Vatican Museums

The statue was discovered in Rome in 1489, among the ruins of an ancient domus on the Viminal Hill, and was immediately acquired by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. When he was elected pope under the name of Julius II (1503-1513), he had the sculpture moved to the Vatican, where it is documented to have been present in the Belvedere since 1508. At the time the Apollo must have been intact, missing only the left hand and fingers of the right hand; between 1532 and 1533 it was restored by Giovannangelo Montorsoli, who completed the left arm, replaced the right forearm and integrated the top of the tree trunk on which the new arm rested.
The statue portrays the god Apollo having just shot an arrow with his bow, which he would originally have held in his left hand. It was made by a copyist workshop that, active in Rome in the first decades of the 2^nd century A.D., replicated a bronze masterpiece made in Greece around 330 B.C., probably by the Athenian Leochares, one of the most famous artists of the time, also known for working at the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the sumptuous tomb of the satrap of Caria Mausolo, considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Serious structural issues emerged in December 2019, necessitating restoration involving the insertion of a carbon fibre rear support anchored to the plinth, a solution that had previously been adopted, no doubt by Antonio Canova, upon the return of the statue from Paris in 1816. The recent restoration has offered the opportunity to replace Montorsoli’s left hand with a cast taken from the “hand of Baia”, the fragment of a plaster copy made in Roman times from the original Greek statue.
The Apollo, much admired since its exhibition in Belvedere, owes its consecration to the inspired pages of Johann Joachim Winckelmann who considered it a sublime expression of Greek art, «the highest ideal of art among the ancient works that have been preserved to us so far».