Leonardo da Vinci, Louise Bourgeois, Caravaggio, Titian, Rodin, Tintoretto, Rubens, Poussin, Bernini… What would the history of Western art be without Ovid’s Metamorphoses? Until May 25, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is presenting a unique exhibition on this major source of inspiration for painters, sculptors and poets, also nicknamed the “Artists’ Bible”.
No museum had previously devoted an exhibition of this importance to this subject. HAS” Across 2000 years, we want to show what is happening when the gods are in contact with mortals “, explains Tacco Dibbits, general director of the Rijksmuseum, during the opening. With the help of the Borghese Gallery in Rome, where the exhibition will travel for a second stage, the Dutch museum has brought together 80 works from all over the world. Every painting, sculpture, photograph, video, object of art illustrates one of the many myths listed in theMétamorphoses (1st century) by Ovid (43 BC-18 AD), this reference work which tells often dramatic stories where gods and humans are transformed into hybrid beings, animals, plants or stones.
The poet and the artist, creators of metamorphoses
The exhibition opens with the metamorphosis of poets and artists who transform words into images to create works of art. We discover in this first spaceThe poet’s inspiration (1628) by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). In this painting, the painter represents a poet, probably Ovid, who kneels before Apollo. The god makes him drink from a golden cup, which symbolizes divine inspiration. Poussin thus makes a direct reference to the Roman author who described Apollo as the source of all poetic inspiration.
Nicolas Poussin, L’Inspiration du poète, 1628, huile sur toile, Lower Saxony State Museum Hannover Photo © Connaissance des Arts / Agathe Hakoun
The creation of humanity
In hisMétamorphosesOvid tells the myth of Prometheus, a titan who made the first man from clay. Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) evokes this legend in his Prométhée (1911) asleep with a head  reduced to its essential geometric linesmade of Carrara marble. We recognize an ear, a nose and fine eyebrows drawn on an ovoid head, a shape which symbolizesthe origin and the life. Not far away, Birth (1981) by Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) illustrates the creation of the female body, associated with earth and water, in the form of a vulva which contains smoking ashes. A photograph that evokes the fertility and generative force of women.
Constantin Brancusi, Prometheus, 1911, marble, Philadelphia Museum of Art Photo © Connaissance des Arts / Agathe Hakoun
Ana Mendieta, Birth (Gunpowder Works), 1981, tirage à la gélatine argentique. Courtesy the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo © Connaissance des Arts / Agathe Hakoun
Arachne, weaver of stories
Sometimes the most beautiful metamorphoses are those that are happening right now. In his painting Arachne and Minerva (1695), Luca Giordano (1634-1705) painted the hands of the mortal in the process of changing into spider legs, a web weaving between her fingers. In the poet’s text, Arachne challenges Minerva to a weaving competition. Faced with her talent, the goddess transforms the mortal into a spider. HAS” Ovid identified with Arachne, considered her a weaver of stories and often took the side of women, who are often victims in mythology », says Frits Scholten, commissioner of the exposition. DansÂSpider Couple (2003) by Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), the animal takes on a whole new meaning. The sculptor created a giant spider stretching its legs, accompanied by a smaller one. Both tender and threatening, protective and predatory, the giant arthropod pays homage to the artist’s mother, who restored tapestries.
Luca Giordano, Arachné et Minerve (détail), 1695, huile sur toile, Patrimonio Nacional, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid. Photo © Connaissance des Arts / Agathe Hakoun
The loves of Jupiter
Among the most popular myths ofMétamorphosesimpossible not to mention those linked to loves of Jupiter. Golden rain, swan, bull, satyr, cloud… the king of the gods took a thousand and one forms to seduce, with or without their consent, young nymphs or women. The Rijksmuseum brings together in the same room masterpieces that illustrate these stories. We findDanaé (c. 1552) by Titian (c. 1489-1576), a princess fertilized by Jupiter in the form of golden rain. In front of her,Leda and the Swan (before 1517) after Leonardo da Vinci, attributed to Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, represent un plein de grâce in a family scene which brings together the wife of the fallen king of Sparta, Jupiter and their children Castor and Pollux, hatched from an egg. And among the most surprising metamorphoses, let us cite that of the myth of Jupiter and Io ​​​​​​in which the god attacks the young priestess by taking the appearance of a cloud. Correggio moves away from the Ovidian story here by highlighting not the brutality of the assault but the sensuality of the young woman whose hands and lips here seem to abandon themselves to the caresses of the clouds.
Correggio, Jupiter and Io, circa 1530, oil on canvas, Vienna Museum of Art History
A metamorphosis activated by the visitor
It’s the occasion of the exhibition, the Louvre musée ready to goSleeping hermaphrodite. This Roman copy of a Greek statue represents the body of the son of the Greek gods Hermes and Aphrodite, fused with the nymph Salmacis to become half man and half woman. In the 17th century, Cardinal Borghese asked the sculptor Bernini to complete the ancient marble by adding a mattress under the Hermaphrodite. Usually exhibited among the Greek and Roman antiquities of the Louvre, the masterpiece is displayed here in majesty in the center of a room plunged into darkness. Visitors can move around around him and thus assist to this metamorphosis in act where the feminine and the masculine combine.
« Everything changes, nothing dies »
The exhibition concludes with theApollo and Marsyas (1696) by Luca Giordano. In mythology, the satyr challenges the god to a music competition but his arrogance costs him dearly: Apollo flays him alive. During the Renaissance, under the influence in particular of the Neoplatonic movementthis bloody story symbolise the liberation of the soul of body. Nothing really disappears, the soul simply changes body, like a continuous metamorphosis. A paradoxically positive interpretation in the face of the violence of the scene. This last room thus pays homage to the words of Ovid “Everything changes, nothing dies », bien avant «ÂNothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed» by the chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794).
Luca Giordano, Apollon et Marsyas, 1696, oil on canvas, National Heritage, Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid. Photo © Connaissance des Arts / Agathe Hakoun
