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The Library of Renaissance Symbolism The Symbolic Literature of the Renaissance |
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Metamorphosis is from the two Greek words meta and morphe meaning change of form.
Ovid’s poem relates some two hundred and fifty different stories involving hundreds of different characters from the myths set in a history of the world from the creation up to his own time. But apart from its appeal as an epic story in its own right and as source material for the writers of the Renaissance, the poem and its popularity illustrated the continuing concern with a fundamental philosophical problem: the nature and reality of change both on a physical and a semantic level. According to the Metamorphoses (in the translation of Sandys) the myths describe: The World’s originall, past humane thought: This extract is taken from Book XV, the last book of the Metamorphoses in which Ovid, in the voice of Pythagoras, sums up his theme that change is the one certainty for earthly things. The nature of transformation and change, metamorphosis, how material things could change and simultaneously retain their identity, was an ubiquitous concern of Greek philosophy. Plato’s elegant solution to this paradox was that material and earthly objects were mere reflections or symbols of his Divine Forms, which latter were, in the words of Cornelius Agrippa, ‘one, simple, pure, immutable, indivisible, incorporeal and eternal’. This insight of Plato as to the nature of material change was the origin of the obsession with symbol and allegory during the whole period from classical times to the Renaissance (Raybould Ch. 1).
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