Borghese Gladiator
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The lifesize[1] marble so-called Borghese Gladiator, a Hellenistic sculpture that is actually of a swordsman, created at Ephesus about 100 BCE, is signed by Agasias of Ephesus, son of Dositheus. It was found at Nettuno in the Anzio region before 1611 and added to the Borghese collection in Rome. At the Villa Borghese it stood in a ground-floor room named for it. Sold to Napoleon by Camillo Borghese in 1807, it was taken to Paris when the Borghese collection was acquired for the Louvre Museum[2], where it now resides.
Misnamed a gladiator due to an erroneous restoration, it was among the most admired and copied works of antiquity in the eighteenth century, providing sculptors a canon of proportions. A bronze cast was made for Charles I of England (now at Windsor), and another by Hubert Le Sueur was the centrepiece of Isaac de Caus' parterre at Wilton House; that version was given by the 8th Earl of Pembroke to Sir Robert Walpole and remains the focal figure in William Kent's Hall at Houghton House, Norfolk. Other copies can be found at Petworth House and in the Green Court at Knole (illustration).
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Louvre catalogue
- Two copies at the Louvre here and here.
- Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 1981. Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900 (Yale University Press) Cat. no. 43, pp 221-24.
- Lestache copy
