Main Campus - Anderson Hall
Room: 007

No work from classical antiquity is so widely illustrated in modern European art as is Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is therefore surprising that a general account of Ovid's influences on modern art history from the Renaissance to the present has yet to be written. This lecture, an approach or prolegomenon to that unwritten history, is a broad overview of Ovid's extensive influences on painters and sculptors during the last 500 years. It focuses on stories about such mythic artists as Apollo, Mercury, Pan, Pygmalion and Narcissus in works by Botticelli, Michelangelo, Bernini, Rubens, Daumier, Picasso, Magritte and many other moderns who worked under the spell of the ancient poet.