White marble sculpture
- History
- January 21, 2024
In 1620, at the age of 22 Gian Lorenzo Bernini was asked to make a mattress for the Hermaphrodite. He was paid sixty scudi for making the buttoned mattress upon which the Hermaphrodite reclines, so strikingly realistic that visitors are inclined to give it a testing prod.
Around the world there are about twenty copies of Hermafrodite but only one is Bernini’s mattress and it’s at the Louvre.
White marble sculpture, The Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Borghese), attributed to Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Naples 1598 – Rome 1680), circa 1700. According to the Roman poet, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (4:285 – 288), Hermaphroditus was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite who refused the advances of one of Diana’s nymphs, Salmacis. But the gods then answered her prayer that their bodies could be joined into one. The marble Hermaphrodite, lying on side with arms above the head, was unearthed near the Baths of Diocletian in Rome in about 1608. It was believed to be a Roman copy of a bronze mid-second century BC original by Polycles. It was presented to Cardinal Scipione Borghese who commissioned Bernini to restore it and make for it the marble mattress. It became one of the most admired statues in the Borghese Collection and was commonly reproduced in bronze and on a reduced scale in marble. In 1807 it was purchased with the bulk of the Borghese Collection by Napoleon and is now in the Louvre.
