What is the big deal with Ovid and artists?

It has been called an “epic of rape”, with good reason. Almost no one—almost nothing—in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is safe from seduction (or worse). Animal, vegetable, mineral: all are tainted. Leda lies beneath that swan. A laurel tree has a terrible time with Apollo. Danaë is mistreated by a shower of gold. Ovid’s writing is what the young people call “problematic”. And that is before you even open his “Art of Love”.

Ovid is also, to artists, irresistible. The first-century Roman poet has inspired so much art that he has been described as the “artists’ bible” (albeit a rather secular, smutty one). Chaucer filched freely from Ovid; Shakespeare imitated him; George Bernard Shaw reimagined him. The medieval era was so keen on Ovid it was called an aetas Ovidiana—an “Ovidian Age”.

Artists still turn to Ovid for inspiration. Ted Hughes told “Tales from Ovid”. Ali Smith borrowed from Ovid for her book “Girl Meets Boy”. Now there is “Metamorphoses” (Shape-shifters), a new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which will travel to the Galleria Borghese in Rome in June. The show lays bare—and there is a lot of nakedness—Ovid’s influence on artists.

This influence might surprise many gallery-goers. Ovid is a bit of a classical casualty. People still know that Horace carpe-d the diem. They know that Marcus Aurelius meditated. They are aware that Thucydides had a trap. Ovid? Not so much.

But step inside the new show, and there are many familiar faces. Those who thought they didn’t know Ovid are quickly corrected. Here is Leda and that seductive swan (imagined by a follower of Michelangelo—the original was allegedly destroyed by Queen Anne of Austria, because she found it too erotic). There is Narcissus (gazing at himself in an inky puddle, by Caravaggio). Over there is Arachne (hulking bronze spider sculptures by Louise Bourgeois). Not far is Pygmalion (rising from white stone, by Auguste Rodin). And there is Hermaphroditus, with a pinchably soft bottom (by Bernini, pictured).

You realise that what you know of classical culture you know from Ovid. So much of it hangs on a surprisingly slender thread (an estimated 99% of all Latin literature was lost), and often the writer who wove the narrative thread that remains was him. Ovid appeals partly because he, like his poems, was a shape-shifter. To read Ovid is to feel unsettled: comedy turns into tragedy; tragedy into comedy; women turn into men; everyone turns into trees; nothing is quite what it seems. The Bible offers “order, justice and salvation” (nice things, but dull ones), says Ingo Gildenhard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University. But Ovid offers “a world in flux, transgressive desire, sex and violence”. Ovid is often immoral. He is never dull.

Ovid’s strength is, unfortunately, this exhibition’s weakness. Transformation and shape-shifting are themes that most artists in history have tackled: the assortment of works sometimes feels random (such as a creepy looping video of pythons slithering across a woman’s face, evoking Medusa). But it is not the masterpieces that are the star here: it is Ovid himself. ■