Бернхард Холлик
Кельнский университет, Германия
Our image of Ovid is shaped by classicist displays such as the statues of the Italian sculptor Ettore Ferrari. Yet, a portrait drawn by an anonymous artist in William Caxton’s (d. 1492) manuscript of his Middle English version of the Metamorphoses shows an astonishingly different picture: Ovid, with the attributes of an oriental sage, is kneeling in a cloister cell, while receiving divine inspiration from an icon of Christ. The aim of the paper is to investigate how the portrait of Ovid in Caxton’s autograph reflects the reception of his poems in the Late Middle Ages and to what degree the study of classical poetry served as a link between scholasticism and art in this period.
Examination of Caxton’s portrait works as a prominent example of further illuminated manuscripts from 1300–1500 that similarly show Ovid as a scientific and religious authority. These paintings were not the result of an art-immanent development but constitute reflections on the reception of Ovid in contemporary thought: the Metamorphoses as well as the love poems were consulted as sources of ancient theology and philosophy of nature; for example in more academic works such as Bradwardine’s De causa Dei, but also in the mystical treatises of Richard Rolle. Reciprocally, commentaries on the Metamorphoses like the Ovidius Moralizatus by Pierre Bersuire were quite often engaged in the recent theological and scientific discourse. Mythographic sermons helped to popularize this view on the Roman poet. Hermetic ideas play a significant part in this transformation of Ovid from a pagan author to an inspired prophet and Christian scholar. Further, they may explain the orientalism of some of the pictures under investigation.
Highlighting this ideological basis, the paper will show that the seemingly anachronistic image of antiquity in late medieval book painting is not merely the result of historical ignorance but that it is rooted in specific intellectual mechanisms of perception and reception of ancient culture.