The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal Volume 15 1987

28 Vermeulelibation dish (phiale) and the lowered left, the bow, oreven both a bow and an arrow. 3This impressive statue is neither a work of the periodbetween late Archaic and early Transitional Greeksculpture nor a sleek eclectic creation of the Pasiteleanperiod in Naples and Rome of circa 85 B.C. and later inthe first century. 4While incorporating memories of Atticand South Italian Greek sculpture at the time of thePersian Wars, the stance and the softened forms of thebody mark this carving as a work of the late fourthcentury B.C. or a generation later, influenced by the socalledPraxitelean traditions of Greek sculpture. Thetechniques of carving—the finishing in the hair, flesh,diadem, and drapery and the details of animal andplinth—as well as the simplified piecing with dowels,conform to practices of around 300 B.C. This Apollobelongs among the rare examples of so-called "Archaizing"Greek art of the period before the lateHellenistic age.Research over the past century, particularly since theFirst and Second World Wars, makes it evident that"Archaistic" Greek art began in the fifth or fourth century,rather than in the period of copyism in the firstcentury B.C. Modern terminologies ("Archaizing,""Archaistic," and "Lingering Archaic") are explained byB. S. Ridgway in The Archaic Style in Greek Sculpture. 5The Getty Apollo, by Ridgway's criteria, can be classedas "Archaizing." It is "a work of sculpture which belongsclearly and unequivocally to a period later than480 and which, for all its differences in plastic treatmentof drapery and tridimensionality of poses, retains a fewformal traits of Archaic style, such as coiffure, pattern offolds, gestures or the like." 6Unlike the Apollo from theHouse of Menander at Pompeii with its cold, polishedFigure 1. Statue of the god Apollo. Greek, circa320-280 B.C. Marble. H (max.): 148 cm(58 1 //); W (max. at the rib cage): 46 cm(18V8 W ); D (max. at the left side of the plinth):24.8 cm (9W). Malibu, The J. Paul GettyMuseum 85.AA.108.3. A precedent for the griffin as attribute and support placed closeto one leg is found in a statue of Dionysos with his panther positionedat the bottom of the drapery that falls from his right wrist; the sculpturewas found in a house at Priene. See Theodor Wiegand and H.Schräder, Priene (Berlin, 1904), pp. 368-369, fig. 463.4. The truly Roman version of such a statue is the youthful Apolloin the Archaic style in the Museo Nazionale, Naples, from theHouse of Menander at Pompeii. See J. B. Ward-Perkins, A. Claridge,and J. Herrmann, Pompeii, A.D. 19 (Boston, 1978), vol. 2, no. 83, p.148. The archetype of the Apollo studied here was copied in Julio-Claudian times in the small marble statue in the Palazzo della Bancad'ltalia, Via Nazionale, Rome, showing that the original belonged tothe first years after, or, in Sicily, the last moments of, the Persian-Carthaginian wars. See E. Paribeni, "Di un nuovo tipo di Apollo distile severo," Antike Plastik 17, Teil 6 (1978), pp. 101-105, pis. 50-52.5. See Christine Mitchell Havelock, "Archaistic Reliefs of theHellenistic Period," AJA 68 (1964), pp. 42, 44, pi. 17, fig. 1, a relief ofHermes and the nymphs belonging to the fourth century B.C., circa320. See B. S. Ridgway, The Archaic Style in Greek Sculpture (Princeton,1977), pp. 303-319, and bibliography, pp. 320-322.6. Ridgway (supra, note 5), p. 303.