Bissera Pentcheva's Hagia Sophia and Multisensory Aesthetics: a Multi-sensory Religious Experience

Hagia Sophia: A Multisensory, Transcendent Experience

“Hagia Sophia and Multisensory Aesthetics”, written by Bissera Pentcheva, explored how the interior design elements of Hagia Sophia, namely the gold accents and book-matched marble, reflect and represent language and literature of the time. Mention of traditional chants and burning incense is also an important aspect when considering the total sensory aesthetic experience that worshipers were a part of. Emphasis is put on the combination of these active sensory details because, together, they create an environment based on the aural architecture that enriches the practice of worship and enforces Byzantine ideals and innovations in religious practice.

Before addressing the articles in depth analysis of the marble and gold interior of Hagia Sophia, I would like to speak to the historical setting and context of the structure. The construction of Hagia Sophia was one of Justinian’s enormous building projects, and probably his most well-known and appreciated, representing a rebirth of the church after it was destroyed during the Nika riots of AD 532. Justinian’s emphasis of rebuilding the church also represented his strive to make this the church that would revive all the other churches in Constantinople. We not only see very evident connections to this in the architecture and design choices of Hagia Sophia, but we see this very clearly in literature of the time. Pentcheva frequently references the ekphratic poem, “Descriptio Sanctae Sophiae” by Paul the Silentiary that describes the experience of Hagia Sophia in a new and flowery literature style, reflecting not only direct experiences of being in Hagia Sophia, but also giving historians clues as to how the cultural style of all Byzantine art forms are connected.

Pentcheva shows her readers the shared cultural style of Byzantine literature and art by focusing primarily on the use of the root marmar- in the Greek language. Uses of the root are scattered across Paul’s poem, forming words like marmaron, marmarygma, and marmairo to describe Hagia Sophia in vivid imagery. Marmaron, meaning marble, is used most often due to its importance in the structure and gleaming quality of Hagia Sophia. The marble of Hagia Sophia is book-matched so that it has a wave-like appearance that influences the eye to create an animated surface when light shines from the base of the dome that houses 40 windows, even though the marble has a cloudy grey coloring. This grey marble comes from the island of Proconnesus in the Sea of Marmara that is near Constantinople, a heavy influence as to why it was chosen as the marble that would be used in the decoration and construction of Hagia Sophia. Though much of the structure is grey marble, there are four bands of green marble in the flooring that are said to represent the four rivers of paradise (Pentcheva: 96). With this inference, we can draw parallels between the use of marmaron, marmarygma, and marmairo. First, we will focus on the use of marmairo, meaning coruscating water. Marmairo directly draws back to the inference of the four bands of green marble representing the river of paradise because of their book-matched, wave-like appearance. Paul the Silentiary uses images like Bosphorus, the strait that connects the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea, that back the idea that the marble has a water-like quality about it. Mainly, marmairo is used as a describer that tells how the sun reflects off the marble and animates it, making it move like water in the wind under the sun. Animation is key when marmarygma, meaning to shimmer, is used in Paul’s poem because it reflects, again, on the quality of the marble when it’s under sunlight. The movement of the sunlit marble is also reinforced by the gold that shines brightly in the monumental dome and the mosaics of Hagia Sophia. “’The ceiling encompassing gold-inlaid tesserae, whose pouring down in glittering gold-streaming ray irresistibly bounces off the faces of the faithful.’” (Paul, Pentcheva: 98). This instance that Pentcheva is referencing from Paul’s ekphratic is important because it shows that the gold and the marble are a united sensory experience. At dawn when the sun’s rays breech the domes windows and make the faces of the golden mosaics look as though they are truly alive and among the worshipers. Glitter “marks the amination of matter.” (Pentcheva: 100)

Animation is not only important when considering marmar- in the sense of creating images of Hagia Sophia, but it is important when speaking of charis, meaning beauty and grace in Greek, that directly relates to the Holy Spirit and worship in Hagia Sophia. Paul the Silentiary uses the image of the ambo, a raised stand formally used to read the Gospel, as a connector between marmar- and charis because the sea, probably the Sea of Marmara, pushes at an island like the congregation pushes at the ambo (Pentcheva: 99). This use of literature to describe art is very important when considering the combination of ritual and memory of worship to create a form of imagery that is strongest to the readers because it helps intertwine the inanimate with the animate. Imagery was key in Paul’s poem because he could use excessive metaphors to relate to the excessive use of marble and gold in the interior of Hagia Sophia. Along with the uses of gold and its relating metaphors, Paul creates images of darkness to juxtapose the shimmering quality of the gold with the darkness of onyx possibly mirroring the Devil and the influences of hell that are absent from the interior of Hagia Sophia. Because the darkness is pushed out by the light that floods the interior of Hagia Sophia, we can further infer the purpose of Hagia Sophia as a soul cleansing experience.

Soul cleansing plays a major role in the religious experience due to the nature of sinning and the negative connotations that have been placed around the undesirable aspects of character, human nature, and death. There are many instances of cleansing that are deeply rooted into the structure of Hagia Sophia. Notably, the halo of windows in the base of the dome and the burning of incense. Architecturally, the dome of Hagia Sophia appears as though it is suspended from the heavens because of the halo-like ring of windows that embellish the base of the dome. The dome creates a “special mystical quality of the light flooding the interior” (Gardner, Paul: 262) that dominates the interior of Hagia Sophia and causes all the animation in the décor. With the surplus of cleansing light, the interior of the church was flooded with the scent of burning incense, specifically nard oil, the scent referenced in “The Song of Songs” by Gregory of Nyssa that directly relates the Holy Spirit (Caseau: 84). Not only nard oil was burned throughout the church, other scents like resin, myrrh, and kyphi were burned at specific times of the day. Kyphi, specifically, signified cleansing because it was said to bring relief and protection to those who the scent surrounded. Incense was also used to cleanse the church after a funeral service because it would carry away the bad odor of death and further put a literal smokescreen between life and the afterlife.

When speaking of connections between worshipers and the Holy Spirit, nothing is more vital than the acoustics of the interior of Hagia Sophia. “Icons of Sound: Aesthetics and Acoustics of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul”, a collaboration study between Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and Department of Art & Art History, shows that Hagia Sophia’s acoustics are considered wet acoustics, meaning that an echo lasts up to 10 seconds. The sound bounces off the marble surfaces and reverberates with sound being suspended in the air, almost creating a wave of sound. A tradition of Byzantine worship was the repetition of chants; these chants would splash off the walls and floors and fill the interior with walls of moving sound. With the image of waves still in mind, we can consider the sound of the chants to have a somewhat cleansing nature that conjures the Holy Spirit in the charis of the experience. The only way, then, for worshipers to be close to the Holy Spirit would be to take part of the religious practice firsthand in Hagia Sophia. This creates icon through enactment.

Gregory of Nyssa said that, “because of what we can perceive, we believe in invisible things, and because of what we experience in the world, we believe in the promise of future things.” (Pentcheva: 96). Even though we perceive imaginable things, we still look towards fact to describe them to us. Pentcheva tells us that, because of this, she has been lead to believe that ekphratic poems are a reliable source of historical information when examining artwork from the past that lack other experimental documentation. The only way the ekphratic can be interpreted as a credible source, Pentcheva says, is if one if reading it before the artwork it describes. I believe that, specifically in the case of Hagia Sophia, the ekphratic by Paul the Silentiary should always be received as a credible source describing the experience of the individual because it is an opinionated document that uses overexaggerated literary devices. Without these key aspects, we wouldn’t have a connection to the cultural style shift of the time and we couldn’t infer that Hagia Sophia connects deeply to the divine and that the purpose of the decoration and architecture was effective in the mind of worshipers.

To again quote Gregory of Nyssa, “sense perception is a means of reaching the spiritual” (Pentcheva: 101). This would further the argument that Hagia Sophia is a multisensory religious experience. But does this multisensory experience define modern art, and if so, could we consider Hagia Sophia a move towards a modern style of art? Pentcheva says that “modern art is characterized by desire to break away from naturalistic representation… this is not medieval art” (101). I’d like to disagree with her statement because modern art isn’t something that is characterized by a desire to breakaway, it is characterized by a desire to break the bounds of art in existence. I would include Hagia Sophia as an architectural feat that moved towards the beginnings of modern art because it created an experience that was something totally brand new to art: a multisensory, transcendent experience.