French Bronze Figure of the Borghese Gladiator on Marble Base

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A very old French bronze of The Borghese Gladiator which stands on a marble base. This piece is heavy duty … Read more A very old French bronze of The Borghese Gladiator which stands on a marble base. This piece is heavy duty and well-made and it sits on a marble base. In very good condition with a small chip to the corner of the marble. Measures 11.75 inches tall x 11 x 8 inches.


The Borghese Gladiator is a Hellenistic life-size[1] marble sculpture portraying a swordsman, created at Ephesus about 100 BC, now on display at the Louvre. The sculpture was added to the Borghese collection in Rome. At the Villa Borghese it stood in a ground-floor room named for it, redecorated in the early 1780s by Antonio Asprucci. Camillo Borghese was pressured to sell it to his brother-in-law, Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1807; it was taken to Paris when the Borghese collection was acquired for the Louvre,[5] 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;[6] 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 Hall, Norfolk. Other copies can be found at Petworth House and in the Green Court at Knole. Originally a copy was also located in Lord Burlington's garden at Chiswick House and later relocated to the gardens at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. In the United States, a copy of "The Gladiator at Montalto"[7] was among the furnishings of an ideal gallery of instructive art imagined by Thomas Jefferson for Monticello. See less