SOURCE: Barolsky, Paul. “As in Ovid, So in Renaissance Art.” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 2, (summer 1998): 451-74.

In the following essay, Barolsky explores the relationship between the content of the Metamorphoses and the aesthetic of transformation in visual arts during the Renaissance.

The story of Italian Renaissance art abounds in images inspired by the fables of Ovid's Metamorphoses, pictorial “poems” by Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Correggio, and Titian, among others. More profoundly, the very theory of Renaissance art, grounded in the concept of imitation, was often seen or described in terms of a central Ovidian fable, specifically the story of Pygmalion. Our understanding of the ways in which Ovid pervades the visual culture of the Renaissance is woefully inadequate, however. Whereas there are by now broad studies of Plato and Aristotle in relation to Renaissance art, there is, perhaps surprisingly, no such general understanding of Ovid's place in the visual culture of...