Antinous

Antinous was a handsome young man who lived in the early 100s AD. The Roman Empire then stretched from Egypt to southern Scotland, and Emperor Hadrian was perhaps the most powerful man in the world.
Between Hadrian and Antinous there arose a love affair of which we know little until this far afterwards. But when Antinous drowned in the Nile, the emperor mourned deeply and sincerely. He also honored the memory by officially proclaiming that Antinous now had the status of god, something otherwise reserved for the imperial family.

Hadrian commissioned a series of artworks depicting Antinous as various divinities, most notably as Bacchus, Mercury and Osiris. Many were in colossal format and erected in public places around the kingdom. The love story was thus not a secret that was hidden away, but on the contrary, it was raised to a mythical level.

The Art Academy's Antinous is life-size. It is cast after a marble sculpture from Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, and was originally located at Mellby in Södermanland. The plaster was donated to the Academy in 1810 by Admiral Wachtmeister, who then owned the Mellby collection. As a thank you, he was also named an honorary member three years later.

The Art Academy's Antinous is thus a Roman work of art, but of course the beautiful youth has aesthetic similarities with classical Greek art, which was so admired by the Romans. In the right hand there are fragments of a staff, which would indicate that Antinous was this time portrayed as Mercury, the messenger of the gods. This calm and slightly wistful figure can be contrasted with a head in colossal format that the Academy of Arts bought in 1830, and which is now installed by the elevators in the academy building's entrance from Jakobsgatan. Here Antinous has vines and pine cones in his hair. It is there that there is no doubt that he appears as Bacchus, or in Greek Dionysus, the god of viticulture.