needed to make a brilliant display when placed in position throughout the building. From Carystus came a light green, and from the Phrygian mountains a rose-coloured marble diversified with streaks of deep red and silver. Sparta supplied an emerald green, and the Iassian hills a blood-red species veined with a livid white. Much porphyry was floated down the Nile; in Lydia was found a bright-tinted marble seamed with lines of red, and in Numidia a crocus-stained variety which shone like gold. Atrax yielded a green and blue marble resembling grass sprinkled with cornflowers; and lastly there was an abundant supply of the coarse white kind in the adjacent Isle of Proconnesus.[1]
Having cleared and surveyed the site, the architects drew out the plans of the church and fixed the interior measurements at 270 × 230 feet. The central portion of this area was to be covered by a dome having a diameter of 107 feet, which should overhang the pavement at a height of 160 feet. No roof of any magnitude, elevated in this manner, was known to them, of which the dome was not upheld by frequent supports, so that free movement from end to end of the building was obstructed by their presence. Anthemius and Isidorus, however, determined that the nave of their church should lie open for its full width in a clear sweep from the main entry to the apse, in which stood the Patriarch's throne.[2] In the central area, therefore, at the*
- ↑ These details as to the marbles are drawn from the safe authority of Paul the Silentiary (617, et seq.), whose poem descriptive of St. Sophia is copious and exact. Lethaby and S. (op. cit., p. 235, et seq.) try to identify the marbles as far as they are known to modern commerce.
- ↑ The raising of domes in masonry was well understood throughout the Empire at this time. The knowledge had probably been brought to Rome in the second century B.C. as a result of her conquests in the East. The dome of the Pantheon, built or restored by Hadrian (c. 120),
