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
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