ABSTRACT
The inscriptions in Hagia Sophia and the prominence of apostles and evangelists, which were examined in the previous chapter, are the elements in the decorative programme that are most capable of holding up overt political messages. The possible allusions to the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople suggest Manuel's desire to echo the imperial city in his new capital, and to demonstrate his knowledge of it, even if only through intermediary texts. However, this aspect of the decoration of the church forms only one reading of one part of the overall programme. Other areas of the painted interior display a variety of unusual and interesting features, which can also shed light on the cultural orientation of Trebizond in the thirteenth century. The arrangement of the images, their relationship to the liturgy and their use of space demonstrate the access and knowledge that the designers and painters of Hagia Sophia had to up-to-date theological and artistic ideas, their willingness to innovate, and their impact on later developments in Byzantine art. These all provide further evidence of the relationship between Trebizond and the rest of the Orthodox world in this period. The analysis relies both on iconographic and on stylistic comparisons, which investigate the skills and techniques of the artists involved as well as the devices they employed to convey ideas in the images, whether through their use of narrative, composition, incidental detail or the depiction of the human figure.
