Accompanying Sharon to a weekend conference in Amsterdam, I took the opportunity, while she was hard at work, to visit the Rijksmuseum’s blockbuster exhibition inspired by Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses.

Written around 8 AD, Metamorphoses chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the time of Julius Caesar, weaving together more than 250 familiar and less familiar myths. A key theme is that “all things change, but nothing dies”. Humans, animals, and gods constantly change shape. For example, Arachne the weaver turns into a spider, while Jupiter disguises himself as a bull, a swan and a shower of gold.

The exhibition brings together more than 80 works from around the world, including the Ashmolean. They include paintings, sculptures, metalwork and ceramics, as well as contemporary photography and video art. The artists range from Bernini, Titian, Correggio and Caravaggio to Rodin, Brancusi, Magritte and Bourgeois.

Many of the works are directly inspired by individual myths, while for others the link is more tenuous. One of the most impressive, if unsettling, modern pieces is a video installation by the Dutch artist Juul Kraijer, inspired by the myth of Medusa, in which three large screens play videos of snakes slithering across her face. But for me the highlight was Bernini’s Sleeping Hermaphrodite, from the Louvre.

This sculpture depicts a story from Metamorphoses in which the nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, merge into a single body combining both sexes. The marble figure is a Roman sculpture from the 2nd century AD and was excavated in 1618. The Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini then added a marble mattress and pillow, which appear uncannily lifelike and soft.

The last time I read any number of these myths was in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid. But, as shown below, we have some fine copies of Metamorphoses in the Library, both in Latin and in Dryden’s translation. And if you would like to know more about Ovid, our own Gail Trimble discussed him recently on Radio 4’s Human Intelligence (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002pff3).

As Gail observes, Ovid was interested in “all the different kinds of people who might exist in these worlds: men and women, free people and enslaved people, humans and gods, and animals and monsters”. Through this lens, he was “pushing at the boundaries of what human experience is”. Without his irreverent retellings, the mythological richness found in Shakespeare, for example, would be much diminished.