Good grief, I saw this sculpture on the Sleeping Hermaphrodite on instagram and went off on a bit of a bender looking it up – its an ancient sculpture rediscovered buried in part of Ancient Rome in the 17thC, people really liked it so top famous sculptor Bernini was hired to sculpt a new mattress for it to be mounted on. I wonder what it was mounted on originally, I mean back in Hellenistic Greek times?

 

I don’t like that button mattress much, it looks to modern, ok, they had button mattresses in the 17thC, but it doesn’t look right to me, anyhow, there’s loads of versions,

Well years went by, and Napoleon ended up in Rome, and he bought the sculpture, (under duress as they say) and transported it to the Louvre, where it still resides, thing is, Hermaphroditus was the child of Aphrodite and Hermes, you can see she is quite female in shape, and yet she has a male genitals, a she-male or lady-boy or whatever, well, you can have that as an operation as they do being trans or part trans or what not, but back then this would have been highly unusual and quite exciting if that’s what you’re looking for.

L00K!

I think the one they dug up was bronze, and they based their copy on it, but since then, the bronze one has disappeared, which seems odd to me, how does a thing like that disappear? I mean, I miss-lay things from time to time, but never anything that weighs half a ton!

There’s a page on it here, but I haven’t actually read it as I’m getting too worked up

https://www.collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/opere/sleeping-hermaphroditus

Well I think its quite interesting to try to imagine what the Greeks thought about all this, what the Romans thought when they took it on, and what they thought about it in the 1600’s when they dug it up, then what Napoleon thought in the 1800’s when he bought it? Then came the Victorians, I read how this Victorian poet named Algernon Swinburne wrote a poem about this lovely idea, 

https://www.telelib.com/words/authors/S/SwinburneAlgernonCharles/verse/p1/hermaphroditus.html

https://victorianweb.org/victorian/authors/swinburne/simmons12.html

Was he gay? I cant remember, I went on to read about his friend Walt Whitman, who was also a bit groovy in his time, I read that you can’t understand Americans if you haven’t read Walt Whitman, so I read a bit, I now understand Americans, or maybe not, cos I only read a couple and didn’t really get it.

Anyhow, what’s all the fuss about? Oh yeah, that!