Istanbul, Turkey
Constantinople
41.0086° N · 28.9800° E
What is there today
Hagia Sophia has stood since the year 537 and for almost a thousand years was the building with the largest dome in the world. In the smaller and less visited church of Saint Saviour in Chora survive the fourteenth century mosaics and frescoes that mark the last great flowering of Byzantine art.
Why this image comes from here
Here it was decided how an icon is painted, and here it was decided, after a century of destroying them, that painting them was legitimate. The imperial workshops fixed the tradition still followed today, and from them came gold beaten so thin that a leaf weighs less than the air that moves it.
Pieces from this place
Constantinople
Virgin of the Golden Mantle
Ref. AS015016 – AS015030 – AS015042
Not available
Constantinople
Archangel Gabriel
Ref. AS027016 – AS027030 – AS027042
Not available
Constantinople
Virgin Hodegetria, she who shows the way
Ref. AS032016 – AS032030 – AS032042
Not available
Constantinople
Archangel Michael
Ref. AS033016 – AS033030 – AS033042
Not available
Constantinople
Christ the Teacher
Ref. AS040016 – AS040030 – AS040042
Not available
Constantinople
Man of Sorrows
Ref. AS041016 – AS041030 – AS041042
Not available
Constantinople
Christ in Glory
Ref. AS050040
Not available
Constantinople
Saint Marina
Ref. AS053016 – AS053030 – AS053042
Not available
- Virgin of the Golden Mantle
- The brocade of the mantle and the crackled ground remember the imperial workshops of Constantinople, where gold was beaten so thin that a leaf weighed less than the air that moved it.
- Archangel Gabriel
- The type of the half length archangel, with the messenger s staff and the ribbon in the hair, is fixed in the mosaics of Constantinople, flanking Christ in the apses. From there the whole Orthodox world copied it, and this panel repeats it with the worn gold of old pieces.
- Virgin Hodegetria, she who shows the way
- The original was venerated in the monastery of the Hodegoi in Constantinople, from which it takes its name, and was lost in 1453 when the city fell. It survived in the copies: it is the most repeated Marian type in the history of the icon.
- Archangel Michael
- Constantinople dedicated more churches to him than to any other angel, starting with the Michaelion that Constantine raised outside the walls. From there comes the type of the warrior archangel, in the armour of a Roman officer rather than a tunic.
- Christ the Teacher
- The panel has its field gouged out, with a border of bare wood all around. That hollow has a name, kovcheg, and it is not decoration: the image is painted inside a box, not on a flat surface, so that the viewer leans in instead of looking straight on.
- Man of Sorrows
- In Greek this type is called Akra Tapeinosis, extreme humility. It is a deliberately impossible image: the body is dead and yet it is standing. It does not depict a moment of the story, it depicts what that moment means.
- Christ in Glory
- The panel is round, and that is no whim of format: it is the shape of domes. What is resolved here in a circle of forty centimetres is what in a Byzantine church takes up the entire ceiling, with Christ at the centre and everything else turning around him.
- Saint Marina
- Marina was martyred at Antioch in Pisidia while very young, and her cult spread from Constantinople across half of Europe. In the West she is called Margaret, and it is the same saint: two names for one life.