ABSTRACT
According to Horace Walpole, Lady Townsend described his modern bronze copy of an ancient Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture as the only happy couple she had ever seen.1 This sculptural type we recognize in some ten Roman replicas and variants, most of them found in Italy, and several, like the Hermaphrodite Borghese now in the Louvre (Fig. 47), above ground at least since the seventeenth century.2 Some of these sculptures have undergone changes at the hands of modern collectors and artists. The Louvre Hermaphrodite, for example, sleeps on a tufted cushion sculpted for it by Bernini.3 This comfortable bed replaced the rocky outdoor setting in which these figures originally slept.
