The Bronze Doors of the Gate of the Horologium at Hagia Sophia

* I wish to acknowledge with thanks my indebtedness to Professor E. Baldwin Smith of Princeton University for valuable suggestions on the bibliography and monuments cited; also, to express my appreciation for permission granted me to reproduce in Figs. 4, 5, and 6 prints from the unique negatives of Syrian monuments, drawn from the archives of the expeditions led by the late Professor Howard Crosby Butler.

Abstract

The doorway which opens outward from the south end of the narthex of Hagia Sophia at Constantinople today gives access to a large, irregularly oblong chamber of uncertain date. The south doorway from this in turn opens to the exterior and may be identified as the Gate of the Horologium. Here stand the two great valves of a magnificent double door, “huge and lofty, and covered all with bronze,”¹ perhaps the finest examples of Byzantine ornamental bronze work that have come down to us (Fig. 1). Unfortunately, they have sagged and settled upon their hinges so much that they can no longer be moved to and fro but stand ajar motionless.² Each leaf is divided into two beautifully framed panels of unequal height, the taller below, the shorter above, both embraced by flat studded members, bordered on three sides by narrow rectangular strips of varied ornament, obviously coarser and less pleasing than that of the four panels. “One easily recognizes,” writes Salzenberg, “from the composition and technical execution of the ornament, that he has before his eyes a work of very different periods” (Fig. 2),³ a conclusion which is strengthened by the varying thickness of the bronze itself.⁴ Of the heavier portions, the panels which fill the four beautiful frames first mentioned, as well as another at the top of the left-hand or eastern valve (Fig. 1), may be accurately dated in the second quarter of the ninth century. This is proved by an inscription in the upper part of the eastern leaf and by the eight elaborate paired monograms upon the panels within the four frames, which give the names of the emperors, Theophilus and Michael, as well as of Theodora, with the date 841 replacing an earlier erasure reading 838 (Fig. 3).⁵ The monograms are damascened in silver, a technique early popularized by the Byzantine metal workers and still represented by several fine doors of the eleventh century at Amalfi, Monte Cassino, and other places, which are known to have come from Constantinople.⁶