Berenice's Tresses (La Chioma di Berenice)

What you're looking at

A young woman stands naked on a low rocky base, caught in the act of stepping forward. Her arms rise above her head and her fingers interlace, lifting a heavy mass of hair away from her neck. She wears almost nothing: a necklace close at the throat and a headdress of Egyptian type, the sculptor's shorthand for a Ptolemaic queen. At her feet a small brazier of incense smokes. The pose is an offering, and the thing being offered is the hair itself.

Borghi carved the figure from a single block of white Carrara marble and set it on a tall column of veined marble with a turning mechanism, so that a viewer could rotate the statue and study it from every side. The figure alone stands about 190 centimeters; with its column and wooden base the whole ensemble rises to just under three meters. Raised arms are a technical risk in marble, since the stone must carry its own weight through thin forearms and joined hands, and the success of that bridge of stone over the head was part of what made the piece famous.

Look closely at the surface and the contrast of textures is deliberate: polished, almost waxy skin against the deeply drilled locks of hair, which Borghi undercut so they catch shadow. The step forward, with weight shifting onto one leg, keeps the long body from reading as a column of its own.

Who was Berenice?

Berenice II (c. 267–221 BC) was the daughter of Magas, king of Cyrene, and the wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, king of Egypt. When her husband marched against the Seleucid kingdom in Syria in the Third Syrian War, she vowed her hair to the goddess Aphrodite in return for his safe return, and dedicated it in the goddess's temple when he came home.

The story became famous because the hair then vanished from the temple. The court astronomer Conon of Samos announced that it had been taken up into the sky, and named a faint cluster of stars near the tail of Leo Coma Berenices, Berenice's Hair, a constellation that still carries the name. The court poet Callimachus turned the episode into an elegy, The Lock of Berenice, and the Roman poet Catullus translated it into Latin as his Poem 66, in which the severed lock itself speaks. Borghi's base is inscribed BERENICES CRINIS, the Latin phrase for the queen's hair.

How Borghi made it

Ambrogio Borghi (1848–1887) trained at the Brera Academy in Milan and became professor of modeling there at about thirty-two, one of the rising names of Lombard sculpture before his early death at thirty-eight. Berenice occupied him for several years. A smaller clay sketch dated 1876–77 is in a private collection in Monza, and a full-size plaster model (174 centimeters, now missing its arms) belongs to the Musei Civici di Monza. Borghi's daughter Ada gave that plaster, with other models from his studio, to the city in 1937.

Scholars of Milanese sculpture have connected the figure with Borghi's study of Mannerist bronzes by Giambologna and Benvenuto Cellini, whose elongated, upward-twisting nudes it recalls, and with a nearer model: Francesco Hayez's painted nude Archangel Michael, also shown with raised arms.

The 1878 Paris Exposition

Borghi sent the finished marble to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, where it won a silver medal and earned him the Legion of Honor. Its frank sensuality divided critics. Some found the nude too fleshly for a historical subject; others were overwhelmed by the carving. Charles Blanc, the founding editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, called it the most beautiful body of a young woman ever to come alive from a block of Carrara marble.

That tension is the key to the work. Italian sculptors of the 1870s used ancient and exotic subjects (queens, slaves, nymphs) as a respectable frame for the nude, and Borghi's Berenice belongs with the tradition seen in Canova's Psyche and the virtuoso veiled marbles of Naples and Milan. What sets her apart is that the subject is genuinely about the body: the sacrifice is of her beauty, and the sculptor makes us see what she gives up.

Where is Berenice's Tresses today?

The marble was sold after the exhibition. In 1904 it was sold again in Brussels, at the sale of the Somzée collection, and remained for more than a century in a Brussels house, in a room built to hold it. It returned to the market at Sotheby's in London in 2011 and is now in a private collection, so it cannot be visited. The best place to see Borghi's design in person is the Musei Civici di Monza, which displays the full-size plaster.

For more nineteenth-century marble, see our selection of famous sculptures and the essay on academic art.