New Constantine

Constantine styled himself, at times, as a new Augustus. Later Christian rulers modeled themselves and their propaganda after Constantine. In an essay in Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-century Writings on the Visual Arts , Richard Krautheimer comments on the Carolingian debt to Constantine the great: ““All Charlemagne’s political ideas, his conception of a new Empire, and of his own status were based upon the image of the first Christian emperor. Numerous documents testify to the parallel which time and again was drawn between the Carolingian house and Constantine: the scribes of papal chancellery, as well as other contemporaries throughout the last decades of the eighth century, addressed Charlemagne and referred to him as the ‘New Constantine’; the crown which Constantine was supposed to have given to Pope Sylvester was allegedly used in 816 by Stephen V for the coronation of Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious; Aix-la-Chapelle was in Carolingian terminology a Nova Roma , like Constantinople in the phraseology of the fourth century.”

Beside this documentary evidence is the evidence from architecture and art:

“visible proof of the equation between the Frankish emperor and Constantine was given by the famous mosaics in the tri-conch tricinium of Leo III in Lateran . . . . The Apse of the building contained a mosaic with the Mission of the Apostles, the triumphal arch a group of three figures on either side. In its original state the group to the right represented St. Peter giving the pallium to Leo III and a standard to Charlemagne; in the group to the left Christ conferred the keys on a pope, probably Sylvester, and the labarum on Constantine. Nothing could better illustrate the intended parallelism between the two emperors, both defenders of the Church: the Roman who was the first Christian upon the throne of the Caesars, and the Frank who succeeded him after half a millennium . . . . As visualized in Rome, at the papal court, the parallelism is a characteristic example of medieval typology intended to illustrate the papal and imperial policies. Beyond that it illuminates the conception which the Carolingian period had of Roman Antiquity: it seems as though Antiquity were epitomized in the Christian Rome of Constantinople and Sylvester” (377).