Apollo Belvedere

Apollo Belvedere Marble statue (Vatican Mus.) of the Greek god Apollo, discovered towards the end of the 15th century and long regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of world art and the absolute standard for male beauty (it is named after the Belvedere Court in the Vatican, in which it was once displayed). The statue is a copy from the Roman period of a Classical or Hellenistic Greek bronze, and Leochares has been proposed as the sculptor of the lost original. It was often copied or adapted, for example by Bernini in his Apollo and Daphne and by Reynolds, who painted his Commodore Keppel in the posture of the statue but in 18th-century dress. Winckelmann's rapturous description of the Apollo Belvedere enshrined it as one of the models of Neoclassicism, but from the later 19th century its reputation declined and it now seems cold and academic to many critics. Whereas to Winckelmann it appeared ‘the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity’, to Kenneth Clark it seemed that ‘in no other famous work of art are idea and execution more distressingly divorced.’