What Pliny saw
Pliny the Elder, listing the bronzes of Praxiteles, writes that he made a youthful Apollo, at the age of puberty, who with an arrow in his hand is poised to strike a lizard creeping towards him, and that it was known as the Sauroktonos. That short description is enough to identify the type with confidence among Roman statues and coins. What it does not tell us is who commissioned the statue, where it stood or what it meant; those questions remain open.
The pose
A naked youth stands with his weight on his right leg and his right hip thrown out. His torso turns slightly down to the right; his left arm reaches forward and rests against a tree trunk, on which the lizard climbs. His right arm, which held the arrow, makes him pivot at the waist. His hair is elaborately arranged. This is Apollo without his usual signs of majesty: a slender youth and a small animal. Praxiteles and his contemporaries often showed the gods as young and gentle; this Apollo is the male counterpart of the Aphrodite of Knidos in his exploration of the nude.
Boy or adolescent? Close or far?
The copies raise their own questions. Pliny speaks of an adolescent, the Roman poet Martial of a child. The surviving versions fall into two types: one in which Apollo stands close to the tree, like the copy in the Vatican, and one in which he stands further away, like the Louvre copy. Coins seem to support the Louvre type as closest to the original, but the Vatican type is structurally simpler and could be the older. Over time copyists also mixed the figure with Praxiteles’ Eros, and the lizard varies from copy to copy. Some scholars even reject the attribution to Praxiteles and see the type as a pastiche made for Roman clients in the first century BCE.
The Cleveland bronze
One version stands apart. The Cleveland Museum of Art owns a bronze Apollo of this type, 1.5 metres tall, with copper and stone inlays, dated between about 350 and 200 BCE. The museum attributes it to Praxiteles or a follower, and reports that more than one scholar has suggested it could be the very sculpture Pliny saw. Others have read the creature as the mythical serpent Python and called the statue the “Python-Slayer”; the museum notes that no specific evidence connects it to Delphi.
Where to see it
The Louvre in Paris shows the Borghese marble copy, the Vatican Museums the version close to the tree, and the Cleveland Museum of Art the bronze. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.70 (Perseus Digital Library).
- Musée du Louvre, Praxitèle exhibition (2007), “The Apollo Sauroktonos”; collection record Ma 441.
- Cleveland Museum of Art, “The Cleveland Apollo” (2004.30); Vatican Museums, catalogue MV.750.0.0.
