CRITICAL QUOTES

• Andrea Bolland - "it effectively marked the end of Bernini's large-scale work for the cardinal and signalled a turning point in the lives of both patron and sculptor"
• "We may even view Bernini's Apollo and Daphne as an emblem of change in fortune" - Bolland
• "Bernini's sculpted metamorphosis also coincides with a period of transition in his own career as in the mid 1620's, his principal source of patronage shifted from the Borghese family to the newly ascendant Barberini family" - Bolland
• "Apollo and Daphne was created at a time when Bernini had just begun to establish himself as Rome's leading sculptor" - Bolland
• "It is impossible for false taste and base feeling to sink lower" - John Ruskin
• "[Bernini is] a rare man, sublime artificer, born by Divine Disposition for the glory of Rome to illuminate the century" - Pope Urban VIII
• "True likeness - the kind he wanted to capture in his sculptures - was the animation of character, expressed in the movements of bodies and faces." - Simon Schama
• "Bernini's marble does indeed seem to mutate into other substances: fibrous rope; brilliant steel; locks of hair." - Simon Schama
• "Apollo is thwarted by a lightning metamorphosis as Daphne's body seems to climb into the sky like the tree she is instantly becoming." - Schama
• "the stupendous capacity of the sculptor to render the nanosecond with such material vividness" - Schama