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SPEAKER 1: Well, there's the head.
SPEAKER 2: And elbow.
SPEAKER 1: I see a knee and a finger pointing up.
SPEAKER 2: And a shin.
SPEAKER 1: And a foot.
SPEAKER 2: And another foot.
SPEAKER 1: We're looking at the remains of a colossal marble
representation of the emperor Constantine.
SPEAKER 2: And this colossal sculpture was originally,
we think, about 40 feet high.
So really big.
SPEAKER 1: And it would have filled this extraordinary space
at the end of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine.
SPEAKER 2: This was a very large public space
right here on the Forum.
And at the end of it was a rounded area, a niche.
And the sculpture was found there,
so we think it was meant for that space.
SPEAKER 1: Michelangelo is the one who actually brought it
up to the Capitoline Hill, which was the ancient government
center.
Constantine is certainly a Roman emperor,
but he's the last pagan Roman emperor.
And the person who really ushers in Christianity
and all the changes that will take place in Italy
and end the former empire.
SPEAKER 2: Well, and he moves the capital of the empire
to Constantinople, the city of Constantine all the way
in the east and so, in a way, begins
the decline of the city of Rome that we
see happen in the Middle Ages.
SPEAKER 1: So maybe it's not so inappropriate
that we see him in fragments in this city.
SPEAKER 2: I find this portrait so interesting.
We think his body had a core of wood and mud brick,
and maybe was covered in gilded bronze.
We're not really sure.
But I find him so different looking
than other images of emperors.
SPEAKER 1: Well, you know this is
a really interesting stylistic moment when
we think about ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
I think most people just think of the high classical moment
and all of its naturalism.
But we're talking about a long period of time
in the classical era, and styles change there also.
SPEAKER 2: If you think about the history of Roman emperors
and their images, you often see a combination
of realism and idealism.
So that the citizens of the Roman Empire
could identify that particular emperor.
So we know what Hadrian looked like, or Trajan looked like,
or Vespasian looked like.
SPEAKER 1: Right, there has to be enough specificity
so you can say, ah, that's my emperor.
SPEAKER 2: Exactly, but at the same time they were idealized
to greater or lesser extents and thereby
recalled ancient Greek sculpture.
And by idealizing them, they were
made to seem divine or godlike.
But here Constantine doesn't look
like either of those traditions to me.
SPEAKER 1: Well, this was a moment of real transition.
It's not the issue between a kind of really high pitch
nationalism that can actually capture the characteristics
of an individual's face, and a kind of idealism.
This is actually a kind of abstraction of the human body.
SPEAKER 2: There's something abstracted, I think,
about the oval shapes of his eyes,
where we have a sense of them being
reduced to geometric shapes.
The way that his eyebrows form these semicircles
around the ovals of his eyes.
There's something that looks geometric about, not
only his face, but his hair.
And maybe this is a sign of moving
towards that symbolic way of representing
that we see with the beginnings of Christianity.
SPEAKER 1: I think It's impossible to untangle it
from the rise of Christianity, because
of our subsequent knowledge of what will happen.
And I think we perhaps don't know
enough about the subtle shifts in Roman style.
But my understanding is that there was also
different kinds of representation
for different strata of society.
And that one could recall, that you
sort of in the imperial past, one
could recall the more intellectual pursuits
of the Greeks through a kind of naturalism.
But one might speak to the here and the now and the broader
population through a greater degree of abstraction.
SPEAKER 2: If your figures that look to us as disproportionate,
maybe stocky, and stiff in their movements
without the lovely contrapposto that we see in
ancient Greek and Roman art.
So he seems to be looking beyond us
and not really in the here and now.
And maybe in that way, too, there
is some suggestion of the Christian and the Heavenly.
SPEAKER 1: Well, certainly of his divinity.
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