{"id":266059,"date":"2026-02-03T20:43:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T20:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/266059\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T20:43:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T20:43:15","slug":"a-lot-of-ovid-a-bit-of-stephen-fry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/266059\/","title":{"rendered":"a lot of Ovid, a bit of Stephen Fry"},"content":{"rendered":"

The epic poem Metamorphoses, written more than 2,000 years ago by the Roman poet Ovid, has inspired writers and artists for centuries, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Caravaggio and Rubens. <\/p>\n

Ovid\u2019s work, despite its pagan subject matter and erotic overtones, has been described as the \u201cBible for artists\u201d as it is perhaps second only to the holy text in its influence upon western literature and art. <\/p>\n

Now the poem is the subject of an exhibition of more than 80 masterpieces inspired by the text, which have defined the golden ages of art and literature.<\/p>\n

The show will open at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in co-operation with Rome\u2019s Galleria Borghese, and will feature an audio guide narration of Ovid\u2019s stories and how artists have interpreted his work, compellingly relayed by Sir Stephen Fry.<\/p>\n

Listen to Stephen Fry\u2019s audio commentary<\/p>\n

The exhibition includes works from sculptors such as Bernini, Brancusi, Cellini and Rodin, as well as painters including Titian, Correggio, Caravaggio, Rubens and Magritte. <\/p>\n

\u2022 Why do artists keep coming back to Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses?<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOver 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses about what happens if gods touch mortals, human beings,\u201d said Taco Dibbits<\/a>, the director of the Rijksmuseum.<\/p>\n

\u201cOvid\u2019s mythic retelling of the encounters between gods, humans and nature, and the transformations to which they gave rise, capture our imagination today as much as ever \u2014 despite being penned over 2,000 years ago in what is no longer a living language. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey can do this because they are so vivid, imaginative, comprehensive and, above all, universally human.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The exhibition opens at the Rijksmuseum this week<\/p>\n

RIJKSMUSEUM ALBERTINE DIJKEMA<\/p>\n

Ovid (43BC-17AD) finished the poem while he was in exile for upsetting Emperor Augustus on the edge of the civilised world at Tomis, on what is now the Romanian coast of the Black Sea.<\/p>\n

The exhibition, which will be showing at the Rijksmuseum from February 6 to May 25 before moving to the Galleria Borghese, relays the message from Ovid that \u201call things change but nothing dies\u201d as gods, men and women are transformed into animals, plants or rocks by their earthly passions.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The best art exhibitions to book for 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

As a pagan text, Ovid\u2019s poetry, with stories in which human creativity rivalled or surpassed that of the gods \u2014 even if punishment followed \u2014 was considered risqu\u00e9 in a Christian world. However, the church would use his examples of the scandalous behaviours of the Roman gods as allegories for heathen beliefs.<\/p>\n

His tales of Jupiter\u2019s rapes, Athena\u2019s jealousy and Arachne\u2019s pride, Narcissus and Echo, Daedalus and Icarus, Pygmalion\u2019s triumph over nature with his sculpture of perfect woman \u2014 and many more \u2014 have been a lodestone for western culture.<\/p>\n

\"Experts<\/p>\n

Sleeping Hermaphroditus by Bernini<\/p>\n

ALBERTINE DIJKEMA\/RIJKSMUSEUM<\/p>\n

\u201cOvid talks about fears and passions, joys and sorrows, jealousy and revenge, lust and pain,\u201d Dibbits said. \u201cThe myths describe this mystery of being touched by the divine, a magical inspiration also for artists. Because when artists touch their material, be it stone or paint a canvas, they transform the material into being, into a being with a soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1497 the first printed edition of Ovid\u2019s masterpiece appeared in Italian translation, followed by many other languages, and by the turn of the 1600s it had become the \u201cBible of artists\u201d, according to the Flemish painter and writer Karel van Mander.<\/p>\n

\"SPAWN<\/p>\n

Spawn by Juul Kraijer<\/p>\n

COURTESY OF JUUL KRAIJER STUDIO<\/p>\n

In Spawn, a film installation by Juul Kraijer, 56, snakes slowly glide across the face of a woman invoking Ovid\u2019s Medusa. Nearby, Benvenuto Cellini\u2019s scale model for his heroic 16th-century statue in Florence shows Perseus standing elegantly on Medusa\u2019s body, holding her severed, bleeding head aloft.<\/p>\n

In Narcissus by Caravaggio, the son of a river god and nymph bends over the water, hopelessly in love with his own reflection. <\/p>\n

\u201cBy failing to see that it is only a fleeting image, this becomes his undoing and he is transformed into a flower [a daffodil],\u201d Frits Scholten, the exhibition\u2019s curator and head of sculpture at the Rijksmuseum, said. \u201cIn painting this illusion, Caravaggio offers us the astute commentary on the idea that painting itself is merely a two-dimensional.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

Narcissus (c 1597) by Caravaggio<\/p>\n

PALAZZO BARBERINI<\/p>\n

Scholten noted that for Ovid \u201cwhile the individual is finite, mutable and mortal, the collective endures in ever-changing forms\u201d.<\/p>\n

He believes this eternal principle is, perhaps, under threat due to the environmental or geopolitical forces at play in the modern world. \u201cWhat if the Earth\u2019s own soul were to move on? Is our present crisis merely another metamorphosis? Or worse, proof that Ovid was wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The epic poem Metamorphoses, written more than 2,000 years ago by the Roman poet Ovid, has inspired writers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-266059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}