Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Thursday 29 April 2021

Fingering Constantine the Great


The Guardian has a report today about the return to Rome from the Louvre of the left index finger of a monumental bronze statue of the Emperor Constantine the Great. The surviving portions are in the Capitoline Museum, and only fragments of what was once a twelve foot high figure. The head of the Emperor is striking, and unlike others, one that I do not think I had seen before. The report can be read at Giant statue of Roman emperor reunited with long-lost finger

One thing that cannot be denied about the Emperor and his subjects is their determination to commemorate him in massive public statues across the Empire. In that he may have taken inspiration from Augustus, the father of Imperial authority as well as of the patria, about whose statues I posted in The Glory that was Rome

Constantine’s achievements were in so many ways colossal that commemorating them in so many colossae, which in today’s world might seem vainglorious or domineering, seemed and still seems dignum et iustum 


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