When in Rome by Matthew Sturgis

Author:Matthew Sturgis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2011-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

A fanciful reconstruction of the Niobe Group in the gardens of the Villa Medici, from a 1638 account of Rome’s statues by François Perrier

The ‘famous statue’ of the Dying Gladiator – called by Raymond the ‘tyr’d gladiator’ – was the jewel of the Villa Ludovisi collection, and one of the most copied statues of the period.5 It had been discovered only in 1623, during the construction of the villa on a site formerly occupied by the Gardens of Sallust.

At the nearby Villa Borghese there was another, almost equally famous and very much more vigorous, Gladiator (of which both Charles I and the Earl of Pembroke had a copy), and a ‘most incomparable’ polychrome Seneca with enamel eyes, set in an elaborate basin supposedly representing the dying philosopher’s blood-filled bathtub. Evelyn, however, seems to have preferred the ‘hard-soft Hermaphrodite’ lying upon its ‘quilt of stone’. This unsettling erotic work had been discovered, around 1620, in the gardens of S. Maria della Vittoria, and presented to Cardinal Scipione Borghese. (In return he had paid for the façade of the church.) The ‘matarazzo’ on which the figure lay was carved by Bernini. Evelyn bought a small ivory version of the piece.6

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