Choice Review

For more substantial and more usefully (if less dramatically) illustrated than Heinz Kahler's book of the same name (1967), Mainstone's Hagia Sophia is the first monograph on the great church in two decades. Over the first four chapters, his method is to look backward from the building as we have it today to the church as it was in 537. He tn considers its two predecessors, Justinian's building as part of the sixth-century ``architectur scene,'' the development of its design, stages of construction, original furnishings, and later impact. Confusing as this may seem in outline, and hypothetical as some of it is of necessity, this is an original approach and one logically dictated by the physical evidence-material with which Mainstone is more at home than withhe literary sources. This is very much an architect's book. Although it will not serve as a commentary on the drawings in R.L. Van Nice's survey, Saint Sophia in Istanbul (1965, 1986), the volume stands on its own as the fuest account yet of the great church's structure.-A. Cutler, Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus