Portrait of Antinoüs

Roman art

This portrait, which is set on a modern bust, portrays Antinoüs, the young man beloved by Hadrian and to whom the emperor dedicated a religious cult after his death in 130 CE.

The Borghese sculpture, reported in the portico in 1833, is of the ‘Haupttypus’ portrait type, characterised in particular by wavy, unruly hair.

The popularity and longevity of the young man’s posthumous cult are attested by the large number of surviving portraits, produced starting in 130 CE and surviving even the emperor’s death.

Object details

Commentary

The chapels of Antinous and his temples were magic chambers,

commemorating a mysterious passage between life and death;

these shrines to an overpowering joy and grief

were places of prayer and evocation of

the dead; there, I gave myself over to my sorrow.

(M. Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian)

This bust was reported on a shelf on the wall in the Portico in 1833 in the Inventario Fidecommissario (C, p. 41, no. 9). It portrays Antinoüs, the young man beloved by Emperor Hadrian who died in mysterious circumstances on the Nile in 130 CE. After the death of the young man, who was originally from Bithynia, the emperor deified him and founded a cult devoted to him. Pausanias reported that the young man ‘has honors in other places also, and on the Nile is an Egyptian city named after Antinoüs’, specifically Antinoöpolis (Periegesi della Grecia 8: 9, 7–8). The spread of the cult was accompanied by flourishing artistic production, in which Antinoüs is often associated with other divinities, especially Dionysus and Osiris. Pausanias also reported a building dedicated to him in Mantineia that was ‘remarkable for the stones with which it is adorned, and especially so for its pictures. Most of them are portraits of Antinous, who is made to look just like Dionysus’ (Periegesi della Grecia 8:9, 8).

The figure’s head is slightly turned to the left and has been set on a modern bust. The young man has a full face, with a rounded chin, a generous mouth with a slightly protruding upper lip, a broad, straight nose and a rectilinear brow that arches slightly at the ends. The hair is an unruly but compact mass of curls, left long on the nape of the neck and falling over the forehead in series of comma-shaped locks. The portrait is of the ‘Haupttypus’ type identified by Meyer, which is known in a large number of copies and characterised most of all by the elaborate hairstyle. There is a close affinity between this bust and one that was found in Hadrian’s Villa and is now in the Prado Museum (Schröder 1993, pp. 202–205).

As for the dating of the portrait, a likely date is the end of the first half of the second century CE, considering the death of the young man in 130 CE as the terminus post quem.

Giulia Ciccarello