In Le sommeil de l’Hermaphrodite, an amphibious creature, with female breasts and pubic region and powerful legs, sits enthroned at the centre of a piece of architecture up in the sky. 

Alberto Savinio was in Paris when he painted the sleeping hermaphrodite. “I’ve only been painting since March”, he said in November 1927 during an interview on the pages of Comoedia, “although I’ve always thought about it. I’d already done some drawings and watercolours back in Italy. But it’s in Paris that I’ve started painting…”¹ Here, in 1914, during his first visit to France, the artist born in Greece to Italian parents and educated in Munich made his debut as a musician and writer among the circle of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Soirées magazine, going under the pseudonym of Alberto Savinio instead of Andrea de Chirico to stand out from his brother Giorgio. 

Among the first works of Savinio the painter, Le sommeil de l’Hermaphrodite (The Sleep of the Hermaphrodite) testifies to the continuity between literary and painterly production, recalling Hermaphrodito, the book published in 1918, previewed in part in La Voce magazine as early as 1916. The theme, which recurred throughout the artist’s career, was one that circulated within Metaphysical painting during the de Chirico brothers’ years in Ferrara, together with Filippo de Pisis and Carlo Carrà, author of a painting called Idolo ermafrodito (Hermaphrodite Idol) in 1917.² 

In Le sommeil de l’Hermaphrodite, an amphibious creature, with female breasts and pubic region and powerful legs, sits enthroned at the centre of a piece of architecture up in the sky. The load-bearing columns of the eccentric framework rise up from the bottom edge of the canvas, left evanescent and unfinished. They support two platforms, one inhabited by the seated figure and the other by a solitary tree, in a combination that brings together human and plant, organic and artificial. The solid yet aerial structure culminates in a wide open room, with the clear division between light and shadow cutting through the walls and floor. The stages and the room, revealed by the absence of the fourth wall, give the painting the air of a theatrical scene, a motif that Savinio would develop in his painting throughout 1928. 

The construction, comparable to the “trophies” that Giorgio de Chirico assembled in his paintings, was conceived to host a divine creature. By this date, Savinio had already depicted the androgyne, offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite, modelling the figure on the Hermaphroditus in the Galleria Borghese, a Roman copy after an original by the Greek sculptor Polykleitos, restored by Bernini and transferred from Rome to the Louvre in Paris during the Napoleonic era.³ In the painting of 1927-28, the plump body with plentiful folds and growths highlighted by the dark marks on the blood-red tones of the flesh, seems to look back to the tale told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, a gory version of the myth of the hermaphrodites, twofold beings that were then separated into men and women by the sword of Zeus, who punished their arrogance and subdued their power. The stumps visible on the right side of the body, which are also present in a small preparatory drawing,⁴ recall the iconography of mutilated statues but can also be interpreted as a sign of the divine amputation. The accent on the carnality of the figure, which is grotesque to the point of appearing vile, has a literary precedent in the “Orazione sul tetto della casa”, one of the chapters in Hermaphrodito, in which a “Semite builder”, at the top of a “cuboid of bricks”, is “a mixture of the two sexes”: “pregnant […] and breasted like a Tiresias, the man on the roof throws from the stinking passage bunches of meat that drop to the ground, then get up and walk.”⁵ Starting with a reference to The Breasts of Tiresias, the Surrealist play by Apollinaire, and with his reading of Sex and Character, the book by Otto Weininger published in 1903, Savinio transformed the gender ambivalence into a procreative capacity, making the hermaphrodite of the text a prolific entity, a “real machine of the world” - as he writes - capable of “patromaternity”.⁶ Deep in sleep, the faceless figure of the painting is also a potential body, a blind embryo, introverted in his own organic and growing physicality. After arriving in Italy via a Parisian auction, Le sommeil de l’Hermaphrodite probably entered the Cerruti Collection in the 1980s, being almost unpublished at the time. It is introduced by the authoritative opinion of Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, with two copies taken from the catalogue remaining in the archives (figs. 1, 2).⁷ Accompanied by brief typewritten notes, the annexes by Fagiolo Dell’Arco visually reconstruct the conception of the painting in the eponymous drawing and indicate the importance of the template for the work by comparing it to a later Untitled piece of 1928.⁸ 

Giorgina Bertolino 

¹ Lagarde 1927a.

² The oil on canvas also known as The God Hermaphroditus belongs to a private collection.

³ Untitled. Hermaphrodite with Elephants, 1927, in Vivarelli 1996, p. 36, no. 1927 17, ill. Savinio himself, in a text from 1947, mentioned the Borghese Hermaphroditus. He almost certainly had the opportunity to see the version with the marble bed sculpted by Bernini at the Louvre in Paris.

⁴ The Rest of the Hermaphrodite, 1927-28, pencil on paper, 25.5 x 21 cm; in Vivarelli 1996, p. 243, no. 1927-28 4, ill.

⁵ Savinio 1995, pp. 188-190.

⁶ Ibid. p. 189.

⁷ The undated annexes by Fagiolo dell’Arco consist of two photocopies: the reproduction of the drawing is taken from the catalogue Milan 1976; the one of the Untitled piece from the catalogue Milan 1970b. The work is documented in the video recordings of the collection made at Villa Cerruti in April 1993 and features in the handwritten inventory of the collection dated 30 June of that same year.

⁸ Untitled, 1928, in Vivarelli 1996, p. 49, no. 1928 9, ill.