Apollo Belvedere

The Apollo Belvedere is a famous ancient marble sculpture that was rediscovered in the late 15th century in Terracina and since then is considered an outstanding example of classical statuary. It is located in the Vatican Belvedere Statuenhof and is part of the antique collection of the Vatican Museums.

The marble statue is a Roman copy of an executed in bronze in the original work, which was created 350-325 BC. It is usually assigned to the late classical sculptor Leochares. The right forearm and the left hand were missing, they were added, then removed, in 2008, they present themselves as supplemented.

The work that the Greek god Apollo shows, by an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi from the 1530s became known. Already before, Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, called L' Antico, a wax model of the statue made ​​to pour it in the years 1497/1498, a bronze copy. This was part of the collection of the Gonzaga. 1504 encountered a representation in virtually identical pose in Albrecht Dürer's Adam and Eve, so obviously Dürer himself could take the Apollo in Rome inspected. At this time the Apollo may have been owned by Giuliano della Rovere, later Pope Julius II, who in the open courtyard of the Belvedere, one north of St. Peter located, later associated with the papal palace summer villa on the work of the 1511 Vatican, had to spend. After this the Belvedere statue was named. The head of the statue was Michelangelo as a model for the main judge of the world Jesus Christ in the Sistine Chapel. For the first time the image of Christ was of the usual type of deviation in an official order of a Pope in Rome and out quite a pagan deity in accordance with the viewer in mind.

In the 17th, 18th and early 19th century, the Apollo Belvedere was considered the finest surviving single figure of antiquity. Plaster casts of the statue belonged to the most important objects of study in the academic art world. Accordingly, you still subject has influenced numerous works of sculpture and painting. For Johann Joachim Winckelmann the Apollo Belvedere was " the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity ." Winckelmann's description of the work contributed to the Apollo Belvedere particularly shaped the aesthetics of classicism. Seized Goethe wrote to Herder in the summer of 1771:

My whole being is shaken, you can dencken, man, and it fibriert still too much, as that my pen could draw stet. Apollo Belvedere, why are you showing yourself in your nakedness that we have to be ashamed of ours?