Louvre appeals to all to buy bronze Apollo from Pompeii

The Louvre calls it “Mission Apollo”: it is a campaign that the Paris museum has launched to acquire an extraordinary bronze statuette, 68 centimeters high, from the 1st or 2nd century B.C., depicting the god Apollo and coming from Pompeii. It formerly decorated perhaps a Roman villa, which was destroyed during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 .C.: hidden for centuries by the ashes, it escaped the fate that characterized many Roman bronze antiquities (i.e., that of casting for reuse of materials) and ended up on the antiques market, it is not clear how. The work has been known since 1922, and has been in private hands ever since. Now the Louvre is trying to acquire it, and is asking for everyone’s help-a custom for the Parisian museum, which with “Mission Apollo” thus inaugurates its tenth Tous mécènes campaign, the acquisitions program financed... from below, with minute donations from individual private individuals.

Securing the Apollo will cost the Louvre 6.7 million euros: the Société des Amis du Louvre is guaranteeing 3.5 million, while “small patrons” are being asked to make an effort to come up with the 800,000 euros figure by February 28, 2020. Donations can come from all over the world: you log on to the campaign’s dedicated website, decide the amount you want to donate to the Louvre, and pay by bank transfer or credit card.

Since 2010, when the Tous mécènes campaign was first launched, the Louvre has involved 23,000 donors who, according to figures released by the museum, have given an average of 50 euros. As many as nine thousand patrons have more than once pledged their support to the Louvre. Among the works that have been purchased thanks to everyone’s efforts are masterpieces such as the Three Graces by Lucas Cranach the Elder (for which donors covered a quarter of the cost: one million 260 thousand euros) and the Book of Hours of Francis I, also bought thanks to the generosity of donors who secured as much as one million four hundred thousand euros to arrive at the required sum. But there are more than just purchases: the Tous mécènes campaign made it possible to start restorations on the Nike of Samothrace, for example. For the last edition, which took place between 2018 and 2019, Tous mécènes made possible the restoration of thearc du Carrousel, thanks to the support of 4,500 donors.

Currently, the Louvre is the only national museum in France to launch popular patronage operations on such high numbers each year.

Louvre appeals to all to buy bronze Apollo from Pompeii

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