The Canopus is one of the chapels at the Villa where it used to be thought that Antinoüs was celebrated. In the ‘Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian’, Yourcenar relates how she came across Piranesi’s etching of the Canopus. She applauds its insights into the emperor’s mind: ‘The genius of Piranesi, almost mediumistic, has truly caught the element of hallucination here: he has sensed the long-continued rituals of mourning, the tragic architecture of an inner world’ (RC 324). Piranesi’s wide view of the chapel opens up the dome to the spectator, allowing us to look, from a distance and inside, at the private world of Hadrian. In ‘Sistine’, Michelangelo sees a split between his work and nature’s: ‘It is in that respect perhaps that all my work is contrary to nature. At every instant the marble in which we think we have preserved a form of perishable life returns to its place in nature, through erosion, patina, and the play of light and shadow over planes which thought they were abstract but are in fact only the surface of a stone’. The split is healed for the architect-emperor when he is no longer anxious about the nature of the form he has created. Hadrian has built the structure but it is nature’s work and a fresh approach to myth that produces the return of Antinoüs.
We have seen how the concentration on fixed images of Antinoüs led to a fragmented picture of him for the mourning emperor. Under the influence of melancholia, Hadrian is unable to advance beyond the need to manipulate myths in his remembrance of Antinoüs. Hadrian lies at ‘that sinister crossroads between what was and what will be, and what exists eternally’ (290). Pursuing his enquiry into knowledge of the next world, Hadrian ponders the spectral form taken by Achilles in Arrian’s letter. The provincial governor and author Arrian had recounted how Achilles appeared to sailors in their dreams, with Patroclus alongside him: Arrian knows Hadrian will think of Antinous. He has given up trying to specify the origin of the phantom of the Other, content to accept it as a feature of the confluence of ideas at the crossroads: ‘it matters little to me whether the phantoms whom I evoke come from the limbo of my memory or from that of another world. My soul, if I possess one, is made of the same substance as are the specters’ (289).
Processes of visualisation are necessarily an important part of Hadrian’s recollection of his life – and of his acceptance of death. Yourcenar needed Hadrian to find her own perspective on Antinous, so the argument made by some critics that the Memoirs are a suppression of Yourcenar’s true interest in Antinous are worth considering but tend to underestimate the complexity of the passionate relationship represented in the text that we have. Tracing the role of sculpture in Hadrian’s memoirs allows us to see how Yourcenar completed a project that had been with her for over 30 years, engaging with the particular challenge of representing her desire and empathy for both Hadrian and Antinous. Alongside her distinctive approach to the past, Yourcenar could call on the most influential figure for her project since Symonds, namely Proust, with his crucial example of the recreation of a consciousness through memory.
Hadrian’s ultimate goal in these memoirs, as he lies dying at the Villa, is to articulate a detached wisdom that seeks to incorporate both life and death. In a review of Josyane Savigneau’s biography of Yourcenar, Edmund White quotes from Yourcenar’s essay on Cavafy: ‘We are so used to seeing in wisdom a residue of dead passions that it’s difficult to recognize in it the hardest and most condensed form of ardor, the grain of gold pulled from the fire, not from the ashes.’ Yourcenar aimed to convey the truth of both Hadrian’s rule and his passions.