The Colossus of Constantine
A lot can happen to a work of art in 1,700 years. Consider the Colossus of Constantine: what remains of it today are a colossal marble head, standing over seven feet tall; a right arm and, oddly, two right hands; a left kneecap and shin; and both feet, complete with callused toes and sandals, a soldier's feet. Such a curious collection of fragments raises many of the kinds of questions art historians must ask themselves. What did this look like originally, before it fell prey to Time the destroyer and other varieties of vandals? Why did it look that way? And what was it meant to convey in its own time?
Let us begin by piecing together what we know of its history, and work deductively from there. The size of the head suggests that the figure of Constantine, even if seated, would have measured over forty feet high. (For comparison, the seated Lincoln in his monument in Washington is nineteen feet high, less than half the size of Constantine.) A solid marble statue of that size would defy even modern-day moving equipment, so it must have been an acrolith, a statue with sculpted marble parts attached to a framework of wood or brick, covered with clothing or drapery cast in metal. If the marble pieces were reassembled on such a framework, they would likely show that Constantine had himself portrayed in the same pose as the Capitoline Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the most important sculpture in ancient Rome.
The Constantine fragments were found near the ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius and moved to the Capitoline Hill in Rome in 1486 by no less a personage than Michelangelo. Later they were moved to the courtyard of the Capitoline Museum, where they remain today (more fragments were discovered in 1951). But originally the Colossus was meant to be housed in the apse of the Basilica of Maxentius, an ambitious architectural project planned and begun by Constantine's fellow tetrarch, Maxentius.
From a God to a Servant of God
Maxentius and Constantine had a vexed history. After the Emperor Diocletian's death, four co-rulers, the tetrarchs, assumed the government of the empire. Civil war quickly ensued among the rival rulers, with Constantine emerging as the victor with his defeat of Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in a.d. 312. According to Eusebius, Constantine had a vision in which he was promised victory if he fought under the sign of the chi rho, the first two letters of Christ's name; the victory led first to Constantine's tolerance, and finally to his embrace, of Christianity. After Maxentius's defeat, Constantine resumed work on the already grandiose basilica, expanding it further and changing its orientation so that the new focus would be on the Colossus enthroned in the western apse at the end of the main axis.
The basilica was a combination law court, public meeting space, and city hall; it was the largest and the last building added to the Roman Forum. Although basilicas often housed images of the gods, they were not temples; and in later years, the basilica became the preferred form for Christian churches. Here, then, the emperor takes the pose and the place of an effigy of a god.
But with Constantine's eventual adoption of Christianity, he acknowledged that the emperor was no longer a god, but instead the servant of the one God. This called for certain modifications to be made to the Colossus. The right hand with the imperial scepter was replaced with another, this one holding the orb and cross symbolic of Christ's reign over the world. This explains why there are two remaining right hands. The change was probably made after 324: the head is drilled for the insertion of a diadem, which Constantine only wore after that date.
Tipping Point & Legacy
The principal changes were made to the head, which seems to have been recut in a new style. One of the polarities art historians look for is the pendulum swing between naturalism and abstraction. Naturalism, the portrayal of things as they appear in nature, shows up in the bulging veins of the arms and the battered toes. Abstraction, which draws out, or abstracts, the essential form and not the superficial appearance, is something new here. While the head keeps certain recognizable features, such as the pronounced aquiline nose and the cleft chin, the face has been chiseled thinner, and thus relatively longer, and the eyes have been enlarged and turned in a slightly upward direction. Constantine's expression thus becomes transcendent, gazing heavenward upon the Eternal.
To some extent, the new alterations are also a look backward, past the hyper-realistic portrait style of Constantine's immediate predecessors to the idealized and abstract portraits of the Emperor Trajan, with their long faces, neat hair, and clean-shaven chins. In the third and fourth centuries a.d., Trajan was regarded as the ideal emperor, with whom Constantine wished to be identified, so that his choice of a more abstract and idealized portrait style had a certain practical and political purpose.
But more importantly, Constantine's Colossus looks forward. In 330, the emperor moved the seat of government and the imperial court from Rome to Byzantium, in the eastern half of the empire (and modestly named it Constantinople). Yet Rome was not entirely abandoned: Constantine left behind his colossal image as a benevolent protector watching over the ancient city. With the move, however, begins a new swing toward the abstract in art, prompted by the Christian concept that everything in the natural world reflects, or is a sign of, the supernatural world beyond. The new art of the Byzantine Empire moved away from naturalistic representations of the world toward a flattened and dematerialized mystical imagery. Constantine's Colossus is a kind of tipping point, a single work that may have changed the course of stylistic history.
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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