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
Daphne Daphne Daphne (; , meaning "laurel") a minor figure in Greek mythology, is a naiad, a variety of female nymph associated with fountains, wells, springs, streams, brooks and other bodies of freshwater. She is said by ancient sources variously to have been a daughter of the river god Peneus and the nymph Creusa in Thessaly (Hyginus "Fabulae" 203) or of Ladon (the river Ladon in Arcadia) or Pineios, and to Ge (or Gaia) (Pausanias and others). There are several versions of the myth in which she appears, but the general narrative appears in Greco-Roman mythology, is that due to a