Cyriacus of Ancona's Seven Drawings of Hagia Sophia

Abstract

Seven unpublished captions in a fifteenth-century manuscript in Parma describe a series of drawings of Hagia Sophia by Cyriacus of Ancona. Although the drawings were not copied into the manuscript, their subjects can be determined from information in the captions, and some idea of what three of them looked like can be gained from related drawings in Giuliano da Sangallo's Barberini Sketchbook. What is most remarkable about the lost drawings is their character as a series of views whose sequence and subjects reproduce the physical experience of a spectator moving through the building. This essay explores the significance of what was, in the mid-fifteenth century, an unprecedented approach to the depiction of architecture. It suggests that the series' structure was drawn from Classical and Byzantine descriptions of buildings known to early Italian humanists and that these literary works provided the conventions within which a new desire to record visual appearance could be realized.

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Notes on contributors

Christine Smith

A specialist in Italian medieval and Renaissance architecture, Christine Smith has published articles in Gesta, Antichità viva, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. For her study of the dome of Pisa Cathedral, she received the annual Founder's Award (1984) from the Society for Architectural Historians for the best article by a younger scholar published in its Journal. [Georgetown University, Charles Augustus Strong Center, via Vecchia Fiesolana 26, Fiesole, Italy]