| Artist | after Leochares |
|---|---|
| Year | Circa 120-140; copy of bronze original of ca. 350-325 BC. |
| Type | White marble |
| Dimensions | 224 cm (88 in) |
| Location | Vatican Museums, Vatican City |
The Apollo Belvedere or Apollo of the Belvedere—also called the Pythian Apollo[1]— is a celebrated marble sculpture from Classical Antiquity. It was rediscovered in central Italy in the late 15th century, during the Renaissance. From the mid-18th century, it was considered the greatest ancient sculpture by ardent neoclassicists and for centuries epitomized ideals of aesthetic perfection for Europeans and westernized parts of the world.
The Greek god Apollo having shot a death-dealing arrow, the episode represented may have been the slaying of Python, the primordial serpent guarding Delphi—making the sculpture a Pythian Apollo; alternatively it may represent the slaying of the giant Tityos, who threatened his mother Leto, or the episode of the Niobids.
Contents |
The large white marble sculpture—2.24 m (7.3 feet) high—depicts the Greek god Apollo as a standing archer. The complex contrapposto of the work has been much admired; it appears to position the figure both frontally and in profile. Although there is no agreement as to the precise narrative detail being depicted, the conventional view has been that the god has just overtaken the serpent Python, the chthonic serpent of Delphi. The arrow has just left his bow and the effort impressed on his musculature still lingers. His hair, lightly curled, flows in ringlets down his neck and rises gracefully to the summit of his head, which is encircled with the strophium, a band symbolic of gods and kings. His quiver is suspended across his left shoulder. He is entirely nude except that his robe (chlamys) is clasped at his right shoulder and is turned up only on his left arm and thrown back.
The lower part of the right arm and the left hand were missing when discovered and were restored by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli (1506–63), a sculptor and pupil of Michelangelo.
The Apollo is thought to be a Roman copy of Hadrianic date (ca. 120-140)[2] of a lost bronze original made between 350 and 325 BC by the Greek sculptor Leochares.
Before its installation in the Cortile del Belvedere, the Apollo—which seems to have been discovered in 1489 at Anzio, or perhaps at Grottaferrata where Giuliano della Rovere was abbot in commendam[3]—apparently received very little notice from artists.[4] It was, however, sketched twice during the last decade of the 15th century in the book of drawings by a pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio, now at the Escorial.[5] Though it has always been known to have belonged to Giuliano della Rovere before he became pope, as Julius II, its placement has been confused until as recently as 1986:[6] Cardinal della Rovere, who held the titulus of San Pietro in Vincoli, stayed away from Rome for the decade during Alexander VI's papacy (1494–1503); in the interim, the Apollo stood in his garden at SS. Apostoli, Deborah Brown has shown, and not at his titular church, as had been assumed.
Once it was installed in the Cortile, however, it immediately became renowned and a demand for copies of it arose. The Mantuan sculptor Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, called "L'Antico", made a careful wax model of it, which he cast in bronze, finely finished and partly gilded, to figure in the Gonzaga collection, and in further copies in a handful of others. Albrecht Dürer reversed the Apollo's pose for his Adam in a 1504 engraving of Adam and Eve, suggesting that he saw it in Rome. When L'Antico and Dürer saw it, the Apollo was probably still in the personal collection of della Rovere, who, once he was pope as Julius II, transferred the prize in 1511 to the small sculpture court of the Belvedere, the palazzetto or summerhouse that was linked to the Vatican Palace by Bramante's large Cortile del Belvedere. It became the Apollo of the Cortile del Belvedere and the name has remained with it, though the sculpture has long been indoors, in the Museo Pio-Clementino at the Vatican Museums, Rome.
In addition to Dürer, the Apollo was sketched and copied by several major artists during the late Renaissance, including Michelangelo, Bandinelli, and Goltzius. In the 1530s it was engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, whose printed image transmitted the famous pose throughout Europe.
The Apollo became one of the world's most celebrated art works when in 1755 it was championed by the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) as the best example of the perfection of the Greek aesthetic ideal. Its "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur", as he described it, became one of the leading lights of neo-classicism and an icon of the Enlightenment. Goethe, Schiller and Byron all endorsed it.[7] The Apollo was one of the artworks brought back to Paris by Napoleon after his 1796 Italian Campaign. From 1798 it formed part of the collection of the Louvre during the First Empire. After the fall of Napoleon (1815), it was repatriated to the Vatican[8] where it has remained ever since.
The neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova adopted the fluency of the Apollo Belvedere for his marble Perseus (Vatican Museums) in 1801. The Romantic movement, however, was not so kind to the Apollo's critical reputation. William Hazlitt (1778–1830), one of the great critics of the English language, was not impressed and dismissed it as "positively bad". The eminent art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) wrote of his disappointment with it. Finally, starting something of a trend among later commentators, the art critic Walter Pater (1839–1894) adverted to the work's homoerotic appeal by way of explaining why it had been so long lionized.[9] Nevertheless, the work retained much popular appeal and casts of the it were abundant in European and American public places (especially schools) throughout the 19th century.
The critical reputation of the Apollo continued to decline in the 20th century, ultimately to the point of complete neglect. In 1969 a kind of epitaph was provided by noted art historian Kenneth Clark (1903–1983):
"...For four hundred years after it was discovered the Apollo was the most admired piece of sculpture in the world. It was Napoleon's greatest boast to have looted it from the Vatican. Now it is completely forgotten except by the guides of coach parties, who have become the only surviving transmitters of traditional culture."[10]
