Borghese Hermaphroditus
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The Borghese Hermaphroditus is a sculpture-type from ancient Rome. It derives its name from its best known examples, in marble, which were part of the Borghese collection. It depicts a life-size hermaphrodite human reclining on a couch, whose form is partly derived from ancient portrayals of Venus, other female nudes, and contemporaneous feminised Hellenistic portrayals of Bacchus. Art historians argue[citation needed] that it is a Roman copy of a bronze work by the Hellenistic sculptor Polycles[1]
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[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 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.[2] The sculpture was presented to the connoisseur, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who in return granted the order 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[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. Another 2nd century copy in the Borghese collection, found in 1781, took and takes its place at the Villa Borghese.
 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 and the Vatican Museums.
[edit] 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 Velazquez and now conserved at the Prado Museum) and for Versailles (by the sculptor Martin Carlier, in marble). 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 [5].
[edit] Notes
- ^ 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
