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This unusual coiffure is a key criterion used to identify his image on ancient coins, and was faithfully imitated in the Renaissance, notably by Giovanni da Cavino, who recreated Corinthian Antinous coins in the 16th century, two of which are on display. All versions, regardless of size or costume, share the same rustic, characteristically ‘Eastern’ mane. Yet even from the small collection assembled at the Ashmolean – a rare and satisfying opportunity to study the representation of a single figure in depth – one develops a strong sense of Antinous’s face, his neck, and, particularly, his hair. Winckelmann fantasised that he was driving out of this world to his apotheosis – an allegory of the power of art to elevate the human to the divine.Ĭast of a relief depicting Antinous at the Villa Albani, Tivoli. It shows the boy in profile, wearing a laurel and grasping another in his left hand his right emerges from the relief, loosely open, as if holding the reins of a chariot. The object of Winckelmann’s hyperbole – the so-called Albani Antinous – is the most idealised of all, and doubly idealised in the ghostly white resin cast displayed in the Ashmolean show. Standing close to this bust, which is mounted about eye-level, it is not hard to imagine, as Oscar Wilde put it in his poem ‘The Sphinx’, the ‘ivory body of that rare young slave with / his pomegranate mouth’.Īntinous is always on the verge of unrecognisability, hovering between equivocations, between particular and idealised forms. Smith in the catalogue calls ‘equivocations’ of the type. With his long, straight nose, gently touching lips, and elegant chin, he looks like Hermes, or Apollo, or a young Dionysus, and indeed was portrayed as all three in various sculptures-what R.R.R.
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Slightly greater than life-sized, the boy (technically not yet a man – a distinction, as the catalogue notes, having to do with the absence of pubic hair) modestly averts his gaze. 130–138), one of the best surviving examples of the type and the only one bearing an original identifying inscription. The centrepiece of the show is the Syrian bust of Antinous ( c. (Left) Bust of Antinous, discovered in Balanea, Syria, in 1879, before it was restored. But there’s something distinct about the Antinous ‘type’, the official portrait commissioned by Hadrian after his favourite’s death – something that, once the memory of the homosexual relationship between Antinous and Hadrian faded, drove Renaissance collectors crazy, made Grand Tourists open their pocketbooks, and inspired Winckelmann to dub a portrait of Antinous ‘the glory and crown of the art of the age, as well as any other’. As the show’s subtitle suggests, the confusion is telling, since after his mysterious death in the river Nile in 130, at the age of about 19, Antinous was honoured as a hero and then worshipped as a god in some parts of the Roman world until as late as the fifth century in a cult that, to some nervous early Christians (such as Origen of Alexandria), rivalled the nascent cult of Christ. Walking through ‘Antinous: Boy Made God’, a small but substantial cross-section of this tradition currently on display at the Ashmolean, one could be excused for confusing one of the 20 representations of the boy with any handsome Greek athlete or god. Staring into the eyes of the boy-favourite of Emperor Hadrian, the poet said, ‘If we knew what he knew, we should understand the ancient world.’ Among the 88 sculptures of Antinous that survive from the second century AD – as many as remain of imperial wives and princesses of the time – and the countless modern imitations, the youth emerges as modest yet sensual, godlike yet distinctly fleshly. ‘Ah! This is the inscrutable Bithynian!’ So Tennyson exclaimed when he caught sight of a bust of Antinous while strolling through the British Museum with a young Edmund Gosse, who recorded the episode in Portraits and Sketches (1912).