Byzantine Culture

History · Article

The Deësis Mosaic of Hagia Sophia

The Deësis in the south gallery of Hagia Sophia is the most admired face in Byzantine art. Its date, its style, the Palaiologan revival, and its rediscovery under Ottoman plaster in 1933.

In the south gallery of Hagia Sophia, on the east wall, is a mosaic panel about four metres high of which rather less than half survives. It shows Christ in the centre, the Virgin turned toward him on the left, and John the Baptist on the right. Everything below the waist is gone; the gold ground is patchy; the Baptist’s figure is badly damaged.

It is generally regarded as the finest surviving work of Byzantine art.

What a Deësis Is

The word deesis means “entreaty” or “supplication.” The composition shows the Virgin and John the Baptist — the two figures closest to Christ in the Orthodox hierarchy of intercession — turned toward Christ with hands raised in petition, interceding for humanity.

It is a compositional formula rather than a narrative scene, and it appears across Byzantine art from at least the eighth century: on ivory triptychs, on the templon beam above the sanctuary screen, in apse and gallery mosaics, in manuscripts. In the developed Russian iconostasis it expands into a whole tier of interceding figures.

The Hagia Sophia panel is the supreme example of the type, and its placement in the gallery — where the court and, during church councils, the assembled clergy would have been — was deliberate.

The Style

What distinguishes the mosaic is its handling of the human face.

Byzantine faces are normally built from a limited number of tones laid in distinct areas with hard edges, producing the schematic modelling described in icon painting technique. The Deësis mosaicist used tesserae of many closely graded tones, very small — down to two or three millimetres in the flesh — laid in curving lines that follow the anatomy, so that the transitions between light and shadow are continuous.

The result is a face with volume and a specific expression: Christ’s is grave, alert and somewhat sorrowful, with an asymmetry between the two sides that is subtler than the famous asymmetry at Daphni. The Virgin’s face, inclined, with lowered eyes and a downward turn to the mouth, is the most affecting image of grief in Byzantine art, and it is achieved without any of the demonstrative gestures the later Palaiologan style would use.

The gold ground behind the figures is set at varied angles, as described in the gold ground technique, so that the background shifts as the viewer moves while the faces stay stable.

The Date

The panel is not dated by inscription, and the arguments turn entirely on style and context.

The consensus places it in the Palaiologan restoration after 1261, most often shortly after Michael VIII Palaiologos recovered the city — possibly as a thank-offering for the restoration of the church to Orthodox use after fifty-seven years of Latin occupation. On this reading it is the first great monument of the Palaiologan revival, predating the Chora mosaics by about fifty years.

A minority view has argued for a twelfth-century date, on the grounds that the classicism of the faces fits the Komnenian period better. The debate is unresolved, and it matters for the history of Byzantine art: if the Deësis is late thirteenth century, the Palaiologan revival begins at an extraordinarily high level immediately after the recovery of the city; if it is twelfth century, the revival has a longer prehistory.

The Rediscovery

The mosaic was plastered over after the Ottoman conquest, along with the other figural mosaics of Hagia Sophia, and was unknown until the twentieth century.

In 1931 the Turkish government gave the Byzantine Institute of America, directed by Thomas Whittemore, permission to uncover and conserve the mosaics. The Deësis was revealed in 1933 and published soon after, and its effect on the study of Byzantine art was immediate: nothing of comparable quality had been known, and the received view that late Byzantine art was a declining provincial tradition became untenable.

Whittemore’s methods have been criticised since — the removal of Ottoman plaster and painted decoration, the consolidation techniques, the incomplete documentation — and conservation of the panel has continued in later campaigns. The mosaic is fragile; sections of the Baptist’s figure have deteriorated further, and the surrounding wall has had repeated structural problems.

Seeing It

The south gallery of Hagia Sophia is reached by a stone ramp rather than stairs, built wide enough for an empress to be carried up. The Deësis is at the east end, past the tomb slab of the Venetian doge Enrico Dandolo, who led the Fourth Crusade — a juxtaposition that is entirely accidental and completely appropriate.

Since the building’s reconversion to a mosque in 2020, access to the galleries has been restricted and has changed several times; at various points they have been closed to visitors entirely, and at others accessible through a separate upper-level museum route. Anyone travelling specifically to see the Deësis should check current arrangements before going, which is a sentence that would have seemed absurd about the most famous mosaic in the world until quite recently.

Why It Is Held in This Regard

Superlatives in art history are usually suspect, and there is a reasonable objection that the Deësis is admired partly because it is accessible, famous and photographs well.

The stronger case is this. Byzantine art was not attempting naturalistic portraiture, and judging it by that standard is a category error. What the Deësis achieves is something the tradition was attempting: a face that is simultaneously a specific human presence and an image of something beyond the human, holding both without collapsing into either. Most Byzantine images achieve the second and sacrifice the first. This one does not, and it does it in coloured glass cubes on a wall.

How It Was Made

The technical description explains why the panel is held in the regard it is, and the details are recoverable from close examination.

Tesserae size. In the flesh, the cubes run down to about two or three millimetres — roughly a quarter the size of those used for the drapery and the gold ground. Smaller tesserae permit finer tonal gradation, at a proportionate cost in labour.

Tonal range. Where a typical Byzantine face is built from four or five distinct flesh tones with visible boundaries, the Deësis uses many more, in closely graded steps, so that the transitions read as continuous modelling rather than as adjacent fields.

Setting direction. The tesserae in the faces are laid in curving rows that follow the form — around the eye socket, along the bridge of the nose, across the cheekbone — so the grain of the setting itself describes the anatomy.

The gold ground. Set at deliberately varied angles, so it shifts as the viewer moves, while the flesh stays optically stable.

Materials. Glass for the coloured tesserae, with gold-leaf sandwich cubes for the ground and silver-leaf cubes used sparingly in the highlights of the drapery.

The result is that at three metres the faces read as modelled volume, and at thirty centimetres they dissolve into coloured glass. The technique is discussed generally in Byzantine mosaics; what is unusual here is the sheer patience of the execution.

The Condition

It is worth being clear about how much is missing, because reproductions crop generously.

The panel originally stood about four metres high and would have shown three full-length or three-quarter figures. What survives is the upper portion: Christ’s head, shoulders and raised hand; the Virgin’s head and shoulders; and the Baptist’s head and part of his torso, in noticeably worse condition than the other two.

Below roughly chest height, everything is gone — lost when the setting bed failed, taking the tesserae with it. The surrounding wall shows the bare brick and mortar.

There has been further deterioration since the 1933 uncovering. Sections of the Baptist have continued to lose tesserae, the wall behind has had structural problems, and the panel has been the subject of repeated conservation campaigns.

The Whittemore Campaign and Its Critics

The uncovering of the Hagia Sophia mosaics between 1931 and the 1950s is the foundation of modern knowledge of Byzantine monumental art, and the methods have been questioned since.

Thomas Whittemore, who directed the Byzantine Institute of America, obtained permission from the Turkish government in 1931 and worked through the decade. The Deësis was revealed in 1933.

The criticisms, made mostly from the 1990s onward, are these: that Ottoman plaster and painted decoration of real historical value was removed without adequate recording; that the documentation of the process is thinner than modern standards require; that consolidation materials used were not ideal; and that Whittemore’s selection of what to uncover reflected a preference for Byzantine over Ottoman phases that was not a neutral scholarly judgement.

The defence is that the work was done to the standards of its decade, that Whittemore’s negotiation with the Turkish state was a considerable diplomatic achievement, and that without it the mosaics would have remained unknown for another half century.

Both are fair. What is not in doubt is the effect: a body of material that overturned the assumption that late Byzantine art was a provincial decline, and did so within about two years of the plaster coming off.

Continue exploring