Metamorphoses. Ovid and the Arts

 

Carmina morte carent. Poems do not know death. — Ovid 

The Poem as Cosmogony 

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora — so Ovid opens his Metamorphoses, that poem in fifteen books which, around 8 AD, recast the Western imagination for the two millennia to come. The poet's animus reaches toward bodies transformed into new forms, from the creation of the cosmos to the deification of Julius Caesar, weaving more than two hundred and fifty myths into a narrative continuum whose unifying principle is neither a hero nor a war, but change itself as ontological law. The Ovidian world knows no stability: gods, men, nymphs, animals and plants belong to a single continuum of transformable matter, a universe in which every identity is transitory and every form is a promise of another form. 

The exhibition makes this radical vision its own. Metamorphosis is not treated as an iconographic theme, a repertoire of subjects to be catalogued, but as an aesthetic and philosophical category: a way of understanding the body, time, the boundary between nature and culture, between the sacred and the earthly. It is in this sense that the curators' critical undertaking reveals itself as one of rare depth: interrogating Ovid not to celebrate him, but to ask what he still tells us about ourselves. 

The Villa as an Ovidian Organism 

No place in Rome could better host this exhibition than the Galleria Borghese, and not for merely aesthetic reasons. Cardinal Scipione Borghese had the Casino Nobile erected outside Porta Pinciana, conceiving the architecture as a semiotic device — a system of meanings in which myth, self-representation and art interweave in a coherent apparatus. In the eighteenth century, Marcantonio IV Borghese and the architect Antonio Asprucci redesigned the interiors, placing sculptures at the centre of the rooms and integrating them into decorative schemes drawn directly from the Metamorphoses: Ovid was therefore not a guest theme, but the invisible load-bearing structure of the entire building. The exhibition does nothing more than bring this original vocation to light: the Villa is already, and has always been, an Ovidian poem in marble and stucco. 

The Exhibition Route: From Creation to the Body as Enigma 

The exhibition path — more than eighty works from leading international institutions — unfolds through the great thematic nuclei of the poem. It begins with the creation of the world: that chaotic cosmogony which Ovid narrates as the separation of elements, as the first universal metamorphosis in which form arises from formlessness. It is the originary question: what does it mean for something to become something else? 

In the entrance to the Galleria Borghese, before the visitor even confronts the Berninesque marbles and the masterworks of Ovidian myth, the space is inhabited by something radically other and yet deeply consonant: the Kelp Sculptures by ANiCKA Yi — Solar Loci, Water Belly, Sea Salt High-Rise — luminescent cocoons suspended in the air, built from kelp seaweed, aquazol, acrylic resin, LED lighting and animatronic insects. The perceptual ambiguity is immediate and deliberate: at first glance they resemble paper lanterns, cocoons, or pods gestating a being within. Then a sound — a hum — and a movement reveal that something is flying inside, that the matter is inhabited. Yi, a Korean-American artist whose practice spans biology, philosophy and technology, constructs here what we might define as a post-biological ecosystem: hybrids in which the vegetal and the mechanical render each other porous, in which bios and techne cease to be sealed categories. Her sculptures do not illustrate Ovidian metamorphosis — they inhabit it: like Daphne becoming tree without ceasing to be Daphne, these organic-artificial forms exist in a threshold state, neither dead nor fully alive, neither natural nor entirely artificial. In this sense, the dialogue with the exhibition is not ornamental but ontological — ANiCKA Yi poses the same question Ovid posed two thousand years ago: if forms transform, what remains of being? 

To the theme of Love is devoted one of the exhibition's densest passages. Ovidian eros is cosmic force before it is sentiment: Cupid launching the golden arrow at Apollo and the leaden one at Daphne performs not a sentimental gesture but a restructuring of the order of the real, producing a chain of crossed desires doomed to the impossible. The flight of Daphne — that nymph who asks her father Peneus to be transformed rather than possessed — is one of the most vertiginous myths in the entire ancient repertoire: metamorphosis as an act of will, as an extreme form of freedom, as the body's withdrawal from the law of another's desire. The heart, Ovid writes, keeps beating beneath the bark. It is not death: it is another life. 

The theme of the Underworld carries the exhibition toward the darkest and most fertile regions of the poem: Orpheus descending into Hades, Pluto abducting Proserpina, the boundary between the living and the dead as a porous threshold through which bodies migrate and forms are redistributed. Bernini's Pluto and Proserpina, a masterwork already present in the Gallery, engages with the exhibited works with an almost dramaturgical intensity: the god's fingers sinking into the goddess's flesh as into clay, the body yielding under the grip yet not dissolving — another metamorphosis captured in the exact instant of its occurrence. 

Pygmalion and Galatea — Matter Becoming Flesh 

Ars adeo latet arte sua. So great is the art that the art goes unseen. — Ovid 

If there is a myth in which metamorphosis coincides with the very act of making art, it is the myth of Pygmalion, narrated by Ovid in Book X of the Metamorphoses, and its resonance in the exhibition is at once philological and profoundly contemporary. Pygmalion is a Cypriot sculptor who, appalled by the imperfection of real women, withdraws his desire from the world and pours it into ivory: he models a female figure of such perfection that the matter seems already to yield to life, already to tremble on the boundary between the inert and the sentient. He falls in love with it. He prays to it, touches it, brings it gifts. During the festivals of Venus he implores the goddess to give him a wife resembling his work — and when he returns, he feels the sculpture pulse beneath his fingers. «Corpus erat»: it was a body. 

The question the myth poses is not sentimental but ontological: where does life begin in matter? What is the threshold beyond which form is no longer inert? The gesture of Pygmalion — to create in order to love, to love in order to animate — is the founding gesture of every artistic practice that interrogates the essence of representation. 

Art history has returned this interrogation with secular obsession. Jacopo Pontormo (1530) depicts Pygmalion on his knees as before a divine apparition, hands clasped, reverential distance: Galatea is already a goddess, already unreachable. François Boucher (1767) makes it a scene of Rococo grace, suffused with angels, in which the transformation resolves into elegant picture-making. Far more viscerally Ovidian is the version by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1890, Metropolitan Museum of Art), where Galatea still has her legs locked in marble while her torso has already come to life and bends toward the sculptor who embraces her with an urgency that admits no waiting: not contemplation, but desire consummated in the very instant of the threshold. Étienne-Maurice Falconet (1763), in his unique sculptural version — a perfect paradox: a statue depicting a statue becoming a woman — resolves the problem through an architectural conceit: Galatea on a round pedestal inside a rectangular one, a statue within a statue, the double ontological plane made visible by geometry. Louis Jean-François Lagrenée (1781) chooses the instant of the first step: Galatea descends from the pedestal, she is already a woman, the metamorphosis has just occurred. Anne-Louis Girodet (1819), the most philosophical of all, all but eliminates physical contact: Pygmalion leans toward Galatea's breast with his hand suspended in mid-air, like one who needs to verify he is not dreaming — between them Cupid acts as mediator of desire, as catalyst of transformation. 

It is in this precise lineage that ANiCKA Yi's Kelp Sculptures place themselves as the most unexpected and necessary of echoes. Here too a form has been created by human hands — kelp woven, dyed, embroidered, shaped into luminescent cocoons — and here too matter seems to transgress its own boundaries: something flies inside the sculptures, a hum spreads, an animatronic movement fractures the stillness of the vegetal. Yi does not depict Galatea: she constructs the Pygmalionic moment in which one cannot tell whether life has already begun or whether it is still merely form. The crucial difference — and the radical updating of the myth — is that in Ovid life is granted by Venus, by an external and transcendent force; in the Kelp Sculptures there is no goddess to pray to. The threshold between the inert and the living is intrinsic to the matter itself, the product of a post-biological hybridisation between the organic and the mechanical in which no external ordering principle intervenes. Where Pygmalion interrogated the gods, ANiCKA Yi interrogates matter. And matter responds with the same ambiguous silence as a heart beating beneath the bark. 

The Ovide moralisé and the Persistence of Myth 

The exhibition then investigates the fascinating chapter of the Ovide moralisé, that medieval rewriting which reinterpreted the Ovidian myths through a Christian lens, decisively shaping their circulation in Renaissance iconography. It is through this allegorical filter that pagan mythology survives and transforms in the Middle Ages, itself metamorphosing — almost by Ovidian irony — into something other, while retaining its form. 

From Correggio to Brancusi: Metamorphosis as Style 

From the masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — Correggio, Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens, Poussin — the exhibition advances toward modernity through Gérôme and Rodin, concluding with Brancusi, whose sculptural lexicon seems to carry metamorphosis to its ultimate consequence: no longer the capture of the instant of transformation, but the already-transfigured form, the body already become principle, abstraction, essence. Where Bernini sculpts the drama of becoming in the most precise anatomical detail, Brancusi sculpts what remains when the drama is over and form has found its repose in the pure. Two opposite and complementary ways of gathering Ovid's inheritance: the Baroque in the excess of transition, the Modern in the sobriety of arrival. 

An Unexpected Contemporaneity 

This exhibition, in its luxuriant erudition, poses questions that reach well beyond art history. The Ovidian idea of a non-fixed identity, of permeable boundaries between the human and the non-human, of bodies as matter in perpetual redefinition — is an idea that the present claims as its own, often without knowing it was inherited from a poet of the Augustan age. The Metamorphoses are, in this sense, a radically contemporary text: not because they speak of us, but because we, unknowingly, continue to speak with their vocabulary. 

The Galleria Borghese, with this exhibition, performs an act that is at once philological and visionary: it restores to Ovid his role as philosopher of form, thinker of change, witness that the stability of being is always, already, the prelude to another metamorphosis. 

In nova fert animus — the animus reaches still further, toward those new forms that bodies have not yet stopped becoming. 

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit. Everything transforms, nothing perishes. — Ovid 

Galleria Borghese Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, 00197 Rome 

Exhibition: Metamorphoses. Ovid and the Arts Dates: 23 June – 20 September 2026
Curators: Francesca Cappelletti, Frits Scholten In collaboration with: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 

Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday: 9:00 am – 7:00 pm (last entry 5:45 pm) Monday: closed 

Tickets: Full price € 16.00 + € 2.00 booking fee Advance booking is compulsory for all categories (including free admissions). Capacity limited to 180 visitors per time slot. 

Ticket purchase: www.gebart.it/musei/galleria-borghese
Official website: galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it
Exhibition page: galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/exhibition/metamorfosi 

Phone: +39 06 841 3979
Visitor information: [email protected]
Box office: +39 06 32810
Institutional email: [email protected] 

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