The Borghese Gladiator is a
Hellenistic life-size[1] marble sculpture portraying a swordsman, created at
Ephesus about 100 BC, now on display at the
Louvre.
Sculptor
The sculpture is signed on the pedestal by Agasias, son of Dositheus, who is otherwise unknown. It is not quite clear whether the Agasias who is mentioned as the father of Heraclides is the same person.
Agasias, son of Menophilus may have been a cousin.[2]
Rediscovery
It was found before 1611, in the present territory of
Anzio south of
Rome, among the ruins of a seaside palace of
Nero on the site of the ancient
Antium. From the attitude of the figure it is clear that the statue represents not a
gladiator, but a warrior contending with a mounted combatant. In the days when antique sculptures gained immediacy by being identified with specific figures from history or literature,[3]Friedrich Thiersch conjectured that it was intended to represent
Achilles fighting with the mounted
Amazon,
Penthesilea.[4]
Misnamed a gladiator due to an erroneous restoration, it was among the most admired and copied works of antiquity in the eighteenth century, providing sculptors a canon of proportions. A bronze cast was made for
Charles I of England (now at
Windsor), and another by
Hubert Le Sueur was the centrepiece of
Isaac de Caus'
parterre at
Wilton House;[6] that version was given by the 8th Earl of Pembroke to
Sir Robert Walpole and remains the focal figure in
William Kent's Hall at
Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Other copies can be found at
Petworth House and in the Green Court at
Knole. Originally a copy was also located in Lord Burlington's garden at
Chiswick House and later relocated to the gardens at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. In the United States, a copy of "The Gladiator at Montalto"[7] was among the furnishings of an ideal gallery of instructive art imagined by
Thomas Jefferson for
Monticello.[8]
It was known, although not in the French national collection, when
Ménageot included it in the background of his The Death of Leonardo da Vinci in the arms of Francis I (1781); indeed, he probably saw it at the
Villa Borghese during his stay at the
French Academy in Rome from 1769 to 1774. However, it was an anachronism in such a setting since Leonardo died in 1519, about ninety years before the statue was discovered.
The headless statue in
Thomas Cole's 1836 painting Destruction (the fourth painting in his The Course of Empire series) is based on the Borghese warrior.[10]
The pose of
Phineas in
Luca Giordano's c. 1660 painting Perseus turning Phineas and his Followers to Stone in the
National Gallery, London appears to mirror the Borghese Gladiator.[11]
^The phenomenon is noted by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (Yale University Press), 1981, who offer numerous examples of fanciful 16th to 18th-century identifications.
^A copy of the Borghese Gladiator in a similar central position in a Dutch garden, appears in a painting by
Pieter de Hooch in the
Royal Collection (
Lionel Cust, "Notes on Pictures in the Royal Collections-XXVIII. Two Paintings by Pieter de Hooch", The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs25 (July 1914: 205–207, illus. pl. 1).
^Possibly referring to a statue that used to stand in the large hall of
Sixtus V's Villa Montalto in Rome, described in the artist Willem Schellinks' Dagh-Register, an unpublished manuscript describing his travels in 1646 and 1661–1665, (Royal Library, Copenhagen, NKS370, vol. II, 718.) as "een statue van den Gladiator, swart marmer", "a statue of the Gladiator, black marble"
^Seymour Howard, "Thomas Jefferson's Art Gallery for Monticello" The Art Bulletin59. 4 (December 1977: 583–600); see Appendix B note 8.
Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 1981. Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (Yale University Press) Cat. no. 43, pp. 221–24.