Townley Antinous

The Townley Antinous is a marble portrait head of Antinous, the Greek youth who was the companion and lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian. He wears a wreath of ivy leaves in his hair. Ivy was the plant of the god Dionysus, called Bacchus by the Romans, so the wreath is read as a sign that Antinous is being shown in that god's guise rather than simply as himself.

Only the head is ancient. It once sat on a full statue carved around 130, in the later part of Hadrian's reign, which ran from 117 to 138. At some point the statue broke and the head was separated from the body. The chest and shoulders you see beneath the face today were carved much later, so that a head on its own could be shown as a finished object in a collector's house. That join is the single most important fact about the piece.

The stone is Parian marble, a fine white marble from the Greek island of Paros that was prized for portrait carving. The head is reported to have been found in 1770 on the Janiculum hill in Rome, near the Villa Doria Pamphili, on ground then called the Tenuta della Tedesca, or "the Germanwoman's estate". It was not standing in a temple or a garden. It had been built into a roadside wall near the Porta San Pancrazio, a gate in the Aurelian Walls, as spolia — old carved stone reused as ordinary building material by later builders who wanted rubble, not art. The remains of the statue it came from were in the same wall.

In July 1773 Charles Townley bought the head for £150. Townley was a British collector of the kind known as a Grand Tourist: a wealthy traveller who toured Italy and shipped antiquities home. He bought it from Thomas Jenkins, an antiquary and art dealer working in Rome. The head was in Britain by June 1774. Jenkins had written in July 1773 that it was "to be received" from John Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset, who had probably owned it in the gap between the wall and the sale. The head later entered the British Museum with the rest of the Townley Marbles. A drawing of the bust attributed to Vincenzo Pacetti is also in the museum's collection.

So the object carries three lives at once. A Roman sculptor carved a portrait of Antinous while Hadrian still ruled. Later builders knocked it down to wall stone. Eighteenth-century dealers and collectors dug it out, gave it a new chest, put a price on it, drew it, and moved it into a private collection that eventually became a public museum. The face is ancient. The complete bust, as it stands in the gallery, is a made thing from several periods.