In this exceedingly rich and wide-ranging study, Elena Boeck projects brilliant shafts of light onto a famous but obscure monument. A colossal equestrian statue that stood for a millennium on a towering column, The Bronze Horseman of Justinian was an urban icon for a remade Constantinople. Far taller than Constantine’s column, or any other freestanding pillar or statue of New Rome, it dominated the city’s skyline alongside the dome of Hagia Sophia. As Boeck shows, it was the centerpiece of a new imperial forum, which Justinian was able to create because of the destruction that attended to his near downfall in 532. In this area devastated by the Nika riot, just north of the Hippodrome and imperial palace, where once stood the Baths of Zeuxippus and the Theodosian “Great Church,” the emperor remade the city center. Countless studies have considered Justinian’s greatest erection (here at pp. 47–53), his cathedral church that rose in just five years and surpassed Solomon’s Temple. Boeck is the first to devote such attention and insight to his second greatest, the Horseman, which was completed within another six years, by 543. She suggests, sensibly but without evidence, that the same designers, architects, and builders would have worked on both projects.In her words, Boeck offers “the first interdisciplinary study of the medieval Mediterranean’s most cross-culturally significant sculptural monument” (p. 3). She succeeds, presenting a feast in eighteen courses (chapters), each comprising many small plates (sections). Most are delectable, but a few are underdone or overcooked. Some topics deserved closer attention or required the expertise of a specialist; others received more attention than they merit, in part because of the author’s own expertise. Most egregiously, consideration of the statue before it was reimagined by and as Justinian is absent, including reflections on its manufacture centuries earlier. As is now well known, the later Roman Empire rapidly lost its statue habit, and creating this horseman, if that were in the fourth century, would have demanded immense skill; more, indeed, than was required to lift it to the top of a tall column (which rightly receives ample attention, pp. 65–70).The book is long, but space could have been saved by an attentive editor. There is a good deal of repetition, occasioned by the structure of the book: each chapter has multiple sections, which require more substantial connective tissue. Because so many topics are addressed, the reader encounters numerous concise introductions, for example on ekphrasis in chapter 3. That chapter, on Procopius, is a necessary and compelling analysis of the author’s “figured speech,” his Kaiserkritik, but it is in a different register to what has gone before.Chapter 4, on quite another bronze horseman in Baghdad, suffers from an overlong introduction to the founding of Baghdad. If it seems to stray far from the matter at hand by evoking “competitive emulation,” it nicely captures the atmosphere of cultural competition between the Byzantine and Abbasid courts during a period when written sources offer nothing to our knowledge of the Constantinopolitan horseman. Moreover, when chapter 5 returns us to Constantinople in the ninth century, a time of renewal, the importance of chapter 4 becomes clear. Extending her analysis, Boeck implicates the bronze horseman in Byzantine defeat and victory, following the loss and restoration of Justinian’s triumphal tiara, the toupha, which then made an unprecedented appearance on Emperor Theophilus’s own head on his copper coinage (p. 131). In this way, Theophilus “established visual dialogue with the horseman in his triumphs of 831 and 837.”Together, these two chapters offer a compelling, original contribution to our knowledge of Byzantine-Abbasid relations. Reflecting upon this fascinating material, I highlight a detail where Boeck is perhaps wrong, and another where she might have made more of the evidence. First, in restoring the statue’s tiara, I believe (at p. 124), Boeck misinterprets Symeon the Logothete’s account: the roofer did not walk a tight rope, but shot a rope across to the top of the column from an equal height, the roof of Hagia Sophia, and then descended to climb up the rope. The distinction is not entirely trivial, given what Boeck makes here, and throughout the book, of the symbolic linking of the two monuments. Second, in the two accounts Boeck cites, one Greek and one Syriac, the statue is named “Augustus.” Boeck notes this in passing—“As we saw above, the rider could be popularly referred to as ‘Augusteos’”—but she does not pursue the matter (Was it related to the name of the Augustaion? Does it imply that this was the city’s definitive imperial image? How does this distinguish it from other imperial statues? Do we know their popular names?).Space precludes substantial commentary on other chapters. The second third of the book leads us through the middle and later Byzantine periods, including the sack of Constantinople and the destruction of much of its statuary by crusaders, and the deterioration of the fabric of the bronze horseman. The last third of the book focuses on the end and afterlife of the monument, embracing Italian, Ottoman Turkish, and Slavic perspectives. Almost in passing, Boeck revisits a heated debate about the “Budapest Drawing” of the statue, which appeared to have been won by Cyril Mango in the 1960s. There is too much here to recommend. I single out chapter 13, an insightful study of Constantinople in the Slavonic imagination of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which makes use of Boeck’s earlier published research. Here, this reader imagined he had identified the inspiration for the book, in an abraded illustration in a Slavonic manuscript, a translation of the Greek Chronicle of Constantine Manasses, now held at the Vatican.