Description
The large white marble sculpture—2.24 m (7.3 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 for his sandals and that his robe (chlamys) is clasped at his right shoulder and is turned up only on his left arm and thrown back.
The lower part of the right arm and the left hand were missing when discovered and were restored by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli (1506–63), a sculptor and pupil of Michelangelo.
Read more about this topic: Apollo Belvedere
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Once a child has demonstrated his capacity for independent functioning in any area, his lapses into dependent behavior, even though temporary, make the mother feel that she is being taken advantage of....What only yesterday was a description of the child’s stage in life has become an indictment, a judgment.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)