Apollo Belvedere
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
Unknown
Materials
Plaster
Measurements
395 mm (H); 240 mm (W); 135 mm (Dia)
Order this imageCollection
Castle Ward, County Down
NT 836689.1
Summary
Plaster, Apollo Belvedere, A model after the Antique marble statue of an early Roman Hadrianic period copy of 120 AD of a bronze original by Leochares, 350-320 BC. The original marble, regarded as the model of masculine grace in the 18th-century, excavated in Rome in the 15th century and first recorded in the garden of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who, as Pope Julius II, had transferred it to the Vatican by 1509, and by 1511 to the Belvedere there, whence its name. With one interruption, when it was seized by the French, from 1797 to 1815, it has been in the Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican museum ever since.
References
Haskell and Penny 1981: Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique, The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500 - 1900, New Haven and London, 1981