My thesis examines the Borghese Sleeping Hermaphrodite, now in the Louvre, as it represents iconographical nuances and layers created by replicating and modes of viewing and display during the Grand Tour. Unearthed circa 1608, Gianlorenzo Bernini was quickly commissioned to create a plush marble mattress and pillow for the figure. This fusion of the early modern and the antique would be artistically reconceived throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. The Borghese Sleeping Hermaphrodite is used as a framing tool to investigate the ways in which antiquity and gender were interpreted in the early modern period through display and receptions of the Borghese sculpture itself and the nature of its artistic replicas, in order to ascertain the manner in which the lure of the antique is reconciled with an increasingly conservative public.
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