In Cleveland Apollo, how is the Scholarly Investigation of the Controversy About Originality elucidated?
The Apollo (also known as Sauroktonos) is a mainstay in classical art history. It has been considered a major work of Praxiteles and is known from Roman marble replicas, coins, and gems. The Apollo is one work in a field where the personal styles of famous Greek sculptors are named in ancient sources but whose masterpieces rarely, if ever, survive as originals. How this statue of a young man and a lizard came to achieve iconic status in art history is an interesting story and one that may deserve to be reexamined considering both the old and more recent evidence.  The Roman author Pliny the Elder in the first century CE, in his Natural History (34.60-70), noted that the famous Athenian sculptor Praxiteles produced a sculpture (in the fourth century BCE) in bronze of a youthful Apollo about to use an arrow to stab a lizard. Pliny used the name sauroktonos (lizard-slayer) for the Praxiteles masterpiece. In 2004 the Cleveland Museum of Art obtained the only known bronze version of this sculptural type (several marble copies from Rome survive). With rare exceptions, the original sculptures from Greece are works of second or inferior rank.Questions have arisen about the identification and attribution of this Roman statue type because the attribution is based only on a passage in Pliny. Recently two things have caused a reevaluation of Pliny’s credit for the work to Praxiteles and the identification of the statue. The first is the Cleveland Museum’s acquisition of a life-sized bronze of the Apollo Sauroktonos type. The Museum claims it is a Praxiteles original. The second is the first monographic exhibit dedicated to the work of Praxiteles held at the Louvre in Paris in 2007. An essay in the exhibition catalog summarizes the scholarship and issues surrounding the Sauroktonos type. While the Cleveland Apollo is discussed in the catalog, it was not included in the exhibition due to issues raised about its questionable provenance. The author of the catalog for the Paris exhibition commented on the work saying “In spite of its abundance, the documentation does not permit us to recognize this work in detail and the context of its creation completely eludes us. The Cleveland bronze was not included in the Paris exhibit because of issues raised over its questionable provenance but it is discussed briefly in the catalog.” The exclusion of the Cleveland bronze – surely not Praxiteles’s original – was due to objections of Greek authorities regarding its authenticity. It is the only existing full-scale version of this type in bronze, the original medium according to Pliny. Because there is no indisputably original freestanding sculpture from Praxiteles, one of the most famous classical antiquity artists, it would be unprecedented to have one that survives.
Pliny the Elder Cleveland Museum of Art Natural History Praxiteles