The Eternal Torso Belvedere. The Materiality and Temporality of Canonization

• Applicant: Dr. Anna Degler
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 549564210

The project is dedicated to the artistic reception of the Belvedere Torso (Apollonius of Athens, ca. 1st century BC, Vatican Museums) between 1500 and ca. 1890 as one of the most influential and contradictory objects of study at the centre of the Greco-Roman canon. Like no other ancient work of art, this sculpture has decisively shaped images and imaginations of 'antiquity', of 'the Renaissance', and of 'modernity'. This constant reconsideration calls for a diachronic study of the materiality and temporality of canon formation. To this end, three new fields of investigation will be introduced: the artistic reception of the Torso in the light of concepts of wholeness and bodily integrity; plaster casts and reproductions of the Belvedere Torso as medium and material for the migration of motifs; the canonisation of the Belvedere Torso in the USA in the context of identity formation and formations of history. How, this project asks, has classical reception functioned as a common aesthetic and normative practice in a Eurocentric and transatlantic discursive field? Exploring the vast array of perspectives and temporalities that motivate and constitute reception processes and that determine canon formation, the project seeks to decenter the unabated importance of the Belvedere Torso in the ‘Western’ canon by confronting it with new settings, actors and occasions of reception, and it examines the conditions that created the various images, versions and projections of the Belvedere Torso. It will show how these images were set in motion to transport their own norms, values and ideas, and, in turn, influenced more recent reception practices and narratives of the original and its canonisation. In light of the influential production of value and the enormous cultural-historical reach of the fragmented sculpture, the project finally aims to gain new insights into dynamic concepts of ‘wholeness’ such as temporality, history, society, the body, and the work of art, which were repeatedly renegotiated artistically through the Belvedere Torso.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants