Ovid’s myths on show at the Galleria Borghese
After its presentation at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Galleria Borghese in Rome presents METAMORPHOSIS. Ovid and the Arts, on view until 20 September. Curated by Francesca Cappelletti and Frits Scholten, the exhibition is held in collaboration with the Dutch museum.
The imaginative power of Ovid’s Metamorphoses comes to life through more than 80 masterpieces on loan from major international institutions. Works by Correggio, Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens, Poussin, Gérôme, Rodin and Brancusi engage with the vision of one of antiquity’s greatest poets, in gallery rooms that were themselves inspired by his text.
The concept behind the exhibition
Starting from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the exhibition explores change and transformation as a key to reading the cosmos, matter and the human condition, in a vision built on the fluid boundaries between the human, the natural and the divine.
At its heart lies the idea of metamorphosis as a generative principle, one that runs through and redefines the cosmos, matter and the body. Through famous myths and often tragic tales, the Metamorphoses gave artists an inexhaustible repertoire of images and conflicts for centuries, giving visual form to passion, desire, cunning, violence, deception and the possibility of redemption.
Inside the exhibition
Through its many masterpieces, among them Apollo and Daphne and The Rape of Proserpina by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the exhibition reaffirms the enduring relevance of myth and its central role in shaping the European imagination, highlighting the visual and conceptual force of Ovid’s stories.
It opens with the section Chaos and Creation, where metamorphosis is tied to the passage from formless matter to ordered space, seen through the work of artists such as Louis Finson, Herri met de Bles, Auguste Rodin and Constantin Brâncuși. The same theme, in a different key, returns in the section devoted to the myth of Pygmalion, where it is the artist’s creative power that gives shape to the invisible, as in the works of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Auguste Rodin.
From birth to death: the theme of the underworld and the return from darkness takes shape around the symbolic pivot of Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina, with works such as Orpheus and Eurydice recounting the experience of those who crossed the realm of the dead while still alive.
Still, the central thread remains transformation itself: from woman to spider, as with Arachne, the starting point for a display of paintings, tapestries and textiles; from human being to stone, as in the tale of Perseus and Medusa, seen through works by Rubens, Sebastiano Ricci and Antonio Tempesta.
A final section is given over to the loves of Jupiter, with works dedicated to Leda and the Swan and to Danaë. Here it is the force of love, desire and passion that sets transformation in motion, at times almost spectacular, as in the shower of gold falling into Danaë’s lap, magnificently rendered in the work by Correggio on display.
The result is a symbolic and sensory reading of change, evoking the tension between order and transformation, the fluidity of identity and the dynamic relationship between body and nature. In this dialogue between myth and art, metamorphosis emerges not only as physical transformation but as an aesthetic and philosophical category, one that questions the relationships between time, space, matter and form.
