Apollo and Daphne (Bernini)

Marble sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Apollo and Daphne is a life sized marble sculpture by the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which was executed between 1622 and 1625. It is regarded as one of the artistic marvels of the Baroque age. The statue is housed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, along with several other examples of the artist's most important early works. The sculpture depicts the climax of the story of Apollo and Daphne (Phoebus and Daphne), as written in Ovid's Metamorphoses, wherein the nymph Daphne escapes Apollo's advances by transforming into a laurel tree.

Apollo and Daphne was the last of a number of important works commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese from Gian Lorenzo Bernini that helped to define Baroque sculpture. Thereafter, Bernini served a succession of popes. Apollo and Daphne was commissioned after Borghese had given an important work of his patronage, Bernini's The Rape of Proserpina (1621 22), to Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi. Through this generous gesture, Borghese hoped to ingratiate himself to the favored nephew of the new pope, Gregory XV. Much of the early work on Apollo and Daphne was done in 1622–23, but Bernini's work on his sculpture of David (1623 24) interrupted its completion. Bernini finished Apollo and Daphne in 1625, and it was moved to the Cardinal's Villa Borghese in September of that year. Bernini did not execute the sculpture entirely by his own hand. As was the common practice at that time, he had help from his workshop. Giuliano Finelli, who was a very gifted sculptor, undertook the finer details that show Daphne's conversion from human to tree, such as the twigs and leafs springing from her hands, and her windswept hair. Some art historians, however, discount the importance of Finelli's contribution, since he was merely realizing Bernini's creative vision. Apollo and Daphne's enthusiastic reception began as soon as the work was unveiled. Viewing the sculpture from this angle allowed the observer to see the reactions of Apollo and Daphne simultaneously, and thus to understand the narrative of the story in a single instant, without the need to move position. When viewed from the left, neither face and little of Daphne's body is visible. Instead, we see a tangle of hair and we can readily see the structural braces that Bernini built into the sculpture: "the carefully designed solid, interlinking forms that connect and support one another." Like Bernini's 1622 sculpture The Rape of Proserpina, Apollo and Daphne has a cartouche with a moral aphorism by Pope Urban VIII. Attributing Christian moral value to a pagan subject was a way of justifying the statue's presence in the Borghese villa.

It is difficult to overstate the importance and the immediate effect of the statues that Bernini made for Scipione Borghese: "Bernini proved that he could make images that dazzled visually, told a story with high drama, and aroused powerful sentiments. These acclaimed statues had qualities the church was seeking, and they helped propel Bernini on his path to become the chief visual propagandist of the Counter Reformation, and the single most important creator of Baroque Rome." One 19th century literary journal considered it the only Bernini work worthy of lasting praise. Others were less positive. An English travel writer in 1829 noted Bernini's technical skill but added that the sculpture "bears all the want of judgment, taste, and knowledge of that age", going on to criticize the appearance of Apollo for being too like a shepherd and not enough like a god. More recent historians have been much more positive. Robert Torsten Petersson calls it "an extraordinary masterpiece suffused with an energy that works out of the tips of the laurel leaves and Apollo's hand and drapery." C. D. Dickerson III says The Rape of Proserpina, David, and Apollo and Daphne are “widely considered the high points of Bernini’s entire career — and even of all seventeenth century sculpture.”