A drawing made by Poussin for the poet Giovanni Battista Marino in Paris, c.1622-23 (see RCIN 911933 for details).

Although the Massimi catalogue describes this as the transformation of the nymph Biblis, the figure at the centre is clearly a youth, not a girl. The drawing is probably a pendant to RCIN 911940 and shows the transformation of Acis into a river-god after he was crushed by the boulder thrown by Polyphemus:

The purple blood from his crusht body fled;
Which presently forsooke the native red:
First like a raine-discoloured streame appeares,
Then christalline. The rock in sunder teares....
From whence a youth arose above the wast,
His horned browes with quivering reeds imbrac't.
(Metamorphoses, XIII, 885ff, trans. Sandys 1632)

Illustrations to Ovid normally compressed the two events of Polyphemus hurling the boulder and the transformation of Acis into a single scene. A drawing attributed to Giacinto Calandrucci at Holkham Hall likewise shows Galatea leaping from her dolphin-drawn shell chariot towards her transformed lover. It is possible that Calandrucci knew the Marino series, for the dolphins and nymphs set before an oblique shore are very similar to the Marino drawing of Thetis and Achilles (RCIN 911934).