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The painter included in his landscape a myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book. VI. Latona, mother to the twins Diana and Apollo, had fled from Juno's ire, after she fell pregnant by Juno's husband Jupiter. She finally arrived in Lycia. She was dying of thirst and she came forward to drink from the water of a lake. For some reason, however, the local inhabitants would not let her drink from it; they even stirred up the lake's muddy floor to make the water dirty. In response to this rudeness, Latona turned the lot of them into frogs.
The illustration of the myth, however, only takes up a small area of the pictorial space. For Savery the legend was less important than the wider landscape.
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