Around Beyazit and Sehzadebas - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 185

immediately, finally completing the project in 1548. Sinan himself
called this his “apprentice work”, but it was the work of an apprentice
of genius, his first imperial mosque on a truly monumental scale.
Sinan, wishing from the very first to centralize his plan, adopted
the expedient of extending the area not by two but by four semidomes.
Although this is the most obvious and logical way both of increasing
the space and of centralizing the plan, the identical symmetry
along both axes has a repetitive efect which tends towards dullness.
Furthermore, the four great piers that support the dome arches
are stranded and isolated in the middle of the vast space and their
inevitably large size is thereby unduly emphasized. These drawbacks
were obvious to Sinan once he had tried the experiment, and he never
repeated it.
The interior, then, is vast and empty; almost alone among the
mosques, it has not a single column; nor are there any galleries. Sinan
has succeeded in minimizing the size of the great piers by making
them very irregular in shape: contrast their not unpleasing appearance
with the gross “elephant's feet” columns of Sultan Ahmet. The general
efect of the interior is of an austere simplicity that is not without
charm: Milton's very un-Horatian “plain in her neatness” might well
describe it.
As if to compensate for this interior plainness, Sinan has lavished
on the exterior a wealth of decoration such as he uses nowhere else.
The handsome courtyard avoids the defect of that of the Süleymaniye
(see Chapter 10) by having all four porticoes at the same height,
at the expense of sacrificing to some extent the monumentality of
the western façade. The şadırvan in the centre is said by Evliya to
be a contribution of Murat IV. The two minarets are exceptionally
beautiful: notice the elaborate geometrical sculpture in low relief,
the intricate tracery of their two şerefes, and the use of occasional
terra-cotta inlay. The cluster of domes and semidomes, many of them
with fretted cornices and bold ribbing, crowns the building in an
arrangement of repetition and contrast that is nowhere surpassed.
It was in this mosque, too, that Sinan first adopted the brilliant
expedient of placing colonnaded galleries along the entire length of
the north and south façades in order to conceal the buttresses, an