Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (review)

Abstract

Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. By Robert S. Nelson. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 278, 11 color plates. $65.00.) This fascinating investigation of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul amasses a wealth of documentation-some of it well known and some of it new-to document and assess how it became a modern icon. It focuses on the people, writings, and illustrations that illuminate this history. Intelligently and beautifully written, and well produced, with 119 figures and ten color plates, the important monograph of the Byzantine art historian Robert S. Nelson should appeal to the scholar and the general reader alike. Nelson begins his inquiry with the completion of the last major restoration of the building from 1847 to 1849 by the Swiss architects, the Fossati brothers, and concludes around 1950, a rather arbitrary date, as he admits. But the century of his overview was crucial for the transformation of Hagia Sophia as artifact of the past-first as the cathedral and patriarchal church of Constantinople and then as the sultan's and the caliph's principal mosque Aya Sofya, into a monument of the present-since 1934 a museum seen by virtually all visitors to the city. We learn about the critics, poets, archeologists, architects, illustrators, photographers, philanthropists, government officials, and religious congregations who are tied to the fabric of Hagia Sophia's modern reception. The monograph is selective, focusing upon the European and American reception of the building, and excluding interpretations by Turks of the late Sultanate and early Republic, modern Greeks (except for some Greek Orthodox communities who migrated to the United States and built churches), and Orthodox Christians in late Czarist and early Soviet Russia. Nelson's narrative unfolds in eight chapters. In Chapter One he sketches the lines of the Early Byzantine church of the sixth century, its post-Iconoclastic mosaic decoration, and the liturgical processions associated with the building. Then he outlines the scornful attitudes about or neglect of the building by late eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers. A few writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, however, offered positive appraisals of Hagia Sophia. For example, in her popular illustrated travel book The Beauties of the Bosphorus (London, 1838), Miss Julia Pardoe,who gained admittance to Hagia Sophia, termed it an architectural wonder (p. 63). Chapter Two analyzes how certain scholars and architects in Germany, France, and England appropriated Byzantine architecture in the service of their respective countries. The next chapter discusses the sympathetic attitude toward Byzantine architecture in the writings of John Ruskin and how Ruskin made it relevant to Victorian building. No matter that Ruskin never visited Constantinople and based his grasp of Byzantine architecture on Venice, especially on architectural sculpture and mosaics in San Marco inVenice.Yet his The Stones of Venice (1851-1853J) launched a general reappraisal of Byzantine architecture in general and Hagia Sophia in particular. Chapter Four is to my mind the most important in the book. In the second half of the nineteenth century both photographic images of the building and its first scholarly studies appeared.The latter are well known in academic circles, but the photographs, engravings, and other reproductions gathered by Nelson are less familiar. The superhero of this period was the British artist James Robertson, who moved to Constantinople in 1841 to modernize the Ottoman mint and who within a decade had taken up photography. …