Visualizing Metamorphosis: Picturing the Metamorphoses of Ovid in 14th Century Italy, in: Troianalexandrina, Vol. 14, 2014 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Quaderni D Italianistica, 2008
Rfcfnskìni er, or indeed with what is known of their subject. John O'Malley's elegant essay, "Paul Grendler and the Triumph of the Renaissance," weaves a sort of tapestry incorporating elements of Grendler's work along with reflections on historiography, on the nature of the Renaissance, and on the history of educational ideas and practice. Pivotal to the piece is a review of what the Renaissance was understood to be, especially in North America, over the last half-century or so. The now dominant consensus on the centrality of humanism (and widespread concurrence in Kristeller's famous definition of it as based on the studia hiimanitatis) leads O'Malley to reflect on Grendler's scholarship and on just how important the various disciplines comprising the studia humanitatis have been in shaping education in Europe and the New World. The range of discussion is vast, but the piece never becomes a tour de force. O'Malley skilfully uses telling detail to make general points and adds an element of intimacy by referring to Grendler's career (and his own) as marking the arc of time over which the "triumph of the Renaissance" became manifest. Intimacy of a different kind runs through the essay of William J. Callahan, friend and colleague of Grendler's at the University of Toronto, whose biographical sketch rounds out the volume. Rather than presenting a cursus honorum, Callahan summarizes the highlights of Grendler's scholarly publications, but focuses mainly on his personal iter^and the broad orientation of his life and work. The book is handsomely produced and includes illustrations, some of them colour plates, but their relationship with the essays is often indirect. It also shows signs of haste by way of (sometimes embarrassing) lapses in proofreading. These are small irritants, and they subtract little from the honour the volume does its dedicatee.
Journal of Roman Studies, 2002
REVIEWS Dryden in order to justify Heywood's humanist 'translation-as-imitation' (io), but his comprehensive study of the cultural, economic, and literary conditions in which Heywood translates Ovid renders such justification unwarranted. A complete translation of the proem and all three books of Ovid's Ars Amatoria then follows, each book supported by a detailed commentary in which S. highlights the relation between Heywood's Ars and the Ovidian text. Appendices include textual notes for each of the books, including discrepancies and editorial emendations, a brief but useful bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and separate indices for introduction and commentaries, and for the translation itself. However, it is somewhat unfortunate that, given Heywood's particular-and, for a classicist of his time, unusual-concern for the accurate spelling and printing of his work-this new edition should be not entirely free from typographical errors (4 'may' for 'many'). In his introduction S. observes that Heywood's 'colleagues in the theaters and courts thought his translation worth reading; literary pirates proved that it was worth stealing; the consumers and publishing underworld of the next generation demonstrated that Loues Schoole was worth reading and stealing-again and again' (29). Colleagues in the field of Classical reception, literary critics of Renaissance literature, and a new generation of readers may well agree.
Goran Stanivukov 2001 Afterword Ovid And The Renaissance
In the Renaissance literature classroom, 'Ovid' is never very far away. But when his name is invoked, it often is in the form of a brief literary allusion that raises more questions than it answers ('after being raped by her brother-in-law, Philomela's tongue was cut out; she was later transformed into a nightingale') or worse, an inert and inexplicable reference to an even more temporally distant text ('see Fasti}. In a time when Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, and Milton have been joined on the syllabus by Isabella Whitney, Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Gary, and Margaret Cavendish, it might seem to be asking too much for students to read English translations of Ovid as well. Why should students and scholars return to the Renaissance Ovid? What are the uses of Ovidianism at this moment? The essays included in Ovid and the Renaissance Body demonstrate compellingly that the reasons for such a 'return' differ from just a decade ago, when the 'attempt to salvage a tradition that is rapidly disappearing' was, among other things, part of Jonathan Bate's motivation for analysing 'Ovid's inspiriting of Shakespeare' in Shakespeare and Ovid. 1 The contributors to this new collection are less interested than was Bate in the sources of creative inspiration and the ingenuity of literary allusion, or even in how Renaissance writers renovated, incorporated, and revised Ovidian styles and themes. Rather, these essays treat Ovidianism as a contested cultural resource for the creation of distinctively early modern representations of the body, gender, and eroticism. Insofar as feminist, psychoanalytic, new historicist, and queer scholarship has, over the past twenty years, changed the terms by which these phenomena are understood, a return to the author that early moderns considered the 'preceptor of wanton love' was all but inevitable. 2 Along
The Bible des pöetes, an allegorized french translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was published in Paris in 1493. Its publisher and printer, Antoine Vérard, performed a number of luxury copies for great personalities, of which four copies are preserved, two copies in Paris (BnF Velins 559 and Velins 560), a copy in London (BL IC. 41148) and a last one in Grenoble (Bibliotheque Municipale Rés I.57). Its combination of woodcuts and miniatures makes them unique copies within the entire run of the edition, which is quite a contradiction itself of what the spirit of printing represents. In these luxurious specimens Vérard recovers a tradition that had begun with the earliest manuscripts of Ovide moralisé, but had been diluted over the years, the desire to visualize, through hundreds of images, each metamorphosis narrated by Ovid. I'll analyze three of the four copies to see the differences and iconographic similarities, that show the work of three different groups of miniaturists on the same basic text and with same guidelines. These three printed/illuminated examples speak of three ways to visualize Ovid at the same period of time, which reveals episodes and mythological scenes that follow settled models, or quite the opposite, from diverse moments used for the same mythological episode to very different solutions to solve certain metamorphosis. What these copies shown us is the creative and interpretative ability that each miniaturist has put into this rich and extensive corpus of images and gives us an immense field of study on the interpretation of the myth and image of the Metamorphoses in the Late Middle Ages.
After Ovid, After Theory . International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2019
It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Ovidian poetry has stimulated and framed classicists' engagement with philosophical ideas that have emerged since the mid-twentieth century, in the fields of critical theory, cultural studies and psychoanalysis. The multiform and palimpsestic dialogues that have grown out of this specific engagement seem to encapsulate the evolution not just of Latin literary studies but of classics as a discipline, in the wake of postwar , post-colonial thinking across the humanities. Of all the Ovidian 'revivals' through the twentieth century, beginning with Pound, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Picasso, Dali, Freud and Lacan in the 1910s-30s, the 'third wave' of the late 80s onwards (and the fashioning of a 'postmodern Ovid' in criticism, literature and visual art) has been by far the most expansive and the most problematic. 1 It is this Ovid, an Ovid who in the second decade of the new millennium feels standardized and endlessly reiterable, but who is animated by contradictions, repressions, critiques, misreadings, and connections not quite made, who will be the focus of this essay. My discussion will be punctuated by speculative pointers towards new shores, just as the wave ebbs.