A viral social media trend last year suggested men think about the Roman Empire every month. Now, one Roman’s digital footprint is making headlines.
Constantine, who ruled for three decades in the 4th century and was famously the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, is living up to his moniker of “Constantine the Great” with a “massive” new statue in Rome, said The Associated Press (AP).
Authorities unveiled the 13-metre structure on Tuesday: a full replica of a statue of Constantine from about AD312, made using 3D modelling from scans of the nine “giant marble body parts” remaining from the original.
Body parts and ‘British wizardry’
Visitors keen to see the “colossal statue” that once graced Rome’s Forum have, for more than 500 years, “made do with the bits and pieces stacked in a courtyard of the Capitoline museum”, said The Times.
These were an “enormous marble head with staring eyes”, feet, an elbow, a shin, wrist, knee, hand and an arm, which were dug up in 1486.
But with 3D scanning, research and “some British wizardry”, said the paper, artist Adam Lowe recreated the whole statue at his Factum Foundation workshop, a Madrid-based non-profit that makes digitally reconstructed replicas of cultural masterpieces.
The 1:1 scale reproduction will now be on display at the Capitoline Museums in Italy’s capital.
“Its scale is breathtaking and it is very emotional to see Constantine looking out across Rome again,” said Lowe.
‘The violence of power’
Historians believe that the original statue depicted the god Jupiter, before Constantine had it rededicated to himself.
“What was frustrating is that there is a statue of Jupiter at the Hermitage in St Petersburg we would have liked to scan,” said Lowe, “but couldn’t because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
“Jupiter would have had a beard, and on the face of the statue you can see traces of a beard,” Salvatore Settis, an archaeologist and art historian who worked with Lowe, told The Times. The beard was chipped off to make it resemble clean-shaven Constantine.
Despite the loss of godlike facial hair, the statue still “inspires awe in the smaller viewers below”, said the AP news agency – just as Constantine intended, according to officials.
“In this statue there’s not just beauty, there’s the violence of power,” said Settis, representing the Fondazione Prada, the cultural arm of the Milan-based fashion house that paid for the project.
A copy, funded by British investor Jonathan Ruffer, will be displayed in the County Durham town of Bishop Auckland.
That’s more fitting than it sounds, Lowe told The Times, because Constantine was running the forces patrolling Hadrian’s Wall and was proclaimed emperor in York.
British artist digitally reconstructs original from remaining fragments to create new statue of Roman emperor