Belvedere Torso
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Belvedere Torso is a fragment of a nude male statue, signed prominently on the front of the base by an Athenian sculptor "Apollonios son of Nestor", who is unmentioned in ancient literature. The statue is documented in Rome from the 1430s, not because it elicited admiration but because an antiquarian epigrapher, Ciriaco d'Ancona, made note of its inscription; a generation later it began its career as a catalyst of the classical revival. Early drawings of the Torso were made by Amico Aspertini, ca 1500-03, by Martin van Heemskerck, ca. 1532-36, by Hendrick Goltzius, ca 1590; the Belvedere Torso entered the visual repertory of connoisseurs and artists unable to go to Rome through the engraving of it by Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, ca 1515. Around 1500 it was in the possession of the sculptor Andrea Bregno. It was in Palazzo Colonna at the Sack of Rome in 1527, when it suffered some mutilation. How it entered the Vatican collections is uncertain, but by the mid-16th century it was installed in the Cortile del Belvedere. "The Laocoön took two months from unearthing to Belvedere canonization," Leonard Barkan observed, "the Torso took a hundred years."
The figure has traditionally been identified as a Heracles, seated on an animal skin, though in recent studies, the skin has been identified as that of a panther, not the Nemean lion, occasioning other identifications.
It was once believed to be a 1st century BC original, but is now believed to be a copy of an older statue, likely dating to the 2nd century BC. The statue's figure is portrayed seated on an animal hide; the exact figure represented remains open to debate (possibilities include Hercules, Polyphemus and Marsyas, among others). The contorted pose of the torso and musculature were highly influential on late Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque artists, including Michelangelo and Raphael.
The statue is currently part of the collection of the Museo Pio-Clementino of the Vatican Museum. The name "Belvedere" derives from the Cortile del Belvedere, where the work was formerly displayed. The torso should not be confused with another famous work of the collection, the Apollo Belvedere.
Legend has it that Pope Julius II requested that Michelangelo Buonarotti complete the statue fragment with arms, legs and a face. He respectfully declined, stating that it was too beautiful to be altered, and instead used it as the inspiration for the majority of the figures in the Sistene Chapel, including, but not limited to, the Sibyls and Prophets bordering the ceiling. The Belvedere Torso remains one of the few ancient sculptures admired in the 17th and 18th centuries whose reputation has not suffered in modern times.
Several small bronze reductions of it were made during the 16th century, often restoring it as a seated Hercules.
