An ancient bronze of Apollo that vanished during the Second World War and was feared lost forever went back on display at the Hungarian National Museum on Wednesday, 80 years after it was last seen.
The statue’s return to public view is a detective story in itself. It resurfaced recently in the museum’s modern-age mixed collection, where it had been entered in the 1961 inventory book as a “pharmacy figurine” of unknown origin from the mid-19th century. It took the museum’s conservators and archaeologists to establish its true identity — that of the Apollo bronze believed lost in the war, the museum told MTI on Wednesday.
The work is one of the museum’s earliest pieces, acquired before 1825. Its first scholarly publication appeared in 1894, tracing it probably to Pecs, the site of the Roman town of Sopianae. Before the war it was a fixture and highlight of the archaeological exhibitions; amid the post-war disorder of the museum’s collections it slipped into the modern-age holdings, where its age and origin went unidentified for decades.
The 56-centimetre figure depicts a naked youth in a pose invoking contrapposto, the compositional principle of mature classical sculpture. Its striking eyes were covered in silver sheet, and they still seem to glow against the dark bronze of the face. Its eye modelling, stockier proportions and deeply grooved hair point to a date in the second half of the 2nd century AD, the Antonine period.
The hollow, thin-walled casting was made by ancient bronzesmiths using the indirect lost-wax process — body parts cast separately, then joined by soldering. Curiously, while the front has suffered aggressive pitting corrosion, the back survived the centuries in almost pristine condition.
In Greek mythology, Apollo is the most complex of gods, embodying order, radiant intellect and moral purity. This figure follows the Apollo Citharoedus type, the kithara-singing Apollo popular since the Hellenistic age: the raised left arm once held the instrument, the lowered right hand the plectrum. Apollo’s stringed instrument stood for mathematical precision and the triumph of civilisation over untamed Dionysian wildness.
Medium-sized bronzes are rarities, their production prohibitively expensive in antiquity. The newly identified work once graced a representative space — perhaps a garden or a fountain — of a Roman town house or country villa.
The Apollo can be seen for a month from Nov 4 in Room 6 of the museum’s permanent archaeological exhibition “On the Border of East and West“, as part of the Treasure of the Month series of small exhibitions.
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