Sleeping Hermaphroditus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Borghese Hermaphroditus is a type of marble sculpture depicting Hermaphroditus life size, reclining on a couch, with a form that is partly derived from ancient portrayals of Venus and other female nudes, and partly from contemporaneous feminised Hellenistic portrayals of Dionysus/Bacchus. It represents a subject that was much repeated in Hellenistic times and in ancient Rome, to judge from the number of versions that have chanced to survive. It derives its name from its best known examples, in marble, which were part of the Borghese collection.
Martin Robertson described it as a good early Imperial Roman copy of a bronze original by the later of the two Hellenistic sculptors named Polycles; the original bronze was mentioned in Pliny's Natural History.
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Ancient examples
First example
The first example to be discovered, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, was unearthed in the grounds of Santa Maria della Vittoria, near the Baths of Diocletian and within the bounds of the Gardens of Sallust; the discovery was made either when the church foundations were being dug (in 1608) or when espaliers were being planted. The sculpture was presented to the connoisseur, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who in return granted the order the services of his architect Giovanni Battista Soria and paid for the façade of the church, albeit sixteen years later. In his new Villa Borghese, a room called the 'Room of the Hermaphrodite' was devoted to it.
In 1620 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Scipione's protégé, was paid sixty scudi for making the buttoned mattress upon which the Hermaphroditus reclines, so strikingly realistic that visitors are inclined to give it a testing prod.
The sculpture was purchased in 1807 with many other pieces from the Borghese collection, from principe Camillo Borghese, who had married Pauline Bonaparte, and was transferred to the Musée du Louvre, where it inspired Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Hermaphroditus" in 1863, and where it remains. Another 2nd century copy in the Borghese collection, found in 1781, has taken its place at the Villa Borghese.
Second example
A third Roman marble variant was discovered in 1880 (illustration, left), during building works to make Rome the capital of a newly united Italy. It is now on display at the Museo Palazzo Massimo Alle Terme, Rome.
Other ancient copies
Other ancient copies are to be found at the Uffizi, Florence, and in the Vatican Museums.
Modern copies
Many copies have been produced since the Renaissance, in a variety of media and scales. Full size ones were produced for Philip IV of Spain in bronze, ordered by Velázquez and now in the Prado Museum, and for Versailles (by the sculptor Martin Carlier, in marble). The composition has clearly influenced Velázquez's painting of the Rokeby Venus, now in London. A reduced-scale bronze copy, made and signed by Giovanni Francesco Susini, is now at the Metropolitan Museum. Another reduced-scale copy, this time produced in ivory by François Duquesnoy, was purchased in Rome by John Evelyn in the 1640s .
See also
