Sleeping Hermaphroditus
Unknown; mattress by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Bernini 1598-1680) · Roman, c. AD 100-150; mattress carved 1620
Approached from one side, the figure is a young woman asleep on her stomach, hips turned, one knee drawn up, the head resting on folded arms. Move round to the other side and the body reveals male genitals. Hermaphroditos was the child of Hermes and Aphrodite; the nymph Salmacis desired him, embraced him in her spring and begged the gods that they never be parted, and their two bodies were fused into one. The sculpture stages that story as a trap for the viewer, and the whole point is the walk around it.
The marble is a Roman version of a celebrated Hellenistic invention, probably a bronze of the second century BC, and several other copies survive in Rome and Florence. The ancient carver concentrated on the long unbroken curve of the back, the relaxed slackness of the sleeping shoulders and the soft crease at the waist, surfaces polished to catch light evenly so that the reversal comes as a shock rather than a joke. The mattress is a separate and much later performance. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, then barely in his twenties, supplied it in 1620 for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, hollowing the Carrara marble into a yielding cushion that dents under the hip and elbow.
The statue was dug up in 1608 during building works near the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, on ground that had belonged to the Gardens of Sallust. Borghese claimed it at once, and it stayed in the Villa Borghese until Napoleon's purchase of the collection in 1807 sent it to Paris. Its fame in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rested precisely on the double discovery that still makes people circle it twice.
Did You Know? The plump mattress with its buttoned tufts is not ancient at all: the twenty-one-year-old Bernini carved it in 1620, and visitors routinely try to press it.
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