Apollo Vanquishing the Python

This is not a picture you see on a wall. It is fixed to the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, the long gilded room that Louis XIV's painter Charles Le Brun had begun almost two centuries earlier and left unfinished. In 1850 the state gave the empty central panel to Eugene Delacroix, by then the ageing leader of French Romantic painting, and he seized it as a chance to measure himself against the old masters overhead. He shows Apollo, god of light, loosing his arrows on the serpent Python, chaos driven back by sun and order. He finished in about a year, and the gallery reopened in June 1851 under Louis-Napoleon, months before the coup that made him emperor.