[Illustration: Fig. 239.--The Wrestlers. (In the Uffizi, Florence.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 240.--Apollo Belvedere. (In the Vatican.)]
Before we pass to the last active period of Hellenic art, one other work, preserved from this age, the Apollo Belvedere of the Vatican (_Fig._ 240), still claims our consideration. Though without the name of the artist, or of the place of its origin, and not, perhaps, to be classed directly with the greatest productions of Pergamon and Rhodes, it is yet not unworthy to rank by their side. It is, like the Laocoon, one of the best-known statues among the existing treasures of antiquity, and scarcely needs a minute description. The splendid triumphant head looking into the distance, the slender figure, as fine in modelling as it is noble, the pleasing grace of the light step, assure for it an admiration, the more universal as these beauties--the combined result of the schools of Lysippos and of Praxiteles--are just those which are the most generally recognized. It is not an original work, in the full sense of the word, but an early Roman copy from the bronze, and seems to bear a closer relation to it than does the lately discovered head which is now in the museum at Basle. This latter has lost the characteristic features of the bronze style, and from the greater freedom of its treatment may be called a _translation_ into marble, in distinction from the _copy_ in the Vatican. Another reproduction of this work recently made known by Stephani, a bronze statuette in the Strogonoff collection, at St. Petersburg, has given an additional explanation of the action in which the god was represented. In the marble the left hand was wanting, and in the restoration this was supplied with a bow; but in the Strogonoff Apollo remains are still to be seen of the ægis, held in the hand, with which the deity drove back the Greeks, as described by Homer, Il. xv. 306. If the far-shooter be thus changed into the ægis-bearer, the shaking of the ægis symbolizing the storm, a plain reference may be found to the original motive of the work. When the Gauls threatened Delphi in 279 B.C., the defence of the Greeks was effectively assisted by a terrible storm, which threw the barbarians into a fearful panic, and which was regarded by the Greeks as caused by the personal intervention of Apollo, Athene, and Artemis. This might well have had an effect upon art similar to that of the victory of Attalos over the Gauls in Asia Minor. The Ætolians, indeed, proposed to erect at Delphi a votive offering, with figures of field-officers and of the three gods, while a statue of Apollo was erected in Patrae from a similar reason. In view of this, Overbeck has ventured to combine the Apollo Belvedere, the Artemis of Versailles (_Fig._ 241), and the striding Athene of the Capitoline Museum into one group, to which ideal union the unsimilarity of the workmanship, and even of the scale of the three statues, is not so much opposed--since these are all copies that have come down to us from different times--as is the movement of the Apollo, the middle figure, towards the right. This difficulty might be met by changing the positions, so that Athene should stand at the right and Artemis at the left, whereby the action of the figures might be from, rather than towards, each other, Artemis being turned decidedly more towards the front. If, however, this work originated in consequence of the victory in 279 B.C., it shows that a generation before the time of Attalos, at least in Greece proper, although attention had already been devoted to momentary action, art nevertheless still stood upon an ideal height, and could still delineate gods worthy of admiration.