Apollo and the Apollo Crater - Paris, France
Posted by: Groundspeak Premium Member Metro2
N 48° 51.666 E 002° 20.138
31U E 451271 N 5412227
The Louvre entitles this sculpture "Apollon du type de l'Apollon de Cassel". It was once in the collection of Cardinal Richilieu.
Waymark Code: WME8BY
Location: Île-de-France, France
Date Posted: 04/17/2012
Published By:Groundspeak Regular Member Bernd das Brot Team
Views: 20

This sculpture is located in the Louvre and that Museum's website (visit link) informs us:

"The posture of this statue of Apollo, as well as the structure of the face and the hair, are typical of the work of Athenian sculptors between 460 and 470 BC. On the strength of the descriptions given by Pausanius, statuary of this type was either attributed to Kalamis (in which case it would be the Alexikakos Apollo, "averter of evil", in the Agora in Athens) or, more frequently, to Phidias (in which case it would be the Parnopios Apollo, "the locust killer", of the Acropolis).


Male nude
The statue represents a naked man, standing with his feet flat on the ground. The tree trunk was added by the copyist and serves only to ensure the stability of the marble; it was not part of the original work, which was probably a large bronze. The hair, held in place by a headband and plaited at the back, is arranged in curly strands separated by a central parting. Two ringlets fall smoothly behind each ear. This elaborate coiffure surrounds a heavy oval face given a somewhat austere expression by the thick eyelids and full lips.

From Mercury to Apollo
Restored first of all as Mercury, this marble statue entered the collection of Cardinal Richelieu in 1631 and was placed in the courtyard of his chateau. A second restoration, of which only the legs remain, turned it into Bonus Eventus, a Roman harvest god, for its presentation at the Louvre. In point of fact, the long hair and youthful physiognomy show it to be an effigy of the god Apollo, and it is now presented as such.
The Louvre statue reproduces a type that bears the name of the most complete surviving example, today in Kassel (Germany). Examination of the other replicas makes it possible to reconstitute the gesture made by the figure; the left hand, raised at elbow height, will have clasped a cylindrical object (probably a bow, the attribute of Apollo), while the right hand, lowered, may have held a sprig of laurel, the tree traditionally associated with the god.

A work characteristic of the severe style
The "Kassel type" Apollo was one of the responses of Athenian sculptors in the fifth century BC to the problem of representing a moving body, an essential issue in the evolution of the male nude. The heel of the free leg has not yet left the ground, and the shoulders are still on a horizontal plane, but the hips are moving in response to the forward movement of the right leg. This is still in the early classical style, before Polyclitus developed the solution of "contrapposto". The face, with its heavy features, and the arrangement of the hair also indicate that the original can be dated between 450 and 460 BC. The pronounced eyelids, thick mouth, and strong chin are all characteristic of the severe style that flourished between 480 and 450 BC.
In his Periegesis (Guide to Greece), Pausanias mentions two statues of Apollo that could match this dating: the Parnopios Apollo (the "locust killer") by Phidias and the Alexikakos Apollo ("averter of evil") by Kalamis. But however tempting it might be to seek a famous name behind a type of statuary whose fame is shown by the number of copies that have come down to us, attribution to either of these two sculptors, none of whose work is known with certainty to have survived, must remain largely a matter of supposition."

as for the Apollo crater, Wikipedia (visit link) informs us:

"Apollo is an enormous impact crater located in the southern hemisphere on the far side of the Moon. This formation dwarfs the large crater Oppenheimer that is located next to the western rim. The crater Barringer lies across the northern wall. To the southeast is the crater Anders, and Kleymenov is just to the east of the rim.

Apollo is a double-ringed walled plain whose inner ring is roughly half the diameter of the outer wall. Both the outer wall and the interior have been heavily worn and eroded by subsequent impacts, so that significant parts of the outer and inner walls now consist of irregular and incised sections of mountainous arcs.

The interior floor is covered in a multitude of craters of various sizes. Several of the more notable craters have received names. The IAU used the eponyms of people associated with the Apollo program when designating some of these formations."
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Celestial Body: Moon

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