Athena’s work showed the gods of Mount Olympus, august and glorious. Arachne wove a scene of gods behaving badly: Jupiter, in the form of a bull, seducing Europa; Jupiter, in the form of a swan, seducing Leda; Jupiter, at it again, as a shower of gold, seducing Danaë. And so on (and on) through the misdemeanours of Bacchus and the ravishments of Saturn. In punishment for her presumption, Athena ripped up Arachne’s tapestry and turned her into a spider, eternally weaving marvellous webs.
It is one of the most enduring stories told by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the great compendium of transformation tales taken from the Greek myths. You may not know every name — Cadmus and Harmonia? Cephalus and Procris? Anyone? — but you will know the stories of Athena and Arachne, of the hopelessly mismatched lovers Narcissus and Echo (echo, echo) and of Daedalus and Icarus, who flew too close to the sun.
Written in the early 1st century AD, the Metamorphoses have had a long afterlife. Chaucer picked and mixed from Ovid. He is threaded through Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the plays of Shakespeare. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the rude mechanicals rehearse, perform and mangle Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (“O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall”). Ted Hughes brilliantly recast the Metamorphoses in his 1997 Tales from Ovid.
But it is in art that the Metamorphoses have truly taken flight. Ovid’s stories of transformation, rage, lust, cruelty, cunning, revenge and despair have inspired painters including Titian, Correggio, Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens and sculptors such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi and Louise Bourgeois (all those Arachne-like spiders). The intertwined threads of Ovid and his artistic followers are to be explored in a new exhibition, Metamorphoses, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Gods and monsters abound.
Here you will find Perseus holding up the severed head of Medusa in a bronze statue by Benvenuto Cellini and in a painting by Sebastiano Ricci. Here is Narcissus, lips parted as if to kiss his reflection, in a painting by Caravaggio. Here is the grisly spectacle of the centaur Marsyas flayed by Apollo in a painting by Luca Giordano. Here, too, are Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s heads with their turnip noses, onion cheeks and chestnut-case goatees. Not strictly in Ovid, but transformations nonetheless.
The Metamorphoses (“meta”, change; “morphosis”, form) were written late in Ovid’s life, while he was in exile in Tomis, now Constanta, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. He was born in 43BC in Sulmo — modern-day Sulmona, in the Italian region of Abruzzo. His father hoped he would make his name in law, but, in Ovid’s telling, “the Muse was drawing me secretly to her work”. Every time he tried to write without meter, each line came out in verse. He rose to fame in the age of the Emperor Augustus, inventing a wholly new genre now called Latin love elegy. His poems were amorous and satirical, pitting high style against base passions. Somehow or other he angered Augustus, who banished him to Tomis, where he finished the Metamorphoses — longer than Virgil’s Aeneid and about as long as Homer’s Odyssey — shortly before his death in AD17.
The stories of the Metamorphoses have appealed to artists for many reasons. They are, first and foremost, rattling good yarns. They also offer unusual visual challenges. How do you turn silken flesh into rough bark or spectators into stone? How do you paint a shower of gold? What is art but an almost alchemical act of transformation? Ground pigment and a little linseed oil or beaten egg and glue can become anything and everything: a painted chapel, an altarpiece, the Mona Lisa. The sculptor takes a block of marble and summons from it a man, a woman, a lion, a lamentation.
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The Metamorphoses are full of craftsmen, artists and architects. Prometheus adds raindrops to clay and, in Hughes’s lovely, loose interpretation, “rolled it under his hands, pounded it, thumbed it, moulded it, into a body shaped like that of a god”. Arachne and Athena weave their tapestries. Pygmalion, the sculptor, disappointed by flesh-and-blood women, carves a perfect, unspeaking example from ivory. (One can imagine the pleasure with which Jean-Léon Gérôme painted the pinkening buttocks of the statue in his Pygmalion and Galatea at the moment Galatea comes to life.) Vulcan doesn’t just bang out suits of armour, he is a consummate silversmith who, for the doors of the sun god’s palace, forges reliefs showing the oceans encircling the world and the glittering signs of the zodiac. Daedalus is a master artificer and plotter of labyrinths. Narcissus is more enraptured by an image than by the real world.
Ovid is a remarkably painterly poet. He doesn’t just tell you that Arachne wove a tapestry or that Daedalus made some wings. He tells you that the threads were of Tyrian purple and that the feathers were arranged in a rising slope like the reeds of rustic Pan pipes. He can be viscerally visual, as in this account of the flaying of Marsyas: “The skin was peeled from his flesh, and his body was turned into one great wound; the blood was pouring all over him, muscles were fully exposed, his uncovered veins convulsively quivered; the palpitating intestines could well be counted, and so could the organs glistening through the wall of his chest.” In Giordano’s painting of the flaying of Marsyas, on loan to the Rijksmuseum, Apollo braces one foot against the centaur’s leg as he works at the skin with a knife. With his spare hand he pulls at a swatch of flesh dripping blood like a dishcloth.
Violence comes in many guises in Ovid. It can be sickeningly near the bone, as with Marsyas, and it can be almost burlesque in its excess. In the Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, Theseus hurls an antique wine bowl, richly embossed with figures, into the face of an opponent. “As globules of blood and fragments of brain poured out of the wounds, the centaur, vomiting wine from his mouth, fell backwards and drummed with his heels on the sodden sand.”
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Often, violence comes in disguise. I wrote earlier in this piece about Jupiter “seducing” Europa, Leda and Danaë. They are really rapes. Artists have tended to gloss over and give gloss to these assaults. There are two paintings by Correggio in the Rijksmuseum exhibition. One is Jupiter as a dark cloud, and Io; the other is Jupiter as a golden shower, and Danaë. In the Danaë painting Jupiter’s caressing hand, half-formed, half-dissolved in mist, is ingeniously done. But there’s no life in the painted figures of Io and Danaë, no fear, no resistance, no reluctance, no fury. Danaë readies herself to lie back and think of Argos. Io submits without a murmur. They were painted by a man, for a man: Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua.
The most famous work of art inspired by Ovid is Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. It’s a sculpture that truly seems to transform before your eyes. Fleetness gives way to fixity, fingernails become bay leaves, toes take root in the ground. Unlike Correggio’s willing victims, Bernini’s Daphne is all struggle. Everything happens at once in this marble pas de deux. Apollo’s hand fastens on Daphne’s waist. Her mouth opens in a scream. She is terrified that he has caught her, more terrified still by her transformation into a laurel tree — deliverance and imprisonment together. A carapace of bark is creeping across her body. Her legs are half-encased by trunk.
Surely, surely, the Bernini is travelling to the Rijks? I am told that, regrettably, Apollo and Daphne has never, and will never, leave the Borghese. But there are at least four flights a day from Amsterdam Schiphol to Rome Fiumicino if you would like to make it a double.
The Rijks exhibition promises many other treasures and transformations, from silversmiths’ dishes worthy of Vulcan’s workshop to Brancusi’s enigmatic Prometheus. Ovid’s Metamorphoses ends with a vow. The author may not live forever, but his poems “shall sweep me into eternity, higher than all the stars. My name shall never be forgotten.”
