Art and Light: The Cleveland Apollo

We stepped into the Cleveland Museum of Art on Tuesday morning, wishing to find our treasure. From the previous day's brainstorming sessions during walks and lunch, we've decided that focusing on one artifact in the museum is the best way to explore the object's history and represent its story. We had some general ideas - the object would preferably be from ancient civilizations - but other than that, we hoped to go on impromptu adventures and see where history leads us.

We entered through the East wing of the Hubbell & Benes building, and under the brilliant sunlight diffracted through the glass ceiling, we saw it: Apollo. 

He was a bronze statue, unfortunately missing both arms, standing atop a square pedestal and leaning towards an invisible tree. Apollo Sauroktonos, Apollo the lizard-slayer, they used to call him, from his mythological root and battle of wits against a lizard. There are many Hellenistic copies of this story, one of the more famous ones preserved in the Louvre, but this Apollo is different. He's much slimmer and youthful, with all masculine traits unseen compared to his marble counterpart in France, and his androgynous presence can almost make you mistake him for a girl at some angles. The pose, too, deviates from the rigid and structured Roman interpretations of Greek classics, its contrapposto extreme to nearly the point of unnatural, yet the undeniable dynamism grounds it back to reality. There are no words that could be used to describe him other than a masterpiece.

We almost immediately decided that this is the piece we're going to focus on. Not only is its exquisite craftsmanship impressive, but from brief online research from the museum's portable database ArtLens, we discovered that it also has an interesting acquisition history. However, to ensure the breadth of our research, we did tour the entire Greek, Hellenistic, Etruscan, and Egyptian gallery before making our way to the Ingall Library to explore the story of Apollo further.

With help from a librarian, we discovered various online research articles and a book written by the previous Greek and Roman art curator, who acquired the statue in 2004. In that book, I found the fascinating story of the origins and mysterious provenance of this artifact. 

In Michael Bennet's Praxiteles: The Cleveland Apollo, he described in-depth the enthralling artistic beauty of the statue, pointing out several features that created the ethereal lightness and its captivating grace: the curve and counter-curve perfectly animate the figure from within, and its organic three-dimensionality seemed positively buoyant, even weightless. Each detail - the fleshiness of the hand, implied muscle mass, every strand of hair - indicates masterful skill and patience, something nearly unseen outside of the original Greek sculptor's works. 

That leads to the central question and mystery surrounding the artifact: who is its creator? Bennet theorized that the figure is ancient Greek from the casting techniques, materials, and corrosive degrees, but more in-depth research is needed to reach a definitive answer. He hypothesized that this Apollo might be one of the works of Praxiteles, the sculptor who made the revolutionary step of creating Aphrodite of Kinos, the first nude female statue that caused a surge of artistic progress. Indeed, this Apollo has a softness and androgynous beauty often found in Praxiteles' works, its demeanor strikingly similar to that of Aphrodite's. After intensive studies, the era and location seem to match up, and from one descriptive sentence in a scripture mentioned by Pliny the Elder, this speculation has been the dominating narrative until today.

How, then, did the CMA obtain this precious artifact from an ancient master? After World War II, the statue was recovered by a gentleman in Ernst-Urich Germany, where it probably lost its arms and the tree it originally lean on. Due to pure luck and chance, Apollo was discovered by the market which didn't realize its value, until Michael Bennet collected it for the museum in a race of time. 

Praxiteles originally created the statue for Apollo's sanctuary at the "navel of the world," where it represented the god's conquest over the python, the victory of order and civilization over chaos and anarchy. Now it's displayed at the exact center of the Cleveland Museum of Art, guarding the atrium, enduring the legacy of classical traditions over modern customs.

Michael Bennet brilliantly concludes, "through the glass, the god of light, reason, and music - the headmaster of the Muses - would be forever visible in his temple. It was safe at last."