Metamorphoses – Ovid and the Arts
Published by Hannibal Books to coincide with exhibitions at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, (6 February – 25 May 2026) and the Galleria Borghese, Rome, (22 June – 20 September 2026).
The final word of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is “vivam”: I shall live.
It was prophetic. More than any other poet, Ovid lives on as a muse to fine artists to this day.
In turn, art inspired Ovid, the original recycler, for whom “all things change, but nothing dies”. His work is full of ekphrasis, or artful descriptions of other works of art – weaving, in the story of Arachne, painting, as Narcissus tinges daffodils, and perhaps, above all, sculpture as cosmos emerges from chaos, humans are petrified and, in the case of Pygmalion, a statue comes to life.
His appeal to successive generations from Michelangelo to Poussin to Rodin is in the challenges he lays down to depict torments that stretch the imagination and the tragic, overwhelming drama of metamorphosis when extreme change is the only option.
The tension Ovid repeatedly evoked between cold stone and warm, human flesh is brilliantly expressed in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s virtuosic statue “The Rape of Prosperina”, in which Pluto’s fingers press, leaving dents, into Prosperina’s thigh and waist.
It is part of the collection at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, whose general director Francesca Cappelletti has joined forces with Taco Dibbits, her counterpart at the Rijksmuseum, to make us understand Ovid’s power to inspire other artists – from Bernini’s sublime Baroque to the realists of Dutch art to the surrealists and beyond.
For curators, the problem is how to select and arrange the relatively straight renditions of Ovid’s stories, modern interpretations and whether to include more general metamorphoses as demonstrations of how artists respond to layers of complex meaning accrued over time. Cappelletti and Dibbits lean towards the highly ambitious and all-inclusive. Their prime appeal is to the connoisseur, but everyone should be compelled by the argument that Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a supreme source of artistic inspiration.
To take one example from the abundance, Medusa is another subject for Bernini. In what is, we are told, “perhaps the most impressive and certainly the most personal Medusa ever created in art”, his version in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, as opposed to the Galleria Borghese, captures the precise moment of Medusa’s metamorphosis from a beautiful woman with luxurious hair to a petrifying monster with a head of snakes. It is highly personal in that art historians consider it may have been a revenge portrait of Bernini’s former lover who betrayed him with his own brother and whom he had previously portrayed with great tenderness.
Even as a work of revenge, Bernini’s sculpture is decorous compared with Peter Paul Rubens’ grisly, severed “The Head of Medusa” with serpents made to resemble entrails.
Medusa in Ovid’s story was guilty only of beauty, which for him was a recurrent theme as women’s looks were their fate and that was that. It can still be the case, but now it is questioned and Medusa has come to symbolise not just victimhood, but female force.
Among the modern Medusa’s Juul Kraijer’s 1970 “Spawn” is an “alter-Medusa” that neutralises the potency of her petrifying stare as the snake-wrapped woman turns her gaze inward and the ambiguous result hovers between beauty and horror. We are appalled, we are fascinated and, as with all the best Ovid-inspired art, we find ourselves empathising with a living being trapped in circumstances that are extraordinary and yet no more improbable than the idea that one minute we can be breathing and the next as cold and dead as stone.
Barbara Lewis © 2026.
Metamorphoses – Ovid and the Arts
Published by Hannibal Books to coincide with exhibitions at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, (6 February – 25 May 2026) and the Galleria Borghese, Rome, (22 June – 20 September 2026).
The final word of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is “vivam”: I shall live.
It was prophetic. More than any other poet, Ovid lives on as a muse to fine artists to this day.
In turn, art inspired Ovid, the original recycler, for whom “all things change, but nothing dies”. His work is full of ekphrasis, or artful descriptions of other works of art – weaving, in the story of Arachne, painting, as Narcissus tinges daffodils, and perhaps, above all, sculpture as cosmos emerges from chaos, humans are petrified and, in the case of Pygmalion, a statue comes to life.
His appeal to successive generations from Michelangelo to Poussin to Rodin is in the challenges he lays down to depict torments that stretch the imagination and the tragic, overwhelming drama of metamorphosis when extreme change is the only option.
The tension Ovid repeatedly evoked between cold stone and warm, human flesh is brilliantly expressed in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s virtuosic statue “The Rape of Prosperina”, in which Pluto’s fingers press, leaving dents, into Prosperina’s thigh and waist.
It is part of the collection at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, whose general director Francesca Cappelletti has joined forces with Taco Dibbits, her counterpart at the Rijksmuseum, to make us understand Ovid’s power to inspire other artists – from Bernini’s sublime Baroque to the realists of Dutch art to the surrealists and beyond.
For curators, the problem is how to select and arrange the relatively straight renditions of Ovid’s stories, modern interpretations and whether to include more general metamorphoses as demonstrations of how artists respond to layers of complex meaning accrued over time. Cappelletti and Dibbits lean towards the highly ambitious and all-inclusive. Their prime appeal is to the connoisseur, but everyone should be compelled by the argument that Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a supreme source of artistic inspiration.
To take one example from the abundance, Medusa is another subject for Bernini. In what is, we are told, “perhaps the most impressive and certainly the most personal Medusa ever created in art”, his version in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, as opposed to the Galleria Borghese, captures the precise moment of Medusa’s metamorphosis from a beautiful woman with luxurious hair to a petrifying monster with a head of snakes. It is highly personal in that art historians consider it may have been a revenge portrait of Bernini’s former lover who betrayed him with his own brother and whom he had previously portrayed with great tenderness.
Even as a work of revenge, Bernini’s sculpture is decorous compared with Peter Paul Rubens’ grisly, severed “The Head of Medusa” with serpents made to resemble entrails.
Medusa in Ovid’s story was guilty only of beauty, which for him was a recurrent theme as women’s looks were their fate and that was that. It can still be the case, but now it is questioned and Medusa has come to symbolise not just victimhood, but female force.
Among the modern Medusa’s Juul Kraijer’s 1970 “Spawn” is an “alter-Medusa” that neutralises the potency of her petrifying stare as the snake-wrapped woman turns her gaze inward and the ambiguous result hovers between beauty and horror. We are appalled, we are fascinated and, as with all the best Ovid-inspired art, we find ourselves empathising with a living being trapped in circumstances that are extraordinary and yet no more improbable than the idea that one minute we can be breathing and the next as cold and dead as stone.
Barbara Lewis © 2026.
By Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, art, books, exhibitions, history, painting, sculpture • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, history, painting, sculpture