Apollo Belvedere

The statue is a Roman marble copy of a lost Greek bronze, probably by Leochares, who worked in the fourth century BC. Notice how the marble version needed a tree stump beside the right leg for support; the original bronze would have stood free. The hair is worked into elaborate curls with a knot on top, a fashion for gods and youths. The lower arms and hands are sixteenth century restorations by a pupil of Michelangelo, and the fig leaf was added later still. Walk around to the side and you will see that the figure is designed to be seen in motion, the cloak opening like a backdrop behind him.

The Apollo was known in Rome by the fourteen nineties and belonged to Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. When he became Pope Julius the Second he had it placed in this courtyard in fifteen hundred and eleven, giving the statue the name Belvedere after the summer palace. For three centuries it was considered the most perfect sculpture in existence. The scholar Winckelmann wrote that it was the highest ideal of art, and Goethe, Byron and Napoleon all made the pilgrimage. Taken to Paris in seventeen ninety eight, it returned in eighteen sixteen. Modern taste prefers the drama of the Laocoon, but standing here you can still sense why this cool, effortless figure once defined beauty itself.

Did You Know? The Apollo Belvedere was the model for the Apollo Seventeen mission patch, and the statue's face appears on countless neoclassical portraits of young men.