Tea at Trianon: The Many Lives of Hagia Sophia

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 19, 2025

The Many Lives of Hagia Sophia

From ArtNet News:

Constructed on orders of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I in 537 C.E., the Hagia Sophia replaced a cathedral that had originally been built by Constantine I several centuries earlier and subsequently renovated by his successors Constantius II and Theodosius II.

Justinian’s iteration, the foundation of the one we know today, was nothing short of an engineering marvel. Designed by the mathematicians Isodore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, its most striking feature was (and remains) its circular dome. Connected to its base by triangular supports, it appeared, in the words of one 6th-century scholar and writer, “not to be founded on solid masonry, but to be suspended from Heaven.” Unlike other domes of its kind, it also allowed abundant sunlight to penetrate the building, appropriately illuminating its cavernous, mosaic-covered interior. (Read more.)