[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This edited volume brings together fourteen different papers from the 2019 conference Dopo Ovidio. Aspetti della ricezione ovidiana fra letteratura e iconografia at the University of L’Aquila. The contributions gathered by Franca Consolino cover a wide range of approaches to the reception of Ovid. The chapters focus on different points of reception—from late antiquity to the eighteenth century—and are presented in a loosely chronological fashion. While the different approaches, time periods and forms of reception explored highlight the complexity and depth of the reception of Ovid as a field of study, there is no thematic thread tying the work together. This contrasts with other edited volumes exploring Ovidian reception, like Barbara Weiden Boyd’s Ovid’s Homer,[1] Alison Sharrock, Daniel Möller and Mats Malm’s Metamorphic Readings,[2] and Julie Van Peteghem’s Italian Readers of Ovid from the Origins to Petrarch.[3]
Individual chapters are excellent. Maria-Pace Pieri’s exploration of Ovid in Reposianus uses a range of evidence from this rather obscure late antique author. Pieri highlights the more obvious use of Ovid in Reposianus’ Concubitus Martis et Veneris, with direct quotations and structural styles in addition to the more subtle allusions. Pieri concludes that this work not only provides evidence of Reposianus’ use of Ovid, but also demonstrates the popularity of Ovid in Vandal Africa.[4]
In a chapter on the presence of Ovid in the works of Isidore of Seville, Donato De Gianni argues that Isidore cites Ovid more than any other classical author, followed by Virgil, Lucan, Lucretius and Martial. De Gianni systematically identifies both direct (through quotation and Ovidian examples) and indirect (through second-hand quotation and scholia) references by Isidore. Further, he argues for a clear Ovidian influence on Isidore of Seville’s Latin constructions. As a result, he concludes that Ovid’s voice in Isidore is muted, that is, his original meaning is overwritten, in comparison to those of other authors, whose perspectives are preserved by Isidore. Instead of his content, it is Ovid’s writing style that Isidore picks up the most. Despite this, Isidore’s varied repurposing of Ovid’s oeuvre is on par with his use of Christian sources.
Luisa Corona, in ‘Moving through the Metamorphoses’, traces the reception of Ovid not through texts but in the linguistical development of Italian vernacular components of motion encoding (the ways in which movements and actions are represented and described within a language). Starting with a critical analysis of the theories of Leonard Talmy around the typology of motion events as verb-framed or satellite-framed,[5] Corona identifies and addresses a flaw in the existing approach, which classifies a language through static, synchronic studies. Instead, they establish that language constructions of movement, both in Italian and Latin, changed over time, requiring diachronic study. Corona systematically analyses the encoding of motion in a “corpus of texts that produces comparable data” (p.182), that is, in Latin, vulgarisations and translations of Ovid’s Metamorphose. While previous studies of parallel corpora have used translations into multiple languages, Corona focuses on multiple translations into a single language with a wide diachronic scope. As a result, cross-linguistic variation within a single language over time that establishes progressive preferences and morphology.
Giuseppa Zanichelli studies the manuscripts of Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius Moralizatus, produced in Northern Italy in the fourteenth century. He explores the interplay between the text and illuminations, revealing that, although some illustrations were mnemonic in nature—visual cues to facilitate memorisation—most provided a thematic link connecting the allegorical and moral elements of the written work with the imagery. Constanza Barbieri focuses on the depiction of scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the sixteenth-century Loggia di Galatea in the Villa Farnesina in Rome. The appeal of the subjects lay in the view that Ovid’s narrative provided material open to new interpretations dependent on their context. In questioning potentially anachronistic modern interpretations and seeking the perspective of the sixteenth century viewer, this illustrated chapter reinforces the role of the reader at the point of reception.
However, the scholarship across the volume is uneven. Stefania Filosini explores nuances of Ovidian influence in Prudentius’ Psychomachia which are at times difficult to locate. Ovid appears “more in subtle echoes” (p.10) that “rely on the understanding and participation of the reader” (p.10) than in direct quotation. Identifying traces of Ovid in motifs, imagery, expression and structure, Filosini concludes that the Ovidian influence in Prudentius appears in diverse but inconclusive forms, from a single word to a cadence or an allusion. Michele Maccherini focuses on artistic portrayals of the story of Narcissus. He identifies themes evident in the artistic recreation of this myth in sixteenth century art to examine the innovative nature of the painting of Narcissus commonly attributed to Caravaggio. In particular, he notes the isolation of the figure of Narcissus—from both other individuals and from nature itself—in this painting, as opposed to other renditions in art and sculpture. While his analysis of the innovations of the work are insightful, Maccherini concludes that Caravaggio, with his penchant for self-portrait, did not paint the Narcissus. The fact that Caravaggio tended to use self-portrait and is clearly not the figure in the Narcissus painting, appears to be the sole basis of his claim and, presented alone at the end of the chapter, leaves the reader surprised.
While there is much of interest to the scholar of Ovidian reception within the individual chapters, as an edited volume the work suffers from the lack of a clear theme and inconsistent scholarship.
Authors and Titles
- Ovidian Presences in Prudentius’ Psychomachia, Stefania Filosini
- Ovid in Reposianus and the Complexity of Reception, Maria-Pace Pieri
- Allusions to and Quotations from Ovid in the Writing of Isidore of Seville, Donato De Gianni
- Geoffrey’s musa iocosa: the Vita Merilini as an ‘Ovidian’ Poem, Francesco Marzella
- Il distico della commedia elegiaca latina. L’eredità di Ovidio, Lucio Ceccarelli
- Moving through the Metamorphoses. The Linguistic Encoding of Motion in Ovid and his Translators, Luisa Corona
- The Reception of Ovidius moralizatus in Northern Italy in the Late Middle Ages, Giuseppa Z. Zanichelli
- The Myth of Narcissus in Painting and Sculpture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Some Reflections, Michele Maccherini
- Ovid and the Aerial Metamorphoses Painted by Sebastiano del Piombo in the Loggia di Galatea, Constanza Barbieri
- The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Vulgarized Editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Italy and Spain, Giuseppe Capriotti
- Folengo and Ovid: the Tempest in the Canto di Giuberto, Fabiola Bartolucci
- Mark Alexander Boyd and Ovid’s Heriodes. Lavinia’s Epistle to Turnus, Franca Ela Consolino
- Ovid in the Old World and the New: the Metamorphoses as Interpreted by George Sandys, Enrico Botta
- “Orrendo a un tempo e innocente amore”: The Ovidian Myrrha in Italian Literature, Valeria Merola
Notes
[1] B. Boyd. Ovid’s Homer: Authority, Repetition, Reception. (Oxford University Press, 2017).
[2] A. Sharrock, D. Möller, & M. Malm. Metamorphic Readings: Transformation, Language, and Gender in the Interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. (Oxford University Press, 2020).
[3] J. Van Peteghem. Italian Readers of Ovid from the Origins to Petrarch: Responding to a Versatile Muse. (Brill, 2020).
[4] A useful addition to her analysis of Reposianus’ appropriation is Cichoń’s earlier unpacking of the political implications of the poem. N. Cichoń. “Repozjanus, O schadzce Marsa i Wenery”. Scripta Classica 14 (2017): 51-56.
[5] L. Talmy, Towards a cognitive semantics: typology and process in concept structuring, vol. 2 (Cambridge MA, 2000), 101-128.