St Sophia's Mosaics Circle Dome

St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral is unbelievably ornate, so today I am confining the post to the dome. Artist William Chavalas created the 27-foot wide/long picture of Christ--whose head alone is ten feet tall. Chavalas also designed the stained glass windows.

This particular photo is posted on Flickr by Michael Fletcher, who retains all rights to it.

The amazing thing to realize as you look up is this: See those tiny figures of saints, in between the stained glass windows? See them? Those are actually life-sized mosaic figures. If you were to get up there, you would stand about as high.

Now, the dome is a painting. But those 24 saints that look so tiny are mosaics, They were completed in 1989 by artist Sirio Tonelli, who has since installed Byzantine style mosaics in over 100 churches in the US, including St. Paul's Cathedral in Orange County and St. Sava in San Gabriel, which I blogged about. He also created the double eagle mosaic in St. Sophia's plaza courtyard. I believe he still has his studio in Chicago.

In 1989, the "Procession of Saints" mosaics cost $300,000, and were created in Italy then transported to the US. There's actually only 21 saints, two archangels, and one representation of the "spirit" of Christ. They replaced the paintings of angels that had been there since 1952.

There are incredibly detailed and beautiful pictures of the dome and one of the figures in this photostream by photographer John Gaylord.--this to the right is a partial image. It's all I can find of the mosaics!

Seeing-Stars has a write up on this church, as it was the setting for a wedding on NYPD Blue. In real life (what's that?) it hosted the wedding of the same NYPD Blue star, Sharon Lawrence, as well as the funeral of actor Telly Savalas.

Charles Skouras helped lay the cornerstone to St. Sophia's in 1948  after making it very big in Hollywood--as the head of Fox West Coast and National Theaters. His two brothers (all three were poor immigrants at one time) also found success, Spyros as president of 20th Century Fox for twenty years ending in 1962, and George as head of United Artists Theaters.

No expense was spared on this Byzantine-inspired cathedral. Here's a few sentences from a 2003 article on St. Sophia:

With leaded glass from Belgium, England and Germany; marble from Greece and Italy; 17 over-the-top chandeliers from Czechoslovakia, three of which each weigh a ton; 25,000 pounds of copper on the roof; religious depictions everywhere; a dome rising 90 feet into the air and lots of 24-carat gold leaf; St. Sophia is a very visible symbol of Orthodox faith and a translation of Skouras’ belief in service. Built for approximately $2 million between 1948 and 1952, if built today, costs would exceed $50 million.

When it opened in 1952, the church was situated in LA's Greek neighborhood at Pico and Normandie. Not true now, but the big Greek Festival is still held there every year, and in fact just wrapped  up.

Here is a picture of artist Sirio Tonelli, a fairly recent one. The mosaic he's completing is definitely not from St. Sophia Cathedral, though it could be from St. Paul's out in Irvine. But I don't know--the picture wasn't captioned.