Ronchey, S. “Costantino Continuato. Ideologia e iconografia del carisma imperiale bizantino agli albori dell’età moderna.” Mélanges Ljubomir Maksimovic. ZRVI. Eds. B. Krsmanovic and S. Pirivatric, 50.2 (2014), pp. 873-897 + plates.

In the second half of the 16th century, after the definitive Turkish conquest of Constantinople, the titulus of Constantine came to be perceived in a fundamentally new way within the design to reaffirm papal authority, culminating in the pontificate of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini.  Diplomatic wrangling and the strategic plan to save Byzantium in the West in the two decades after the fall of Constantinople had and would have had the precise aim of reinstating the hereditary title of the Byzantine Caesars, transferred to the East by Constantine and never extinguished, within the orbit of papal influence.  The seat of Peter and the sceptre of Eastern Christianity should have been symbolically reunited in the ‘New Byzantium,’ which would have had its base at Rome and its bridgehead at Mystras.

Until several years ago, the significance, objectives, implications, and impassioned unanimity of this radical attempt to save the title of Constantine from the Turks and reinstate it in the West were not understood fully by scholars of Western European or of Byzantine history for two reasons: because all of the events occurred in the blind spot between the vision each has of the other and in the period of connection between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era; and further because that very attempt failed and history, we know, is written by the victors. 

The project failed also because its main supporters died one after the other within a short period of time. But during the decades when it was pursued, we witness a true revival of the figure of Constantine and an accentuation of the symbolic primacy and legal significance of his title in the deliberations and political actions of humanist intellectuals, and their reflection in the artistic commissions of the period. 

Manuel II Palaiologos had already been represented in the guise of Constantine and with the symbols of Byzantine royalty proper to the age of Constantine. On the occasion of his visit to the King of France at the turn of the 15^th century, the West, in fact, had conferred on the basileus the original accepted attributes of Roman-Byzantine imperial authority, as articulated in the Laudes Constantini of Eusebius and the Parenetic Chapters of the Pseudo-Agapetus.  That initial Byzantine ‘advent’ in 15^th century Europe, furthermore, had left an ideologically salient iconographic trace in the two gold medallions by the Limbourg Brothers — one representing Constantine the Great on horseback and the other the image of Heraclius on the front, with elaborate allegories pictured on the back — bronze copies of which are held today in Paris; and in that masterpiece of manuscript illumination, Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, also by the Limbourg Brothers and today in the collection of the Musée Condé at Chantilly.

In August of 1438 at Ferrara, Pisanello represented John VIII, Manuel’s eldest son, with characteristics and symbols that are even more ideologically and politically pointed than those adopted by the Limbourgs for the father.  On Pisanello’s medal, John VIII, though represented in his actual historical guise, is pictured according to the typology common to the Roman emperors. The inscription around the profile on the front was, perhaps, suggested by Bessarion, and seems to communicate the affirmation of the imperial inheritance in counterpoint to the Western emperor. In the more complex iconographic project on the back, the symbol of the obelisk alludes to papal power and the meaning of the scene, earlier defined by scholars as “obscure”, should be understood as a good auspice on the part of the emperor to the Church of Rome. This first icon-type will produce a wake of representations, the most note-worthy being those by Piero della Francesca in his frescoes at Arezzo and in his Flagellation.

Constantine is at the centre of the Battle of Constantine and Maxentius, the first fresco of Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross cycle at Arezzo. The same profile, the same pointed beard, the identical hat are attributed by Piero della Francesca to the enthroned male figure at the extreme left of the Flagellation of Urbino who opens the apparently enigmatic sequence of characters in the painting:  the symbolic figure of the New Testament Pilate, understood in his role as legal representative of Roman power, that the prevailing opinion of 20^th century scholars has identified as that of the historical John VIII Palaiologos.

The battle of Constantine against the ‘pagan’ Maxentius points to the battle against the ‘infidel’ Turks fought a few years before not by John VIII but by his younger brother, the basileus who bore the name of the founder of the empire: Constantine XI.  The Turks are clearly depicted through a myriad of symbols, among which the usual ‘demonic’ dragon, which stands out on the flag of the adversaries of this first Constantine evoked in the last Constantine. The Legend of the True Cross becomes a metaphor of the effort to assert the Christian faith over the usurpation by Islam. The Byzantine garments in which Heraclius’s dignitaries are pictured in the scene Exaltation of the Cross, all most likely traceable to Pisanello, identify indisputably in the last Palaiologos dynasty the true heir, the incarnation of the title of Constantine.   

The Flagellation is almost contemporaneous with the frescoes at Arezzo and, like these, was painted on the occasion of the Conference at Mantua in 1459, to celebrate its intent by commemorating twenty years on the earlier Council of Ferrara-Florence, concluded in 1439. The Urbino panel is a sort of political manifesto of the anti-Turk crusade, whose message was inspired by the broader, authoritative atmosphere in Italy which advocated the salvaging of what remained of Byzantium and the legal re-absorption of the enormous, thousand-year-old yet still desirable dynastic inheritance of the Empire of the Caesars, transferred to Constantinople by its founder and first emperor, Constantine.

In its dense symbolic value, the work represents both ‘icons’ of Constantine. The image of the Byzantine basileus enthroned, which opens the sequence of characters, reproduces exactly the profile of John VIII provided by Pisanello on the medal coined between Ferrara and Florence. But the ‘medallion’ portrait of the late Byzantine basileus, witness to the oppression of Eastern Christianity symbolised by the flagellated Christ, is cast in another role: what art historians have identified ‘as Pilate’, or the representative of Roman political-legal authority.  For those who longed for the reconnection between the second Rome with the first Rome of the popes, the Palaiologos basileus represented, above and beyond Emperor of the East, the last direct heir and occupant of the ‘Roman’ throne of Constantine.

A long wake of iconography, much more widespread and articulated, extending until the end of the 15^th century and the beginning of the 16^th century, will, in these decades, multiply the icon of Constantine in painting, in the humanistic art of book illumination, and even in the minor arts such as ceramics, conferring on the image of Constantine the physical traits of the Byzantine basileis of the time and underscoring both his indisputable legitimacy and the priceless political value of the legacy of the Caesars of the Second Rome.

The artistic expressions restore a plethora of minute and oft-misunderstood images of unrivalled eloquence: a minor independent iconographic current that feeds or touches on all the art of the period - painting, fresco, bas-reliefs commissioned by the bourgeoisie, as well as nobles and princes, or still more often insinuating itself in the form of miniatures on the pages of intellectuals’ books.  The same characteristics and symbols conferred on John VIII, then on his brother Constantine XI, and from here returned to Constantine the Great, reveal a transference or temporal short circuit, by which the identification of the last Byzantine sovereigns, defenders of Constantinople, with its founder, corresponds to the impassioned project to re-annex the legal inheritance of the Byzantine Caesars to the West, and in particular, to the Papacy.

Only in the 1470s, after the failed ideological and legal reunification of the First Rome with the Second became an incontestable and insurmountable fact, the passage of the titulus of Constantine to the Osmani Turks, on the one hand, and the Third Rome, on the other, would result in not only the eclipse of Byzantium from the political self-awareness of the Modern Era, but also a metamorphosis in the reception of the historical figure of the founder of the Byzantine Empire.

His dynastic succession would pass to Russia, through the marriage between Zoe Palaiologina, eldest daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, and Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, negotiated by Bessarion via the use of papal funds earmarked for the anti-Turk crusade in Morea. Through Zoe, who would take the name Sophia, the imperial tradition of Constantine with its rites, emblems and symbols, would be linked to the court of Ivan III Grozny. From here would begin the translatio ad Russiam of the title of Constantine, from which another story would emerge that would remove it again from Western interests and memory.