Diana and Apollo Killing Niobe's Children Jacques Louis David Buy Art Prints Now
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Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 14, 2023
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Niobe, the daughter to Tantalus, a son to Jupiter, was married well to the King of Thebes, known as Amphion, in that ill-fated town. When women of Thebes were called so that they can worship the goddess of the city called Latona, Niobe says that she is more praiseworthy of the women’s worship than goddess Latona.

Reciting a series of reasons like her wealth as well as her family, she includes her children as one of her claims. This is because she has fourteen children, seven daughters, plus seven sons against goddess Latona’s two (who happened to be the gods Diana and Apollo. Latona was nearly childless compared to Niobe.

Latona gets annoyed by Niobe’s pride and orders her children to punish Niobe. They find Niobe’s seven sons and kills them one by one, beginning with the oldest, with his arrows. Apollo had thought of sparing the life of the youngest child, but unfortunately, had released the arrow already. And Artemis killed the daughters. They employed poisoned arrows to eliminate them. Amphion, Niobes husband, swore to revenge against Apollo after seeing his dead sons. The News of these killings reaches Niobe quickly; her husband Amphion buries a carving knife in his chest to ends his pain. Niobe embraces the bodies of her dead sons, and afterward mocks Latona yet again, still declaring her victory.

When Niobe's daughters are putting the corpses of their brothers in coffins, Diana begins to kill the women with poisonous arrows. Six of them are killed quickly, and one is left. Afterward, in frenzy –fear their mother, as she wrapped herself with her clothes, she screamed, "Oh, please leave for me this remaining child! The smallest of them, my dearest daughter, only just leave me one!" however, even when she was still begging for life, it was taken from her remaining child. Without a child now, she bent down at the side of her slaughtered sons, her dead daughters, as well as the corpse of her husband.

The breeze by that time was not even moving her already fallen hair, and a cold chill spread on her flesh.this art has a lot. Her pale eyes, they moved not, her sour tongue turned inflexible in her firm jaws. Her gorgeous veins hard, and her fixed neck and unbending hands could not move nor bend. A distraught Niobe runs away to Mount Sipylus in Asia Minor, where she turns into stone as she weeps. The stone drips water to form the Achelous River.

Diana and Apollo Killing Niobe's Children has long been a well-liked subject for this sculptor. Their carving has always been an inspiration for the illustrative drawings as well as paintings. Regardless of, or probably as a result of the grim killing in this story, it has attracted several very artistic history painters.