The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople

From its foundation in the fourth century to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth, the city of Constantinople boasted a collection of antiquities unrivaled by any city of the medieval world. This book reconstructs the collection from the time of the city's founding by Constantine the Great through the sixth century reign of the emperor Justinian. Drawing on medieval literary sources and graphic and archaeological material, it identifies and describes the antiquities that were known to have stood in the city's public spaces.
This book reconstructs Constantinople's collection of antiquities from its foundation to its fall.
Sarah Bassett is Associate Professor of Art History at Wayne State University. A scholar of late antique and Byzantine art, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Dumbarton Oaks. She has contributed to Dumbarton Oaks Papers, The American Journal of Archaeology, and The Art Bulletin.
"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...This book's accessible and straightfoward 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 the history of collecting and display." CAA Reviews Ann Marie Yasin