Metamorphoses

‘Everything is constantly changing, yet nothing ever fully disappears,’ wrote the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso in his Metamorphoses. In this work – especially influential for artists – he described a world filled with transformations, in which gods and humans turn into animals, plants, or stones. In more than eighty works by artists such as Titian, Correggio, Cellini, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rodin, Brancusi, Magritte, and Bourgeois, themes such as passion, desire, lust, jealousy, cunning, and deception are explored.

The exhibition highlights the imagination behind several iconic fables through paintings, sculptures, goldsmith’s work, ceramics, contemporary photography, and video art. The life-size bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa – created by the Dutch artist Hubert Gerhardt for the Duke of Bavaria – and its model: the prototype for Cellini’s famous Perseus, are exhibited together for the first time.

Cover image: Auguste Rodin, Pygmalion et Galatée, 1908–9 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.