Walking on Water: Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

For centuries, observers imagined a "frozen sea" in the book-matcbed marble floor of Hagia Sophia. Enduring perceptions of marble as a liquid substance led to similar descriptions of floors of other medieval churches, east and west, and the concept was consciously revived in late-nine teenth-century London. Such floors could simultaneously evoke primeval chaos and theological images of the sea: devotees who "walked on water" could visualize themselves in a sacred edifice of macrocosmic pretensions in which the Creator too would feel at home.