The Survival of the Image of Antinous: the classical cult, the 19th-Century Press, and the Construction of the National Body in Brazil

Abstract

This paper analyzes the trajectory of the image of Antinous, from Roman Egypt to contemporary Brazil, drawing on the concept of survival and the notion of anachronism as formulated by Georges Didi-Huberman. The article is structured around three main axes. First, it examines the theological plasticity of his cult in Antiquity, in which associations with deities such as Osiris and Dionysus enabled a wide iconographic circulation. Second, it discusses his reception in nineteenth-century Brazil as an ideal of neoclassical beauty at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, as well as his persistence as a “mental image” in nineteenth-century periodicals, where he functioned as an aesthetic and moral yardstick in the press. Finally, it analyzes the instrumentalization of Antinous within the eugenic project of the First Brazilian Republic, as exemplified by the work of Fernando de Azevedo and the journal Educação Physica. At this stage, the image of the ephebe was “purified” of its homoerotic charge and converted into a model of virility and racial health for the nation, culminating in the paradox of being iconographically confused with the Belvedere Hermes. The paper concludes that Antinous survives as a dialectical image that, through successive reconfigurations, reveals how the past operates in shaping the sensibilities and discourses of the present.