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1. Ovid’s Artists
- University of Wisconsin Press
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1 Ovid’s Artists Artists at Work in nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illa) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen. [I am moved to tell about forms changed into new bodies; Gods, inspire the beginnings of my work, for you have changed even these, and lead down/spin out a continuous song from the first beginning of the universe to my own time.] Met. 1.1–4 Artists and their artworks have always been the colorful fellowtravelers of Greek and Roman epic and epyllion.1 Well before Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Daedalus, Hephaestus, and other craftsmen, named and anonymous, delighted the epic heroes in their company with sculptures , paintings, and shields and cups of metal,2 while Demodocus, the Sirens, Orpheus, and Iopas enchanted them with cosmogonic and martial lays;3 Helen, Penelope, Minerva, and the anonymous artist behind the extraordinary ekphrasis of Catullus 64 created narratives for and about the heroes in woven and embroidered cloth.4 The depth and detail of such representations of artworks and artists in ancient epic vary considerably; examples range from the briefest of allusions to an artist to full-scale ekphrastic descriptions of works of art.5 With transformation as the Metamorphoses’ central theme, it is not surprising that displays of creative activity of one sort or another, in which material is transformed or translated into another medium, are a regular feature of the action of the poem. It opens, as promised in its 22 third line, with the original metaphor of artistry from the natural world, the creation of the universe. The world’s first artist, the pointedly unnamed mundi fabricator, ‘craftsman of the universe,’6 is styled at various points in the opening narrative as a sculptor, a weaver, and even a Vulcan-like metallurgist, whose universe, shaped out of chaos, shares many features with the world as depicted on the shield of Achilles in Iliad 18.7 With such a creative and transformative opening, the epic certainly can be and has been read, by Barkan most notably, as expressing an “art of continuous changes, radiant with multiplicity but confounding clear definition,” reflecting “a reality in the universe that is similarly fluid.”8 Human creativity is similarly one of the epic’s most persistent motifs , a mortal complement to its physical and psychological metamorphoses motivated by a host of cosmic, divine, and other mysterious forces. Arange of arts and skill-levels are represented, from the folkloric and mythographic narratives of Ovid’s countless storytellers, epitomized by the bored and restless Minyeides in book 4, to the most sublime forms of artistry. In book 6, the imprisoned Philomela so subtly weaves her tragic story into a web that it is decipherable only to its recipient , her sister. The craftsman Daedalus, already well-known to Roman epic audiences from Vergil’s description in Aeneid 6 of the elaborate gates he decorated for the Temple of Apollo, leaves Crete behind in Metamorphoses 8 on a machinery of wings he designed and constructed for himself and his son. In book 10, Pygmalion sculpts an ideal female companion, whom Venus animates at his request. Polyphemus’s long travesty of a pastoral lament in book 13 throws Ovid’s mini-Aeneid off its already-tottering heroic balance.9 Even the famously warlike Perseus is figured artistically in the epic; as he petrifies his enemies with the Gorgon Medusa’s head, he creates an impromptu sculpture garden of their marble imagines in book 5.10 Such episodes document Ovid’s fascination with the potential (both positive and negative) inherent in human creativity and expression, and highlight the aetiological role (usually unintentional) of human behavior in the great coming-into-being of his metamorphic universe. It is indicative of Ovid’s special interest in artists, their products, and particularly the conditions under which those artworks are created that he dedicates four lengthy episodes in the Metamorphoses to the stories of five literary and fabric artists, or groups of artists, in the process of creating six different artworks. Metamorphoses 5 and 6 are bridged by a pair of competitions, the first in song, the second in weaving. At the Ovid’s Artists 23 [44.195.23.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:51 GMT) outset of book 5, Minerva has come to Mt. Helicon to see the new Hippocrene spring, and hears an account of a recent singing contest between the Muses and a group of...