here were not a
considerable number of works of art of the best periods. The one list
which has been left us by the Greek logothete professes to give
account of only the larger statues which were sent to the melting-pot.
But it is worth while to note what were these principal objects so
destroyed.

Constantinople had long been the great storehouse of works of art and
of Christian relics, the latter of which were usually encased with all
the skill that wealth could buy or art furnish. It had the great
advantage over the elder Rome that it had never been plundered by
hordes of barbarians. Its streets and public places had been adorned
for centuries with statues in bronze or marble. In reading the works
of the historians of the Lower Empire the reader cannot fail to be
struck alike with the abundance of works of art and with the
appreciation in which they were held by the writers.

First among the buildings as among the works of art, in the estimation
of every citizen, was Hagia Sophia. It was emphatically the Great
Church. Tried by any test, it is one of the most beautiful of human
creations. Nothing in Western Europe even now gives a spectator who is
able with an educated eye to restore it to something like its former
condition, so deep an impression of unity, harmony, richness, and
beauty in decoration as does the interior of the masterpiece of
Justinian. All that wealth could supply and art produce had been
lavished upon its interior--at that time, and for long afterward, the
only portion of a church which the Christian architect thought
deserving of study. "Internally, at least," says a great authority on
architecture, "the verdict seems inevitable that Santa Sophia is the
most perfect and most beautiful church which has yet been erected by
any Christian people. When its furniture was complete the verdict
would have been still more strongly in its favor."

We have seen that to Nicetas, who knew and loved it in its best days,
it was a model of celestial beauty, a glimpse of heaven itself. To the
more sober English observer, "its mosaic of marble slabs of various
patterns and beautiful colors, the domes, roofs, and curved surfaces,
with gold-grounded mosaic relieved by figures or architectural
devices," are "wonderfully grand and pleasing." All that St. Mark's is
to Venice, Hagia Sophia was to Constantinople. But St. Mark's, though
enriched with some of the spoils of its great original, is, as to its
interior at lea