Apollo Belvedere - Hendrick Goltzius

The print showcases the famous classical marble of Apollo, the sun god, as he appears in the Vatican's Belvedere Courtyard. Goltzius employs a dynamic engraving technique to emphasize the figure's musculature, accompanied by a small figure of an artist at the bottom right to establish the monumental scale of the work. A snake, representing the defeated Python, coils around the tree trunk that serves as a structural support for the sculpture.

As the god of light, harmony, and prophecy, Apollo was a central figure in Renaissance Neoplatonism, often identified with the 'Divine Intellect' in the works of Marsilio Ficino. This engraving reflects the late Renaissance effort to recover the 'prisca sapientia' (ancient wisdom) through the study of classical form and proportion.