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Sleeping Hermaphroditus
Sleeping Hermaphroditus
Artist	Unknown,; Gian Lorenzo Bernini (mattress)
Year	Ancient Rome sculpture,; 1620 (mattress)
Catalogue	11
Type	Sculpture
Medium	Marble
Subject	Hermaphroditus
Dimensions	169 cm (67 in)
Location	The Louvre, Paris
Preceded by	The Rape of Proserpina
Followed by	Bust of Pope Gregory XV

The Sleeping Hermaphrodite is an ancient marble sculpture depicting Hermaphroditus life size. In 1620, Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculpted the mattress upon which the statue now lies. The form 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 survived. Discovered at Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite was immediately claimed by Cardinal Scipione Borghese and became part of the Borghese Collection. The "Borghese Hermaphrodite" was later sold to the occupying French and was moved to The Louvre, where it is on display.

The Sleeping Hermaphrodite has been described as a good early Imperial Roman copy of a bronze original by the later of the two Hellenistic sculptors named Polycles (working c. 155 BC);^[1] the original bronze was mentioned in Pliny's Natural History.^[2]

Original Borghese copy

The ancient sculpture was discovered in the first decades of the 17th century—unearthed in the grounds of Santa Maria della Vittoria, near the Baths of Diocletian and within the bounds of the ancient Gardens of Sallust. The discovery was made either when the church foundations were being dug (in 1608) or when espaliers were being planted.^[3]

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.^[4]^[5]

The Sleeping Hermaphrodite and many other sculptures were purchased in 1807 from prince Camillo Borghese, owner of the Borghese Collection, who had married Pauline Bonaparte. It was transferred to The Louvre, where it inspired Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "Hermaphroditus" in 1863.^[6]

Musée du Louvre copy
Front
Back
Detail
Top

Ancient copies

A second-century copy of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus was found in 1781, and has taken the original's place at the Galleria Borghese. A third Roman marble variant was discovered in 1880, 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, part of the National Museum of Rome.

National Museum of Rome copy
Back
Front
Detail

Additional ancient copies can be found at the Uffizi in Florence, Vatican Museums in Vatican City, and the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Hermitage Museum copy
Left view
Right view

Modern copies

Many copies have been produced since the Renaissance, in a variety of media and scales. Full size copies 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 [fr], in marble). The composition has clearly influenced Velázquez's painting of the Rokeby Venus, now in London.^[7] 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.^[8] American artist Barry X Ball produced a life-size copy after the Louvre's version, made from Belgian black marble on a Carrara marble base, which was completed in 2010.^[9] This sculpture was sold at Christie's, New York, on 10 May 2016 for $545,000.^[10]

References

Notes

^ Robertson, A History of Greek Art, (1975), vol. I:551-52.
^ Pliny, Hist. Nat., XXXIV.19.
^ According to two seventeenth-century accounts noted in Haskell and Penny 1981:234.
^ Borghese accounts.
^ Haskell and Penny, 1981:235.
^ Text of "Hermaphroditus" Archived 2008-03-17 at the Wayback Machine
^ According to Clark, the Rokeby Venus "ultimately derives from the Borghese Hermaphrodite". The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Princeton University Press. 1990. ISBN 0-691-01788-3. p. 373, note to page 3. See also the entry in: MacLaren, Neil; Braham, Allan (1970). The Spanish School. National Gallery Catalogues (revised ed.). London: National Gallery. pp. 125–129. ISBN 0-947645-46-2
^ Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique (Yale University Press) 1981, cat. no. 48 (pp. 234ff et passim)
^ "Barry X Ball's black marble 'Sleeping Hermaphrodite' after the Louvre's Hermaphrodite Endormi". barryxball.com. Retrieved September 9, 2022.
^ Christie's (10 May 2016). "Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale".

Bibliography

Haskell, Francis and Nicholas Penny (1981). Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1600-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Avery, Charles (1997). Bernini: Genius of the Baroque. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 9780500286333.
Baldinucci, Filippo (2006). The Life of Bernini. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 9780271730769.
Bernini, Domenico (2011). The Life of Giano Lorenzo Bernini. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 9780271037486.
Mormando, Franco (2011). Bernini: His Life and His Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226538525.
Robertson, Martin (1975).A History of Greek Art, vol. I:551-52, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wittkower, Rudolf (1955). Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque. London: Phaidon Press. ISBN 9780801414305.
Mancinotti, Luca (2017). Ermafroditi dormienti Tipo Borghese. Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider. ISBN 9788891316134.