Borghese Hermaphroditus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The marble sculpture type known as the Borghese Hermaphroditus is thought to be a Roman copy of a bronze work by the Hellenistic sculptor Polycles[1]. Nominally, it represents the mythological figure Hermaphroditus, or a generic hermaphrodite being, owing something to ancient portrayals of Venus, other female nudes, and contemporaneous feminised Hellenistic portrayals of Bacchus.
Contents |
[edit] Ancient examples
[edit] First example
The first example to be discovered in the first decades of the seventeenth century on the grounds of Santa Maria della Vittoria, near the Baths of Diocletian; the discovery was made either when the church foundations were being dug (in 1608) or when espaliers were being planted.[2] The sculpture was presented to the connoisseur, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who paid for the façade of the church in return. In his new Villa Borghese, a room called the 'Room of the Hermaphrodite' was devoted to it.
In 1620[3] Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Scipione's protegee, 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]
The sculpture was purchased in 1807 with many other pieces from the Borghese collection, who had married Pauline Bonaparte, and was transferred to the Musée du Louvre, where it inspired Algernon Swinburne's "Hermaphroditus" in 1863, and where it remains.
 The Louvre example |
 Louvre example - face |
 Louvre example - face |
[edit] Second example
A second variant was discovered in 1880 (illustration, above right).
[edit] Other ancient copies
Other ancient copies are to be found at Florence, the Vatican Museums and the Villa Borghese.
[edit] Modern copies
Full-size copies
- in bronze, for Philip IV of Spain, ordered by Velazquez—it is conserved at the Prado Museum
- in marble, for Versailles, made by Martin Carlier.
Versions were also made for collectors at reduced scale:
- a bronze signed by Giovanni Francesco Susini, at the Metropolitan Museum
- in ivory by François Duquesnoy, purchased in Rome by John Evelyn in the 1640s [5].
[edit] References
- ^ mentioned by Pliny (XXXIV.80)
- ^ According to two seventeenth-century accounts noted in Haskell and Penny, p. 234.
- ^ Borghese accounts.
- ^ Haskell and Penny, p. 235.
- ^ Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique (Yale University Press) 1981, cat. no. 48 (pp 234ff) et passim
