Apollo bust statue

Apollo was the most multifaceted of the Olympians — god of music, prophecy, healing, light, and reasoned harmony — and Greek sculpture devoted itself to perfecting his idealised features over centuries. The Apollo Belvedere, found near Rome in the late fifteenth century and admired across Europe as the supreme image of male beauty, set the canonical type: an aristocratic face, the laurel-bound hair, the cool, distant gaze. Every Apollo bust descends from that long tradition of carving the very face of order.