Transformation As Art, Ovid’s Metamorphoses

15 February 2011 – 15 March 2011

If Ovid had never existed, there would be plenty of blank walls in the world’s art galleries. His masterpiece, Metamorphoses, has uniquely influenced art and literature across 2,000 years, ravishing the palettes of artists from Raphael and Titian through Velasquez, Rembrandt and Giordano to Tiepolo, Poussin and Moreau. Lives, he says wryly, will always be liable to sudden change by forces outside ourselves and of that alone can we be certain. But who is the magician?