Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Hermaphroditus.
The gallery
Sleeping Hermaphroditus
Unknown (Roman copy); mattress by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, c. 2nd century CE (mattress 1620)
The Borghese Hermaphrodite in the Louvre — Hellenistic languor with Bernini's buttoned mattress — Salmacis' embrace made marble.
Sleeping Hermaphroditus (Palazzo Massimo)
Roman copy after a Hellenistic original, 2nd century AD (copy); Greek original 2nd century BC
A second Roman Imperial marble of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus type, displayed in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome. Like the more famous Borghese–Louvre example, it shows the figure reclining face-down, the dual sex revealed only as the viewer circles — Hellenistic erotic surprise preserved in another Imperial copy.
Hermaphroditus and the Nymph Salmacis
Bartholomeus Spranger, c. 1580–1582
An oil by the Prague Mannerist Bartholomeus Spranger in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Salmacis coils around the resisting youth at the fountain that will fuse them — Ovid's Carian episode painted as courtly erotic entanglement, Hermaphroditus still distinct in the moment before the waters change his form.
The Nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
François-Joseph Navez, 1829
A Neoclassical oil by François-Joseph Navez in the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent. Salmacis embraces Hermaphroditus at the spring's edge — cool marble flesh and still water staging Ovid's metamorphosis as a quiet, almost sculptural encounter rather than a violent fusion.
In play
Sleeping Hermaphroditus
The Borghese Hermaphrodite — Hellenistic languor on Bernini's mattress — remains the figure's defining afterlife in marble.
Hermaphroditus
Child of Hermes and Aphrodite — Salmacis' fountain still supplies the vocabulary for dual-sexed form.
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Book IV's Carian episode — the nymph who will not let go — is still the canonical telling of Hermaphroditus' change.