Scipione Borghese Villa Borghese, Bernini produced a life-sized figure of David (1623) and three sculptural groups with mythological themes. The culminating work in this series that Bernini created for Borghese, Apollo and Daphne (1623–25), represents an incident popular in Italian poetry of the early seventeenth century, and ultimately derived from the Metamorphoses by the ancient Roman poet Ovid. Bernini depicts Apollo reaching out toward the river nymph Daphne just as she is transformed into a laurel tree by her father in order to prevent her from being burned by the touch of the god of the sun. Understood within its original intellectual
The Wood Nymph life, they experienced a certain type of female sexual adventurousness that their wives could not easily match." He hypothesizes that "The Wood Nymph" and other contemporaneous compositions were Sibelius's method of dealing with the emotional consequences of this and his guilt towards his wife Aino. With its focus on sexual fantasy, "The Wood Nymph" differs sharply from the Rydberg poem "Snöfrid" which Sibelius set in 1900. In "", Gunnar, the patriotic hero, resists a water nymph's sensuous "embrace" to instead "fight the hopeless fight" for his country and "die nameless". The contrast between Björn and Gunnar, Murtomäki argues, reflects Sibelius's