Apollino

This slender young Apollo is a Roman marble, carved in the middle of the first century after a Greek model close to the manner of Praxiteles. For generations it stood in the Villa Medici in Rome, until the family moved it to Florence in 1770 and set it here in the Tribuna, the small octagonal room Buontalenti built to hold the Medici's finest antiquities. Part of what you see, though, is not ancient at all. Around 1840 a painting fell from the wall and struck the statue, and the sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini was called in to repair the damage. The nose, the hair, the right hand and the left arm below the elbow are all modern restorations, added to complete a figure that had reached the modern age already broken.