Have you ever wondered who Emperor Constantine — the man who had the vision of creating Nova Roma in the East, in a city he named after himself — was? Most Istanbulites have no idea who he was or what he looked like, even though they live in the very city he literally founded and put on the world map. Without him, the city might have remained just a humble fishing town of a Greek colony.
Constantine has been resting in fragments for hundreds of years in the garden of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome. The Colossus of Constantine is truly colossal — its head alone is 2.5 meters high. The format of the statue drew inspiration from the statue of Zeus at Olympia from the 4th century BC. The surviving fragments display incredible realism and naturalistic detail.
The original statue is estimated to have been 13 meters high. In 2022, archaeologists embarked on an ambitious project to recreate a replica of the monument using contemporary technologies such as 3D modeling. The reconstructed statue was finally installed in February 2024 in the garden of Villa Caffarelli, adjacent to the Capitoline Museums where the original fragments are kept.
Now, we can finally grasp the grandeur of Constantine’s sculpture and the grandiosity of the man as emperor.
