A victory over another Roman
On 28 October 312 Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, just north of Rome, and took the city. It was a civil war: the loser was a Roman emperor too. Three years later the Senate dedicated an arch in his honour on the road used by triumphal processions, between the Palatine Hill and the Colosseum.
The inscription says Constantine won “instinctu divinitatis”, by the inspiration of the divinity, and through his own greatness of mind. The phrase is vague on purpose, or so many historians think: a Christian could read it as the God of the Christians, a traditional Roman as any god. Constantine later credited his victory to the Christian God, but the arch shows no Christian sign.
The largest arch in Rome
The arch is about 21 metres high, 25.9 metres wide and 7.4 metres deep, with a large central passage and two smaller ones. It is the largest Roman triumphal arch to survive. Its structure follows the older arches of the Forum, such as the Arch of Septimius Severus, but its decoration is something else.
Sculpture from three earlier emperors
Most of the reliefs were made more than a century before Constantine and taken from monuments that no longer exist. Archaeologists call reused pieces of this kind spolia. On the arch they come from three reigns:
The sculptors did not simply move these reliefs. Wherever the old emperor appeared, his head was recut as Constantine, so the new ruler stands in scenes carved for Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. The same Marcus Aurelius survives in bronze, unaltered, in the equestrian statue on the Capitoline.
What was carved new
The new work of 315 runs as a narrow frieze above the side passages. It tells Constantine’s campaign: the march from Milan, the siege of Verona, the battle at the Milvian Bridge with Maxentius’s soldiers drowning in the Tiber, the entry into Rome, a speech in the Forum and a distribution of money to the people. The figures are short and stand in rows facing the viewer, with the emperor at the centre and larger than the rest.
Seen next to the Hadrianic roundels just above, the change is striking: the old reliefs have depth and natural bodies, the new frieze is flat and ordered. For a long time this was read as a decline of skill. Today many historians see a different taste, closer to the art of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, in which clarity of rank mattered more than natural space.
Why reuse old sculpture?
There are two main answers, and they can both be true. One is practical: the arch was finished in about three years, and older reliefs of high quality were available. The other is a message: Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius were remembered as good emperors, and putting Constantine’s face on their deeds placed him in their line. Some scholars have also suggested that the arch itself reuses an earlier monument, possibly of Hadrian’s time; the idea remains debated. Either way, the arch is a lesson in how Roman emperors used images.
Where to see it
The arch stands in the open on Piazza del Colosseo, beside the Colosseum and at the foot of the Palatine. It is fenced but visible from all sides at any time, without a ticket.
Sources
- Parco archeologico del Colosseo, “Arco di Costantino”.
- Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VI 1139 (dedicatory inscription).
- World History Encyclopedia, “Arch of Constantine”.
- J. Elsner, “From the Culture of Spolia to the Cult of Relics: The Arch of Constantine and the Genesis of Late Antique Forms”, Papers of the British School at Rome 68 (2000).
.jpg){kind=link}