Apollo and Daphne

What you are looking at

A young god, running, has just reached the woman he is chasing. His left hand touches her hip; his cloak flies out behind him, and his right leg is still lifted in mid-stride. She is twisting away from him, arms flung up, mouth open in a cry. And at the very moment he touches her, she is changing. Bark climbs over her legs and wraps her hips. Her toes are sprouting roots into the ground. From her raised fingers and her streaming hair burst thin, translucent laurel leaves.

Walk slowly around the group. From one side you see a chase; from another, the bark closing over Daphne's body like armor, Apollo's hand landing on wood instead of skin. The marble is carved so thin in the leaves and fingertips that light passes through it. Few sculptures make stone do so many different things at once: skin, hair, cloth, bark, root and leaf.

The story from Ovid

Bernini's source was the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book I). Apollo, proud of having killed the monstrous serpent Python, mocked Cupid's small bow. In revenge Cupid shot two arrows: a golden one into Apollo, to make him fall in love, and a leaden one into the nymph Daphne, daughter of the river god Peneus, to make her flee all love. Apollo chased her through the woods. Exhausted, Daphne begged her father to destroy the beauty that had brought this on her, and she was transformed into a laurel tree. Apollo, still loving her, made the laurel his sacred plant, its leaves the crowns of poets and victors.

Bernini chose the single moment in Ovid's poem where both endings meet: the instant of capture and of escape.

How Bernini made it

Bernini (1598–1680) was in his early twenties and already the favorite sculptor of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V and one of the great collectors of the age. Apollo and Daphne was the last of a series of large marble groups he carved for the cardinal's villa, after The Rape of Proserpina and the David.

The figure of Apollo is based on the most admired ancient statue in Rome, the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican, which Bernini turned from a standing pose into a running one. The most delicate passages, the roots, branches and leaves, were carved with the help of Bernini's assistant Giuliano Finelli, a specialist in fine detail. The work used drills, rasps and abrasives to achieve different surfaces, from the polished skin to the rough texture of bark.

What does Apollo and Daphne mean?

The group was made for a cardinal, and a moral was added to excuse the display of a pagan love chase in a churchman's house. Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, composed a Latin couplet that was carved on the base. In translation: whoever, in love, pursues the joys of fleeting beauty fills his hands with leaves, or plucks bitter berries. Pleasure that is chased is lost at the moment it is grasped.

Other readings come from Ovid himself. The story explains the laurel as the emblem of poetry and fame: art and glory born of a desire that cannot be fulfilled. Some modern viewers also read it as a story of pursuit and refusal, with Daphne's transformation as her only escape from unwanted desire.

Reception and legacy

Visitors were astonished from the start. The sculpture was originally placed against a wall, so that a visitor entering the room saw Apollo's back first and then, walking round, discovered Daphne's transformation as a story in time. It now stands in the center of the room, so it can be seen from every side.

It became the model for Baroque sculpture's ambition to capture motion and emotion in marble, and Bernini's later religious masterpiece, the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, builds on what he learned here. Compare Antonio Canova's cooler, neoclassical treatment of love and myth in Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, and see more in famous sculptures and Greek mythology in art.

Details most viewers miss

• The toes. Look down at Daphne's feet: her toes are already lengthening into roots that dig into the rock.
• The bark's edge. The bark rises up her body at different heights on each side, closing over her hip just where Apollo's hand lands.
• Apollo's quiver. He still carries his quiver on his back, the archer who mocked Cupid's skill now struck by Cupid's arrow.
• Daphne's face. Her expression is one of fright, not yet of relief; Bernini catches the moment before she understands she has escaped.

Where to see Apollo and Daphne

The sculpture is in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, in the room named after it, in the villa for which it was carved. The museum admits visitors in timed slots of about two hours and requires advance booking. Try to see the group from the angle of the doorway first, as Bernini's early visitors did, then walk around it.