Apollo Sculpture Views

General Goods

Here are some pictures showing the whole casting process of Sabin Howards’s figure e“Apollo/”, from molding the original clay figure to reproducing it in plaster. The mold took a week, and the total plaster process took 4 days. We had to weld a steel armature to fit inside the sculpture, for internal support, then we could plaster around it.

The Apollo Belvedere or Apollo of the Belvedere — also called the Pythian Apollo[1] — is a celebrated marble sculpture from Classical Antiquity. It was rediscovered in central Italy in the late 15th century, during the Renaissance. From the mid-18th century, it was considered the greatest ancient sculpture by ardent neoclassicists and for centuries epitomized ideals of aesthetic perfection for Europeans and westernized parts of the world.

The Greek god Apollo having shot a death-dealing arrow, the episode represented may have been the slaying of Python, the primordial serpent guarding Delphi — making the sculpture a Pythian Apollo; alternatively it may represent the slaying of the giant Tityos, who threatened his mother Leto, or the episode of the Niobids.

The large white marble sculpture — 2.24 m (7.3l feet) high — depicts the Greek god Apollo as a standing archer. The complex contrapposto of the work has been much admired; it appears to position the figure both frontally and in profile. Although there is no agreement as to the precise narrative detail being depicted, the conventional view has been that the god has just overtaken the serpent Python, the chthonic serpent of Delphi. The arrow has just left his bow and the effort impressed on his musculature still lingers. His hair, lightly curled, flows in ringlets down his neck and rises gracefully to the summit of his head, which is encircled with the strophium, a band symbolic of gods and kings. His quiver is suspended across his left shoulder. He is entirely nude except that his robe (chlamys) is clasped at his right shoulder and is turned up only on his left arm and thrown back.