The late antique city Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, was full of statues. Inhabitants and visitors to the city would have seen assemblies of sculpture on display in numerous public spaces throughout the city, in venues as varied as baths and civic basilicas, circus arenas and open forums. The collections were not only large, frequently bringing together dozens of individual sculptures, but they were also exceptionally varied, including subjects ranging from imperial portraits, to animals and traditional Greco-Roman gods, to abstract personifications. Perhaps most incredibly, however, is the fact that the vast majority of these statues, which were set up in a series of campaigns beginning with Constantine in the second quarter of the fourth century through Justinian in the sixth, were not products of the late antique city. They were instead artifacts of other times and places, from New Kingdom Egypt to classical Greece and imperial Rome, which had been deliberately relocated to the new capital. In their late antique settings, the objects formed components of sculptural programs and elements of urban spaces that would have been utterly foreign to their original audiences. In The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople, Sarah Bassett outlines the details of this...