Desiderio and Diletto: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne

Abstract

This essay examines Gian Lorenzo Bernini's famous statue of Apollo and Daphne in light of a tradition of poetics and art theory in which vision and touch play central roles. The interaction between these senses is explicitly figured in Bernini's statue, which deploys all the marvels of the sculptor's craft in the representation of the god of poetry, a sister art. The statue, created at a time when the role of the senses in both poetry and art was being scrutinized, emblematizes the poetics of Bernini's own sculptural enterprise, which was, at this moment, undergoing its own momentous metamorphosis.