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  • Konstantin der Grosse, Trier, 2 June to 4 November 2007 and Similar Enterprises
  • David H. Wright

“Supersize me!” appears to have been the motto of the Constantine exhibition in Trier last summer. Not only did the Landesmuseum commission a laser-guided Carrara marble replica of the colossal head from the Basilica Nova, exhibit it briefly in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and then in Trier remove a window to hoist it into its permanent gallery—amid photo-ops and attendant publicity—but they also made eight full size plastic replicas of the colossal left foot and set them up in various sites in the city, for celebrations and accompanying hoopla. The exhibition counted 797 catalogue numbers in the Landesmuseum, 285 in the Bischöfliches Museum (for Christian material in the Constantinian era), and 131 in the Stadtmuseum (a collection dedicated to local history, built into the Porta Nigra). That total of 1,213 entries assigns numbers to a lot of replicas, models, and other didactic material, but many of the entries are for sets of small objects, or even a whole hoard of coins found in Trier. The curatorial burden was staggering. The scholarly leaders were the historian Alexander Demandt (emeritus at Berlin) and the art historian Josef Engemann (emeritus at Bonn), but the administration was in the hands of a special corporation, Konstantin-Ausstellungsgesellschaft m.b.H.

With lots of advertising, with travel agencies offering package deals for excursions and optional wine tastings, total attendance nearly reached 800,000 in a four month run, and this was proclaimed the measure of extraordinary success. A ticket of admission to all three museums was twelve Euros a day. The budget announced in advance was 6.6 million Euros, of which 1.5 million came from the national government. The nominal occasion was the designation of Luxemburg und Grossregion as Kulturhauptstadt Europas for 2007; the logo was a silhouette of a moose raising its head to bellow out this designation in three lines of capitals. To judge from the Luxembourg website, the cultural attractions in Luxembourg itself were mostly rock bands and similar popular entertainment. The German justification was the sixtieth anniversary of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, a new regional grouping cobbled together by the French occupation authorities after the Second World War.

The exhibition included many superb works of art, but the organization and the information given the visitor were more appropriate to a historical museum, showing many casts, models, and photographs, and with wall labels with historical summaries of some length (always addressed to laypeople). The main galleries were arranged in a strict linear sequence for didactic effect. An audio guide in German, French, Dutch, or English was included in the price of admission, but it discussed only a few selected objects, always stressing the historical as opposed to artistic context. The first significant gallery, for example, was devoted to documenting the imperial crisis of the mid-third century, showing coins from the short-lived Gallic Empire (260–273), and, [End Page 370] for the subsequent Germanic invasion, two complete hoards of coins secreted but not recovered, and two human skulls broken open by blows to the head. In the next gallery was a cast of the Venice tetrarchs, for which the guide explained the political significance but did not add that the Venetians stole these pieces from Constantinople by breaking them out of two columns about 85cm in diameter, nor that, because no such monument would have been erected in Byzantium at that time, the columns well may have been removed by Constantine from Diocletian’s palace at Nicomedia, where they must have been part of an extraordinarily impressive hall. On the other hand, the visitor was offered the possibility of pushing a button to learn more about porphyry—its imperial connection and its unique source in Egypt near the Red Sea, but nothing about its extreme hardness, which conditions the style of these portraits by limiting subtle modeling or fine detail.

Then, after a small gallery of plans, models, and photographs of imperial residences, the visitor was led to Disneyland: a small dark gallery filled with flames from a digital light show and sinister electronic...

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