Apollo

With this statuette, also known as the “Apollo of Transylvania”, after the place where it was found, a masterpiece of small Roman sculpture has been preserved. Our Apollo is not depicted as an avenging and punishing god, like the famous Apollo Belvedere at the Vatican Museums, for example, but as the god of healing, the god of the Delphic Oracle and the leader of the Muses. His attributes are laurel and lyre rather than bow and deadly arrow. Thus, our Apollo probably held a laurel trunk in his left hand and a branch in his lowered right. As is wellknown, the laurel was sacred to Apollo; because of its purifying and expiatory powers, it played an important part in his cult. Typologically, the statuette is a smaller replica of the larger than life-size marble statue that was found in the Tiber in Rome in 1891 (now in the possession of Rome’s Museo Nazionale). The “Tiber Apollo” and statuettes related to it are works of Roman eclecticism. In comparison with the moulding of the body, which is in keeping with the early Classical works of Greek sculpture of the 5th century BC, the hair-style with the ringlets on the forehead and the long spiral curls falling down the shoulders seem old-fashioned. Around the time of the birth of Christ, the cult of the god Apollo experienced an upswing in Rome. In 28 BC Augustus, who later declared Apollo to be his personal god, dedicated a temple to the deity out of gratitude for his intervention at the Battle of Actium. It was situated close to his own palace, the Casa di Augusto. According to Ovid (Metamorphoses 15.865) a Phoebus domesticus, a “resident Apollo”, existed in the lararium, the private cult shrine of the palace. Like several others, our statuette could also be based on this type. The Archaic stylisation, which lends the bronze sculpture a highly decorative charm, was probably also chosen to document the venerable age of this cult.
© Kurt Gschwantler, Alfred Bernhard-Walcher, Manuela Laubenberger, Georg Plattner, Karoline Zhuber-Okrog, Masterpieces in the Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities. A Brief Guide to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 2011