Apollo pursuing Daphne

The sun god Apollo – identifiable by the golden rays around his head – pursues a young woman whose fingers are sprouting foliage. This is Daphne, a river nymph with whom the god has fallen in love. She rejects his advances and, rather than allowing him to catch her, is turned into a laurel, the tree sacred to poetry (Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 540ff.)This is one of ten frescoes which originally adorned the walls of a room known as the Stanza di Apollo in a garden pavilion in the grounds of the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati, near Rome. Eight of the frescoes, which have been transferred to canvas, are in our collection. All show stories of Apollo, mostly as told by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorposes.The iconographical scheme of the pavilion was conceived by Domenichino’s friend Giovanni Battista Agucchi to glorify the Aldobrandini family and to express their philosophical and religious ideas. The precise significance of each scene is not always clear but Apollo as the sun god was also the god of art and music and the Stanza was a temple to the arts. Here, sensual desire is transformed into poetry.This scene was on the left-hand wall of the Stanza, and is painted as a trompe l'oeil tapestry, with an embroidered border (as is Apollo killing the Cyclops, which was on the same wall). Domenichino himself was responsible for the overall design of the frescoes, basing it on a long tradition of illustrated editions of Ovid’s famous poem. He may have referred to illustrations in Antonio Tempesta’s 1606 edition, although he revised the composition of each scene to make it clearer and more legible.Many preparatory studies by Domenichino survive for this project. A pen and ink drawing in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle is very closely followed in this fresco, and a black chalk figure study for Daphne is in the Louvre in Paris. Although designed by Domenichino himself, much of the actual painting seems to have been left to assistants.