Apollo of Piombino

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The Apollo of Piombino or the Piombino Boy is a famous Greek bronze statuette^[1]in late Archaic style that depicts the god as a kouros or youth. It was found in 1832 at Piombino (Roman Populonia), in Etruria, in the harbor off the southwest point and was purchased for the Musée du Louvre in 1834. Its archaic style led scholars like R. Lullies and M. Hirmer (Lullies and Hirmer 1960) to date it in the fifth century BCE and place its facture in Magna Graecia, the Hellenic culture of southern Italy; Karl Schefold included it in Meisterwerke Griechischer Kunst 1960^[2] and casts of it were to be found in university and museum study collections. B.S. Ridgeway (Ridgeway 1967) proved it to be, not simply an archaising sculpture of the first century BCE, designed to appeal to a Roman with refined tastes, but a conscious forgery, with a false inlaid inscription in archaic lettering. The two sculptors responsible could not resist secreting a lead tag with their names inside the sculpture. One was a Tyrian emigré to Rhodes.

The study of ancient Greek sculpture in the last decades has moved away from the traditional practice of identifying sculptures based on brief literary descriptions and attempting to recognize the characteristic manner of some famous names as reflected in reproductions of their work and variants based on their style, and concentrates instead on the socio-political world in which sculpture was created and other less subjective criteria^[3]

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading

• Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, "The bronze Apollo from Piombino" Antike Plastik 7 pp 43-75. (1967).
• R. Lullies and M. Hirmer, Greek Sculpture (New York) 1960.