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26 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
Setting the arm akimbo with the hand turned back was undoubtedly cultivated
by the aristocrats: it appeared in many of their portraits during the mannerist and
baroque periods. A spectacular example is the anonymous double portrait Sir
Walter Ralegh and His Son, depicting the transmission of aristocratic privilege
through the learned imitation of the gesture (Plate 4). The Restoration and earlyeighteenth-century
theatres accordingly included this gesture in the proper form
for issuing a command; and actors adopted it in their own portraits (Plate 5). It
could also be used theatrically to show the various perversions of authority,
including raillery, boasting, and most frequently, pride (Plate 6).
But by the mid-eighteenth century, the bourgeois strategy of specifying an
affected bodily style as sodomy—a transcoding from the connection of
aristocratic spectacularity with sexual excess—had produced a reading of this
gesture as characteristic of the effeminate sodomite. In a 1761 satire called The
Fribbleriad, David Garrick assigned the gesture to two sexually suspect
“fribbles,” one of whom had “a thumb Stuck to his hips, and jutting bum” (28)
while the other had “kimbow’d arm, and tossing head” (30). Hogarth, in his
Analysis of Beauty, added the gesture to his sketch of a famous Roman statue of
Antinous (Plate 7). Hogarth praised the serpentine line embodied by the
Antinous: “If uniform objects were agreeable,” he wrote, “the Antinous’s easy
sway, must submit to the stiff and straight figure of the dancing master” (20).
But in his accompanying sketch, Hogarth exaggerated the contrapposto stance of
the Antinous beyond that of the classical sources themselves. In the drawing,
Antinous totally depends on the dancing master for support, as if he were a prima
ballerina being presented to the audience by the danseur. Hogarth called
attention to the excessivity of their respective lines both by foregrounding
Antinous’s missing right hand and by linking the line of the drapery around
Antinous’s right wrist with the cuff of the dancing master’s sleeve. Hogarth also
gave his Antinous the conventional signs of aristocratic pride, emphasizing the
aristocratic profile and setting the left arm—missing or damaged in most of the
classical examples—akimbo on the hip with the hand turned back.
It is an open secret among art historians and classical scholars that Antinous was
the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Upon Antinous’s unexpected death in
the prime of his beauty, Hadrian had the boy deified, established games in his
honor, founded an oracle and an entire city in Egypt in his name, and littered his
empire with statues and busts of the youth, hundreds of which survive today. 7 The
implications of this would have been obvious to an English middle class
traditionally resentful of the homosexual favorites of their kings, the example of
William III only the most recent in Hogarth’s memory. Did Hogarth depict the
Antinous’s “submission” to the dancing master as a satire on the production of
sprezzatura? Both the dancing master and the Antinous became, in his sketch,
petits maîtres (little masters)—the dancing master because he is too affected, the
Antinous because he is effeminate, both aristocratic and dependent. Hogarth
valorized the serpentine line as the standard of the beautiful, which he defined as
the form and proportion necessary to sustain the subject, or the “fitting.” But