News
History, myth, and the stories behind the art.
From Marble to Merch: How We Turn a 1,900-Year-Old Sculpture Into Original Art
People occasionally ask how a print of a Roman marble bust ends up on a canvas, a poster, or a mug without looking like a blurry museum postcard or, worse, a...
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Antinous as a Queer Icon: How a 2nd-Century Youth Became a Modern Symbol
Antinous has been dead for roughly nineteen centuries, and for most of that time, nobody was building Shopify stores ...
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The Many Faces of Antinous: Why Over 100 Statues of Him Survive
Here's a strange fact to sit with: more portraits of Antinous survive from antiquity than of almost any other individ...
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The Deification of a Mortal: How (and Why) Hadrian Made Antinous a God
Roman emperors got deified with some regularity — it was practically a job perk, voted on by the Senate after death, ...
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Antinoöpolis: The City Hadrian Built for His Lost Love
Most grief fades into a private matter — a memory, a photograph, maybe a headstone. Hadrian's grief built a city. On ...
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Was Ancient Rome Actually Queer-Friendly? Separating Truth From Wishful Thinking
It's a tempting story: an emperor publicly loves another man, deifies him after death, builds him temples across the ...
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How Antinous Died on the Nile: The Mystery, The Theories, The Ancient Sources
In October of 130 CE, somewhere near the Egyptian town of Hermopolis Magna, a young man drowned in the Nile. That's t...
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Hadrian and Antinous: The Real Timeline
Movies and Pinterest boards tend to compress this into "emperor falls in love with beautiful boy, boy dies tragically...
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Who Was Antinous, Really?
If you've landed on this page because a bust, a print, or a Pinterest board caught your eye and you're wondering *wai...
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