Sculptural group of Apollo and Daphne, artwork by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1622-25), now in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. The sculpture is inspired to the episode, narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I, 452-567), in which Apollo, fallen in love with Daphne, a Naiad or spring Nymph, daughter of the Earth and of the river god Ladon, was refused by the girl, who was transformed into a laurel tree by the intervention of her mother. Since that moment, the laurel became a plant sacred to the god Apollo.

[Source: http://berninilorenzo.blogspot.it/2011/06/apolo-e-dafne-uma-das-esculturas.html]