The Rape of Proserpina

Interesting facts

The marble group stands about 2.25 metres tall and was carved from Carrara marble in roughly two years.

Bernini received at least three payments for the work, totalling at least 450 Roman scudi, from Cardinal Scipione Borghese.

Its original pedestal carried a Latin couplet by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, written a few years before the statue was carved.

It is the only one of Bernini's early Borghese commissions for which a preparatory drawing is known to survive.

A marble study of Proserpina's head, linked to the statue, was sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1968.

After the Ludovisi gift the group moved repeatedly, reaching Palazzo Piombino only in the 1890s before the Italian state bought it in 1908.

The present base was carved by Pietro Fortunati in 1911, replacing the original pedestal, which has since been destroyed.

During the First World War the statue was shielded inside a protective box packed with sandbags.

Bernini drew on earlier treatments of the theme by Giambologna and Annibale Carracci, and possibly on a bronze Pluto and Proserpina by Pietro da Barga.

Art historian Rudolf Wittkower argued that Bernini's dynamic design shaped how such abduction scenes were sculpted for the next 150 years.

Why it is worth it

In the Galleria Borghese in Rome, a marble god lifts a struggling young woman off the ground, and the stone seems to give way under his fingers. Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved The Rape of Proserpina, more precisely the abduction of Proserpina, in 1621 and 1622, when he was only 23. The group shows the moment from Ovid's Metamorphoses and Claudian's poem on the same myth when Pluto, god of the underworld, seizes the daughter of Ceres and carries her down to his realm. The three-headed dog Cerberus at his feet marks the threshold of the underworld.

The sculpture is famous for making marble behave like other materials. Pluto's hand presses into Proserpina's thigh as if into living flesh, tears run down her cheek, and her hair and Pluto's beard fly loose. Bernini achieved these effects by switching tools, smoothing skin with abrasives, cutting foliage with a chisel and roughening drapery with a rasp. Proserpina's arm reaches out into empty space, and the heavy figures appear weightless; Cerberus, missing from the only surviving preparatory drawing, may have been added partly to support the group. Unlike Mannerist sculpture such as Giambologna's Abduction of a Sabine Woman, which asks to be walked around, Bernini designed the whole drama to read from a single viewpoint in front of the base.

The work was commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Bernini's early patron, and was the first in the series of great Borghese sculptures that went on to include his David and Apollo and Daphne. In 1623, however, the cardinal gave it to Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of the new pope Gregory XV, possibly to win favour with a rival family. It stayed with the Ludovisi for nearly three centuries, standing for a time at the foot of the grand staircase of Palazzo Piombino, until the Italian state bought it in 1908 and returned it to the villa for which it was made. It now stands in the centre of the Salone degli Imperatori on a plain marble base carved in 1911.

Getting there

The Galleria Borghese stands inside the Villa Borghese park in central Rome, about 2.4 km from the Esquilino district. The nearest airport is Rome Ciampino (CIA), about 15 km to the south-east; Rome's main airport, Fiumicino (FCO), lies farther out to the west.

From the encyclopaedia

The Rape of Proserpina, more accurately translated as The Abduction of Proserpina, is a large Baroque marble group sculpture by Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini, executed in 1621 and '22, when Bernini's career was in its early stage. The group, finished when Bernini was just 23 years old, depicts the abduction of Proserpina, who is seized and taken to the underworld by the god Pluto. It features Pluto holding Proserpina aloft, and a Cerberus to symbolize the border into the underworld that Pluto carries Proserpina into.

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The Rape of Proserpina

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