The book series Intersections is committed to presenting topics significant for early modern research from the perspective of a broad spectrum of humanities with an interdisciplinary approach. Volume 70 takes up central myths as recorded in Ovid's Metamorphoses and focuses on transformations, creative reinterpretations, and reinventions of these narratives in the visual arts and literature.
The first chapters deal with printed cycles, book illustrations, and humanistic commentaries. Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich and Sabine Lütkemeyer identify the non-Ovidian parts in several pictorial cycles and demonstrate how the Ovidian stories were expanded into a mythographic compendium. Robert Seidel offers a comparative analysis of the commentaries on the Metamorphoses by Petrus Berchorius, a contemporary of Petrarch, and later humanists. Seidel's point of comparison is the Phaeton episode, whereby the medieval allegorical interpretation of Berchorius already seems strongly outdated compared to the humanistic approaches. Barbara Hryszko depicts the fundamental change of meaning that the Metamorphoses d'Ovide en Rondeaux of Isaac de Benserade imposes on the Ovidian patterns: it is no longer the gods who are the seducers, but the women, with their virtues and vices, so that the poem fits perfectly into the French court culture of the second half of the seventeenth century.
A main part of the book is devoted to the reception of Ovid in painting and prints. Jan L. de Jong traces a principle erotic theme, the adultery of Mars and Venus, in sixteenth-century Italian works, and concludes that the painters creatively condensed narrative sequences into single motifs, and furthermore integrated motifs from other historical and mythological material. Another famous Ovidian couple relationship is examined by Karl A. E. Enenkel in his contribution on Salmacis and Hermaphrodite. He considers the encounter of the two mythological figures within different connotations of violence, seductive female nudity, satire, and spying. In her study of Nicolas Poussin's Realm of Flora, Leonie Drees-Drylie examines the reinvention of Ovidian myths in this painting, in which the painter combined characters from varying myths into complex painted allegories. Daniel Fulco focuses on the translation of two Ovidian themes, the Gigantomachy and the fall of Phaeton, into monumental mural painting in the German states around 1700. The author demonstrates the integration of these pictorial inventions into a broader European context and shows their function as depictions of political power relations, defense against chaos, and establishment of authority.
Two essays relate to art objects: Noam Andrews examines two silver statuettes of Daphne by Wenzel and Abraham Jamnitzer and describes the multiple material transformations in these artworks as generative correspondences between art and nature. Morgan J. Macey discusses the adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the tapestry Narcissus at the Fountain (Boston). The unusual subject in this medium is updated through the decorative sensuality of the textile artwork as a moral showpiece of courtly culture in late medieval France.
Another section of the book focuses on the reinterpretation of Ovid in literature. Daniel Dornhofer and Susanne Scholz take the reader to Elizabethan England and show how the ancient writer was claimed for the Protestant cause. They also decode the Actaeon episode in the seventh book of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene as a critique of Elizabeth I's politics. Viceregal Peru is the setting for Andrea Lozano-Vásquez's and Patricia Zalamea's reflections on the play written in Quechua, The Rape of Proserpina and the Dream of Endymion of 1644/46. They analyze the techniques by which the Ovidian narrative as a Christian allegory is interwoven with Inca elements. The last two essays are devoted to the reinvention of the Metamorphoses in literary and art theory: Kerstin Maria Pahl focuses on John Dryden as translator and translation theorist, and his analogy between translation and portraiture. Claudia Cieri Via looks at art-theoretical implications of the Perseus myth and shows the myth's relation to artistic creation, especially within the paragone of the visual arts.
As with most interdisciplinary edited volumes, the question arises whether the chapters reflect an interdisciplinary diversity of methods or are a mere collection of essays from different disciplines. The latter impression prevails in the present book, which is partially caused by the conservative division of sections according to medium or genre, which are in the end addressed according to the discipline prevailing in a particular field. Interpretations that are intrinsic to the literary or visual works of art predominate; matters of cultural history, as well as social and gender history, are only touched upon and rarely developed. Even historical contextualization is hardly undertaken or, when addressed, as in the chapters on mural painting in the German states and on Ovid's reception in Elizabethan England, remains rather unspecific. In contrast, traditional genre hierarchies are stabilized by the uneven distribution of studies of visual and applied arts throughout the book, and the complete absence of the majolica istoriata in the volume is surprising. These aspects aside, the book nonetheless offers a captivating view and multiple early modern perspectives on perhaps one of the greatest mythmakers of classical antiquity.
