The Capitoline Antinous - Bronze After the Antique

Rome, early 19th century
After the Antique
The Capitoline Antinous
Bronze

The present figure, better known as the Capitoline Antinous is modelled on the antique prototype which is housed in the Capitoline Museum, Rome (inv. no. MC741), which was reportedly discovered at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli and is first recorded in the collection of Cardinal Albani in 1733. The statue was bought by Pope Clement XII in 1733 and went on to form the nucleus of the Capitoline Museums Rome, where it remains. The restored left leg and the left arm, with its unexpected rhetorical hand gesture, were provided by Pietro Bracci. In the 18th century it was identified as Hadrian’s lover Antinous owing to its fleshy face and physique and downturned look, but contemporary scholarship tends to consider it a copy of a fourth century BC Greek bronze, possibly of the god Hermes.
Capitoline Antinous was one of the many antiquities surrendered to the French under the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797 and housed in the Musée Central des Arts in 1800. By 1816, however, it was returned it to the Italians and placed in the newly refurbished Capitoline Museum in Rome.

As soon as it was discovered this figure of Antinous was so popular that it dethroned, in the hearts of certain art lovers and art historians, another famous figure of Antinous: the Belvedere Antinous, a marble discovered in 1543 and admired ever since in papal collections. In 1750, in his Traité des pierres gravées, Mariette wrote about the Capitoline Antinous: "in the thirty years since it was discovered, it would almost have made us forget the statue of the same Antinous at Belvedere*, if it had not had the privilege of having appeared first, and of always having been rightly regarded as regulating the proportions of a handsome young man".
The Antinous of the Belvedere and the Antinous of the Capitol are in fact the two most famous statues of athletes or ephebes, mistakenly called Antinous from the 16th to the 18th century. The grace of their poses, the absence of other ancient marbles of young men of comparable quality, and the supposed place of their discovery (now disputed), which recalled the name of Hadrian, all conspired to identify them as Antinous, whereas modern researchers consider them to be Imperial-period Roman copies of Greek statues from the 4th century BC, with Hermes concerning the Capitoline Antinous.

The immediate success of the Capitoline Antinous led to numerous copies being made. The first marble copy was made in Rome for king Louis XV, begun by the sculptor Marchand in 1741 and completed by Jacques Sally in 1747; it was then presented by the king to the financier Etienne Michel Bouret in 1753, while another marble by the Italian sculptor Francesco Carradori was placed in the Palatine Gallery of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 1785. Bronze casts were also made by Luigi Valadier in the 1780s, one delivered to the French collector for Pierre Grimod d'Orsay in 1785 (Musée du Louvre), and another kept in the collections of the Villa Borghese in Rome. Finally, a bronze copy was also made for the Tsar of Russia by Vasily Petrovich Ekimov in 1800 for the gardens of Peterhof Palace.

Other small-scale reproductions in bronze are known to have been made, most notably by Francesco Righetti (Christie’s, London, 12th June 2003, lot 1036) and Giacomo Zoffoli (Sotheby’s, Paris, 23rd March 2006, lot 49), who both specialised in small-scale 'classicising' bronzes to cater for the tourist trade in Rome during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was also a popular model for plaster and marble versions (Sotheby’s, London, 6 December 2022, lot 64).
This bronze is likely to have been casted in the early 19th century by one of the many expert Roman bronze caster. It has particularly fine detailing, such as in the hair.

Literature :
Francis Haskell & Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique, Yale University Press, 1981, pp. 143 & 144
Francesco Paolo Arata, Il ruolo del Museo Capitolino nella Roma del settecento. in Ricordi dell' Antico, pp. 61 à 71, Silvana, Roma 2008