[MUSIC PLAYING] 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. [MUSIC PLAYING]