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On three massive screens in a darkened room, snakes glide over the face of artist Juul Kraijer – covering her eyes, caressing her lips. She is the silent but terrifying snake-headed Medusa, and one of the surprises in an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam revolving around Greek and Roman myths.
While the show features rarely lent works from masters such as Caravaggio, Bernini, Rodin and Brâncuși, it marries them with modern artists who reinterpret the legends where male gods do all they can to get their wicked way and the powerless are punished. Transgender bodies, bare breasts and even a volcanic vulva appear in artworks inspired by Roman poet Ovid’s masterpiece, Metamorphoses.
Taco Dibbits, general director of the Rijksmuseum, believes the 200 myths and legends from this ancient epic poem still speak to our uncertain times. “The Metamorphoses have inspired artists for over 2,000 years and the subject is very relevant today, when everything is changing,” he says. “Things are morphed into other forms. People morph into other people. It’s about the force of nature and giving an explanation to our passions, to our sadness, to our fears. That’s what makes it so intensely human.”
The show features plaster models by Auguste Rodin, with figures emerging from crude rock like the female sculpture created by Pygmalion in Ovid’s legend, who comes to life. There is a room inspired by Leda and the Swan, with Zeus “seducing” the Spartan queen by taking the bird’s form.
It also includes a rare loan from the Louvre. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th-century carving of Sleeping Hermaphroditus – which sets an ancient Roman sculpture of a hermaphrodite with male and female sexual organs on a lifelike marble mattress – was inspired by Ovid’s story of a couple’s bodies merging in sexual union.
There are some uncomfortable outcomes for women in the tales. Jupiter assumes the form of a cloud or shower of gold to impregnate his female target. As one explanatory board admits: “His loves are rarely tender – more often coercive and one-sided.”
Modern artists, particularly women, give another point of view: South African sculptor Nandipha Mntambo’s 2009 bronze of Jupiter as a bull is cast into a powerful, female form. The story of Arachne, who challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest and was eventually transformed into a spider, becomes a massive bronze spider statue created by the late French-American artist Louise Bourgeois.
A room about chaos and creation features Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s Birth (Gunpowder Works). It depicts a female body made from earth and water, with what the gallery describes as a large “vulva-like form containing smouldering ash”.
Frits Scholten, senior curator of sculpture, says there is a level of modern discomfort with the sexualisation of rape in some of Ovid’s stories and the art they inspired. “All these early stories in Ovid were reinterpreted by each generation and our generation looks at them in a different way,” he says. “We do address the fact that it’s often not very friendly to women.
“At the same time, we say that you have to be nuanced in your view: these were scenes from fantasy, from ancient fairy tales, and they were often symbolic. I’m not saying that they are OK, but they exist, they are part of our culture and part of our history.”
Scholten points to a copy of a painting of Leda and the Swan, once created by the Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo. “That’s a bedchamber piece,” he said. “You can be fairly sure that it hung over a bed in a palace in Italy. The original one by Michelangelo went to France and was destroyed by the French queen – she didn’t like it. So it is about power.”
In celebrating these stories of change and transformation, Dibbits says the exhibition is ultimately about hope. “It gives a form to our fears, to the violence change often brings forth, but also the softness and the sweetness of it,” he says. “Everything undergoes a metamorphosis but the soul stays. That’s the hope: we haven’t lost our souls.”
