Bernhard Hollick The Poet as a Saint: The Caxton Master’s Portrait of Ovid and Its Literary Background

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://dx.doi.org/10.18688/aa155-4-47
Title The Poet as a Saint: The Caxton Master’s Portrait of Ovid and Its Literary Background
Author email bhollick@uni-koeln.de
About author Bernhard Hollick — Ph. D., Postdoctoral Research Fellow. University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne. Germany
In the section Classical Antiquity on the Ribs of European Middle Ages DOI10.18688/aa155-4-47
Year 2015 Volume 5 Pages 433–440
Type of article RAR Index UDK 7.034(410) Index BBK 85.03
Abstract

The frontispiece of William Caxton’s Middle English translation of the Ovide moralisé en prose in Cambridge, Magdalen College, Old Library, Ms. F.4.34, fol. 16r, shows Ovid as a Christian saint, praying to and receiving inspiration from an image of Christ. There is no similar picture in any other manuscript. However, the artist, who is usually referred to as the Caxton Master, could draw on a broad literary background: the text illustrated by him belongs to a group of sources from France, which offer Christian interpretations (the so-called moralisations) of the Metamorphoses. At the same time, the Caxton Master is rooted in a home-grown English classicism, which from 1300 onwards established Ovid as a major authority, as is evident by commentaries, sermons, and — most surprisingly — scholastics writings. This paper aims to shed light on this interaction of literature and art.
Keywords
Reference Bernhard Hollick. The Poet as a Saint: The Caxton Master’s Portrait of Ovid and Its Literary Background. Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art: Collection of articles. Vol. 5. Eds: Svetlana V. Maltseva, Ekaterina Yu. Stanyukovich-Denisova, Anna V. Zakharova. St. Petersburg, NP-Print Publ., 2015, pp. 433–440. ISSN 2312-2129. http://dx.doi.org/10.18688/aa155-4-47
Publication Article language english
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