AN ART HISTORY MYSTERY: APOLLO SAUROKTONOS & THE CLEVELAND APOLLO: STATUES OF THE MONTH FEBRUARY 2020

AN ART HISTORY MYSTERY:

APOLLO SAUROKTONOS & THE CLEVELAND APOLLO

STATUE OF THE MONTH, FEBRUARY 2020

This month we’re going to look at an intriguing art historical mystery – the possibility that a lost statue by Praxiteles, one of the greatest Classical Greek sculptors, may have turned up after almost two thousand years.  The statue’s rediscovery attracted surprisingly little attention in the mainstream press, so this is an attempt to spread the news - and to help you decide whether you think the original statue has indeed been found. 

A few years ago, the World Museum in Liverpool received an intriguing request from the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio: could they borrow the Liverpool copy of the Apollo Sauroktonos (‘Apollo the Lizard-Slayer’) by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles?  It’s worth pointing out that unlike the Apollo Belvedere (Statue of the Month for January 2020), which only survives in a single ancient copy, there are about twenty extant copies of the Apollo Sauroktonos (Snyder et al, 2017).  It was assumed that the original bronze statue by Praxiteles had long since been lost or destroyed.  The interesting thing about the Cleveland exhibition was that they believed they’d managed to acquire the original artwork itself, a statue now known as the Cleveland Apollo.

                                                Cast of the Apollo Sauroktonos in the Ashmolean 

                                                Museum Cast Gallery, Oxford

The copies of the Apollo Sauroktonos all depict Apollo as a naked teenage boy, whose attention is completely absorbed by a lizard climbing up an adjacent tree-trunk.  An ancient audience would instantly recognise the young Apollo from his androgynous look: long hair (tied up with a ribbon) and a beautiful face, combined with pubescent male genitals.  Ancient viewers would also recognise that Apollo’s concentration on the lizard’s movements, plus the arrow or dart in his hand, foreshadowed his achievement as an adult in killing the Python, a giant reptile which guarded the sanctuary at Delphi. 

Praxiteles & the Apollo Sauroktonos

Before we examine the Cleveland Apollo’s claim to be the original statue, let’s look at what we know about Praxiteles and his sculptures.  In 4^th century BC Athens it was common for a son to follow his father’s profession; Praxiteles was the son of a sculptor called Kephisodotos, whose most famous piece (Eirene & Ploutos, or Peace & Wealth), stood in the Athenian Agora.  Praxiteles’s three most famous statues – the Knidian Aphrodite, Hermes & the Infant Dionysus and the Apollo Sauroktonos – were probably produced c 350-330 BC (the end of the Late Classical period, in art history terms).    

Most Classical sculptors tended to specialise either in marble or bronze, as the two materials require a completely different process: a sculptor working in marble is removing material from a block of stone (a reductive method), whereas a sculptor working in bronze would begin by making a clay model, building it up from nothing (an additive method).  Sculptors working in bronze (which has high tensile strength) could confidently create statues with raised arms and ambitious poses, whereas sculptors working in marble had to stick to more conservative poses, ensuring that the statue had sufficient support.

Praxiteles was unusually talented in that he was equally skilled in creating bronze and marble sculptures, a point emphasised by Pliny the Elder, who includes the Apollo Sauroktonos in his list of Praxiteles’s bronzes:  ‘he also made a young Apollo who, close at hand, is lying in wait with an arrow for a lizard, which is creeping up, for which reason they call him the Sauroktonos’ (Natural History 34.70).  One of Praxiteles’s trademarks was to convey narrative by using an object (a tree-trunk covered by a baby’s blanket; a tree-trunk with a lizard; a dress draped over a water-jar) which could also serve as an inbuilt support for the statue.  It’s therefore tempting to assume that he produced designs which would work equally well in bronze or marble.  Extra branches could be added to the tree-trunk to support the figure of Apollo in marble copies.

Praxiteles's marble statue of Hermes & the Infant Dionysus (the statue on the left is the original marble statue at Olympia)

                                                            

                                   Roman copy of Praxiteles's Knidian Aphrodite, from

                                                 Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, near Rome

Apart from the inbuilt support (usually on the figure’s left), Praxiteles’s statues tend to have other features which make them instantly recognisable: androgynous, willowy bodies draped against the support in a sexy S-bend; the placing of the weight on the figure’s right leg, with the left leg trailing behind, the heel raised off the ground to suggest potential movement; the use of contrapposto, whereby one side of the body (usually the right side, in his case) is compressed, whilst the other side is extended; and deep-set eyes, creating a dreamy, boy-band poster expression (and who wouldn’t want Apollo in their boy-band?). 

Praxiteles is often seen as the master of ‘humanising the gods’– depicting the gods engaged in everyday activities (like babysitting, washing or casually killing lizards), although as I have mentioned earlier (in the Apollo Belvedere article), I think that what’s really going on here is a trend towards depicting different, more approachable gods - Dionysus, Aphrodite, Hermes, Apollo – rather than the ‘heavy brigade’ who feature so often in fifth-century statues: Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Athene.  Praxiteles was also prepared to experiment with showing the gods at different stages in their lives: he sculpted Dionysus as a baby (albeit with the proportions of a miniaturised adult) and Apollo as a teenager. 

The Liverpool Apollo Sauroktonos

The Liverpool version of the statue is of interest in itself, as a good example of the market for antique sculptures in the years of the Grand Tour.  The statue forms part of the Ince Blundell Marbles, a collection acquired by Liverpool Museum in 1959.  The collection was put together between 1778-1810 by Henry Blundell, owner of Ince Blundell hall at Crosby, during his visits to Rome and through his use of agents there. The Liverpool statue was probably sold to Henry Blundell by the art dealer Gavin Hamilton.

The Liverpool copy of the Apollo Sauroktonos, from the Ince Blundell collection, 'on tour' at the 

Atkinson Art Gallery & Museum, Southport,

Merseyside, UK

At first sight, the Liverpool statue appears to be a Roman marble copy with some minor restorations (rather like the Apollo Belvedere); however, it’s actually a ‘mash-up’, a composite created from fragments of several ancient statues, held together with glue and resin.  The iron clamps which hold the various fragments together have been skilfully covered with marble plugs.  The head and the body come from two different sculptures.  The head could be a head of Apollo from a different statue, reworked to make it more similar to the head of the bronze version of the statue from the Villa Albani; the headband, for example, is rounded on one side and flat on the other.  It has even been suggested that the head could have come from a copy of a female statue by Praxiteles; after all, his male nudes, especially his figures of Apollo, were so androgynous that they were virtually interchangeable with his statues of Aphrodite. The tree trunk and the lizard are modern – that is to say, 18^th century. The nose and part of the lips have also been restored. 

(Many thanks to Chrissy Partheni at Liverpool Museums for these details)

The Cleveland Apollo

In 2004 the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio acquired a bronze version of the Apollo Sauroktonos, virtually complete apart from the supporting tree and part of each arm.  Without the tree, the leaning figure looks rather ungainly and unstable.  The animal being stalked by Apollo had become detached from the statue, but metallurgical tests have subsequently proved that it was cast from the same melt.  However, it’s not a lizard, but a serpent-like creature.  It has four webbed feet, each with three toes, unlike any known creature but probably coming closest to a skink. 

                                The Cleveland Apollo, with close-up of the serpent-like creature

As in many ancient bronzes, the lips and nipples have been painted with copper, to make them stand out (pure copper is redder than when it’s alloyed with tin to make bronze). The bronze eye sockets have been inlaid with stone; the right one is original, the left one has been replaced at some point.  The bronze base-plate soldered onto the statue (which appears to have been added in the 19^th century) has a circular area of solder where the tree trunk would have been.  It’s not a big circle, suggesting Apollo was leaning against a thin sapling – as a bronze statue wouldn’t need a hefty tree for support, like a marble one would.

The Cleveland Museum purchased the statue from an art dealer in Geneva, but it emerged that the statue had originally come to light on a country estate in Saxony, East Germany.  The original vendor was a German lawyer, Ernst-Ulrich Walter, who found the statue on his family estate at Leutwitz in the former DDR, near Dresden.  He remembered seeing the statue displayed in a wooden pavilion in the garden during his summer visits in the mid-1930s.  The manor house and its estate were damaged by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War, and Walter’s family lost control of the estate during the Communist era.  When Walter managed to reclaim the estate in the early 1990s, he came across the bronze statue, now smashed into several pieces. His account was confirmed by a Romanian art historian, Lucia Marinescu, who saw the statue, then in fragments, when she visited Leutwitz in 1994.  Walter believed that the statue was just an 18^th or 19^th century garden ornament, not worth the substantial cost it would take to repair it.  He subsequently sold the statue - in the period after reunification there were plenty of dealers looking for overlooked artworks in the former DDR – and it reappeared in Switzerland about eight years later.   

Corrosion on the bronze confirms that the statue was kept outside for a considerable time after being excavated, so this would fit with the use of the statue as a garden ornament.  However, we still have no idea how or when Walter’s family acquired the statue, or where and when it was originally excavated.  Assuming that Walter’s family acquired it sometime after they bought the Leutwitz estate in 1889, where on earth had it been before that? 

·         The statue could presumably have been found anywhere in Greece, Italy or the rest of the area covered by the Roman Empire.  Given that many surviving Greek bronzes (the God of Artemision, the Youth of Antikythera, the Youth of Marathon, the Riace Warriors) were found in the sea, one suggestion has been that the Cleveland Apollo was found in the sea off the coast of Greece, before being smuggled abroad; the Central Archaeological Council of Greece even put an embargo on the statue being included in a Praxiteles exhibition at the Louvre in 2007, given the possibility that it had been looted from Greece.  However, subsequent scientific analysis of the statue concluded that ‘the corrosion products excluded the possibility that the sculpture had been buried in a marine environment’ (Snyder et al, 2014) – so the statue was definitely buried somewhere on dry land.  The patina on the bronze was consistent with the statue having been buried in the ground for a long time.  Tests also showed that the statue had been in a fire at some point in its career.    

·         As we know so little about the statue’s provenance, it’s very difficult to prove if it was looted.  The Cleveland Museum, aware that its decision to purchase a statue with such weak provenance (at least for its ownership before the 1930s) would be controversial, have been defensive, pointing out that ‘unprovenanced’ isn’t necessarily a euphemism for ‘looted’ (Bennett: 35) and that ‘in the absence of documented information about a work’s ownership history, one cannot assume illegal activity’ (Bennett: 29).   The extensive tests carried out by the Cleveland Museum certainly suggest that the statue was dug up at some point around or before 1900, which would render it exempt from laws covering the sale of recently-looted antiquities. 

Conclusion:  Is the Cleveland Apollo the Original Statue by Praxiteles?

So is the Cleveland Apollo an original bronze by Praxiteles?  There’s a lot at stake here: if this statue is an original work by Praxiteles, then it could be the only original work by him that we have, as controversy still surrounds the marble Hermes & Dionysus from Olympia (Praxitelean original or high-quality copy?)

Arguments in Favour

·         The price paid for the statue by the Cleveland Museum of Art - $5 million –   would certainly suggest that they believed it to be Praxiteles’s original statue (or as close to that as it’s possible to get).  They only agreed to pay this price after carrying out X-rays and laboratory tests on the statue, and after getting several eminent art historians, familiar with Classical bronzes, to take a look at the statue

·         The curious serpentine creature seems to be an attempt to represent the Python at Delphi, a fantastical creature designed to perch on a slender bronze tree-trunk.  We can only assume that some Roman copyist, in the process of creating a marble version with a chunkier tree, decided to turn the creature into a more substantial and more recognisable lizard – and that the other copyists subsequently followed his lead.  Pliny isn’t the only Roman author to refer to the statue as the Sauroktonos (the Lizard-Slayer); the poet Martial also mentions it in one of his epigrams

·         It’s easy to get so hung up the statue’s provenance that we forget to look at the quality of the modelling, which is very fine. The detail on the fingernails and the toes is phenomenal, including the way the little toe tucks under the fourth toe.  Apollo’s headband is very convincing as a flexible piece of fabric, following the contours of his hair.  The quality of the modelling would certainly support the idea that it’s the work of Praxiteles

·         Although the bronze used for casting the statue has a high lead content (between 9-16%), which would not have been the case for a 5^th-century Greek statue, the addition of lead to the bronze is apparently consistent with the manufacture of bronze statues from the Late Classical period onwards.  The thickness of the bronze (Greek bronze statues are actually hollow) would also be consistent with a 4^th century date. 

Arguments Against

·         Given that Praxiteles worked in Athens, we would expect his work to be cast in a foundry which used lead from the Laurion mines in Attica.  However, lead-isotope analysis of the Cleveland Apollo has excluded Laurion as a source for the lead; it’s possible that the lead used in the bronze came from a site in France or the Balkans.

What are the possibilities?

·         It could be Praxiteles’s original bronze statue.  Michael Bennett at the Cleveland Museum suggests that it was originally commissioned for the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, probably placed near the area where the re-enactment of Apollo’s victory over the Python took place every eight years.  Bennett suggests that the statue was brought to Rome under Nero’s instructions, where it was seen by Pliny the Elder

·         Even though there’s no doubt that it’s a genuine ancient bronze, it’s possible that it wasn’t manufactured by Praxiteles himself – it’s possible that it could have been cast from his original clay model by his sons, Kephisodotos II and Timarchos who followed in his profession

·         One art historian has suggested that it could have been made by a Greek sculptor later than Praxiteles, working for a Roman patron

Back view of the Apollo Sauroktonos, in a temporary display at Two Temple Place, London

Where to See It

The Cleveland Apollo is in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Ancient copies of the Apollo Sauroktonos can be found in:

World Museum, Liverpool (marble copy, full size, 18^th-century ‘mash-up)

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (marble copy)

Louvre, Paris (marble copy, full size)

Archaeological Museum, Amsterdam (marble copy, full size)

Vatican Museum (Pio-Clementine), Rome (marble copy, full size)

Villa Albani, Rome (bronze statuette)

Casts of the Apollo Sauroktonos can be found in:

Ashmolean Museum Cast Gallery, Oxford

References & Further Reading

Michael Bennett (2013).   Praxiteles: The Cleveland Apollo.  London & Cleveland:                                    Cleveland Museum of Art, in association with D Giles

   - definitely recommended reading for anyone who wants the full story of the

     Cleveland Museum’s decision to purchase the statue

J J Pollitt (1990).  The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources & Documents.  Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

Colleen Snyder, Ernst Pernicka & Peter Northover (2017).  ‘The Cleveland Apollo:

 Recent Research & Revelations’ in: Artistry in Bronze: The Greeks & their

Legacy. XIXth International Congress on Ancient Bronzes, October 2015.  

J Paul Getty Museum & Getty Conservation Institute.

            www.getty.edu/publications/artistryinbronze/conservation-and-analysis-40

Many thanks to Chrissy Partheni, Curator of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the World Museum Liverpool, for details of the Liverpool Apollo Sauroktonos, and for first drawing my attention to the existence of the Cleveland Apollo.