Belvedere Torso Sculpture in Marble

This Belvedere torso is hand-carved in white marble and turns sharply at the waist: the chest swings one way, the thighs the other, and the body bends forward over a rock draped with an animal skin. Ridges of muscle fold across the abdomen where the twist is tightest. This new sculpture is carved by hand, breaks included. Neck, shoulders and thighs end in rough, granular stone, left unpolished against the smooth skin, so the piece reads as a fragment, as its model does. Fine grey and ochre veins cross the chest, and the figure sits on a plain block of pale marble. That model is the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican Museums, signed by the Athenian sculptor Apollonios in the first century BC, probably after a Greek bronze; the museum's preferred reading is Ajax contemplating his suicide. Michelangelo used it as a model for figures in the Sistine Chapel, and with the Ares Borghese type it set the pattern for the heroic male nude. At 84 cm high, the torso can stand on its own block on the floor of a bay window, with no further plinth; side light there picks out the twist of the abdomen. From behind, the back is worked as fully as the front, down to the shoulder blades and the groove of the spine.