Italian Baroque art Milan. The city hosted numerous formidable artists, architects and painters of that period, such as Caravaggio. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was the leading sculptor of his day and the favorite artist of several popes and their relatives, who gave him important commissions. His ‘Apollo and Daphne’ in the Villa Borghese in Rome illustrates how he could precisely capture in white marble the dramatic moment when Daphne, fleeing the pursuing sun god, realizes she is metamorphosing into a laurel tree. This ability to make expressive dramatic narratives in sculpture can also be seen in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645–52), created
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