Apollo Belvedere returns after 5 year restoration

The iconic Apollo Belvedere statue is back on public view at the Vatican Museums after five years of restoration and $280,000 spent repairing serious structural weaknesses and giving it a thorough cleaning.

Discovered in 1489 in the remains of an ancient domus on the Viminal Hill, the larger-than-life-size statue of Apollo is an early 2nd century Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze from around 330 B.C. probably by Athenian sculptor Leochares, famous for having worked on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It depicts the god, nude except for his sandals and a cloak clasped at his shoulder, having just shot an arrow from his bow. It was in excellent condition and almost intact, missing only the left hand the right forearm (and the bow which would originally have been a metal accessory held in his left hand).

The statue was immediately bought by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, future patron of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Giuliano della Rovere was elected Pope and ascended the Throne of Peter as Julius II in 1503. In 1508, he had the Apollo moved to the Cortile del Belvedere, the enclosed courtyard that connected the Vatican Palace to the Villa Belvedere, the papal summer retreat on the summit of Vatican hill. Julius enlisted the Renaissance master architect Bramante to design the courtyard immediately after his election and part of the design was niches and dedicated spaces to display his burgeoning ancient statuary collection. The Apollo was the nucleus of what would become the immense collection of ancient sculptures in the Vatican Museums.

Once the Apollo Belvedere went on display in the courtyard, it became instantly famous, widely copied and studied by artists all over Europe. In the mid-18th century, German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann lauded it as the pinnacle of Classical Greek aesthetics. “Of all the works of antiquity that escaped destruction,” he wrote, “the statue of Apollo represents the highest ideal of art.” It made Napoleon’s short list of the greatest art to steal from Italy after his victory there in 1796, and it was in Louvre from 1798 until 1815.

It was restored once early on (between 1532 and 1533) by Giovannangelo Montorsoli, who replaced the missing left hand and replaced the damaged right forearm. He added a chunk to the tree trunk by Apollo’s side to act as a support for the new forearm. It was also restored by the sculptor Antonia Canova in 1816 after the Apollo returned to Rome from its Napoleonic captivity in Paris. Canova mounted an additional support to the plinth.

Regular monitoring of the statue revealed in December 2019 that Apollo’s legs were in dangerously fragile condition and that Canova’s support was no longer sufficient. Restorers took an innovative approach to the problem, creating an additional support in the form of an arched carbon fiber rod anchored to the plinth. It bears much of the 330-lb weight of the statue, allowing Apollo’s elegant but fragile contrapposto legs to take a load off.

Restorers also replaced Montorsoli’s left hand with a more accurate replica, a cast taken from the “hand of Baia”, a fragment from another Roman copy of the Greek statue, this one made of plaster. They brought the statue even closer to its original look by cleaning it thoroughly but cautiously, revealing a previously unknown purplish color in the god’s abundant curls. Experts believe these are the traces of a solution used in the application of gold leaf to his hair or to a laurel wreath he wore.

* This article was originally published here