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Item Number: 126756
Title: PRAXITELES : The Cleveland Apollo
Author: Bennett, Michael
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9781907804380
Description: London: Giles, in association with the Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013. 21cm., pbk., 112pp., 62 color plates. Exhibition catalogue. Summary: Both a personal account of an acquisition, and a rigorous art-historical re-examination of one of the most significant works to survive from antiquity, it focuses on an original bronze figural sculpture by one of the most famous and influential sculptors of classical antiquity. Since Roman times Praxiteles’ masterpiece has been known as the Lizard-Slayer (Sauroktonos). Pliny the Elder used the epithet to identify the fourth century BC bronze original in the first century AD. Roman marble copies seemed to confirm this identification. Yet collectors, scholars, and students have all puzzled over the meaning of the young Apollo killing a lizard. What could Praxiteles have had in mind? What was its original context? Praxiteles: The Cleveland Apollo shows that the answers to these long-standing questions are implicit in the bronze sculpture acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2004. The work is likely to be the original seen by Pliny after it was removed from Delphi by Nero. At Delphi it represented Apollo’s victory over the Python, the triumph of order (kosmos) over disorder (chaos) at the sacred oracular sanctuary the Greeks called the Omphalos: the center of the world. The Cleveland Apollo is most likely the only surviving original sculpture by Praxiteles, and the only life-size Greek bronze that can be securely attributed to a Greek sculptor by name. The author recounts the story of the acquisition and reveals the astonishing circumstances of its recovery: after German unification, it was found on an East German estate where it had languished for decades in a ruined condition after the outbreak of the Second World War and throughout the communist era. The art market saved this uniquely important work of art. Now it is kept safe for posterity in one of America’s best comprehensive art museums. (Cleveland Masterwork Series, 2)
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