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Article: As in Ovid, so in Renaissance art.
- Article from:
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Article date:
- June 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 The Renaissance Society of America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The story of Italian renaissance art abounds in images inspired by the fables of Ovid's Metamorphoses, pictorial "poems" by Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Correggio, and Titian, among others. More profoundly, the very theory of Renaissance art, grounded in the concept of imitation, was often seen or described in terms of a central Ovidian fable, specifically the story of Pygmalion. Our understanding of the ways in which Ovid pervades the visual culture of the Renaissance is woefully inadequate, however. Whereas there are by now broad studies of Plato and Aristotle in relation to Renaissance art, there is, perhaps surprisingly, no such general understanding of Ovid's place in the ...