BELVEDERE TORSO

Hellenistic sculpture fragment of a male nude (5 feet 2 5/8 inches high) in the Vatican Museum; the work is signed by the Athenian sculptor Apollonius the son of Nestor and was long thought to be a 1st-century-BC original. It is now believed that Apollonius copied a 2nd-century original. The dynamic pose of the torso influenced the development of the energetic figure style of Michelangelo and was subsequently much studied by artists of the Mannerist or Late Renaissance and Baroque periods.