Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Python.
The gallery
Apollo Slaying Python (Apollon vainqueur du serpent Python)
Eugène Delacroix, 1850–1851
The vast central canvas of the Galerie d'Apollon ceiling at the Louvre, executed by Delacroix in oil on mounted canvas (about 8 by 7.5 metres) to complete the seventeenth-century decorative scheme begun by Charles Le Brun. Apollo, radiant in his sun-chariot at the apex of the composition, looses an arrow into the writhing, dark-coiled Python far below, who is pierced amid storm-wracked clouds and floodwater. Delacroix orchestrates the triumph of light over darkness — blazing yellows and golds around the god set against the purples and shadow of the serpent — as a cosmic allegory of order conquering primeval chaos, the divine sun-god slaying the earth-born monster of Delphi.
Apollo Victorious over the Python
Pietro Francavilla, 1591
A marble statue by the Flemish-born Mannerist sculptor Pietro Francavilla, a pupil of Giambologna, now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It commemorates Apollo's first triumph: having slain the great serpent Python with his bow and arrows, the youthful god stands in graceful contrapposto with the dead monster coiled lifeless at his feet. The work celebrates the slaying at Delphi from which Apollo took the name Pythian and the oracle as his own, rendered with the elongated elegance and spiralling poise characteristic of late-sixteenth-century Florentine sculpture.
Apollo Killing Python (illustration to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book I)
Virgil Solis, 1581
An engraving by the Nuremberg printmaker Virgil Solis made to illustrate Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book I, lines 434–451), the passage in which Earth, fertilized by the sun after the great flood, brings forth the enormous serpent Python that terrorizes the new race of men. The print shows Apollo drawing his bow against the immense coiling dragon, the deed that, in Ovid, leads the god to institute the Pythian Games in commemoration. As a widely circulated book illustration it helped fix the iconography of the Apollo-and-Python episode for early-modern European readers.
Leto with Artemis and Apollo Escaping from Python (relief)
Unknown, 4th–3rd century BC
A Hellenistic Greek relief, now in the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, depicting the goddess Leto fleeing with her twin children Apollo and Artemis from the pursuing serpent Python. The scene draws on the tradition (preserved by Hyginus) in which Python, fated to die at the hands of Leto's offspring, hunted the pregnant goddess across the world before she could give birth — the prelude to Apollo's later return to Parnassus to slay the dragon. The carving is a rare ancient depiction that frames Python not in its death but as the threatening pursuer of the unborn god.