15 - Horse as Historia, Byzantium as Allegory

Summary

In the course of the fifteenth century the horseman ceased to be a monument and became a powerful memory. After the fall of Constantinople, the lost monument was granted new life in intellectual spaces between the real and the imagined, the antiquarian and the allegorical. Renaissance artists, such as Apollonio di Giovanni, Andrea Mantegna, and Vittore Carpaccio, projected the horseman into key cities of the "western" past such as Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. The bronze horseman became an architectural witness to lost worlds and civilizational turning points. The equestrian monument became gradually detached from its original Constantinopolitan setting and entered the repertoire of the archaeological imaginary with moralizing connotations. Its placement in cities such as Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome was not accidental, for Constantinople itself had variously been celebrated or lamented as the new Athens, the New Jerusalem, and of course, the New Rome. The last of its kind, it was co-opted by the fertile Renaissance imagination as a colossal monument that bore witness to defining events of the ancient past. This colossus now was history.