The sculpture was cast in one piece, void of any welding with the exception of a small hatch for the core support. Patinated with iron nitrate.

Complete with the original socle of Portuguese granite.

From the artist, acquired by the museum, with the support of the former head of the department of Dutch History of the Rijksmuseum, Wim Vroom, 2015 ; on long term loan to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2023, to be placed in the garden of the Dutch ambassador in France, Hôtel d’Avaray, 85 Rue de Grenelle, Paris, 2023 in France; where placed, with the assistance of the artist, 3 April 2024

Object number: BK-2015-56

Credit line: Private gift

The sculptor Caspar Berger (b. 1965) has been exploring the self-portrait since 2001. It was in that year that he produced his Self-Portrait I, based on a true-to-life cast of the sculptor sitting nude. Berger’s motivation was a confrontation with the Self-Portrait by the sculptor Johan Gregor van der Schardt in the Rijksmuseum (BK-2000-17).¹¹See F. Scholten, A. Berk, J. Teeuwisse, Caspar Berger. Imago, exh. cat. The Hague (Museum Beelden aan Zee) 2007, pp. 78-80. Fascinated by the technical challenge of producing a portrait of himself in three dimensions, but particularly by the connotations and symbolic possibilities raised by manipulated self-portraits, he has since produced more than thirty sculptures of himself. The earliest of the works in this series investigated above all the aspect of introspection, i.e. self-investigation. His later works, by contrast, including the present Torso/Self-Portrait 6, are conceptually more multi-layered. Central to these works is the meaning of the skin as a boundary between the outside world and the interior, but also its function as a personal, cultural or even political membrane: as a flayable, tangible, recognisable and transformable aspect of the human id, i.e. the personal image. The technique of working with ductile latex moulds allows Berger to create entirely new forms by applying self-manipulation and self-mutilation. With Torso/Self-Portrait 6, a cast of his own body was used in an attempt to claim – to literally subsume – the Belvedere Torso for himself.²²For Berger’s fascination with the concept/notion of the fragmented artwork and specifically the_ Belvedere Torso_, see F. Scholten, A. Berk, J. Teeuwisse, Caspar Berger. Imago, exh. cat. The Hague (Museum Beelden aan Zee) 2007, pp. 51-52. The starting point for the sculpture is a 1:1 cast of the marble Belvedere Torso in the Vatican Museums, subsequently furnished with a new skin attached with small pins. This second skin is in fact a stretched latex copy (mould) of the artist’s body, with the resulting composite then cast in bronze.

In this manner, a world-famous icon of art history was reutilized in an entirely new way while still referring to the tradition. Many sculptors of the past have alluded to the Belvedere Torso in their work: Adriaen de Vries’s Bacchant in the Rijksmuseum (BK-2015-2-1), for example, restates a large section of the marble original’s back. Rodin, in his turn, looked to the Torso as the starting point for his Thinker, which, when placed on the sculptor’s tomb in Meudon with the name Rodin inscribed in capital letters on its pedestal, declared its meaning as a symbolic self-portrait.

Only two casts of the Torso/Self-Portrait 6 exist at the present time (with a maximum edition of five casts). One bronze was commissioned by the Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen (with the acronym ‘ZZM’ incorporated in the title) and today held on long-term loan at Museum Beelden aan Zee in The Hague. The title of the second cast – the present bronze in the Rijksmuseum – includes the befitting acronym ‘RM’.

Frits Scholten, 2026

C. Berger, Update #1. Caspar Berger, 2008-2009, (self-published) Amsterdam 2009; C. Berger, Caspar Berger-Singer prijs 2013, (self-published) Amsterdam 2013; F. Scholten, ‘Caspar Berger. Torso ZZM/Self-portrait 6’, in Dutch Art in Detail: 100 Works of Art From Seven Centuries, Eindhoven 2014, pp. 712-19; Scholten in J. de Hond et al., ‘Recent acquisitions’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 66 (2018), no. 3, pp. 278-303, esp. pp. 302-03, no. 12

F. Scholten, 2026, 'Caspar Berger and Atelier 80 (bronsgieterij), Torso RM/Self-Portrait 6, AmsterdamDreumel, 2008 - 2010', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20020819