Apollo and the Python

Apollo stands here in the pose of the Apollo Belvedere, the antique marble in the Vatican that Rubens had studied in Rome. The Python has just been killed. The serpent lies coiled in the lower right corner, stuck with the great number of arrows Ovid describes. The god, though, turns his head back over his shoulder toward the small figure of Cupid in the air. That turn is the subject of the panel. In the first book of the Metamorphoses Apollo mocks Cupid for calling himself an archer, and Cupid answers with the arrow that sends the god chasing the nymph Daphne, who escapes by becoming a laurel. One story ends and the next begins on the same small piece of wood. The Rubens scholar Julius Held noticed a change of mind in Apollo's forward foot, painted over once. Cornelis de Vos carried the design onto the large canvas, and the Daphne that follows it is his too.