2026

Pencil and compressed charcoal on Sicilian perlato limestone

272 x 200 x 33mm, framed

This drawing depicts a small nineteenth-century bronze sculpture of unknown authorship in the Wallace Collection, London. The bronze is a copy of a probably Roman marble (known as the Berlin Hermaphroditus) at the Altes Museum, Berlin, which itself is presumably the copy of a lost Greek original. That makes my drawing the copy of a copy of a copy: specifically a copy on limestone of a bronze copy of a marble copy of a probably bronze original.

Like the more famous Roman Sleeping Hermaphrodite, the sculpture is almost tender in the announcement of its binary gender. The title Pomegranate, however, derives from a tiny detail in the drawing’s ornamental backdrop. The juxtaposition is a coincidence (the backdrop is a fragment of the frame enclosing Ary Scheffer’s 1835 Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta appraised by Dante and Virgil, also in the Wallace Collection and hung by chance behind the sculpture), yet a fitting one: according to J. C. Cirlot’s A Dictionary of Symbols, ‘the predominating significance of the pomegranate, arising from its shape and internal structure rather than from its colour, is the reconciliation of the multiple and diverse within apparent unity’.

The object in the figure’s right hand is faithful to the Berlin marble, where it is in fact the broken fragment of what will likely have been (according to Marie Delcourt’s scholarly book Hermaphrodite) a thyrsus: the staff characteristically borne by the followers of Dionysus. In the bronze, however, it can never have been anything but the short rod or baton that it remains; it was modelled and then cast in that form from the beginning. Like the consular batons of Rome, the Field-Marshal’s batons of later centuries or the sceptres of kings and queens, it has become a token of power.