Antinous Mondragone exhibition history Henry Moore Foundation
Provenance
In 1618–1619, the gallery of Palazzo Mondragone began implementing pedestals for the displayed antiquities, including their colossal busts. These busts were displayed in pairs of male and female figures that often brought disagreement with them in terms of who they were depicting; the male figure that was assumed to be a depiction of Julius Caesar was replaced by the Mondragone figure after its recovery from the earth. It is said to have been found near Tusculum, specifically at Frascati between 1713 and 1729 and was certainly displayed as part of the Borghese collection at their Villa Mondragone there. However, these dates have been argued against on the basis that the Antinous head was recorded as being seen in the gallery decades before in 1687 by Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, a Swedish architect that had visited the villa.In 1807, it was bought with a large part of the Borghese collections for Napoleon; the Antinous head being sold for one of the highest prices out of the entire collection. Sometime after this, a brown layer of wax was added to give an opaque finish, along with plaster around the base of the neck to make the statue look more complete – these were both removed in recent cleaning.  It is now held at the Louvre Museum, though it toured to the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds in 2006 for the exhibition "Antinous: The Face of the Antique", and returned to the United Kingdom for the British Museum's exhibition "Hadrian: Empire and Conflict" in 2008.
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