Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
49
Sleeping Eros
The fragment is cut away at the top of the thighs, including the wing tips. The left side of Eros, lying on the ground, is missing, as is the right arm at the elbow and the left hand. There are some incrustations on the surface, especially around the head. Drill marks are visible in the hair and other areas.
His quiver and bow beneath his cloak, which is fastened with a brooch on the right shoulder, are all on a rockwork pillow covered with the skin of the Nemean lion. This is a spirited, decorative version in marble of exceptional quality of one of the more complex Hellenistic creations in bronze or terracotta. The original was probably made in the second century B.C. This copy has been dated in the Flavian period (A.D. 70 to 98) of the Roman Empire.
Of all the various sleeping Erotes that have survived from ancient times, the bronze in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from Rhodes, is closest to the original version, and Boethus has been suggested as the original creator, in the third century B.C. Almost every major site with decorative sculpture in marble has yielded statues of the sleeping Eros. All the examples at Side in Pamphylia were found in the areas around the city, indicating they were used as monuments on tombs, in the same way sleeping children and little Cupids or "cherubs" were placed on the graves of babies in New England cemeteries of the nineteenth century. The symbolism went back to sculpture identified with Lysippos in the middle of the fourth century B.C. (Capitoline Eros, unstringing the bow of Herakles) and represented Love disarming Force or Strength. Here, confident Eros sleeps surrounded by the trophies of Herakles (Inan, 1975, pp. 161-163, nos. 86-88; also Parke Bernet 4753Y, 9 December, 1981, New York, no. 236).
Thus, to recapitulate, various versions of the sleeping Eros in marble attest to the popularity of one or more Hellenistic originals, presumably fashioned in bronze, but occasionally in marble. The bronze Eros in the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been perceived as an original creation of around 150 B.C. or earlier, one that may have inspired versions in marble, although no exact, mechanical copy has survived. The sleeping Eros who has captured the bow or club or lionskin of Herakles is one concept that developed for somnolent little love gods from the Eros holding the bow (attributed to Lysippos) among the popular standing, genre statues of the fourth century B.C. The Eros asleep with poppies in hand is the figure that has a more funerary implication, again the ancient equivalent of the sleeping children in classic American cemeteries like Mt. Auburn in Cambridge-Watertown.
All these small statues were created (and copied) in an age when divine (or human) child-forms were popular, and when sculptors of the late Hellenistic period were interested in new positions, new angles (as here, lying asleep) for the divine or human subject. And, finally, a sleeping Eros must have been a popular work of art on the table at banquets of the type described by Petronius in his Satyricon or in a garden of the type commissioned by Cicero in his letters to his friend Atticus. It is not without reason and a sense of history that the young Michelangelo's Sleeping Cupid was sold to Cardinal Riario as an ancient sculpture in marble. The Italian Renaissance, in the traditions of Donatello's children, admired the phase of antiquity that produced these sleeping Erotes (Haskell, Penny, 1981, p. 54f).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
