Italian, circa 1800

With Tomasso Brothers, Leeds and London;

From whom acquired by Karsten Schubert Ltd

The Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican ranks among the most celebrated statues from antiquity. Today thought to be a Hadrianic copy, made in c. 120-140 CE, of a 4th-century BCE Greek bronze original, the statue was excavated in Rome in 1489. The marble was recorded in 1509 in the garden of S. Pietro in Vincoli, which was then under the custodianship of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who became Pope Julius II (1503-1513). By 1511, the Apollo had been installed in the Cortile del Belvedere of the Vatican, and thereafter received a vast amount of attention from artists and commentators alike. The most influential of these was J.J. Winckelmann, who dedicated pages to the Apollo’s beauty and hailed it as the embodiment of antique ideals. One of the most amusing descriptions of the Apollo was made by the great American painter Benjamin West. Upon visiting the Eternal City in the summer of 1760, he encountered considerable snobbery from the native populous who mocked him for a perceived lack of sophistication. Anxious to see the impression of this classical exemplar on West's supposedly uncultivated mind, they opened up the doors of the Belvedere to reveal the Apollo, only to be shocked when the painter dryly remarked, 'My God, how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior' (Haskell and Penny, op. cit., p. 150). The statue’s fame was further enhanced after it was ceded to Napoleon under the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797, arriving in Paris in a garlanded case in July 1798; it was returned to Rome in January 1816.

Karsten Schubert (1961-2019)

Karsten Schubert was an influential Anglo-German art dealer who played a leading role in promoting the Young British Artists (YBAs) in the 1980s and 1990s. Schubert exhibited the likes of Rachel Whiteread, Alison Wilding, Gary Hume, Michael Landy and Ian Davenport, as well as then more internationally well-known artists such as Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley. Later in life Schubert founded Ridinghorse a high-end art historical publisher, named after an art space he had opened in 1995 with Charles Asprey and Thomas Dane.

In Schubert’s obituary in The Guardian, Charles Darwent noted that, ‘For all his love of Britain and English tailoring – he became a British citizen not long before his death – he had a depth of culture and historical understanding that remained admirably German…. When he wrote his own history of museology, The Curator’s Egg (2000), it was with the easy assurance of one who could quote Marcus Aurelius from memory’.

Karsten Schubert was a member of the Faculty of the Fine Arts of the British School at Rome, and sat on the Advisory Board of Drawing Room London. His personal art collection including drawings by Cezanne and Mondrian, as well as ancient sculpture. Schubert’s interest in Grand Tour bronzes cast after antique models reflects both his erudition and his rich intellectual heritage.

RELATED LITERATURE

F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven/London, 1981, pp. 148-151