COSTANTINO CONTINUATO. IDEOLOGIA E ICONOGRAFIA DEL CARISMA IMPERIALE BIZANTINO AGLI ALBORI DELL’ ETÀ MODERNA
Constantinus Continuatus. Ideology And Iconography Byzantine Imperial Charisma At The Dawn Of The Modern Age

Summary/Abstract: In the second half of the 16th century, after the defi nitive Turkish conquest of Constantinople, the titulus of Constantine came to be perceived in a fundamentally new way within the design to reaffi rm papal authority, culminating in the pontifi cate of Aeneas Sylvius 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 infl uence. 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. 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 fi gure of Constantine and an accentuation of the symbolic primacy and legal signifi cance of his title in the deliberations and political actions of humanist intellectuals, and their refl ection in the artistic commissions of the period.

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