Apollo and Daphne in Art
Between 1622 and 1625, Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculpted a very famous baroque, life-sized marble entitled Apollo and Daphne. Apollo clutches Daphne’s hip pursuing her as she flees trying to escape him. Apollo desperate and longing wears a laurel crown foreshadowing Daphne’s metamorphosis into the laurel tree. Daphne is portrayed halfway through her metamorphosis into the laurel tree with her arms already transforming into its branches as she flees and calls to her Father to save her from Apollo.
Artists such as Antonio del Pollaiuolo often manipulate scenes from famous Greek mythology into the setting of their time periods. In Pollaiuolo’s painting Apollo and Daphne, both Apollo and Daphne are shown dressed in Renaissance garments as Daphne is in the midst of transforming into the laurel tree. It hangs today in the National Gallery in London.
Charles Garabedian displays Apollo and Daphne quite differently than the usual rendering.
In recent literature it has been argued that "The Kiss" of Gustav Klimt is a painting symbolic of the kissing of Daphne by Apollo at the moment she is transformed into a laurel tree.
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“I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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A Daphne and a Mary who live in privacy;
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If head and limb have beauty and the instep’s high and light
They can spread out what sail they please for all I have to say....”
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“O mischief, thou art swift
To enter in the thoughts of desperate men!”
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