Apollo and Daphne was the last of a number of important works commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese from Gian Lorenzo Bernini that helped to define Baroque sculpture.

Apollo and Daphne was commissioned after Borghese had given an important work of his patronage, Bernini's The Rape of Proserpina (1621–22), to Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi.

Giuliano Finelli, who was a very gifted sculptor, undertook the finer details that show Daphne's conversion from human to tree, such as the twigs and leafs springing from her hands, and her windswept hair.

[7] Viewing the sculpture from this angle allowed the observer to see the reactions of Apollo and Daphne simultaneously, and thus to understand the narrative of the story in a single instant, without the need to move position.

[9] Like Bernini's 1622 sculpture The Rape of Proserpina, Apollo and Daphne has a cartouche with a moral aphorism by Pope Urban VIII.

When Phoebus (Apollo), fated by Cupid's love-exciting arrow, sees Daphne, the maiden daughter of Peneus, a river god, he is filled with wonder at her beauty and consumed by desire.

These acclaimed statues had qualities the church was seeking, and they helped propel Bernini on his path to become the chief visual propagandist of the Counter-Reformation, and the single most important creator of Baroque Rome.

An English travel writer in 1829 noted Bernini's technical skill but added that the sculpture "bears all the want of judgment, taste, and knowledge of that age", going on to criticize the appearance of Apollo for being too like a shepherd and not enough like a god.

Robert Torsten Petersson calls it "an extraordinary masterpiece ... suffused with an energy that works out of the tips of the laurel leaves and Apollo's hand and drapery.

Dickerson III says The Rape of Proserpina, David, and Apollo and Daphne are “widely considered the high points of Bernini’s entire career — and even of all seventeenth century sculpture.”[16]