Apollo Vanquishing the Python

High on a ceiling of the Louvre, the sun god fires his arrows at a monstrous serpent. Delacroix painted it in 1850 and 1851, and in doing so finished a decorative project that had waited 188 years.

The story behind the painting

The Galerie d'Apollon, on the first floor of the Petite Galerie in the Louvre, was rebuilt by the architect Louis Le Vau after a fire in 1661. Charles Le Brun, first painter to Louis XIV, imagined a ceiling showing the course of the sun through time around the figure of Apollo, with allegories of the seasons and the constellations. He began in 1663, but fifteen years later, absorbed by Versailles, he had finished only four of the eleven large paintings for the vault. Work resumed in 1769 with Hugues Taraval, continued into the nineteenth century, and Delacroix finally completed the central compartment in 1851.

What to look for

The French Wikipedia article dates the oil on canvas between 1850 and 1851, while Wikidata simply records the 1850s. Wikidata gives its size as 800 by 750 cm, a vast surface meant to be seen from below. Among the subjects Wikidata lists are Apollo, his chariot, horses, the Sun, putti, the combat itself and the serpent Python. Look up and follow the struggle across the ceiling: the god of light set against the giant snake born of the Earth, a battle staged on the scale of the sky itself.

Meaning and intent

In Greek myth, Python was a female dragon in the form of a giant serpent, born of Gaia, the Earth. She guarded the springs of Mount Parnassus on the road to the oracle of Delphi and had the gift of prophecy. Hera, jealous of Zeus's union with Leto, sent Python to hunt Leto, who hid with Poseidon's help and gave birth to Artemis and Apollo on Delos. A few days after his birth, Apollo set out with a bow and arrows forged by Hephaestus, found the serpent in a wild gorge of Parnassus, and pierced her with golden arrows, avenging his mother.

Legacy

After his victory Apollo took over the oracle, covered the tripod of the Pythia with the serpent's skin and founded the Pythian Games, held every four years. Delacroix's ceiling was criticised in its time, and some concluded that Le Brun was no longer at home here: he was at Eugène Delacroix's. Yet Delacroix signed the work and closed a building site that had lasted 188 years. According to the article, the canvas was acquired from Arthur Stevens in Brussels in 1865 and integrated into the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon, where visitors still look up to it.