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Apollo Belvedere
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
| Apollo Belvedere |
| Between 350 and 325 BC. |
| White marble |
| Vatican City, Vatican Museums |
The Apollo Belvedere is a celebrated marble sculpture from Classical Antiquity. It was rediscovered in the late 15th century, during the Renaissance, and for centuries (up through the 19th century) it has epitomized ideals of aesthetic perfection for Europeans and westernized parts of the world.
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The marble is a Hellenistic or a Roman copy of a lost bronze original made between 350—325 BC by the Greek sculptor Leochares.
The Mantuan sculptor Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, called "L'Antico", had 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 Giuliano 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 the 1530s it was engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, whose printed image transmitted the famous pose throughout Europe.
The neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova adopted the fluency of the Apollo Belvedere for his marble Perseus (Metropolitan Museum) in 1801.
- Image of Apollo Belvedere with a fig leaf
- The sculpture shown with and without a fig leaf
- 16th century engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi
- Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 1981. Taste and the Antique (Yale University Press) Cat. no. 8. Critical history of the Apollo Belvedere.
