On three massive screens in a darkened room, snakes glide over the face of artist Juul Kraijer \u2013 covering her eyes, caressing her lips. She is the silent but terrifying snake-headed Medusa, and one of the surprises in an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam revolving around Greek and Roman myths.<\/p>\n
Force of nature \u2026 room inspired by Leda and the Swan in the Metamorphoses exhibition. Photograph: Albertine Dijkema\/Rijksmuseum<\/p>\n
While the show features rarely lent works from masters such as Caravaggio, Bernini, Rodin and Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i, it marries them with modern artists who reinterpret the legends where male gods do all they can to get their wicked way and the powerless are punished. Transgender bodies, bare breasts and even a volcanic vulva appear in artworks inspired by Roman poet Ovid\u2019s masterpiece, Metamorphoses.<\/p>\n
Taco Dibbits, general director of the Rijksmuseum, believes the 200 myths and legends from this ancient epic poem still speak to our uncertain times. \u201cThe Metamorphoses have inspired artists for over 2,000 years and the subject is very relevant today, when everything is changing,\u201d he says. \u201cThings are morphed into other forms. People morph into other people. It\u2019s about the force of nature and giving an explanation to our passions, to our sadness, to our fears. That\u2019s what makes it so intensely human.\u201d<\/p>\n
The show features plaster models by Auguste Rodin, with figures emerging from crude rock like the female sculpture created by Pygmalion in Ovid\u2019s legend, who comes to life. There is a room inspired by Leda and the Swan, with Zeus \u201cseducing\u201d the Spartan queen by taking the bird\u2019s form.<\/p>\n
It also includes a rare loan from the Louvre. Gian Lorenzo Bernini\u2019s 17th-century carving of Sleeping Hermaphroditus \u2013 which sets an ancient Roman sculpture of a hermaphrodite with male and female sexual organs on a lifelike marble mattress \u2013 was inspired by Ovid\u2019s story of a couple\u2019s bodies merging in sexual union.<\/p>\n
There are some uncomfortable outcomes for women in the tales. Jupiter assumes the form of a cloud or shower of gold to impregnate his female target. As one explanatory board admits: \u201cHis loves are rarely tender \u2013 more often coercive and one-sided.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fluid gender \u2026 Gian Lorenzo Bernini\u2019s 17th-century carving of Sleeping Hermaphroditus. Photograph: Amie Galbraith\/Rijksmuseum<\/p>\n
Modern artists, particularly women, give another point of view: South African sculptor Nandipha Mntambo\u2019s 2009 bronze of Jupiter as a bull is cast into a powerful, female form. The story of Arachne, who challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest and was eventually transformed into a spider, becomes a massive bronze spider statue created by the late French-American artist Louise Bourgeois.<\/p>\n