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
Lotus tree sub-evergreen tree native to Africa that grows to about 25 feet bearing yellowish green flowers, as well as "Ziziphus lotus", a plant with an edible fruit closely related to the jujube, native to North Africa and the islands in the Gulf of Gabes such as Jerba. In Ovid's "Metamorphoses", the nymph Lotis was the beautiful daughter of Neptune, the god of water and the sea. In order to flee the violent attention of Priapus, she invoked the assistance of the gods, who answered her prayers by turning her into a lotus tree. The Book of Job has two lines (),