The late antique city Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, was full of statues. Inhabitants and visitors to the city would have seen assemblies of sculpture on display in numerous public spaces throughout the city, in venues as varied as baths and civic basilicas, circus arenas and open forums. The collections were not only large, frequently bringing together dozens of individual sculptures, but they were also exceptionally varied, including subjects ranging from imperial portraits, to animals and traditional Greco-Roman gods, to abstract personifications. Perhaps most incredibly, however, is the fact that the vast majority of these statues, which were set up in a series of campaigns beginning with Constantine in the second quarter of the fourth century through Justinian in the sixth, were not products of the late antique city. They were instead artifacts of other times and places, from New Kingdom Egypt to classical Greece and imperial Rome, which had been deliberately relocated to the new capital. In their late antique settings, the objects formed components of sculptural programs and elements of urban spaces that would have been utterly foreign to their original audiences.

In The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople, Sarah Bassett outlines the details of this fascinating story of old sculpture in new settings, of the refashioning of cultural heritage through late antique appropriation, and of the role of statues in urban image-making. While students of early Byzantine Constantinople will be familiar with her work on several independent sculptural collections from previously published articles (on the Hippodrome, the Baths of Zeuxippos, and the Lausos collection), as well as from several important interventions by other scholars, here for the first time do we find the city’s varied collections treated as a whole. This book, therefore, is a welcome addition to the scholarship on early Constantinople and will significantly inform future investigations of sculpture display in antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

The author has divided her book into two interrelated sections. The first half provides a discursive account of the city and the creation of its late antique sculpture collections. The second half presents a catalogue of the sculptures on display, the vast majority of which are long since lost and now known only through literary testimony (provided in English translation excerpts).

One of the great strengths of the book is Bassett’s ability to synthesize the wide range of evidence about individual sculptures in their Constantinopolitan settings into a series of lucid chapters focused on the major ideological trends in the fourth-to-sixth-century shaping of the city. Before delving into the more meaty interpretation, however, the book opens with two stage-setting chapters. These effectively bring both uninitiated readers and specialists in Byzantine studies up to speed on the necessary historical and urbanistic background. The first chapter contains a basic introduction to the shaping of the city as it was transformed from the town of Byzantium under the Severans (193–235 CE) to Constantine’s new capital of Constantinople, inaugurated in 330 CE. This history of Constantinian constructions provides a convenient overview of well-known material, but particularly stresses the “Roman-ness” of the city’s monumental complexes and the city’s accommodation of different religious groups. The second chapter presents both a synopsis of the content and distribution of the sculptural displays and some suggestions regarding the financing and logistics of co-opting and transporting the works from various corners of the Empire. Since evidence for the practical mechanisms for this relocation process is nearly non-existent, some of the suggestions on these matters are highly speculative, as the author readily acknowledges.

The subsequent chapters comprise the book’s real substantive contribution. Beginning with the major campaigns of civic sculptural adornment carried out under Constantine, Bassett traces a story of imperial motivations and ideological messages transmitted through sculptural decoration. Bassett’s central goal in these chapters is to use existing information concerning the location and chronology of sculptural assemblies—what statues were positioned where by whom—to support her reading of the programmatic message each patron employed statuary to convey.

Bassett begins with a description of the three major collections of statuary set up under Constantine at the Hippodrome, Baths of Zeuxippos, and Forum of Constantine.. Analyzing each of these venues as a programmatic ensemble of sculpture gathered from various parts of the empire, Bassett concludes that through the assemblages Constantine sought to claim a direct link to the cultural forebears of Greece and Rome. Bassett’s examination of Theodosian Constantinople in chapter 4 suggests a late-fourth- and fifth-century revival of the Constantinian tradition of urban development and reuse of antiquities. The difference with this earlier period, she asserts, is the Theodosian shift away from crafting a new urban image and toward promoting “dynastic aggrandizement.” In her discussion of the Lausos Collection set up in the early fifth century in a portico along the Mese, Bassett stresses the contrast between the sculptural programs arranged by imperial initiatives and this apparently private venture. She reads this large collection—which included figures of Pan, Eros, Kairos, numerous animals, and several famous Greco-Roman cult statues—in wholly religious, and specifically, triumphantly Christian terms. The theme of Christian victory is furthermore central to Bassett’s interpretation of the Justinianic reaction to antique statuary in the final chapter. She asserts that the antique gorgoneia and horses said to be from Ephesos, together with philosopher and imperial portraits decorating the rebuilt Chalke Gate, for example, projected an image of Christian kingship.

In each case, Bassett’s analysis favors programmatic explanations of statuary ensembles. This approach raises larger questions regarding the coherence of the collections and each of the individual pieces within them, as well as the intentionality of those who assembled them to convey a single, unified message. While generally speaking, the author’s attention to the sculptures’ historical and urbanistic context is commendable, one wonders if the resultant readings are perhaps too restrictive and whether a more discursive, interpretative approach is desirable. For example, Bassett’s analysis of the Theodosian assemblage in the Hippodrome sees the common message of statues as one of “victory,” the statues of Zeus, Athena, and the Muses displayed in the Senate House in the Augusteion encapsulating “ideas about and ideals of ethics” (91), and those in the Baths of Zeuxippos as sharing the theme of paideia. Yet such unified themes depend on a single, consistent reading of the sculptures by ancient viewers; and to argue a convincing case for them would, it seems, necessitate a more sustained analysis of the contemporary reception and interpretation of the statues. It would, in other words, be useful to inquire more deeply into the rhetorical construction of the statues, both individually and collectively, in the primary source documents (about which more below) and the mechanisms by which identifications, past associations, and the “message” of statues would have been communicated to a late antique viewer in Constantinople.

In addition, some readers might hope for more explicit engagement with the comparative and methodological questions raised by the phenomenon of reappropriated and recontextualized ancient objects. Though Bassett states at the outset of the Constantinian chapter that these collections will be “conceived largely in historical terms” (51), Constantinople is, on the whole, treated in isolation, as an anomaly. Certainly the new capital is unique in many ways, but there are precedents and parallels, both for the urban display of statuary in Roman and late Roman cities and for the political/religious use of earlier statuary redeployed in new settings, which could have productively informed the investigation of Constantinople’s statue collections. We might think, for example, about how Constantine’s program compares to policies and practices carried out earlier in Rome (the import of statues from abroad and the Roman display of booty from Greece and elsewhere) or to patterns of civic display found in other urban centers in late antiquity. Although these are not lines of thought the author pursues in depth (cf., the concluding comments [131–36]), her overview of sources is a valuable step for anyone interested in developing such questions further.

The catalogue forming the second half of the book is arranged first chronologically by collection; within each collection, the individual entries are organized in alphabetical order by the English title (often generic) given to each sculpture. One unfortunate side effect of this arrangement is that passages of primary sources are dismembered and artificially reorganized as discrete excerpts within individual statue entries. This format makes it exceptionally difficult to comprehend the relationships drawn by the original authors of the texts between the statues they discuss. For example, catalogue entry no. 45 on a portrait of Aristotle opens with an excerpt from Christodorus of Thebes’s Ekphrasis on the Sculpture in the Baths of Zeuxippos beginning, “And near him stood Aristotle, the prince of Wisdom: he stood with clasped hands . . .” (166). Any reader interested in discovering the identity of the “him” next to whom Aristotle stood must flip through the catalogue to find an entry that cites the immediately preceding section of the Ek. passage (which is found back on page 163 because Aischines alphabetically precedes Aristotle, though the entries are separated by those on Alkibiades, Andromache, Aphrodite, and others).

In addition, the reader should be cautioned about the use of plates in the catalogue: a cursory look gives the impression that the works reproduced in the images are extant pieces from the Constantinopolitan collections. Yet only ten of the sculptures reproduced in the catalogue plates have attested Constantinopolitan provenance. Fully eighteen of the works pictured in the catalogue do not have even questionable connections to the late antique capital. They are included as illustrations of sculpture types to which literary evidence about the city’s collections points. These plates are useful in providing the reader with a visual sense of the possible appearance of now lost sculptures, but the tenuousness of the associations needs to be remembered. Readers who do not delve fully into the descriptive text of the catalogue could be easily misled by the images and headings. For example, a reader whose attention is caught by the famous and seductively complete image of the Doryphoros statue in the Naples Museum reproduced in plate 7, and who then sees in bold typeface on the facing page the catalogue entry title, “26. ACHILLES (PLATE 7),” could easily miss the caveat included in the prose of the entry stating that, “secure association of the figure with known statue types is not possible” (160).

Finally, a few words must be said about the organization of the book. While there are clearly several advantages to separating the analytic discussion in the chapters from a more systematic presentation of evidence in the catalogue, there are also some drawbacks caused by such a sharp divorce. On the one hand, the main narrative of the text is perhaps rendered more readable and streamlined by segregating off the highly detailed information included in the catalogue. Yet, by partitioning the primary sources so fully from the historical narrative, the discussion loses a sense of the contours, biases, forms, and limitations of the sources themselves. As a result, the picture presented in the book’s main chapters is relatively straightforward and uncomplicated; each collection of statuary from Constantine’s to Justinian’s is understood as outlining a coherent, programmatic message (e.g., Constantine’s “all encompassing vision of romanitas” (78)). The primary sources themselves, however, are complicated. Most, for example, are written many centuries after the collections they describe were formed—some well after they ceased to exist. Of relevance, then, is not only how “accurate” are their testimonies, but also their own relationship to and motivations for writing about the often glorified and wondrous past of the early city and its rulers. Secondly, though the explicit aim of the catalogue is to reconstruct the late antique collections—“to determine as far as possible the specific classical nature of the Constantinopolitan holdings” (140)—the majority of the texts are far richer and more precious documents. Replete with narrative and ekphrastic elements, as well as methodological challenges, they would reward examination that looks beyond a mere identification of subjects.

We must, therefore, be grateful to Bassett for assembling the wide range of sources for the vast collections of ancient sculpture gathered in the city of Constantinople in the first centuries after its conversion to an imperial capital. This book’s accessible and straightforward discussion of the use of ancient sculpture in the early Byzantine city will be of immense value to scholars and students interested in questions of late antique urbanism, of the reception of the classical past, and of the history of collecting and display. It will, moreover, undoubtedly give rise to further inquiry into a wider range of questions raised by the rich sources to which it has provided greater and overdue visibility.