The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (20 page)

Aphrodite of Cnidus
.

Statue by
Praxiteles
, made for the city of Cnidus in Asia Minor. It is now lost, but it was his most famous work in antiquity (
Pliny
thought it was the finest statue in the world), and was the ancestress of the modern female nude—the first life-size statue showing the goddess completely naked. Several Roman copies survive (for example in the Vatican): they show the goddess in a gently twisted pose, with right hand casually masking the pudenda and left hand dropping her robe over an urn. The statue was placed in an open shrine so it could be seen from all four sides, each view being equally admired.

 
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(1880–1918).
French poet and art critic. Apollinaire was ‘the most influential art critic writing in France during the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914 … a cardinal figure in creating the artistic climate of Paris early in this century—a climate in which anything and everything was thought possible’ (John Golding ,
Visions of the Modern
, 1994). He was among the first to acclaim
Picasso
(in 1905), praised
Matisse
in 1907 and
Braque
in 1908, and led the way in doing honour to Henri
Rousseau
. One of the earliest champions of the
Cubist
movement, he published
Les peintres cubistes
in 1913, and helped to found the offshoot group
Section d'Or
. Apollinaire was also a friend of the
Futurists
and composed one of the Futurist Manifestos. He coined the word ‘surrealist’ in 1917 and through André
Breton
he influenced the views of the
Surrealist
school. His early death was hastened by wounds sustained fighting in the trenches in the First World War.

 
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Apollo Belvedere
.

Marble statue (Vatican Museums) of the Greek god Apollo, discovered towards the end of the 15th cent. and long regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of world art and the absolute standard for male beauty (it is named after the Belvedere Court in the Vatican, in which it was once displayed). The statue is a copy from the Roman period of a
Classical
or
Hellenistic
Greek bronze, and
Leochares
has been proposed as the sculptor of the lost original. It was often copied or adapted, for example by
Bernini
in his
Apollo and Daphne
and by
Reynolds
, who painted his
Commodore Keppel
in the posture of the statue but in 18th-cent. dress.
Winckelmann's
rapturous description of the
Apollo Belvedere
enshrined it as one of the models of
Neoclassicism
, but following the revelation of the Parthenon sculptures (see
ELGIN MARBLES
) and the aesthetic discovery of
Archaic
Greek sculpture, it fell from grace, seeming cold and academic to many critics. Whereas to Winckelmann it appeared ‘the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity’, to Kenneth
Clark
it seemed that ‘in no other famous work of art are idea and execution more distressingly divorced.’

 
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Apollonio di Giovanni
.

See
CASSONE
.

 
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(1921– ).
Dutch abstract painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and ceramicist, regarded as the most powerful of the post-war generation of Dutch artists. In 1948 has was a founder of the
Cobra
group. He moved to Paris in 1950 and during the 1950s gained an international reputation, spending much of his time in the USA. In his Cobra period Appel was among the most energetic exponents of expressive abstraction, anticipating
Art Informel
. His work, executed in very thick impasto and violent colours, had the restless, agitated character of northern
Expressionism
rather than the more restrained classicism of the French: in the words of Herbert
Read
, looking at his pictures one has the impression ‘of a spiritual tornado that has left these images of its passage’. Latterly he has often painted with a rather smoother facture and in a style somewhat closer to
Hard Edge
.

 
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