In 1850 Delacroix received the most important commission of his artistic life, involving the decoration of the Senate and Palais Bourbon libraries and the monumental Salon de la Paix at the Hotel de Ville, including the decoration of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre. Following a fire, Le Vau had reconstructed this historical gallery for Louis XIV, while the decoration was entrusted to Charles Le Brun. Then in 1678, Louis left Paris for Versailles and work had ceased. In 1793, after the French Revolution, the Louvre had become a museum and the Second Republic deemed the completion of the decoration a Republican duty. Le Brun had intended a subject dear to the heart of the ‘Sun’ King: Apollo on his chariot. For Delacroix, to make his mark at the very heart of the Louvre — the home of all the great masters — by decorating the central part of a ceiling was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Before he began the commission, he left France for Belgium, feeling the need to study Rubens’ works one more time.
The subject of Apollo Slays Python is taken from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses and concerns the victory of Good over Evil, taking the general form of beauty vanquishing the ugly and genius overcoming ignorance. Delacroix honours Le Brun’s intention to depict the mythological figure of Apollo in the gallery of that name, though the artist extends the allegory with a further message close to his own heart: intelligence wrestling with barbarity and light struggling through darkness. By emphasising the contrast between the two parts of his composition, the world of the sun above and that of darkness beneath, Delacroix transforms Le Brun’s project and raises it to the plane of an eternal symbol.