Belvedere Torso
Apollonios, son of Nestor, of Athens (active first century BC) · First century BC
What remains is a powerful male body without head, arms or lower legs, seated on an animal skin draped over a rock. The figure leans forward and twists to the left, the muscles of the back and abdomen bunched under the skin. Nobody knows for certain who he is. The lion or panther skin suggests Hercules, but the pose has been read as Ajax contemplating his suicide, as the satyr Marsyas, or as the wrestler Polyphemus. The signature on the rock names Apollonios, son of Nestor, an Athenian working in Rome.
Walk around the torso slowly, because it changes with every step. From the front the chest is compressed as the body turns; from the back the spine forms a long curve and the shoulder blades push out like wings. The sculptor understood how the muscles of a seated man tighten and release as he twists, and rendered that knowledge in stone with astonishing confidence. The surface is unpolished in places, and the breaks are old, which gives the fragment a rugged honesty that later artists found more exciting than any complete statue.
The Torso was recorded in Rome in the fourteen thirties and was in the Vatican by the fifteen thirties. Michelangelo was so devoted to it that he refused to restore it and called himself its pupil; the exaggerated bodies of the Sistine Chapel, especially the figures around the Last Judgment, owe much to it. Rodin kept a cast in his studio. Popes and collectors left it broken on purpose, a rare decision in an age when every fragment was completed. In the Hall of the Muses it now sits among statues of the nine Muses and philosophers, a headless body that taught generations of artists how to draw.
Did You Know? Michelangelo reportedly refused Pope Julius's request to restore the Torso, saying it was too beautiful to touch.
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