Anthemios från Tralles
Anthemius was a mathematician rather than a master builder, an expert in geometry and optics. Together with Isidore of Miletus he designed Hagia Sophia, whose dome on pendentives was something no one had seen before.
Anthemius was born around 474 in Tralles in Asia Minor, in present-day western Turkey, into a learned family. His father Stephanus was a physician, and several of his brothers became known in medicine, law and literature. Anthemius himself became a mathematician and physicist, specialising in geometry, optics and mechanics. Among other things he wrote a treatise on burning mirrors, in which he discussed how parabolic mirrors concentrate sunlight, and he studied conic sections. The sources call him mechanikos, a title for someone who had mastered both theoretical geometry and applied mechanics. It was in this capacity, rather than as a traditional master builder, that he came to the court of Emperor Justinian in Constantinople.
After the Nika riots of 532, when the old Hagia Sophia burned down, Justinian commissioned Anthemius and Isidore of Miletus to build a new church. It was consecrated as early as 537, after barely six years of work. The solution combines an elongated basilica with a centrally planned building: a very large dome rests on four pendentives, curved triangles that transfer the thrust from the dome’s circular base to four massive piers. Half-domes on two sides extend the space. A ring of windows at the base of the dome makes it seem to float on light. The first dome collapsed after earthquakes in 558 and was rebuilt, higher, by Isidore the Younger. Anthemius died around 534 and never saw the church completed.
Hagia Sophia was the largest church interior in the world for almost a thousand years and became the model for Byzantine churches throughout the eastern Mediterranean, in Russia and in the Balkans. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 it was converted into a mosque, and Ottoman architects, above all Sinan, developed its dome system further in mosques such as the Süleymaniye in Istanbul. The pendentive also became a cornerstone of Western dome building, from St Peter’s in the Renaissance to Baroque churches. Anthemius shows that architecture could be applied mathematics long before modern engineering. Nordic travellers, among them architects and art historians in the 19th century, measured and drew the church, and it has long held an established place in Swedish architectural education.