Apollo Belvedere

The statue is housed in the Vatican Museums in Rome, specifically in the Pio-Clementine Museum's Octagonal Court. It has been on display there since Pope Julius II acquired it for the Belvedere courtyard in the early 16th century.

The surviving sculpture is a Roman marble copy of a lost Greek bronze original generally attributed to the Athenian sculptor Leochares, dating to around 330 BC. The Roman copy itself was likely created in the 2nd century AD during the Hadrianic period.

Art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann famously declared it the highest ideal of classical male beauty in the 18th century, cementing a reputation that had already been building for centuries. Renaissance artists studied and copied the statue extensively as the definitive model of idealized human proportions.

Yes, Napoleon seized the Apollo Belvedere under the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797 and took it to Paris, where it was displayed in the Louvre. It was returned to the Vatican in 1815 after Napoleon's defeat.