abstract:The Belvedere Torso is a fragment of a nude male statue, signed prominently on the front of the base by an Athenian sculptor "Apollonios son of Nestor", who is unmentioned in ancient literature. The statue is documented in the collection of Cardinal Prospero Colonna in Monte Cavallo, Rome from the 1430s, not because it elicited admiration but because an antiquarian epigrapher, Ciriaco d'Ancona (or someone in his immediate circle), made note of its inscription;Noted in Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: the lure of classical sculpture, 1400–1900, 1981:311.