Borghese Gladiator

The so-called Borghese Gladiator is a Hellenistic lifesize marble sculpture that is actually of a swordsman, created at Ephesus about 100 BCE. It is signed by Agasias of Ephesus, who is also called Agasias, son of Dositheus.

Rediscovery

It was found at Nettuno before 1611 and added to the Borghese collection in Rome. At the Villa Borghese it stood in a ground-floor room named for it. Sold to Napoleon by Camillo Borghese in 1807, it was taken to Paris when the Borghese collection was acquired for the Louvre Museum, where it now resides.

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; 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 House, Norfolk. Other copies can be found at Petworth House and in the Green Court at Knole (illustration).

In painting

• Having seen the sculpture on his Italian travels, Rubens included a figure of Fury in the same pose (seen from behind) in one of the scenes of his allegorical Palais de Luxembourg cycle of paintings for Marie de Medici.
• The figure in the water (Brook Watson) in Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley is based on the sculpture's pose
• 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 in 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.

Notes

References

• Louvre catalogue
• Two copies at the Louvre here and here
• 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.
• Lestache copy