Sleeping Hermaphroditos

From one side a beautiful young woman lies asleep, twisting on her bedding; walk around the figure and the body reveals itself as both male and female - Hermaphroditos, child of the gods Hermes and Aphrodite, fused in myth with a water nymph into a single being. Roman sculptors copied this teasing Hellenistic invention many times, staging the viewer's slow discovery as the whole point. The astonishingly lifelike mattress, with its yielding folds and tasseled cushion, was added in 1620 by the young Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who would become the supreme sculptor of the Baroque.