What Survives of the Colossus of Constantine, and Why Only the Marble Did

The museum describes the statue as an acrolith, and that single word explains almost everything about what is left of it. Only the bare skin was carved in marble: the head, the hands, the forearms, the legs and the feet. Everything else hung on a load-bearing frame, dressed either in gilded bronze drapery or in panels of coloured marble.

It was a practical solution to an impossible problem. A solid marble figure at this scale would have been ruinously heavy, and it would have needed a block of stone nobody could quarry or move. Splitting the job in two let Roman workshops build at twelve metres while using marble only where a viewer would read it as flesh.

It also decided the statue's fate. The frame rotted, and any gilded bronze on it was worth melting down long before anyone thought of preserving Roman sculpture. The marble had no scrap value at all, which is precisely why the hands and feet are still here and the emperor's body is not.

Constantine sat in the western apse of the Basilica of Maxentius, the vast vaulted hall at the edge of the Roman Forum that his rival had started and Constantine finished after defeating him. Anyone standing in that hall would have looked down its length at an emperor whose foot was taller than they were.

The marble pieces were found on that site in 1486. By then the basilica had been a quarry and a ruin for centuries, and the fragments were lying where the statue had come apart. They were lifted out and carried up the hill, and Michelangelo put them in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, the building he was in the middle of redesigning.

They have been there ever since, propped against the wall in the order a body would take. It is an oddly modern piece of display for the fifteenth century: no attempt to restore the missing parts, no invented arms, just the surviving marble left to speak for the scale of what is gone.