ABSTRACT
Beginning essentially in the fifteenth century, there is a visual record of Hagia Sophia in drawings and paintings by artists ranging from the mediocre to the exquisitely skilled, with a culmination in the ambitious campaign by the twentieth-century architect, Robert van Nice. The marble images in Hagia Sophia, like marginalia in their subordinate position, but being formations of nature are profoundly different. Hagia Sophia was built as a setting for the sacred liturgy performed on the highest level, in the presence of the ruler of the Byzantine state, the emperor. The marble paneling of Hagia Sophia has been isolated by being relegated to the level of visual "background noise," against which the more important elements of symbolism and narrative have been played out. One could easily see how a church like Hagia Sophia could be imagined as engendering a restless movement of this sort.
