The Borghese Gladiator and Vase: What Napoleon Took to Paris

The Borghese Gladiator and the Borghese Vase are in the Louvre because Napoleon made his brother-in-law, Prince Camillo Borghese, sell him the family’s ancient sculptures in 1807. The works reached Paris from 1808. The villa in Rome kept its paintings and its Bernini and Canova statues, but lost the antiquities that Cardinal Scipione Borghese and his heirs had collected for two centuries. The rooms they stood in still carry their names.

The 1807 sale by Camillo Borghese

Camillo Borghese (1775-1832) married Napoleon’s sister Pauline Bonaparte in 1803. That made the Emperor his brother-in-law. According to the museum, Napoleon “imposed” the sale of Cardinal Scipione’s archaeological collection on Camillo in 1807. Wikipedia says he was forced to sell for around 3 million francs.

The museum describes the sale as hundreds of works, sent to Paris while Canova was carving Pauline’s portrait. Canova, the museum adds, fiercely opposed it. The Louvre tells the story of the Gladiator’s trip in a short video: loaded on an ox cart, escorted by soldiers, it crossed the Alps in snow on its way to Paris.

The 1807 sale should not be confused with the 1902 sale. In 1902 the Italian state bought the villa and the remaining collection, and that is the museum you visit today. See the Borghese Gallery today for what that visit includes.

The Borghese Gladiator

What it is: a life-size Hellenistic marble of a swordsman, made around 100 BC. It is signed on its support by Agasias, son of Dositheus, of Ephesus, a sculptor known only from this work.

Not a gladiator: the name comes from a wrong restoration. The pose shows a warrior fighting an enemy on horseback, lunging forward with his left arm thrust out. Nineteenth-century scholars guessed he might be Achilles fighting the Amazon queen Penthesilea.

Found: before 1611 at Anzio, south of Rome, among the ruins of a seaside palace of Nero.

In the villa: it stood in a ground-floor room named after it. Around 1780 the architect Antonio Asprucci redecorated that room around the theme of strength and courage, with paintings of the ancient athletes Polydamas and Milo of Croton, and the Borghese heraldic eagle and dragon carved in the capitals.

Influence: it was one of the most copied ancient statues of the 18th century. Bronze casts stand at Windsor and Houghton Hall in England. Bernini knew it well: scholars see it behind the pose of his David, and the museum sees it in the legs of Pluto in his Rape of Proserpina.

Now: in the Louvre’s Galerie Daru, according to the Louvre. The statue is nearly 2 metres tall.

The Borghese Vase

What it is: a monumental marble krater, a wine-mixing bowl, carved in Athens from Pentelic marble in the second half of the 1st century BC for the Roman market as a garden ornament.

Size: 1.72 m tall and 1.35 m across.

Decoration: a frieze of a Bacchic procession, the god Dionysus with his followers, music and wine.

Found: in 1566, in a Roman garden on part of the ancient Gardens of Sallust, and acquired by the Borghese.

In the villa: it gave its name to today’s Room 1. The museum says the room was once called the “Room of the Vase”, after the ancient krater now in the Louvre.

Now: Napoleon bought it from Camillo in 1808, and it has been on display in the Louvre since 1811. Three pairs of copies were made for the gardens of Versailles, and many smaller versions followed.

What replaced them in Rome

After 1815 the family rebuilt the ancient collection, and the rooms were rearranged. The museum’s room pages record what went and what came:

Room	Taken to Paris	In the room today
Room 1 (once “of the Vase”)	Borghese Vase	Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte, since 1889
Room 5, Hermaphrodite	Borghese Hermaphroditus, found in 1609 and given a carved mattress by Bernini in 1620	A similar 2nd-century AD Hermaphrodite in Parian marble, its bed reworked as a mattress by Andrea Bergondi
Room 6, once “of the Gladiator”	Borghese Gladiator	Bernini’s Aeneas and Anchises (1618-1620), moved here in 1888, and his Truth
Room 8, Silenus	Silenus with the infant Bacchus	A Dancing Satyr restored by Bertel Thorvaldsen, and six Caravaggios

Room 1 was rearranged in the second decade of the 1800s under the architect Luigi Canina. The museum notes that despite the losses, the rooms still follow Asprucci’s 18th-century layout, which put the most important statue in the centre of each room.

Seeing it on your visit

You cannot see the Gladiator or the Vase in Rome. You can see the rooms built around them: Room 1 and Room 6, both on the ground floor. Entry to the Borghese Gallery is by timed two-hour slot, up to 180 people per hour, and every ticket must be booked.

The official ticket costs €18 (€16 + €2 booking fee), about $20, and cannot be refunded. The tickets and tours page compares the official ticket with reserved-slot tickets from $46 and guided tours from $55.

For the full picture of what is in the villa now, read about the Borghese Gallery today.