Many years ago, we purchased a group of nine woodcuts depicting some of the stories told in Ovid's Metamorphoses and recently we added three more. On stylistic grounds, we assigned them to the period of c. 1490 to 1500 and, on the basis of their similarity to the woodcuts in the triumph of Venetian printing, Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia. The Strife of Love in a Dream, we tentatively placed them in Venice. REcently, relaxing from updating our website, I glanced at Edith Wyss's The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas in the Art of the Italian Renaissance: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Images (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), where, on p. 84, I came across a woodcut that was clearly very similar to ours. Lucantoniio Giunta, the publisher, took a a Tuscan paraphrase of Giovanne del Virgilio's 1377 allegorized prose narrative, added 52 woodcuts, and published the first Metamorphoses in Italian (by Giovanni Bonsignori), Ovidio metamorphoses vulgare in 1497 (reprinted in 1501). This is not a text of Ovid but a presentation of its allegorized meaning. Sadly, we do not have the whole presentation, but only the woodcuts (some of which are trimmed out of their context) as works of art that must stand alone. The designer of the woodcuts (at least two woodcuts—both of which we have—show his monogram as "AI") chose not to present a single moment but to offer a sequences of incidents in one woodcut. Happily, we discovered on the University of Virginia's website (at http://etext.virginia.edu/Latin/ovid/ovidillust.html#cycles) a complete set of the woodcuts with the full-page visible (though not the versos).

The woodcuts were evidently quite popular because they were used again in Latin editions of Ovid with commentary in Latin published in 1505 and 1509, where they show very little wear from our earlier impressions. The woodcuts may have been based upon drawings made by Benedetto Montagna and may have been cut by Zoan Andrea il Veneziano and Nicolao da Modena. It is also possible that Mantegna's influence also may be included in their genealogy. Readers who prefer their Renaissance Ovids in English can enjoy the first complete translation into English by Arthur Golding (also a translator of Calvin and Luther), Ovid's Metamorphoses (1567), ed. John Frederick Nims (NY: Macmillan, 1965). Golding was in the employ of Sir Philip Sidney's uncle, the Earl of Leicester, and after Sidney's death he completed (or stole, according to Sidney's friend, Fulke Greville, later Lord Brooke), Sidney's translation of his friend Philip du Plessis de Mornay's A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion (London, 1587). It is interesting to think about the mental flexibility of someone who could work on both Luther and Calvin, Ovid, and a French defense of the Christian religion, written by the future Henry IV's chief adviser and translated into English by the son of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Lieutenant of Ireland who was himself a courtier, a poet, a translator of the Psalms, a writer of sonnet sequences and a long prose fiction, and a general and governor of Flushing, given to the English by the rebellious Netherlandish rebels against Spain as security against a loan that Elizabeth made to them, a work that begins with general philosophical principles and moves to the revelation of the only truth in a Protestant understanding of Christianity.

These images offer a kind of baseline. They mark a moment when readers and viewers were just beginning to turn to works like Ovid's Metamorphoses not just for allegorized readings of classical texts as illustrating Christian mysteries as in the Old French Ovide Moralizé (both the verse version done in the 13th century or the prose version from the 15th century) but also out of a renewed interest in the old stories themselves which, by the last third of the 15th century had become the basis for paintings by artists like Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, and Andrea Mantegna, and which in the works of 16th-century Venetian masters like Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese become the subjects of beautiful, powerful, and moving works of art. All references to Ovid are to Charles Martin's translation of the Metamorphoses (NY: Norton, 2004).