Did Ovid hit upon the first law of thermodynamics 2,000 years ago? ‘Everything changes, nothing dies,’ he wrote in his epic poem the Metamorphoses. Throughout the narrative, humans transform themselves (or are transformed) into animals, plants and inanimate objects and all manner of creatures turn into humans. The poem has exerted a profound influence on art and literature; in 1604, the Dutch painter Karel van Mander described it as ‘a Bible for artists’. The Rijksmuseum is celebrating the breadth of this influence by bringing together more than 80 works, ranging from Old Master paintings to modern sculpture and video art, that depict the figures, themes and stories in Ovid’s poem. Highlights include Caravaggio’s limpid rendering of Narcissus (c. 1600), on loan from the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, and Rodin’s marble sculpture Pygmalion and Galatea (1908–09), which has travelled from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Find out more from the Rijksmuseum’s website.
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