Apollo Belvedere of aesthetic perfection for Europeans and westernized parts of the world. It is now in the "Cortile del Belvedere" of the Pio-Clementine Museum of the Vatican Museums complex. The Greek god Apollo is depicted as a standing archer having just shot an arrow. Although there is no agreement as to the precise narrative detail being depicted, the conventional view has been that he has just slain the serpent Python, the chthonic serpent guarding Delphi—making the sculpture a "Pythian Apollo". Alternatively, it may be the slaying of the giant Tityos, who threatened his mother Leto, or the episode of the Niobids.
The Crow and the Snake Croxall the story served as a warning against covetousness and for Thomas Bewick it illustrated the danger of being ruled by brute appetite. The latter interpretation had earlier been preferred by Guillaume La Perrière in his emblem book "Le theatre des bons engins" (1544). There the greedy crow is poisoned internally after swallowing the snake, “thinking it tasted good as sugar or venison”. The Crow and the Snake The Crow or Raven and the Snake or Serpent is one of Aesop's Fables and numbered 128 in the Perry Index. Alternative Greek versions exist and two of these were adopted during