Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s life-sized marble sculpture of Apollo and Daphne towers above visitors to the Galleria Borghese in Rome. It depicts the climactic transformation in the ancient Roman poet Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” when the naiad Daphne, fleeing the impassioned Apollo’s pursuit, turns into a laurel tree.
Help me my father, if thy flowing streams have virtue! Cover me, O mother Earth! Destroy the beauty that has injured me or change the body that destroys my life.
Before she finishes her prayer, the nymph’s body is overcome with inertia, her chest becoming enclosed with thin bark, her feet fused to the earth by meandering roots, her face enclosed by leaves, her hair changing into trembling leaves, and her arms transforming into fluttering branches.Bernini was only 23 years old when he began this sculpture at the behest of Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1622. Borghese commissioned Apollo and Daphne from the young sculptor just after Bernini had finished “The Rape of Proserpina,” which Borghese gifted to Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi.
The soaring sculpture greets us with an array of textures and varying degrees of finish in the marble, but this diversity is subordinated to the harmony of the whole work of art. Its vertical, spiraling gesture draws our eyes upward, to the crest of the composition, where Daphne’s fingers and hair are turning into laurel leaves. The marble of the leaves is so thin and paperlike that it turns golden when sunlight washes over it.
Bernini stays astonishingly faithful to the vision Ovid put forth in words. Apollo and Daphne’s details are particularly striking, such as the uninterrupted transition from toenails to roots as the earthy tendrils fasten Daphne to the ground. The sculpture’s movement invites visitors to walk around it, to experience the narrative as it unfolds in space.
As we begin with the duo’s lower limbs, which are available at eye level, we sense the tensile strength of Apollo’s lust in the manner his legs are captured mid-stride, his right foot firmly pressing against the ground. Daphne’s legs, just ahead of the god’s, are elevated on a mound of earth, which we could imagine manifested itself just moments ago as an answer to the nymph’s prayers. Rather than the taut vigor of Apollo’s gesture mid-pursuit, Daphne’s twisted body is sculpted as if she is limp, subject to the forces anchoring her feet to the ground and pulling her wavy hair up into a delicate cluster of foliage.
The thin laurel bark which emerges from the raised mound of earth encircles Daphne, encasing her in a supple arboreal sheath. As our eyes follow the rough texture of the bark coiling around the river nymph’s smooth flesh, we arrive at the culminating moment wherein Apollo finally makes contact with Daphne. However, moments too late, for the god’s hand does not grasp Daphne’s soft belly, but touches only the newly formed laurel bark. Only the very tip of Apollo’s index finger makes contact with Daphne’s skin, a detail that accentuates the nearly consummated but ultimately unrequited passions of the god.
Although thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt be called my chosen tree, and thy green leaves, O Laurel! shall forever crown my brows, be wreathed around my quiver and my lyre; the Roman heroes shall be crowned with thee.
Daphne’s leaves were thus woven to form crowns, wreaths, and garlands which were bestowed upon athletes at the Pythian Games at the sanctuary of Apollo in Delphi. When we speak of a poet laureate or Nobel laureate, we are in fact drawing on this ancient Greek and Roman tradition of honoring achievements by conferring laurel on meritorious individuals.Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’
Another work of art that portrays transformation is Sandro Botticelli’s tempera grassa on poplar wood panel “Primavera” from the early 1480s—over 140 years before Bernini sculpted his Apollo and Daphne. Painted as a gift for the Medici family, the panel depicts nine figures from classical antiquity gathered together in a grove of orange and laurel. From right to left, they are: Zephyr, Chloris, Flora, Venus (with Cupid flying overhead), the three Graces, and Mercury.
Much scholarly ink has been spilt attempting to arrive at a singular explanation for the presence of these nine figures in the same space. While a story connecting this specific group has not been found, it is known that Renaissance Neoplatonism captivated intellectual circles in Florence at the time, including the Medicis. “Primavera” takes inspiration from Ovid’s “Fasti” and, perhaps, the writings of poets Lucretius and Poliziano (an Italian classical scholar and the Medicis’ poet).
Zephyr, the god of the west wind, hovers on the right side of the painting, grasping at the nymph Chloris’s torso, as delicate flowers emerge from her lips and drift to the ground, which is carpeted in colorful blooms. While the greenery in the painting is quite dark, partially due to the original pigment’s aging process, 500 plant species can nevertheless be identified. Of those 500 species of vegetation, 138 flowers can be specifically identified, confirming that they were all precisely rendered by Botticelli, who may have used the assistance of herbaria (compendia of preserved plant specimens).
Art historians have commented on the visual similarities between “Primavera” and Flemish and French millefleur (“thousand flowers”) tapestries of the late Middle Ages, which featured dark green backgrounds sprinkled with flowers and foliage. These tapestries frequently adorned palaces in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
“However, he made amends for his violence by giving me the name of bride, and in my marriage-bed I have naught to complain of. I enjoy perpetual spring; most buxom is the year ever; ever the tree is clothed with leaves, the ground with pasture. In the fields that are my dower, I have a fruitful garden, fanned by the breeze and watered by a spring of running water. This garden my husband filled with noble flowers and said, ‘Goddess, be queen of flowers.’”
In Botticelli’s painting, Flora is painted in a flowing floral dress, looking directly out at the viewer, scattering pink and red roses on the ground in front of Venus. The flowers are painted with analytic precision, and those that float to the ground from Chloris’s mouth are barely discernible from those that make up the pattern of Flora’s dress. Her posture is dignified, graceful, and mature, in contrast to the passive and vulnerable stance Chloris demonstrates pre-transformation into Flora.
Cupid hovers blindfolded above his mother Venus, his arrow aimed toward the three Graces, goddesses who represent fertility, beauty, and mirth. Mercury, the messenger god, has his back turned from the rest of the group and seems completely absorbed in lifting his caduceus toward some wisps of clouds. An enigmatic and controversial painting, its most common interpretation is as a celebration of marriage and procreation. Although Zephyr’s pursuit of Chloris began as a forced union, it eventually becomes a marriage that brings forth the eternal beauty of spring.
