Metamorphosis of the Metamorphoses: Italian rewritings of Ovid between Renaissance and Baroque

My dissertation is the first to consider the essential nature of pre-Modern Italian vernacularizations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, by treating them as rewritings rather than mere translations. Through this perspective, I expose the innovative drive that renders a text a separate entity from its model. Moreover, I highlight the crucial contributions that these rewritings provide to the reception of a classical masterpiece, as well as to the evolution of Renaissance and Baroque poetics. This study focuses on three volgarizzamenti: Gabriele Simeoni’s Metamorfoseo, Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara’s Metamorfosi, and Giovanni Palazzi’s Ovidio Istorico Politico Morale. Each text approaches Ovid’s work in a unique way, synthesizing or expanding its content, and converting the poem into prose. Each author also relates to Ovid from a different standpoint, which ranges from celebrating his legacy, to actively competing with him, to exploiting the classical author’s fame. I account for the relationships between the Latin (and French) models and their Italian interpretations through philological reading, analysis of the editorial history of the rewritings, and methods employed in comparative literature. My dissertation is also the first to utilize translation studies (in particular the cultural turn) and literary criticism (especially intertextuality, Structuralism, and Readers’ Response theory) to reveal which aspect each rewriting problematizes: the author, the addressee, or the targeted public. Furthermore, I offer a comprehensive analysis of the interplay between word and image in the aforementioned works. Whereas previous studies mainly aimed at identifying the figurative sources, I address the consequences of whether illustrations were recycled from another book or crafted purposely for that precise text. I also examine how illustrations affect the message of a work (reinforcing or undermining it), what value they hold with respect to the written counterpart, and how their positioning on the page determines their role. I thus demonstrate the importance of considering rewritings within literary studies—rather than dismissing them as secondary, derivative literature—as they allow us to track trends in poetics and understand the reception of the classics in the transitional and transformative era between the Renaissance and the Baroque