Sleeping Hermaphroditus

Roman art

Bergondi Andrea

1721-1789

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s integration, in 1620, of an antique sculpture of a sleeping Hermaphrodite with a splendid mattress caused a great stir. Those who were later commissioned to reintegrate sculptures of a similar subject inevitably looked to that work, one of the most famous pieces on display in the Villa Pinciana. This was also the case when, in 1774, another Sleeping Hermaphrodite owned by the Borghese family and until then kept in the cellar of the Villa Pinciana was reworked. The sculptor in charge was Andrea Bergondi. He created a bed composed of a mattress and cushion wrapped in a sheet of soft folds. This second Hermaphrodite was exhibited in the Palazzo in Campo Marzio until the early 19th century, when it was brought to the Villa Pinciana to replace the other one, which left for Paris in 1807.

The figure, nude and supine, is caught in a moment of intimate repose, with a slight twist of the torso in relation to the raised pelvis, suggesting movement in sleep. This creates two sides of vision, one where the viewer observes the hips, sinuous buttocks and face, and a second, opposite, in which the dual nature, male and female, is revealed. The Borghese sculpture is to be considered a reworking from the Roman period, dating back to the 2nd century AD, inspired by an original from the Hellenistic period. Pliny the Elder attributes a statue of Hermaphroditus to the Greek sculptor Polycles, who probably worked in the 2nd century BC.

Object details

Commentary

The work is a combination of an archaeological Hermaphrodite with a mattress made in 1774 by the sculptor Andrea Bergondi.

The young body is gently lying on its right side, with the pelvis slightly raised and the left leg flexed with the foot raised. The arms are folded under the head, which gently rests on them. The figure is nude, only partially covered by the sheet on which it lies, which wraps around the calves. The torso appears to be in a twisting movement, in the opposite direction to the body, as if in an unconscious action in sleep, on one side showing the sinuous face and buttocks, and on the other, the ambivalent nature with the male genitalia and breasts.

The sculpture, initially kept in the storerooms of the Villa Borghese, was moved to a room in the family palace in Campo Marzio, where it was described by Winckelmann in 1764 and, in 1783, by the German writer Wilhelm Heinse, who thought its workmanship was superior to the one later brought to the Louvre (Visconti 1821, I, pp. 67-70, table 27; Winckelmann 1764, p. 368; Wiecker 1977, pp. 39-40, 79, no. 38). The same location appears in the inventory of 1812 (De Lachenal 1982, pp. 77, 79, 104). Visconti, in 1796, illustrates the figure on “a lion skin lying on the bare ground”, providing a valuableterminus post quem for the execution of the restoration (Visconti, Lamberti 1796, pp. 44-45). The work finally appears in its current location, in the Villa Borghese, in the list compiled by Antonio Nibby in 1832 (Nibby 1832, pp. 99-100).

There is no certain information about the circumstances of the discovery. Visconti, in 1821, put forward the hypothesis that the sculpture might come from the area of the Baths of Diocletian, the same place as the Borghese Hermaphrodite, now in the Louvre, in the conviction that “the Romans, scholars of symmetry in adorning the pretorj of their villas, often placed two repetitions of the same image, one corresponding to the other” (Visconti 1821, pp. 70-71, table XXVII).

Ovid, who in his Metamorphoses wished to “sing of the shapes of bodies changing into new bodies”, tells the story of the god, son of Hermes and Aphrodite. The child, who takes his name and physiognomy from his parents, grows up on sacred Mount Ida in Asia Minor. At the age of fifteen, gripped by a desire to explore new places, he comes to a pond of crystal-clear water in Caria, where he is noticed by the nymph Salmacis, inhabitant of the spring. Struck by his beauty, she declares her love for him but is harshly rejected. Faced with the young man’s rejection, the nymph invokes the gods so that their bodies might remain united forever. “The gods accepted her vows ... thus, when the bodies fused in the tenacious embrace they are no longer two, but have an ambiguous appearance, such that one can speak of neither female nor male: the appearance is of neither and both” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV, vv. 289-388).

The Borghese sculpture is believed to be one of several Roman replicas, dating from the 2nd century AD, inspired by an original by the Greek sculptor named Polycles, according to Pliny the Elder, author of a Hermaphroditus nobilis. Pliny reports, however, the existence of two sculptors of bronze with this name, one of the artists of the CII Olympiad, in the years 372-369 BC, and a second, Athenian, working during the CLVI Olympiad, in 156-153 BC (Pliny, Naturalis Historia, XXXIV, 50, 52, 80).

Most scholars consider it more plausible that it is a Hellenistic archetype with classicalinfluences, dating from the 2nd century BC (Klein 1921, p. 93, footnote 115; Giglioli 1955, pp. 923-924; Lippold 1950, p. 366, footnote 16; Coarelli 1970, p. 82, footnote 34). This was a period in which Athenian artists again looked with interest at the classical forms of works from the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Wolfgang Helbig, in 1913, observed that the iconographic model of the sleeping Hermaphrodite was to be found in a marble work from the Hellenistic period and identified the Hermaphroditus nobilis as a type of standing figure, confirmed by a copious number of replicas (Helbig 1913, p. 245, no. 1552).

The compositional scheme of the figure, in a depiction of the Hermaphrodite with a variation of the subject, is found in a sculptural representation of a Reclining Maenad lying on a rock, found on the Acropolis in Athens and dated to the 2nd century BC (Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. 261) and in the Sleeping Ariadne from the Vatican, which can be dated to the same period (Giglioli 1955, p. 923).

The iconographic model of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite is found in numerous examples that differ from each other in small details. The most convincing comparison can be established with a second sculpture of the same statuary type, also from the Borghese collection, now in the Louvre Museum (Minozzi, Fabréga-Dubert, Martinez 2011, pp. 312-315, no. 35). Other replicas are to be found in the work in the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Massimo alle Terme (Caso 2015, pp. 260-261, no. 189), in one in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence (Mansuelli 1958, p. 82, no. 53) and in a last one in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (Guédéonow 1865, pp. 105-106, no. 349).

Giulia Ciccarello

The mattress and cushion are wrapped in a soft sheet, tucked in at the bottom to create wide folds along the entire surface. There is a clear reference in it to the famous Hermaphrodite restored in 1620 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, sold in 1807 to Napoleon and now in the Louvre in Paris. Compared to its 17th-century predecessor, however, there is a marked difference in the rendering of the surface of the mattress, which is no longer quilted “as found in every house today, and which certainly was not in use in the days when Mercury and Venus, according to mythical tradition, gave birth to this monstrous child”, as Nibby noted critically in 1832 (p. 99).

In addition to the sheet and mattress, the head also seems to date to a modern intervention, although the contextualisation of the restoration work is not entirely clear. Platner (1842, p. 350) claims that the head, right elbow and left leg are also modern, a hypothesis supported by Moreno with regard to the head (2003, pp. 213-214, cat. 196). Gangolf Kieseritzky in 1882 describes, among other specimens, the one from Villa Borghese,  “for which A. Bergondi remade the head, the neck, the right elbow, the left hand with the wrist, the lower half of the left leg, the heel and toes of the right foot with the corresponding piece of the sheet, various other pieces of this and the mattress”. The attribution of the important integration of the head and other body parts to Bergondi does not actually appear to be confirmed by the documents. In fact, in the Borghese household accounts there is a documented payment to Andrea Bergondi of 250 scudi on 12 July 1774 “‘for the restoration of an antique marble statue representing a Maufrodito[hermaphrodite] with the restoration of the Matarazzi [mattress] Coscino [cushion] and folds, which make up the sheet” (Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Archivio Borghese, 5840, no. 83, 8253, c. 34, in Fumagalli 1994, p. 184 236n). It would be strange not to mention in the payment at least one intervention as significant as the remaking of the head. It is also significant that Winckelmann, who saw it before Bergondi’s restoration, does not mention it as being mutilated or headless.

As indicated above, Visconti assumes that both specimens were originally in the same room - because the Romans, by placing them on the two sides of the same room but in a parallel position, would have been able to see Hermaphroditus from both sides -, implicitly extending the provenance of the present sculpture to the Baths of Diocletian (1821, I, pp. 70-71). Giusti, on the other hand, calls this specimen a “copy of the beautiful sculpture excavated in Rome at the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria” (1931, p. 30). If the two statues were found at the same time, the integration of the head could also be dated to the first half of the 17th century.

The face of Hermaphroditus, depicted in the serenity of sleep, is framed by gently wavy hair gathered with a ribbon in an intricate hairstyle at the top of the head and at the back. The surface of the face and hair is rough, unpolished and, if it is the work of a restoration, it is the result of a desire to make it as similar as possible to the rest of the sculpture’s body, which has somewhat deteriorated.

In view of the precise indications given in the documents, it is difficult to explain how in 1796 Visconti described the Hermaphrodite as still lacking the restoration of the mattress and sheet (“the bed is ancient, and is formed from a lion skin lying on the bare ground”: Lamberti, Visconti 1796, II, p. 44. 44); this may perhaps be due to the fact that the author, briefly mentioning two sculptures similar to the Hermaphrodite then in the Villa - the Borghese one in Rome and one in Florence - treats them together and probably without precise information.

The sculpture remained until the first decade of the 19th century in the Palazzo di Campo Marzio, only to be brought to the Villa Pinciana to replace the specimen reworked by Bernini, who had left for France when Prince Camillo sold his collection of antiquities to Napoleon.

Sonja Felici