in late antiquity that incorporated transcendental qualities and that necessarily engaged mystical and religious experiences. Aesthetic responses can for this reason not be isolated from the religious responses to art, at least as regards ecclesiastical forms of art.” Various pieces of aesthetic data across diverse art forms and material categories provide clear evidence for a common basis of the aesthetic expressions and experiences in sixth-century Byzantium. 















Aesthetic concepts and expectations are not universal and inevitably culturally conditioned. This means that aesthetic judgements are never neutral but loaded with culture-specific values that acquire meaning only in their particular cultural and historical setting. If it is accepted that aesthetics cannot be perceived independent of the historical and intellectual conditions of which they are a product, we can in turn extract important information about meaning, cultural values and conventions in late antiquity, and about how the world was perceived by its people by attending to aesthetic questions.” A further advantage of the fact that aesthetic sensibilities are culturally conditioned is that it becomes possible to draw extensive conclusions from a limited number of aesthetic responses.”















By integrating the available aesthetic data from philosophical treatises, literary sources and material evidence, it becomes possible to establish the distinctive traits of an early Byzantine aesthetics that is not confined to an individual work of art or any one social group, profession or artistic medium. The central intellectual challenge in aesthetics of the pre-modern world is a meaningful dialogue between artistic production and philosophical concepts at the time.


















 While a dialogue between art and philosophy as part of acommon cultural and intellectual environment can help to explore the mechanisms of perception that make sense of the conceptual content of art, a direct causal relationship between the two cannot be established. Instead, the approach advocated here is to focus on how the sixth-century beholder engaged with art and to start with the particulars and an in-depth analysis of the visual and literary evidence, before moving towards the philosophical concepts and problems of beauty and art. This book does this by beginning with a detailed study of contemporary textual aesthetic responses, followed by the close observation and examination of individual works of art and architecture. It concludes with the late antique pagan and Christian Neoplatonic theories regarding the concept of beauty and the symbolic interpretation of the material world that make possible a meaningful interpretation of the artistic production in late antique Byzantium.


















The definition of aesthetics that this book then adopts concentrates on the concept of beauty and the function and formalism of art in relation to the reality it propounds. In antiquity, beauty was broadly defined to include sensuous, moral and cognitive values. Distinct from beauty were the theories of art as a social practice with a purpose, espousing the concepts of art as representation or as expression.” The value of art and how it relates to beauty depends on the conception of reality and the relationship between this reality and the artistic work. Contrasting presumptions about reality and truth necessarily result in very different kinds of art and different attitudes towards art. If, for example, reality is materialistically defined as the world of common sense, aspects of this reality can easily be represented artistically. If, on the other hand, reality is defined in transcendental terms, for example, in terms of an intelligible divine reality, the question arises to what extent this reality can ever be translated into and expressed by the material and visible form of a work of art. 


















Hence, these two radically different notions of reality pose very different challenges to the work of art. In the most basic terms, the first concept demands a form of art that is committed to representing the material world in a mirror-like manner, while the latter results in a symbolic art purporting to provide access to a reality that lies outside the viewer's ordinary sensuous experience. In other words, the type of reality that art advocates has formal implications insofar as it can either strive for naturalistic rendering or for abstraction to convey the otherness of the transcendental reality. The formalism of art can in turn reveal the theory of reality that the work of art is grounded in. This reciprocity is highly complex, but once its mechanism is understood, the formalism of works of art can be better explained.*!












In essence, my argument is that late antique philosophical and theological ontology and epistemology offer a mode of thought that reflects the conceptual framework within which contemporary artistic production and perceptions of art were situated.

















 The fundamental principle of Platonic and Neoplatonic thought is the notion that beauty in sensible things is the manifestation of the Idea of Good, or in Christian terms, of God, and that beauty is more of an intelligible than it is a sensible quality. As a result beauty has the potential to lead to philosophical or religious truth. The means by which truth can be reached and the definition of this truth, however, were substantially redefined during late antiquity. In contrast to its Platonic heritage, discursive cognition and reason had lost their significance in the search for truth and the ascent of the soul. The Christian God of Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius is known through unknowing and resides in divine darkness, as opposed to the Platonic realm of the ideas that was likened to a place in the sun. This indicates a fundamental shift away from the Classical notion of truth based on critical faculty and logic, and towards religious knowledge based on blind, unquestioning faith.
















In the late antique Christian Neoplatonism of Gregory of Nyssa and PseudoDionysius, the divine transcendence coincides with divine immanence, inevitably resulting in a symbolic interpretation of the material world.” Since beauty was understood as the prototypical divine paradigm that was by implication identified with being, everything was beautiful by virtue of its existence. 

















This is why works of art necessarily have a share in beauty, too. This beauty, however, does not consist in the material, but is found predominantly in the idea of the divine that is reflected in the work of art. The preoccupation with divine beauty in relationship to the material reality of the church of Hagia Sophia is broached in the sixth-century descriptions of the building’s interior. The objects of aesthetic experience highlighted in the two extant ekphraseis of Hagia Sophia include both objects perceptible to the senses as well as objects of thought. To salvage these objects of aesthetic experience from the highly rhetorical descriptions warrants a discussion of the literary conventions of the ekphrasis, which forms the starting point of this book. This is followed by a close examination of the materiality and artistic practices that underlie the architecture and interior design of Hagia Sophia and, for comparison, other late antique ecclesiastical structures and monumental decorations. 














I will concentrate particularly on light and illumination and the psychology of perception, to elucidate the prevailing light management and decorative systems. The study covers the entire range of artistic practices and materials from architectural design and architectural sculpture, to the marble revetment, mosaic decoration and the production of glass tesserae as well as the use of colours. The aesthetic data of the material culture are then contextualised within the intellectual environment of sixth-century Byzantium and the Neoplatonic philosophies of late antiquity. This necessitates the differential treatment of the concept of beauty and the performative nature of art, to consider the broader issues of how an understanding of the functional capacity of beauty and art can enrich our knowledge of artistic production and creativity in late antique Byzantium.
















This study is intended as an inclusive account of the early Byzantine aesthetic experience, and in its critical function it demonstrates the need for an interdisciplinary approach to interpret the aesthetic data and to formulate the aesthetics of sixth-century Byzantium. It is important to stress once more that the clean break between aesthetic and other philosophical values such as ethical, epistemological and ontological that we owe to the eighteenth century poses a real limitation for the evaluation of ancient aesthetics. Exemplary of the problem with an Enlightenment approach is, for example, Michelis’ comment that early Christian art is ‘an art of the Sublime and not of the Beautiful’.** Michelis uses a distinction that did not exist in this form before the second half of the eighteenth century, when the sublime as an aesthetic criterion increasingly asserted its independence from beauty.“ As the quote at the beginning of this chapter indicates, there is no art without aesthetics, and some kind of aesthetics is always integral to artistic strategies. 














In the following chapters it is my aim to clarify the many facets and principles of what constitutes the Byzantine aesthetics based on the church of Hagia Sophia. Aesthetic sensibilities are matters of cultural construction and can provide insights into the cultural identity of a people. This book is therefore not a strictly art-historical assessment of the forms and styles of the monuments. Instead, it takes a historical approach, assessing the transformations and innovations that took place during late antiquity and asking what the art and aesthetics of Hagia Sophia can tell us about early Byzantine civilisation.











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