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Cambridge University Press
052182723X - The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople - by Sarah Bassett
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INTRODUCTION

FROM ITS FOUNDATION IN THE FOURTH CENTURY BY CONSTANTINE THE GREAT to its sack by the army of the Fourth Crusade in the thirteenth, the city of Constantinople boasted a collection of ancient statuary unrivaled by any of the great medieval cities east or west. The self-conscious creation of the emperor and his advisors, this collection, composed largely of antiquities of pre-fourth-century manufacture, was created by transporting the sculptured riches of the cities and sanctuaries of the Roman Empire to the newly founded capital.¹ There, in a series of discrete yet interrelated gatherings spread throughout the city's public spaces, the sculptured patrimony of antiquity was marshaled to create a civic identity for the city, describing its history and in so doing explaining its unique right to urban preeminence.

What was initiated by Constantine was continued by his successors in the later fourth, the fifth, and the sixth centuries. Constantine's son, Constantius, appears to have completed a good deal of the initial work set in motion by his father, and over the course of the next two hundred years, additions continued to be made to extant gatherings around the city. With the expansion of the city limits and the concomitant development of new urban spaces under the aegis of the Theodosian house, new ensembles also were formed in the latter decades of the fourth and in the early fifth centuries. It was only in the sixth century, during the reign of Justinian, that the habit of reuse finally died out, by which time hundreds of ancient monuments graced the city's streets and public gathering places.

Although individual pieces inevitably were destroyed, felled by such natural and man-made disasters as fires and earthquakes or the occasional economic exigency that prompted the sacrifice of statuary for coin, the monuments that had been gathered for display in late antiquity stood largely undisturbed throughout the early middle ages.² Eventually, however, piecemeal attrition gave way to systematic, wholesale destruction as war replaced accident and imperial cupidity as the force behind the collection's demise. Two cataclysmic events shattered the city and with it the collection of antiquities: the 1204 sack of Constantinople by the army of the Fourth Crusade and the capital's fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

In April 1204 the army of the Fourth Crusade, after having laid siege to and captured Constantinople, spent three days pillaging the city. Churches, palaces, and public buildings were raided, their sacred relics and riches scavenged. Public monuments also were assaulted: statues ancient and Byzantine were toppled, some to be destroyed, others to be carried away. There is no question but that the better part of the Constantinopolitan collection was destroyed at this time. Indeed, the wealth of Byzantine artifacts that first appeared in western Europe in the thirteenth century, among them not only relics and reliquaries but also the Horses of San Marco in Venice, confirm the extent of looting and destruction.³

What the Crusaders did not destroy was probably ransacked in May 1453, when the city fell to the Ottoman Turks. As in 1204, the conquering army was granted three full days of looting and slaughter. At the end of this period the central areas of the city are said to have been little more than rubble, a sight reported to have caused the conqueror, Sultan Mehmet Ⅱ, to weep.⁴

The havoc wrought by these great sacks means that a gathering of antiquities that once numbered in the hundreds can now be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Istanbul only three monuments survive in situ: the Serpent Column of the Platean Tripod (cat. no. 141), the Theodosian Obelisk (cat. no. 138), and the porphyry Column of Constantine (cat. no. 109). Archaeological excavation, limited because of centuries of continuous habitation and the growth of the city in modern times, has expanded upon this picture only slightly. Excavations carried out in and around the city have yielded only a handful of antiquities associated with the collection: four statue bases (cat. nos. 31, 47, 75, 144), a sphinx (cat. no. 104), a dolphin (cat. no. 110), a portrait of Tiberius (cat. no. 116), a bronze goose (cat. no. 132), and the colossal head of a goddess (cat. no. 57).⁵

Although its destruction was virtually complete by the end of the fifteenth century, the Constantinopolitan collection has been the source of speculation and commentary from as early as the sixteenth, when it first began to pique the imagination of renaissance humanists. A general awareness of both the collection and the project for its development emerged as early as 1550 in two separate contexts: the intellectual world of Medicean Florence and the court of François I Valois. Although the Italian and the French interests developed simultaneously, their approaches to the gathering and the contexts in which they discussed it could not have been more different, with the Italians viewing the gathering as an artistic phenomenon and the French considering it under the rubric of philology.

The earliest published reference to Constantine's collecting activity appeared in the 1550 edition of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists:

Thus, for this and many other reasons, one sees just how low sculpture and with it the other arts had fallen by the time of Constantine. And if anything else were necessary to bring about their final destruction, it was the departure of Constantine from Rome to establish the seat of his Empire at Byzantium by which act he brought to Greece not only all of the best sculptors and artisans of the age, whoever they might have been, but also an infinity of statues and other examples of the most beautiful sculpture.⁶

As the passage makes clear, Vasari used the fact of Constantine's collecting not as a gateway to any larger discussion of Constantinople and its newly massed gathering of statuary, but rather as evidence in a larger argument about the inexorable decline of Rome as an artistic center. Unsurprisingly Vasari viewed the removal of sculpture from Rome to Byzantium as the ultimate proof that Rome as an artistic center was dead, and with it, the artistic standards of the ancients. With the best artisans having been taken east, there was no one left in the city to produce art, and with the best art taken away, there was nothing left to appreciate. Rome had been denuded. Vasari went on to argue that this step was the last in a process of decline that had manifested itself first in a move away from the imitation of nature toward abstraction, and then in the pathetic reuse of ancient materials in building. As such, it was a definable moment that confirmed not only the death of an ancient artistic tradition, but also Vasari's own belief that the arts, like human beings, are born, grow old, and die.⁷

This negative tendency must have been nourished by the chauvinistic attitudes that underpinned his own literary efforts. As is well known, one of Vasari's own aims in the Lives was to establish the primacy of a reborn Italian art, and within that broader framework the seminal role of Florentine traditions in the development, promotion, and sustenance of that rebirth.⁸ Thus, however lamentable the decay of ancient tradition Vasari documented, the Roman fall from grace was in a perverse sense felicitous as it paved the way for the Florentine reinvention and recovery of antiquity. As the signal event in that process of decline, Constantine's removal of statuary to Constantinople was key in this interpretation of history.

From the point of view of art-historical tradition, Vasari's interest in the Constantinopolitan collection was a dead end. No other art-historical author mentions the collection, and interest in the gathering passes into the realm of historical and philological study from the sixteenth century on. In fact most modern study of the collection is an outgrowth of the interest in Greek philology that occurred in humanist circles across Europe during the Renaissance. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the arrival of Byzantine scholars in the West in the build up to and wake of the Ottoman conquest accommodated this interest.⁹ The presence of such great Byzantine intellects as Manuel Chrysoloras, John Argyropolos, and John Bessarion introduced western Europe not only to the language of classical antiquity, but also to the Byzantine literary traditions that had preserved and commented on the traditions of classical Greece. It was the study of these later texts that opened the door to an awareness of the Constantinopolitan collection, for it was here, in descriptions of the events of Byzantine history and the marvels of the Byzantine capital, that the gathering lived on.

The scholarly interest in Byzantium and its traditions that developed out of the initial philological interests of the humanists was also fueled by contemporary religious and political concerns. The ecclesiastical disputes of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation made for an interest in the Orthodox church on the part of both religious groups, with Protestants lining up in support of the antipapist Orthodox clergy and Catholics calling for union with the eastern church in a bid to strengthen their ranks in the face of growing religious dissent.¹⁰

Equally important for the study of the Constantinopolitan antiquities were the alliances that grew out of western Europe's political infighting. The long-standing rivalry between François I Valois (r. 1515-47) and Charles V Hapsburg (r. 1519-58) led the French king to strike a military alliance with the Turkish Sultan, Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-66), which in turn led to a series of diplomatic agreements that allowed the French open access to Constantinople and its environs. François took advantage of the alliance, not only in military terms, but also in cultural ones, sponsoring a series of studies on the seats of classical antiquity that included an overview of Constantinople and its history.¹¹ The man entrusted with this task was the French humanist Pierre Gilles (1490-1555), who, in accordance with his humanist roots, styled himself Petrus Gyllius for purposes of publication.

Gilles¹² was a contemporary of such noted French humanists as François Rabelais and Guillaume Budé, men who were themselves students of Erasmus and the Italian Humanists. The details of his education are unknown, but it is clear that like his contemporaries, he was not only a crack philologist, but also, by dint of his familiarity with authors such as Aristotle, Aelian, and Pliny, an important scientific observer. In the 1520s and 1530s Gilles wrote several books on natural history, dedicating at least one, a study of Adriatic marine life, to François I.¹³ In addition to his scientific publications, he translated, edited, and commented on a variety of Greek texts and produced a Greek-Latin lexicon.¹⁴ His interest in and command of Greek, coupled with his proven ability as a researcher in the natural sciences, must have made him an ideal candidate for a fact-finding mission to the eastern Mediterranean mounted by François I in 1544.

Gilles appears to have been in Constantinople between 1544 and 1547, and again in 1550.¹⁵ Two important studies resulted from these visits: De Bosporo Thracio libri tres (Lyon, 1561; Leiden, 1632 and 1635) and De topographia Constantinopoleos et de illius antiquitatibus libri quatuor (Lyon, 1561; Leiden, 1661). The latter is Gilles' best-known and most important work. The text describes the city of Constantinople in four books. It is organized by city ward and proceeds from east to west, moving from the tip of the peninsula to the city's defensive land walls in the west. A general account of Constantinople and its setting introduces the project, followed by Book Ⅰ, an outline of the mythological and historical background of the city that describes the city's mythical foundation under Byzas and its early growth in the late Roman and Byzantine period before ending with a survey of its contemporary layout. Gilles then examines Constantinople district by district and monument by monument, giving an overview of the city in his own day. Book Ⅱ goes over the same territory in the same order, but with the aim of reconstructing lost monuments, especially those in the ancient city's monumental core. Books Ⅲ and Ⅳ concentrate on the rest of the city, always with the intent of reconstructing the lost monuments of Constantinople. A survey of contemporary Ottoman monuments completes the book.

Gilles' work is interesting, not only because it is the first scholarly account of Constantinople, but also because of his working method. As the first person to map the city and describe it, he applied the lessons of the Greek sources to an interpretation of modern Constantinopolitan topography. His basic source was the fifth-century regionary catalogue the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolis,¹⁶ which mapped out the city district by district. Following the scheme of the Notitia he observed the architectural and sculptural remains of Constantinople as they survived in the various regions. As befit his humanist bent, his intent was to recover the city's lost antiquities, an aim that set him apart from previous urban commentators, crusaders, and clerics for the most part, whose main interest was in the city's religious sites and their relics.¹⁷

De topographia is not only the first topographical study of Constantinople, it is also the first modern text to include references to the collection of ancient statuary. Naturally, Gilles observed the surviving monuments such as the Serpent Column and the Theodosian Obelisk. More importantly, he also used Byzantine texts to reconstruct destroyed buildings and sculpture. He did so, however, not as an end in itself, but rather as one piece in the larger topographical discussion. Thus, descriptive reporting identifies monuments and their location but offers no interpretation or analysis of either individual statues or the collection as a whole.

The French interest in Byzantium continued into the seventeenth century at the courts of Louis ⅩⅢ (r. 1610-43) and Louis ⅩⅣ (r. 1643-1715).¹⁸ As in the sixteenth century, the interest has its origins in philological study. The systematic editing of Byzantine texts was the primary undertaking, and it is in the context of this enterprise that the real founder of Byzantine historical studies emerged, Charles Du Fresne Du Cange. Du Cange was a prodigious editor of and commentator on Byzantine historical texts. He also undertook research and writing on such related subjects as Byzantine history, genealogy, topography, and numismatics, and he is probably best known for his medieval Greek and Latin dictionaries;¹⁹ however, his great work, the Historia byzantina duplici commentario illustrata (Paris, 1680), is an important marker in Constantinopolitan studies. The book is written in two parts: Constantinopolis Christiana and De familiis byzantinis. The former, a topographical study, deals with the city's structure and monuments, while the latter, a genealogical survey of Byzantine aristocratic families, is more purely historical.

Like Gilles, the foundation for Du Cange's interest was philological and historical; however, unlike his predecessor, Du Cange had no thirst for on-site investigation and study. In fact, Constantinopolis Christiana is the work of an armchair historian: Du Cange never once visited Constantinople and relied completely on Gilles and the Byzantine sources for his topographical information. Nevertheless the book is not simply a repetition of previous labors. Although largely similar in structure and content, Du Cange does offer new information gleaned from his study and observation of texts. As with Gilles, the interest in antiquities is part of the larger project of reconstructing Constantinopolitan topography and with it the stage set for Byzantine history. The material included is reported on the basis of textual references, and as with his predecessor the aim is descriptive and informational rather than analytical.

Gilles and Du Cange made the observation of antiquities an integral part of the discussion of Constantinopolitan history and topography, and in so doing, they established a precedent for all future topographers and historians.²⁰ For all their awareness of the material, however, discussion remained largely superficial, as observations regarding ancient monuments were always subsumed into the larger topographical project.

The first person to focus on the collection itself was the German classical scholar Christian Gottfried Heyne. In an article published in 1792, Heyne offered a handlist of the city's ancient monuments.²¹ Like Gilles and Du Cange before him, Heyne mined the Byzantine sources for information regarding antiquities. Unlike his predecessors, who consistently subordinated an interest in ancient statuary to the overall aims of history and topography, Heyne focused exclusively on sculpture. The result was a two-part census of monuments. Part Ⅰ offered a list of male figures organized first by subject matter (gods, heroes, men of letters) and then by location. Using the same structure, Part Ⅱ presented the evidence for female figures before concluding with a survey of nonrepresentational monuments such as tripods, obelisks, and columns, which he published together with a list of animals and mythical creatures. This project offered the most systematic and detailed study of the Constantinopolitan antiquities to date; however, for all its focus on the statuary, the work was in some senses identical to that of Gilles and Du Cange in that it remained essentially informational. Heyne expressed no awareness of or interest in the gathering as an actual collection or any desire to consider the motivation behind its conception.

It was only in the nineteenth century that interpretive studies of Constantino-politan antiquities became of interest. With the development of classical archaeology as a discipline and the concomitant urge to establish a corpus of classical statuary based on recognizable sculptural typologies, scholars began to be interested less in the collection as a list and more in the details of its individual components. The claims made by Byzantine authors for the presence of such famous works of ancient art as the Olympian Zeus (cat. no. 157) or the Aphrodite of Knidos (cat. no. 151) led German scholars such as Otto Jahn and Wilhelm Gurlitt to search for other famous classical statues in the Constantinopolitan corpus with the result that a cottage industry associating individual statues with some of classical antiquity's most renowned works of art sprang up as scholars vied to identify the city's treasures.²²

A second strand of interpretive study developed in the early twentieth century in the context of anthropology. In a paper presented to the British Folklore Society in the spring of 1924, R. M. Dawkins took up the problem of reception.²³ What interested Dawkins was the afterlife of classical statuary in the postclassical world, and his paper considered the attitudes that medieval observers brought to bear on the remains of antiquity, that is, anything of pre-seventh-century manufacture. On the basis of the textual evidence Dawkins noted a desire on the part of post-seventh-century viewers to interpret sculpture in terms of local, nonclassical history, to attribute to it mystical powers, and to interact physically with statuary, either to prevent wrong-doing on the part of an image or to punish a statue for crimes already committed. Drawing from these observations he concluded that one unifying idea characterized the approach to statuary in the postclassical world, a sense of the power, the knowledge, and the magical skill of the ancients.

Dawkins's use of statuary to explore medieval ideas and attitudes toward antiquity set the stage for Cyril Mango's influential study of classical sculpture in Constantinople.²⁴ Like Dawkins before him, Mango was interested in the problems of afterlife and reception, and like Dawkins, Mango observed the Byzantine propensity for reinterpretation in ways that had little or nothing to do with classical ways of seeing and thinking. At the same time, however, Mango went beyond Dawkins to observe what he felt were two different ways of seeing: one that preserved classical modes of seeing and thinking, and another defined by the folkloristic reinterpretation of images. It is this interest in perception and afterlife that has informed most recent studies of the Constantinopolitan collection.²⁵

For all the awareness of and interest in the Constantinopolitan collection, there has been little desire to study the gathering during the initial period of its formation or to understand it as a consciously developed ensemble. Following the lead of Dawkins, most modern interest has centered on the questions of reception and afterlife. Publication of a series of articles on individual collections within the city has shifted the focus of this discussion somewhat, bringing the contextual and thematic questions associated with the reuse of ancient statuary to the fore.²⁶ This book is an attempt to continue that discussion by examining the collection in the initial period of its formation, the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Its aim is threefold: to reconstruct its contents from the combined evidence of literary, graphic, and archaeological sources; to identify, describe, and analyze individual displays of statuary in terms of chronological development and topographical distribution; and to examine the collection as a whole, not in the warm glow of the afterlife, but in full light of the late antique ideals and assumptions that informed it. In so doing it also hopes to contribute to a growing body of literature on questions of collecting, reuse, and appropriation.²⁷ To this end, the book is arranged in two parts. Part Ⅰ is an overview of the collection's chronological development from its formation in the fourth century under Constantine through the sixth-century reign of Justinian. Part Ⅱ, a census of works known to have been in Constantinople, provides the documentation for the discussion undertaken in Part Ⅰ. Arranged alphabetically by location and within each locus by subject matter, the census presents the monuments known to have been in the city together with the pertinent literary, graphic, and archaeological testimonia.

A word on the documentation for the collection is in order. Of the available testimonia, literary sources have proved most valuable in the creation of the census. Surviving monuments are the exception, and archaeological materials virtually nonexistent, with the result that almost all knowledge of the city's antiquities derives from texts. The nature of these sources is varied. For the most part Greek, the texts range in date from the fourth century through the fourteenth and include, in addition to histories, such diverse genres as chronography, panegyric, and ekphrasis. Non-Byzantine sources supplement these texts. Foreign visitors to the capital occasionally left records of the Constantinopolitan marvels, and scattered sources in ancient authors add historical and descriptive dimension to monuments attested by Byzantine writers.

Native or foreign, contemporary or ancient, these accounts are invaluable as the basic documentation for the collection: they have allowed identification of the greater number of antiquities, provided information about their topographical distribution, and offered details about the history and appearance of individual monuments. At the same time, however, the sources are not without their difficulties. Consistency in reporting is unheard of. Some authors make description their primary aim, while others mention antiquities only in passing. In both instances the kinds of observations made are entirely unpredictable. More often than not, ancient and medieval ideas of what constitutes description bear no resemblance to the modern conception of the exercise with the result that observations about the physical properties of a given monument that would form the backbone of any modern account are often only haphazardly observed, if at all. Thus, issues of size, medium, pose, and provenance, details that are useful to the modern observer wishing to reconstruct the actual contents of the collection, often go unremarked, with the result that the identification of individual statues must rely more often than not on the occasional bit of evidence casually observed, a remark about pose, an iconographic aside.

This is the case, for example, with a fifth-century description of one of the major thermal foundations in Constantinople, an ekphrasis on the statuary in the Baths of Zeuxippos by Christodoros of Koptos.²⁸ As it survives, the ekphrasis describes eighty-one statues or statue groups in the late fifth-century complex. Although some descriptions offer detailed accounts of pose that allow identification with known classical statue types, this kind of observation is rare. Instead, the notion of what constitutes description is defined less by the desire to record physical appearance than by the need to document the perceived sensations of emotion and intellect experienced by the individual figures displayed. The result is that individual passages are often long on interpretation and short on documentation. Consider, for example, the description of the orator Demosthenes (cat. no. 53). In the florid language admired by the age, Christodoros identifies and describes his subject with only passing reference to physical appearance. Instead, the author concentrates on re-creating the orator's mental state by alluding to past historical events. This technique allows Christodoros to infer a state of mind from which the orator's thoughts are duly extrapolated. Far more interpretive than factual, this verse is conceived less as an exercise in physical documentation than as the stirring evocation of a moment. Indeed, the real subject of Christodoros's poetry is not so much observed physical reality as the ephemera of thought and feeling.

Although fascinating in its own right and perfectly consistent with the aims of late antique ekphrasitic writing as a genre, this type of description provides only small pieces of the larger puzzle for most statues. In the case of the Demosthenes, for example, the opening verse describes the figure as standing, and the last suggests in a reference to "brazen silence" that the statue was bronze. These comments are not much to go on, and fuller reconstruction must by necessity depend on outside evidence when available. In this instance, surviving portraits of Demosthenes offer possible examples. In other instances, however, no such comparanda exist and the absence of viable comparative material means that the picture of individual statues will be incomplete.

Texts including detailed physical descriptions can be equally problematic, albeit in different ways. This is the case with Niketas Choniates's thirteenth-century description of a statue of Athena in the Forum of Constantine that was felled during a riot in 1202 (cat. no. 107). In terms of physical observation, Niketas's description is as precise as Christodoros's is vague.²⁹ From it we understand that a standing bronze figure of Athena stood in the Forum of Constantine. Her right arm was outstretched, and the goddess wore a plumed helmet and long gown girdled with the aegis. Apart from outlining a general iconography, the description also suggests style and date of manufacture. Specifically, reference to the deep folds of drapery and the figure's dilated veins suggests a comparison with fifth-century B.C. classical styles. On the face of it, this is a treasure trove of information, and scholars have responded to it by identifying the figure with any one of a number of fifth-century B.C. statues by the Athenian sculptor Pheidias. It is, however, a clear-cut case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, for Niketas observes properties that are generally those of any classical or postclassical representation of Athena with the result that it is impossible to identify this statue with any particular image.

Although problematic in terms of descriptive detail, the texts by Christodoros and Choniates are valuable in terms of clear iconographic definition. Other texts are not so forthcoming. Reinterpretation of classical statuary over the course of the middle ages often resulted in the loss of original identities and the creation of new ones. Thus a statue group of Herakles and the Hesperides sisters (cat. no. 134) in the Hippodrome became a statue of Adam and Eve with the personifications of Famine and Plenty, while a Hekate (cat. no. 159) at the Milion metamorphosed into a representation of Constantine and his two sons, and a statue of Askleipios (cat. no. 16) became a bishop. Recapturing the classical identities of these statues depends almost exclusively on the inclusion of iconographic observation. In the case of the Askleipios statue, for example, identification hinges on a remark that the statue was equipped with one of the characteristic Askleipian attributes, a snake-entwined staff.