For some time academics held Ovid’s works in low esteem, but his immense importance for and influence on poets and visual artists never ceased. As classicists are increasingly exploring the reception of the ancient world, the story of Ovid’s influence on writers such as Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, T.S. Eliot and Ted Hughes has received a great deal of attention.
Discussions concerning Ovid’s reception in the visual arts tend to be dominated by a search for explicit literary sources, often obscuring the importance of artistic conventions and innovations. Paul Barolsky’s title, Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art From Botticelli to Picasso, may suggest a text-centred art history of Ovidian receptions, but he thoughtfully reflects on the complex relationship between literature and the visual arts. Throughout he focuses not so much on the Ovidian origin of visual narratives, but on the ways in which artists have made Ovid’s transformations and innovations, his wit, humour and passion, their own.
A particularly fascinating aspect of Ovidian metamorphoses discussed is the adaptation of one myth’s defining motif in the narration of another whereby two stories are simultaneously linked and transformed as they become part of a larger narrative framework. As Ovid links Pan and Apollo in their vain pursuit of nymphs whose transformations spoil these advances, so does he tie together Pygmalion and Narcissus in their love for a “work of art”.
In the transformation of Ovidian text into images, boundaries between literature and the visual arts are crossed in the metamorphosis of one medium’s story into another’s interpretation of it. In discussing concepts of narrative art, Barolsky explores the limitations of treating Ovidian art as storytelling. Rather, as in the case of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, 1556-59, the representation of a pregnant moment may be seen as the artist’s prompting the viewer himself to retell and reflect on the Ovidian narrative. Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25, not only transforms the narrative into sculpture, but also changes its most prominent artistic model, the Apollo Belvedere, from a single freestanding statue captured in a moderate forward step, into a dynamic sculpture group famous for its vivid portrayal of movement. This statue plays with the Ovidian paradox of turning stone to flesh and flesh to stone, explored most fully in the stories of Deucalion and Pyrrha and of Pygmalion. The image of Pygmalion’s statue’s awakening in painting or sculpture, as in Gérôme’s or Rodin’s Pygmalion, draws further attention to the Ovidian paradox and to the artist’s role in conveying it.
Such metamorphoses are, of course, not limited to Barolsky’s collection of Ovidian art. In literature, too, we encounter Ovidian characters such as Diana and Actaeon (as Faunus) in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, but see also their transformation into other, non-Ovidian, characters such as Spenser’s Errour or Milton’s Sin, both reincarnations of Ovid’s Scylla.
As Barolsky takes his reader through his Ovidian story of (mostly) visual responses to the Metamorphoses, he takes on his subject’s narrative style, weaving different narrative threads through the book. A number of sculptures and paintings are considered from different perspectives, always linking the various aspects of Ovidian art. The absence of citation or references make this book more useful to a general reader than an academic one. Nevertheless, this Ovidian narrative, a carmen perpetuum scored from Botticelli to Picasso, is an enjoyable read.
Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso
Paul Barolsky
Yale University Press, 192pp, £25, $45 (hb)
Sophie Schoess is a doctoral student in classical languages and literature at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In her thesis, she traces the receptions of Ariadne’s abandonment in literature and the visual arts from antiquity through the early modern period, focusing in particular on the motif of Ariadne as a statue or image in literary narratives of the abandonment.