Apollo e Pitone

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1811, and to make sure viewers read it right he attached lines of his own verse about the young god cleansing the earth. The Greek story is simple enough. Apollo, god of light and healing, shoots the Python, a monstrous serpent bred from the mud left behind by a great flood. Turner sets the fight in a vast rocky landscape where the daylight itself seems to be doing the killing, the god small against the cliffs and the dying snake coiled below him. He was in his mid-thirties and had just been made the Academy's professor of perspective. Low and to the right, a smaller worm creeps from the serpent's wound, Turner's hint that the evil is not entirely finished.