Hermes (Belvedere Antinous)

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The Hermes of the Museo Pio-Clementino is a renowned ancient Roman sculpture that has been part of the Vatican collections in Rome for centuries. For a long time, it was admired as the Belvedere Antinous, named after its prominent placement in the Cortile del Belvedere. Today, it holds inventory number 907 in the Museo Pio-Clementino. Its idealized face is not actually that of Antinous, Emperor Hadrian's beloved companion. The cloak draped over the left shoulder and wrapped around the left forearm, along with the relaxed contrapposto stance, identify the sculpture as a Hermes, a type familiar from Praxitelean works. Experts now consider it to be a Hadrianic copy (early second century CE) of a bronze by Praxiteles or one of his students. The sculpture was acquired for Pope Paul III in 1543 when a thousand ducats were paid to Nicolaus de Palis for a "very beautiful marble statue... which His Holiness has sent to be placed in the Belvedere garden". The most likely site of its discovery is in a garden near Castel Sant'Angelo, where the Palis had property. The statue quickly gained fame as the Antinous Admirandus and was mentioned in all accounts of Rome's antiquities. It was engraved in repertories of classical art, universally admired and copied in bronze and marble for Fontainebleau in the sixteenth century and Versailles in the seventeenth century. A bronze copy by Hubert Le Sueur was part of Charles I of England's collections before being acquired by Oliver Cromwell, while another cast by the Keller brothers entered the collection of Louis XIV of France. A marble copy was purchased by Peter the Great, and casts can also be found in art academies such as those in Milan and Berlin. Poussin saw it as an aesthetic canon of ideal proportions, and in 1683, Gérard Audran included it in his collection of engravings representing the Proportions of the human body measured from the most beautiful statues of antiquity, meant for young sculptors. Winckelmann recognized it as a statue "of the first class" and much admired its head, "undoubtedly one of the most beautiful heads of a young man from Antiquity", even though he criticized the working of its feet, stomach, and legs. In Winckelmann's time, the statue's identification as Antinous had already been disproved, and it was instead interpreted as a Meleager, hero of the hunt for the Calydonian Boar. It was finally identified as Hermes by scholar Ennio Quirino Visconti in his catalogue of the Museo Pio-Clementino (1818–1822).