Antinous' Lips: A Note on the Slippery Matter of Realism in Portraiture

Abstract

It came as no surprise to learn that, when the colossal Mondragone Antinous bust from the Louvre was taken out of its crate after a long exhibition tour, the curators noticed that the face was smeared with lipstick (fig. 1). A decade or so ago, a well-known New York museum had to spend a small fortune removing the bright-red kiss bestowed upon a Mondrian by a prominent lady during the opening of the building’s expansion. Apparently, after a few glasses of champagne, the art-lover got over-enthusiastic about the excellence of classic abstract art. So her husband, a museum trustee, had to pay for all the work needed to remove the red crimson that had seeped into the painting’s intricate cracks—and, one imagines, for his own embarrassment. This form of love has a long history. Ovid tells us how Venus rewarded Pygmalion for a statue he had created of the goddess herself. Flattered by his exquisite craft, and moved by the obsession that the artist had developed for his artwork, Venus brought the sculpture to life. He called his bride Galatea. But the idea goes well beyond mythology. Think of Freud’s keen interest in Wilhem Jensen’s novel Gradiva, the story of a man’s obsession with a bas-relief of a young woman he discovered while looking for antiquities in Rome. Arguably, the power that some images have to arouse such passions has its roots in primitive, fetishistic appetites. Consider the awe that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa inspires in the masses of pilgrims that crowd around her at