Trales Anthemium

Fragment of a Greek work of Antemio on the paradoxes of mechanics

Anthemius of Tralles (Ancient Greek: Ἀνθέμιος ὁ Τραλλιανός; Tralles, ca. 474 -ca. 558) was an architect and Greek geometry professor, famous for being one of the two architects, along with Isidore of Miletus, of the Basilica of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (Istanbul).

Biography

Interior view of the dome of the church of Santa Sofia that designed Antemio de Tralles. Istanbul, Turkey.

He came from a cultured family: his father, Estéfano, was a doctor, like two of his brothers, another was a lawyer, and a fourth was described as a "man of letters."

The basilica was built from 532 to 537, although due to a collapse of the dome in 562 it had to be retouched. The commission came from the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. The highlight of the work is its dome, which rests in a large square on four pendentives and ends in forty windows that give the appearance of supporting the dome in a sea of light.

His talents seem to have extended to engineering as well, as he is said to have been tasked with repairing the flood defenses at Dara, a Byzantine fortification in Syria. He was also a capable mathematician. He described the construction of an ellipse and wrote a book on conic sections, which was very useful in designing the dome of the Hagia Sophia. He compiled a study on mirror configurations in his work on mechanical devices which was known to Arab mathematicians as Ibn al-Haytham .

Louis Dupuy (1709 - 1795) published in 1777 a fragment of his treatise On lenses that burn with the title Περί παραδόξων μηχανημάτων (Sur des paradoxes de mécanique: On the Paradoxes of Mechanics), and also appeared in 1786 in volume 42 of the Histoire de l'Academie des Instrumentistes. A. Westermann published a critical edition of this work in his Παραδοξογράφοι (Scriptores rerum mirabilium Graeci, Greek Paradoxographers) in 1839.