Reframing Antinous

LaManna, Kathleen Rose

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Reframing Antinous

LaManna, Kathleen Rose

Abstract

Antinous has been the subject of scholarly fascination for centuries—due in no small part to the ubiquity of his image. He is the most frequently portrayed person in ancient art aside from Augustus and Hadrian. In this thesis, I advocate for revisiting the subject of his portraiture using methods established in the recent “material turn” in anthropological studies. By returning to the material of the sculptural corpus itself, it becomes clear that the large majority of portraits of Antinous with known provenance were discovered in elite second-century villas. This thesis explores the implications of that setting on interpretations of the portraits, which will be approached as social agents capable of impacting the humans and things around them. My central case studies are the assemblage of Antinous portraits discovered at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli and the acrolithic cult statue of the youth from the villa of Herodes Atticus at Eva/Loukou. What can the inclusion of these portraits within the villa realm tell us about elite behavior and social expectations? What can it tell us about how Antinous functioned semantically within the world of the Second Sophistic? Ultimately, my aim is to continue to move studies of Antinous away from unproductive considerations of his biography and to instead investigate the opportunities that arise from engaging with the materiality of his depictions.