Apollo of Piombino at The Louvre, Paris

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The Apollo of Piombino or the Piombino Boy is a renowned Greek bronze statuette from the late Archaic period that depicts the god as a kouros or youth, perhaps also representing a worshipper bringing an offering. The bronze features inlaid copper for the boy's lips, eyebrows, and nipples, while his eyes, missing, were likely made of another material such as bone or ivory. Discovered in 1832 at Piombino, a town formerly known as Roman Populonia in Etruria, near the harbor off its southwest point, this statuette was purchased by the Musée du Louvre in 1834. Its archaic style led scholars like Reinhard Lullies and Max Hirmer to date it in the 5th century BCE and attribute its creation to Magna Graecia, the Hellenic culture region of southern Italy; Kenneth Clark featured it in The Nude (1956), Karl Schefold included it in Meisterwerke Griechischer Kunst (1960), and casts were found in university and museum study collections. One made by the Louvre has been returned to Piombino, but B.S. Ridgeway (Ridgeway 1967) exposed it as a deliberately fabricated Roman forgery with a false silver inscription of archaic lettering on its left leg, dedicating this Apollo to Athena in an unusual move. The two sculptors responsible couldn't resist hiding their names inside the sculpture on a lead tag inscribed when the statue was conserved in 1842; one was a Tyrian émigré who had settled in Rhodes. The Louvre's website notes that a comparable work discovered in Pompeii, in C. Julius Polybius' villa, in 1977 corroborates the hypothesis of an archaising pastiche created for a Roman client in the 1st century BCE. Recent studies have shifted away from identifying ancient Greek sculptures based on brief literary descriptions and attempting to recognize famous names through reproductions of their work towards concentrating on the socio-political world in which sculpture was created and other less subjective criteria.