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A vertical form of roughly sixty-seven centimetres, set on a log round still ringed with bark. High on the reddish-brown shaft, polished smooth, a woman's face surfaces in the grain: calm features, lowered eyelids, hair falling along the flank like a veil. Nothing separates the figure from the wood; she rises out of its surface and stays held in it. The carving stops just short of detachment, at the moment one still hesitates: flesh turning to wood, or wood climbing back toward flesh. A metamorphosis caught on the side of rest.
Bernini's *Daphne* remains the archetype of sculpted metamorphosis, living matter caught becoming another. Here baroque virtuosity gives way to direct carving, and the scene has shed its terror: eyelids lowered, the face rests.