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Title: The emperor's toy boy
Source:
Telegraph
URL Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/mai ... arts/2006/08/01/ixartleft.html
Published: Aug 1, 2006
Author: Telegraph
Post Date: 2006-08-01 23:48:07 by Morgana le Fay
Keywords: None
Views: 44
Alastair Sooke admires a superb show devoted to a great ancient beauty Every era has its pin-ups. Today, we swoon over the likes of Brad and Jude, but in second-century imperial Rome one beautiful boy got the blood tingling more than anyone else: Antinous. Antinous: 'the fleshiness of his face speaks of sensual excess' Born in the town of Bithynium in north-western Turkey, this sultry youth became the teenage boyfriend of the Emperor Hadrian, travelling in pomp with the imperial entourage until his mysterious death in the Nile in the year 130. Distraught, Hadrian decreed that his favourite had swooshed up to the heavens to take his place with the gods. He founded a city on the spot of his death and commissioned a slew of artists to mould his features in stone for his private villa at Tivoli. Soon Antinous was the must-have accessory for the aristocracy. Helen, that notorious beauty of ancient myth, may have launched a thousand ships, but the delicious Antinous inspired artists and craftsmen to fashion thousands of works. He crops up on medallions, cameos, oil-lamps and bowls as well as colossal statues, busts and reliefs, while more than 30 provincial cities issued coinage stamped with his face. Incredibly, more portraits of Antinous survive than of any other figure from antiquity bar Augustus and Hadrian himself. Everyone wanted a piece of the last god of the ancient world. Antinous: the Face of the Antique, a superb exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, gathers together a handful of these images from collections across Europe to ask why artworks of Antinous were so phenomenally popular. With just 14 exhibits, the show is small - but the work displayed is of mesmeric quality. In the first gallery, seven busts are arranged in a sweeping curve against an azure backdrop, an identity parade that invites us to contemplate Antinous's distinctive features. Do they look the same? Broadly speaking, yes. The blaze of luscious curls, the slumberous downcast eyes, the straight nose, striated eyebrows, full lips and broad chest: all conform to the Antinous "type". His expression is melancholy, as though mourning the passing of his beauty. The fleshiness of his face speaks of sensual excess, but there is also a hint of sulky petulance in the plump pout of his half-smirking, half-sneering lips. He died while still an adolescent. Only two sculptures survive with inscriptions confirming their identity as Hadrian's lover (neither is in Leeds), so scholars need a more precise system than gut feeling when identifying an Antinous. Hairstyle is important. If the arrangement of locks follows a particular pattern, we can speculate that we are looking at the work of an ancient copyist who used an officially sanctioned prototype. On these grounds, one bust on show in Leeds is identified as Antinous even though only the back of its head is ancient - the hair sculpted at the front like whorls of whipped cream is the work of an 18th-century restorer. The biggest draw of the exhibition is in the second gallery, where two colossal heads stare down at the viewer with haughty froideur. The outsize Mondragone head from the Louvre is not only the most famous image of Antinous but also one of the most celebrated sculptures to survive from antiquity. It made the great 18th-century German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann sweaty with excitement: he called it "the glory and crown of art in this age as well as in all others", behind only the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon in the Vatican in the pecking order of classical beauty. Until recently it was coated in a brown patina of wax and dust. Cigarette butts and sweet wrappers had accumulated in the holes in its hair where an elaborate metal headdress was once fixed. Restored, it is a thing of awe-inspiring beauty, with cascades of sinuous curls, fantastically smooth cheeks and a mouth sweetly rendered in fine-grained white marble. When I saw it, passing women whispered "gorgeous" and "scrumptious". Look closely at his left cheek and you will see faint traces of scarlet lipstick: a farewell kiss from a curator at the Louvre, perhaps, and testament to the obsessive desire that Antinous can still inspire. At the other end of the scale, a tiny intaglio in the final gallery is the jewel in the exhibition's crown. Once owned by the 18th-century collector Charles Townley and now housed in the British Museum, it has survived as a fragment, with just the lower part of Antinous's face visible from the lips down. Cleverly backlit, the translucent stone has a holographic quality that makes the face look three-dimensional, bringing Antinous spookily to life. Ancient art can feel cold and severe, yet in this exquisite exhibition the lineaments of a boy who lived almost 2,000 years ago have the warmth of pulsing flesh. Hadrian may have made Antinous a god just because he turned him on, but his beautiful memorials carry a touch of the divin
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