Apollo of Piombino

The Apollo of Piombino or the Piombino Boy is a famous Greek bronze statuette [1.15 m.] in late Archaic style that depicts the god as a "kouros" or youth. 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 R. Lullies and M. Hirmer (Lullies and Hirmer 1960) to date it in the fifth century BCE and place its facture in Magna Graecia, the Hellenic culture of southern Italy; Karl Schefold included it in "Meisterwerke Griechischer Kunst" 1960 [Plate 235.] and casts of it were to be found in university and museum study collections. B.S. Ridgeway (Ridgeway 1967) proved it to be, not simply an archaising sculpture of the first century BCE, designed to appeal to a Roman with refined tastes, but a conscious forgery, with a false inlaid inscription of silver in archaic lettering on the left leg. The inscription dedicates this Apollo to Athena, an anomaly. [ [http://www.louvre.fr/llv/oeuvres/detail_notice.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673225376&CURRENT_LLV_NOTICE%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673225376&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=9852723696500817&bmLocale=en Musée du Louvre: Apollo of Piombino] .] The two sculptors responsible could not resist secreting a lead tag with their names inside the sculpture, found when the sculpture was conserved in 1842. [ [http://www.louvre.fr/llv/oeuvres/detail_notice.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673225376&CURRENT_LLV_NOTICE%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673225376&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=9852723696500817&bmLocale=en Musée du Louvre: Apollo of Piombino] .] One was a Tyrian emigré to Rhodes. The Louvre's website adds that a comparable work uncovered in 1977 in Pompeii, in the villa of C. Julius Polybius, corroborates the hypothesis of an archaising pastiche, made for a Roman client in the first century BCE. [ [http://www.louvre.fr/llv/oeuvres/detail_notice.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673225376&CURRENT_LLV_NOTICE%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673225376&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=9852723696500817&bmLocale=en Musée du Louvre: Apollo of Piombino] .]

The study of ancient Greek sculpture in the last 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, and concentrates instead on the socio-political world in which sculpture was created and other less subjective criteria. [Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway characterized the new directions scholarship in this field was taking in "The Study of Ancient Sculpture" "American Journal of Archaeology" 86.2 (April 1982), pp. 155-157. A response and dialogue appeared in William Hood, "In Defense of Art History: A Response to Brunilde Ridgway" "The Art Bulletin" 68.3 (September 1986), pp. 480-482, with a rejoinder by Mrs Ridgeway.]

Notes

Further reading

*Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, "The bronze Apollo from Piombino" "Antike Plastik" 7 pp 43-75. (1967).
*R. Lullies and M. Hirmer, "Greek Sculpture" (New York) 1960.