A large 'Grand Tour' marble bust of Antinous as Dionysus, Italy, 19th C.

H 60 cm

Ref.: The British Museum, Museum number 1805.0703.97, for the original, where it is mentioned that 'the head is reported to have been found in 1770 in grounds known as the Tenuta della Tedesca, near the Villa Pamphili, re-used in post-classical times with fragments of the statue to which the head belonged in a wall that ran under the road to Palo from the gate of San Pancrazio'. (link)

Antinous or Antinoös was a Greek youth from Bithynia and a favourite beloved of the Roman emperor Hadrian. After his premature death before his twentieth birthday, Antinous was deified on Hadrian's orders, being worshipped in both the Greek East and Latin West, sometimes as a god and sometimes merely as a hero.