Course info

Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) is an epic tapestry of stories and images that has had an enduring and transformative impact on the history of art from the first decade of the Common Era to the present day. This course explores how Ovid was influenced by the visual culture of ancient Rome and how his works had a lasting influence on art, and on conceptions of representation, from classical antiquity to the present. Ovid’s text provides vivid depictions of art and artists. The ways artists use Ovid’s myths to tell different stories of their own will be a special concern of this course. The first part of the course involves close reading of the poem and “close looking” at various visual images directly in response to it. The second part of the course will be both art-historical and theoretical. We study how different historical periods—Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Modern, and Contemporary—have approached the task of visualizing Ovid in a variety of media. We will examine the concept of “metamorphosis” in detail. In Ovid, the power to tell a story, and who gets to speak, is a critical theme. Voicelessness is a major issue in the poem to be explored. Other themes to be considered include: perspectives of exile, tensions between satire and empathy, divine vs. human, politics and history, abuses of authority, genre and authorship, self-representation, revenge and punishment, the boundaries between human and animal, myth and etiological narrative, and, of course, metamorphosis. Ovid’s “visual perspectives,” his objectifying gaze, gender, sexuality, and graphic violence (often devastatingly cruel and unjust) are key issues of the texts and must therefore be a key part of this course.