Ronchey, S. “Il titulus di Costantino tra conciliarismo, umanesimo e iconografia.” Costantino I. Eds. P. Brown, G. Dagron, J. Helmrath, A. Melloni, E. Prinzivalli, S. Ronchey, and N. Tanner. I-VI. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2013. 645-64.

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 Silvius 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 transition 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.  It is precisely Constantine who is at the centre of the Battle of Constantine and Maxentius, the first fresco of Piero della Francesca’s cycle, Legend of the True Cross, 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.

A long wake of iconography that has its most emblematic and well known expression in Piero della Francesca’s frescoes at Arezzo and in his Flagellation, but that is 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.

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 Empire that made its name during his humanistic revival.