The Colossal Marble Head of Constantine, Musei Capitolini
The head from Constantine's acrolithic statue in the Basilica of Maxentius, fourth century, now in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori (inv. 1072). The eyes are turned upward and the features are deliberately unnaturalistic — a break with the veristic portrait tradition and the beginning of an imperial image meant to look beyond the world.
The statue stood some twelve metres high in a basilica Constantine finished but did not begin, in a Rome he would shortly leave for a new capital on the Bosporus. Everything about the portrait is an argument: the scale, the frontality, the enlarged eyes fixed above the viewer's head. Whatever Constantine believed privately about his conversion, the public image he commissioned was of a ruler whose authority came from somewhere other than the Senate. See Constantine's conversion, power and the founding of Constantinople.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
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