Author Description

The mosque of Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofia) in Istanbul, rebuilt in its current form as the Cathedral of Constantinople by Justinian in 537, stands as one of the world's most majestic monuments of sacred architecture. This volume, the first modern record of both the exterior and the interior of the building, memorializes its mid-nineteenth-century restoration, and marks a cardinal moment in the representations of Hagia Sophia in the West and in the East. The reconstruction of the mosque, which at the time was remote and of little interest to Westerners, was seen as a sign of progress and westernization to its Ottoman caretakers. The book also serves as a vivid reminder of the importance of reproductive technology in the contextualization of ancient monuments: tinted lithography, a mature technology by the 1850s, is here put to brilliant use in representing the colors, geometrical complexities, and enormous scale of the building. Louis Haghe, the artist who reproduced! Fossati's drawings, was a pioneer of this illustrative art, and the design of the title-page is attributed to Owen Jones. Hagia Sophia has never been depicted more magnificently. This Octavo Edition features images from a copy in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and includes a commentary, a complete new English translation of the text, and full bibliographical details. 6 pages of description + lithographic title page and 25 plates (in two tints) by Louis Haghe after Fossati. Commentary by David Sullivan.