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.
Woman Bitten by a Serpent Woman Bitten by a Serpent Woman Bitten by a Serpent is an 1847 marble sculpture by Auguste Clésinger (1814-1883), now in the musée d'Orsay in Paris. It was commissioned by the industrialist Alfred Mosselman and first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1847, where it and Thomas Couture's "The Romans in their Decadence" were the most commented-upon works. Clésinger had modelled his work on a life-cast of the Mossellman's mistress, the demi-mondaine Apollonie Sabatier (1822-1890), later Charles Baudelaire's muse. The direct use of a life cast as the basis for a sculpture was highly controversial in the 19th century, particularly