The Apollo of Piombino or the Piombino Boy is a famous Greek bronze statuette [1] in late Archaic style that depicts the god as a kouros or youth, or it may be a worshipper bringing an offering. [2] The bronze is inlaid with copper for the boy's lips, eyebrows, and nipples. The eyes, which are missing, were of another material, perhaps bone or ivory.
It was found in 1832 at Piombino (Roman Populonia), in Etruria, in the harbor off the southwest point, and was purchased for the Musée du Louvre in 1834. Its archaic style led scholars like Reinhard Lullies and Max Hirmer [3] to date it in the 5th century BCE and place its facture in Magna Graecia, the Hellenic culture area of southern Italy; Kenneth Clark illustrated it in The Nude (1956), [4] Karl Schefold included it in Meisterwerke Griechischer Kunst 1960 [5] and casts of it were to be found in university and museum study collections; one made by the Louvre has been returned to Piombino. [6]
Instead, B.S. Ridgeway (Ridgeway 1967) proved it to be not simply an archaizing sculpture of the 1st century BCE, of the kind designed to appeal to a Roman with refined tastes, but a consciously fabricated Roman forgery, with a false inlaid inscription of silver in archaic lettering on the left leg. The inscription dedicates this Apollo to Athena, an anomaly. [7]
The two sculptors responsible could not resist secreting inside the sculpture a lead tag inscribed with their names, which was found when the sculpture was conserved in 1842. [7] One was a Tyrian émigré to Rhodes. The Louvre's website adds that a comparable work uncovered in 1977 in Pompeii, in the house of C. Julius Polybius, corroborates the hypothesis of an archaizing pastiche, made for a Roman client in the 1st century BCE. [7] The study of ancient Greek sculpture during the past few decades has moved away from the traditional practice of identifying sculptures based on brief literary descriptions and attempting to recognize the characteristic manner of some famous names as reflected in reproductions of their work and variants based on their style, to concentrate instead on the socio-political world in which sculpture was created and other less subjective criteria. [9]
Praxiteles of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attica sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue. While no indubitably attributable sculpture by Praxiteles is extant, numerous copies of his works have survived; several authors, including Pliny the Elder, wrote of his works; and coins engraved with silhouettes of his various famous statuary types from the period still exist.
In Greek mythology, Porphyrion was one of the Gigantes (Giants), who according to Hesiod, were the offspring of Gaia, born from the blood that fell when Uranus (Sky) was castrated by their son Cronus. In some other versions of the myth, the Gigantes were born of Gaia and Tartarus.
The Apollo Lyceus type, also known as Lycean Apollo, originating with Praxiteles and known from many full-size statue and figurine copies as well as from 1st century BCE Athenian coinage, is a statue type of Apollo showing the god resting on a support, his right forearm touching the top of his head and his hair fixed in braids on the top of a head in a haircut typical of childhood. It is called "Lycean" not after Lycia itself, but after its identification with a lost work described, though not attributed to a sculptor, by Lucian as being on show in the Lyceum, one of the gymnasia of Athens. According to Lucian, the god leaning on a support with his bow in his left hand and his right resting on his head is shown "as if resting after long effort." Its main exemplar is the Apollino in Florence or Apollo Medici, in the Uffizi, Florence.
Kouros is the modern term given to free-standing Ancient Greek sculptures that depict nude male youths. They first appear in the Archaic period in Greece and are prominent in Attica and Boeotia, with a less frequent presence in many other Ancient Greek territories such as Sicily. Such statues are found across the Greek-speaking world; the preponderance of these were found in sanctuaries of Apollo with more than one hundred from the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoion, Boeotia, alone. These free-standing sculptures were typically marble, but the form is also rendered in limestone, wood, bronze, ivory and terracotta. They are typically life-sized, though early colossal examples are up to 3 meters tall.
The sculpture of ancient Greece is the main surviving type of fine ancient Greek art as, with the exception of painted ancient Greek pottery, almost no ancient Greek painting survives. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages in monumental sculpture in bronze and stone: the Archaic, Classical (480–323) and Hellenistic. At all periods there were great numbers of Greek terracotta figurines and small sculptures in metal and other materials.
The Venus of Arles is a 1.94-metre-high (6.4 ft) sculpture of Venus at the Musée du Louvre. It is in Hymettus marble and dates to the end of the 1st century BC.
The sculptures of Hermes Fastening his Sandal, which exist in several versions, are all Roman marble copies of a lost Greek bronze original in the manner of Lysippos, dating to the fourth century BCE. A pair of sandals figures in the myth of Theseus, and when the painter-dealer Gavin Hamilton uncovered an example in the swamp ground called the Pantanello at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli in 1769, he hesitated between calling it a Theseus or a Cincinnatus. Jason's myth also involves a lost sandal. When Augustus Hare saw that sculpture in the Ball Room of Lansdowne House, in Berkeley Square, he noted it as "Jason fastening his sandal."
The Severe style, or Early Classical style, was the dominant idiom of Greek sculpture in the period ca. 490 to 450 BCE. It marks the breakdown of the canonical forms of archaic art and the transition to the greatly expanded vocabulary and expression of the classical moment of the late 5th century. It was an international style found at many cities in the Hellenic world and in a variety of media including: bronze sculpture in the round, stelae, and architectural relief. The style perhaps realized its greatest fulfillment in the metopes of the Temple of Zeus, Olympia.
Phradmon was a little-known sculptor from Argos, whom Pliny places as the contemporary of Polykleitos, Myron, Pythagoras, Scopas, and Perelius, at Olympiad 90 in 420 BCE, in giving an anecdotal description of a competition for a Wounded Amazon for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus: in Pliny's anecdote, the fifth place was won by Phradmon, whom Pliny admits was younger than any of the four who were preferred to him. Trusting in Pliny's anecdote, scholars have often hopefully assigned the "Lansdowne" type of Wounded Amazon to Phradmon.
Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway is an Italian archaeologist and specialist in ancient Greek sculpture.
The Tiber Apollo is an over lifesize marble sculpture of Apollo, a Hadrianic or Antonine Roman marble copy after a bronze Greek original of about 450 BCE. Dredged from the bed of the Tiber in Rome, in making piers for the Ponte Garibaldi.
The Meleager of Skopas is a lost bronze sculpture of the Greek hero Meleager – host of the Calydonian boar hunt – that is associated in modern times with the fourth century BC architect and sculptor Skopas of Paros.
The Subiaco Ephebe is a sculpture of a young man approaching puberty found on the site of the Neronian Villa Sublaquensis at Subiaco in the upper Aniene valley, Lazio, Italy. The headless marble is a copy of a lost Greek bronze, as evidenced by an awkward tree-trunk support and "the failure of the total silhouette to keep manageably within the boundaries of a single block of stone", as Rhys Carpenter observes; it is unlikely to postdate Nero because of its find location. The date of the bronze original that it reflects is contested. When it was first found August Kalkmann gave it a date early in the fifth century BCE. but general opinion before World War II made it a work of the end of the fourth century in the turn towards Hellenistic style, to which Rhys Carpenter objected, suggesting instead that it belonged in the 60s or 70s of the fifth century. Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, in a radical redating of the history of Greek sculpture, has placed it among classicising works of the first century BCE.
The Sleeping Ariadne, housed in the Vatican Museums in Vatican City, is a Roman Hadrianic copy of a Hellenistic sculpture of the Pergamene school of the 2nd century BC, and is one of the most renowned sculptures of Antiquity. The reclining figure in a chiton bound under her breasts half lies, half sits, her extended legs crossed at the calves, her head pillowed on her left arm, her right thrown over her head. Other Roman copies of this model exist: one, the "Wilton House Ariadne", is substantially unrestored, while another, the "Medici Ariadne" found in Rome, has been "seriously reworked in modern times", according to Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway. Two surviving statuettes attest to a Roman trade in reductions of this familiar figure. A variant Sleeping Ariadne is in the Prado Museum, Madrid. A later Roman variant found in the Villa Borghese gardens, Rome, is at the Louvre Museum.
The Piraeus Apollo is an ancient Greek bronze sculpture in the archaic style from the 2nd or 1st century BC, exhibited now at the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus, Athens.
The modius is a type of flat-topped cylindrical headdress or crown found in ancient Egyptian art and art of the Greco-Roman world. The name was given by modern scholars based on its resemblance to the jar used as a Roman unit of dry measure, but it probably does represent a grain-measure, and symbolizing one's ability to learn new information by having an open mind with an empty cup. Serapis was the main idol/figurehead at the Library of Alexandria during the ancient Egyptian & Roman alliance.
The Diana of Gabii is a statue of a woman in drapery which probably represents the goddess Artemis and is traditionally attributed to the sculptor Praxiteles. It became part of the Borghese collection and is now conserved in the Louvre with the inventory number Ma 529.
The Dancers of Delphi, also known as the Acanthus Column, are three figures in high relief on top of an acanthus column found near the sanctuary of Pythian Apollo at Delphi. They are on display in the Delphi Archaeological Museum and were the inspiration for the first of Claude Debussy's Préludes.
The Peplos Kore is one of the most well-known examples of Archaic Greek art. Kore is a type of archaic Greek statue that portray a young woman with a stiff posture looking straight forward. Although this statue is one of the most famous examples of a kore, it is actually not considered a typical one. The statue is not completely straight, her face is leaned slightly to the side, and she is standing with her weight shifted to one leg. The other part of the statues name, peplos, is based on the popular archaic Greek gown for women. When the statue was found it was initially thought that she was wearing a peplos, although it is now known that she is not.
The Euthydikos Kore is a late archaic, Parian marble statue of the kore type, c 490–480 BCE, that once stood amongst the Akropolis votive sculptures. It was destroyed during the Persian invasion of 480 BCE and found in the Perserschutt. It is named after the dedication on the base of the sculpture, “Euthydikos son of Thaliarchos dedicated [me]”. It now stands in the Acropolis Museum.