The Apollo Belvedere or Apollo of the Belvedere—also called the Pythian
Apollo— 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. It is
now found in the Gabinetto delle Maschere of the Pio-Clementine Museum of
the Vatican Museums complex. Description
The Greek god Apollo is depicted as a standing archer having just shot an
arrow. Although there is no agreement as to the precise narrative detail being
depicted, the conventional view has been that he has just slain the serpent
Python, the chthonic serpent guarding Delphi—making the sculpture a Pythian
Apollo. Alternatively, it may be the slaying of the giant Tityos, who
threatened his mother Leto, or the episode of the Niobids.
The large white marble sculpture is 2.24 m high. Its complex contrapposto has
been much admired, appearing to position the figure both frontally and in
profile. The arrow has just left Apollo's 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 for his sandals and a robe
clasped at his right shoulder, turned up 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, a sculptor and pupil of
Michelangelo. History
= Antiquity = The Apollo is thought to be a Roman copy
of Hadrianic date of a lost bronze original made between 350 and 325 BC by
the Greek sculptor Leochares. = Renaissance =
Before its installation in the Cortile delle Statue of the Belvedere palace in
the Vatican, the Apollo—which seems to have been discovered in 1489 in the
present territory of Anzio, or perhaps at Grottaferrata where Giuliano della
Rovere was abbot in commendam—apparently received very little notice from
artists. 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. 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: Cardinal della Rovere, who held the titulus of
San Pietro in Vincoli, stayed away from Rome for the decade during Alexander
VI's papacy; 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, several major
artists during the late Renaissance sketched the Apollo, including
Michelangelo, Bandinelli, and Goltzius. In the 1530s it was engraved by
Marcantonio Raimondi, whose printed image transmitted the famous pose
throughout Europe. = 18th century =
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 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. The Apollo was
one of the artworks brought to Paris by Napoleon after his 1796 Italian
Campaign. From 1798 it formed part of the collection of the Louvre during the
First Empire. = 19th century =
The neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova adapted the work's fluency to his marble
Perseus in 1801. After the fall of Napoleon, the Apollo was repatriated to
the Vatican where it has remained ever since.
The Romantic movement was not so kind to the Apollo's critical reputation.
William Hazlitt, one of the great critics of the English language, was not
impressed and dismissed it as "positively bad". The eminent art critic
John Ruskin wrote of his disappointment with it. Finally, starting something of
a trend among later commentators, the art critic Walter Pater adverted to the
work's homoerotic appeal by way of explaining why it had been so long
lionized. Nevertheless, the work retained much popular appeal and casts
of it were abundant in European and American public places throughout the
19th century. = 20th 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:
"...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." Influence
Dürer, Albrecht, Adam and Eve Copies of the Apollo Belvedere appear as
cultural props in Joshua Reynolds's Commodore Augustus Keppel and Jane
Fleming, later Countess of Harrington. Canova, Antonio, Perseus
In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron describes how the statue requites
humanity's debt to Prometheus: "And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven / The
fire which we endure, it was repaid / By him to whom the energy was given / Which
this poetic marble hath array'd / With an eternal glory--which, if made / By
human hands, is not of human thought; / And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor
laid / One ringlet in the dust--nor hath it caught / A tinge of years, but
breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought.".
Crawford, Thomas, Orpheus and Cerberus Apollo tended by the Nymphs of Thetis
"The Sower" by Jean-François Millet is influenced by the Apollo Belvedere in
the treatment and pose of the figure in the piece. The pose of the figure is
linked to the sculpture as Millet was attempting to heroise the peasant that
he was depicting. Minute Man by Daniel Chester French,
1874 at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts
In Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities, the character Ulrich comments
"Who still needed the Apollo Belvedere when he had the new forms of a
turbodynamo or the rhythmic movements of a steam engine's pistons before his
eyes!" In her poem "In the Days of Prismatic
Color," Marianne Moore writes that "Truth is no Apollo/ Belvedere, no
formal thing." Arthur Schopenhauer in the third book of
The World as Will and Representation refers to the head of the Apollo
Belvedere, admiring it for the way it exhibits human superiority: "The head of
the god of the Muses, with eyes far afield, stands so freely on the
shoulders that it seems to be wholly delivered from the body, and no longer
subjects to its cares." References
= Citations = = Other sources =
Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 1981. Taste and the Antique Cat. no. 8.
Critical history of the Apollo Belvedere.
External links Image of Apollo Belvedere with a fig
leaf The sculpture shown with and without a
fig leaf 16th-century engraving by Marcantonio
Raimondi "Comparing Different Artists - The
Apollo Belvedere" See also the gold medal of the Apollo
Belvedere of the Vatican Museums.