Antinous Mondragone
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| Antinous Mondragone |
| c. 130 CE |
| White marble, height 95 cm |
| Paris, Louvre |
The Antinous Mondragone is a unique colossal 0.95 m high marble example of the iconographic type of the deified Antinous, of c. 130 CE.[1] It was part of the Borghese collection and was displayed at their Villa Mondragone at Frascati, near which it had been discovered in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Winckelmann made it better known by praising it in his History of Ancient Art;[2] In 1807 it was bought with a large part of the Borghese collections for Napoleon. It is now held at the Louvre Museum, though it toured to the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds in 2006 for the exhibition "Antinous: The Face of the Antique".[3]
It formed part of an acrolithic cult statue for the worship of Antinous as a god. Holes have been drilled for the attachment of a head-dress (possibly a lotus flower or uraeus) in metal; the sculpture has also lost eyes in metal.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Antinous, the lover of Emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile that year.
- ^ In the posthumous publication of Winckelmann's history translated into Italian with copious notes by Carlo Fea, Storia delle arti del disegno presso gli antichi Rome, 1783-84, it was described in vol. II, p 386, noted by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (Yale University Press) 1981, p. 101.
- ^ Exhibition page
