Sleeping Nymph

Roman art

Statue of a female figure, identified as a sleeping nymph. The figure is partially nude and reclining on her side on a plinth. Her midsection and legs are wrapped in drapery. Her right hand clasps her left shoulder, creating the slight torsion of her torso. She is leaning on her left arm and her left hand is clasping the rim of a vase that part of her torso is resting on.

Her head is slightly tipped downward, and she rests her cheek on her hand. Her hair is parted in the middle and falls in large curls over her shoulders.

The sculpture is a Roman work dating to the middle of the second century CE, but it was inspired by a Hellenistic model, probably from Pergamon.

Object details

Commentary

This statue of a partially nude female figure, reclining on her side, can be readily identified as a sleeping nymph, an iconographic type well documented in Hellenistic and Roman art.

Her midsection and legs are enveloped by a voluminous mantle. Her slightly raised knee rumples the drapery, which is gathered over her belly and becomes more densely pleated over her feet, which are covered by the fabric. The slight twist of her torso is created by the way she grasps her left shoulder with her right hand. She is leaning on her left arm and her left hand is clasping the rim of a vase that part of her torso is resting on. Her head is slightly tipped downward, and she rests her cheek gently on her hand. Her hair is parted in the middle and falls in large, flowing curls over her shoulders. Her body and face are softly rendered. The figure is lying on a plinth, which references the surface of the rock in the iconography of the sleeping nymph.

The far left and front right of the plinth, the hem of the mantle, the left forearm and drapery, the hand, the vase and the right knee are all restored. However, the sculpture is faithful to the original iconography.

The statue, along with its modern pendant (inv. XVII), was already in the collection in the seventeenth century, and displayed in the covered loggia above the Galleria of the Villa Pinciana. This was one of the state rooms in the apartments on the upper floor of the Casino. The two ‘naiads’, which are slightly smaller than life size, were displayed on wooden bases to the sides of the statues of Bacchus and Mercury, arranged along the wall facing the main salon (I Borghese e l’antico, p. 181).

Iacopo Manilli generically described the sculpture as a ‘sleeping Flower Nymph’ (Manilli 1650, p. 91), while Domenico Montelatici added that it was a ‘statue of a sleeping naiad, with her head and one shoulder on a vase that has been tipped on its side, so that water is pouring out’ (Montelatici 1700, p. 262).

This iconographic subject was especially popular during the Roman imperial period, in particular between the second and third centuries CE, when it was mostly found among the ornamental statuary in grand residences and gardens. Indeed, the detail of the vase (and the hole inside it) suggests that the Borghese nymph was used as decoration for a fountain. This iconographic type is documented in numerous variants and replicas, some of which were even used for funerary purposes, decorating the covers of monumental sarcophagi.

The style, treatment of the drapery folds, which are clearly-defined and rigid, rendering of the hair and handling of the curls, anatomical details and marble surface, especially the exposed skin, suggest a date for the work of about 140–160 CE.

The iconographic and stylistic model for the nymph, which is linked to imagery of sleeping or in any case reclining goddesses and other mythological figures, examples including personifications of rivers, Eros (see the Borghese Eros, inv. CVIIC) and especially Ariadne (see the statues in the Uffizi and the Vatican Museum), drew on a Hellenistic original, probably carved in Pergamon in the second century BCE.

Although it was not included in the Inventario del Fidecommesso Borghese of 1833, the sculpture was added at a later time and assigned number 8. In 1838, Antonio Nibby reported that it had been in the Portico and was now ‘on top of a small sarcophagus’ (Nibby 1841, p. 909).

Clara di Fazio