The Rape of Proserpina

In January 1621 Pope Paul V died, and with him went the power of his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. A new pope, Gregory XV, was elected that February, and his own nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, became the man to please in Rome. That June Scipione ordered this group from the 22-year-old Bernini. It was finished by September 1622, and almost at once Scipione gave it away, to Ludovisi, a keen collector. For almost three centuries it belonged to the Ludovisi family, not here. It came back only in 1908, when the Italian state bought it and moved it to the Borghese. The subject is from Ovid. Pluto, god of the underworld, seizes the girl Proserpina while she is picking flowers and drags her down to his kingdom, with the three-headed dog Cerberus guarding the way. Look at Pluto's hand on her thigh, where his fingers press into the marble as if into flesh. The base she stands on now is not the original. It was made in 1911 by the sculptor Pietro Fortunati.