After about five years of restoration work the Pio Clementino Museum in the Vatican, one of the world's oldest museums dedicated to ancient sculpture, presented a restored copy of the famous statue of Apollo Belvedere, an iconic sculpture of the II century.
Considered the epitome of beauty, the 2.24-meter-high marble statue depicts the ancient Greek god of sunlight Apollo in the form of a beautiful young man shooting an arrow.
The aim of the restoration work, which cost about 260,000 euros, was to eliminate structural damage and imbalance of the structure, discovered at the end of 2019.
By creating an additional support in the form of a carbon fiber rod attached to the pedestal, the restoration made it possible to stabilize the statue without dismantling and moving.
The restorers also replaced the left hand of Apollo Belvedere with a cast from the "hand of Bailly", a fragment of another Roman replica of a Greek statue, this time made of plaster.
The statue of Apollo Belvedere, discovered in 1489 in Rome among the ruins of an ancient house, was brought to the Vatican by Pope Julius II. The sculpture is actually a copy of a bronze one created around 330 BC in Greece and attributed to Leochares, one of the most famous artists of his time.
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