Apollo and Daphne, after Lorenzo Bernini’s Marble Group in the Galleria Borghese, Rome

Liotard has here copied another famous marble sculpture. As well as providing a landscape and stormy sky, he has added the river god Peneus, who changed the nymph into a laurel tree to prevent her being ravished by Apollo. Liotard’s attempts to animate marble sculptures are an idiosyncratic contribution to the paragone, the long-running debate as to the relative superiority of painting and sculpture.