A team of archaeologists discovered this Thursday in a monastery in Greece, a portrait of Constantine XI, the last emperor of the Roman Empire from the East. The fresco was painted with the monarch himself as a model, according to the Greek Ministry of Culture.
The image of Constantine XI was located under a layer of paint on a mural during restoration work on a monastery in Aigio, about 160 kilometers west of Athens. The revealed image shows the figure of a mature man wearing imperial insignia and holding a cross-shaped scepter.
The figure also wears a purple cloak embroidered in gold and decorated with medals on which are engraved double-headed eagles with a crown between their two heads, the insignia of the family of the Palaiologos, the last reigning dynasty of the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire.
The portrait can be safely dated in the middle of the 15th centurya few years before the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire at the hands of the Ottomans. In the portrait “Constantine XI is unequivocally identified,” according to that note from the Ministry of Culture.
The painting of “high artistic quality” directly represents Constantine. “This is not an idealistic portrait, but an authentic one.which faithfully reproduces the physiognomic features of the last Byzantine emperor. He is an earthly figure, a mature man, with a thin face, who exudes tranquility and courtesy,” the ministry note states.
Constantine XI Palaiologos was crowned emperor on January 6, 1449 and died, according to most historians, on May 29, 1453, fighting the Ottomans who besieged Constantinople. With the city also fell the Byzantine Empire, a term created later to differentiate it from the Western Roman Empire.
Byzantium was a continuation of the Roman Empire after its division in the year 395 into two parts, whose first emperors were Honorius and Arcadius, sons of Theodosius I. The Western Empire fell less than 100 years later, but the Eastern Empire lasted a thousand more years.