In a small darkened room at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam sleeps a figure surrounded by curious onlookers. Some hastily, even furtively, take pictures on their phones. Not long after the opening of the museum’s Metamorphoses exhibition, this is the piece – among the 80-plus here inspired by Ovid’s Latin poem – that seems to hold most spectators under its spell. If the curators hoped to demonstrate the enduring allure of Ovid’s epic of transformation, two millennia after its composition, they already have some vital evidence.

Although it looks spookily human, fleshly and yielding, the slumbering creature was fashioned out of marble about a hundred years after the date of the poem. Excavated in Rome in 1618, the second-century ‘Sleeping Hermaphroditus’ then underwent another metamorphosis of its own. The greatest sculptor of the time, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, carved a marble mattress for the ambiguous youth. It looks as improbably cushiony and pliable as the sensuously curving body of the shape-shifting figure itself.

One of the 250-odd stories of transformation spread over the 15 books of Latin hexameters couplets in Ovid’s work, this tale recounts the yearning of the semi-divine nymph Salmacis for the unattainable beauty of a boy created by Venus and Mercury. In Charles Martin’s translation, Salmacis ‘burns with passion for his nakedness’, but, thwarted by his indifference, wraps herself round him ‘just as ivy winds around a tree’ until the gods grant her wish. The separate bodies fuse into something ‘no longer to be called a man and woman/ And, although neither, nonetheless seemed both’.

Here, as it sometimes does, metamorphosis means not an absolute change of state or form – nymph into tree, shepherd into river, god into bull, or cloud, or shower of gold – but the generation of a fluid, hybrid being. It can be a both/and rather than an either/or business. Ovid had little to learn from 21st-century trends about the unsettling attraction of non-binary identities. He might have chuckled to see members of a western generation that ties itself in knots over what it calls ‘the trans issue’ clustered eagerly around a work that captures the aesthetic, and erotic, charge of his principle of endless alteration.

But then some part of his fast-flowing, freewheeling 12,000-line epic still speaks of, and to, almost every life-changing episode – of desire, dread, wonder, or possession by a seemingly alien power – that human beings experience in any age. The poet Ted Hughes, whose 1997 Tales from Ovid constitute one of the deepest modern responses to the epic, writes that it concerns above all ‘human passion in extremis – passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural’.

‘Nothing persists without changing its outward appearance,’ sermonises the philosopher Pythagoras in the speech Ovid inserts into his final chapter, ‘for Nature is always engaged in acts of renewal’. So runs the poet Charles Martin’s rendering, in 2003; but the Metamorphoses in English is one of those ever-changing things as well. In 1567, in the Elizabethan translation that triggered a four-century flood of versions, inspirations and adaptations, Arthur Golding has Pythagoras insist that ‘No kind of thing keeps aye his shape and hue/ For nature loving ever change repairs one shape anew/ Upon another’. This ultimate book of changes has itself morphed into a myriad fresh forms. At the Rijksmuseum, visitors can enjoy an especially strong, though necessarily limited, sample of artworks created after Ovid – fluently presented in Aldo Bakker’s design, and accompanied by a well-produced audioguide spoken by Stephen Fry. The show, however, also invites us to reflect on how, and why, Ovid’s stories can still evoke our world of flux.

They emerged, after all, from a moment of crisis and threat. The charmed life of the well-born Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (born 43 BC) had seen him thrive as a witty, urbane and well-connected storyteller in verse after he gave up the tedium of politics and law. Yet the risqué, dandyish author of The Art of  Love and the Heroides had to weather a harsher climate as the Emperor Augustus launched a back-to-basics moral crackdown. The Metamorphoses themselves date from the first years AD. They reveal a grandstanding artist at the peak of his powers – and his pride, as he signs off with the assurance that ‘in my fame forever I will live’. Hubris courted nemesis – who, personified, turns up in his epic as the goddess of vengeance who punishes ultra-vain Narcissus.

By 9 AD, Augustus had exiled Ovid to Tomis on the distant Black Sea coast (today, Constanta in Romania) on charges of what the poet called carmen et error: a poem and a crime. The poem would likely have been the Art of Love, with its supposed handbook for upper-class adultery, and the error a culpable proximity to anti-Augustus conspirators. Fate rang the changes on the poet of mutability. Although he suffered only relegatio, a milder penalty that did not entail loss of property rights, Ovid never returned to Rome and family. His metamorphosis proved permanent. In unctuous farewell lines towards the end of the Metamorphoses, Ovid lavishes sycophantic praise on Julius Caesar’s dynasty and compares Augustus, Caesar’s adoptive son, to Jupiter himself: on earth, ‘like great Jove’ above, ‘he is our father and our governor’. A lot of good it did him.

The poet died, in 17 or 18AD; the poem lived, just as he foretold. At the Rijksmuseum, most of the pieces – paintings, sculptures, artefacts, engravings – reflect the explosion of Ovidian creativity that followed the circulation of printed editions during the Renaissance. The work itself abounds in depictions of artists and artworks, from Pygmalion falling in love with the statue he carves to the rival tapestries woven by Arachne and Minerva. Ovid presents creativity itself as an act of metamorphosis. Artists seized on his poem not just as a treasure-chest of outlandish stories, but a spectacular tribute to the mysteries of their crafts. Renaissance editions, from the 1497 translation published by Lucantonio Giunta in Venice, often featured lavish illustrations of the tales.

Ovid in book form circulated far and wide, and spawned an immense pan-European progeny of shared imagery. By 1604, the Flemish artist and writer Karel van Mander could describe the epic as ‘a Bible for artists’. Unlike holy scripture, however, it treated the multiple seductions, abductions and outright rapes frequently committed by its divine and human characters with a light, brisk neutrality of voice and stance. Charles Martin, the most addictively readable of several strong recent translators of the whole work, refers to ‘the speed of the narration, the casualness of tone, the rapid changes in point of view’. Ovid’s swiftness and detachment – Italo Calvino, much influenced by the Metamorphoses, dubbed it ‘thoughtful lightness’ – gave another spur to its creative interpreters. These stories left ample gaps for later artists to fill as they desired.

The Rijksmuseum show arranges the tales in linked thematic groups, with an emphasis on a handful of better-known stories: Perseus as he slays Medusa and rescues Andromeda; Leda, Io, Europa and Danaë’s rapes by Jupiter in his various animal, vegetable and mineral guises; Minerva and Arachne; Theseus and the Minotaur; the desires of Narcissus and Pygmalion. Sections explore the prime Ovidian theme of art itself as metamorphosis, while modern works modify a Renaissance-heavy emphasis.

That focus results in a sumptuous selection of major pieces, mostly loaned: Titian’s Danäe; Correggio’s Jupiter and Io; Caravaggio’s Narcissus; Ghirlandaio’s Leda and the Swan; Tintoretto’s Minerva and Arachne; Poussin’s The Inspiration of the Poet, as well as the same artist’s homage to the fount of pictorial narration: The Triumph of Ovid. No surprise that later works sometimes fail to keep pace with these illustrious forerunners, although Dutch artist Juul Kraijer powerfully puts movement back into metamorphosis with her (sinister and compelling) three-screen video work of snake-headed Medusa, Spawn. And Louise Bourgeois’s spiders – here represented by an extra-creepy giant arachnid couple – summon the untamed power as sacred spinner that Ovid’s Arachne wields, even after her weaver-to-insect transfer. After its stint in the Netherlands, the exhibition will move for the summer to the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Aptly enough, it will change: additions will include that museum’s great Bernini, Apollo and Daphne.

After the Renaissance, the Metamorphoses became much more than a popular encyclopaedia of the Greco-Roman legends later labelled as ‘mythology’. The epic came to define, almost to monopolise, the storytelling of antiquity, so that Ovid’s iteration of these motifs served as the template for their transmission. This familiarity, and ubiquity, can dull their force and muffle their shock. The most irresistible pieces on display in Amsterdam restore the shattering violence or strangeness of the moment, and process, of change. Titian’s Danäe, suffused with violating gold; Michelangelo’s Leda, the original lost but present here in a magnificent engraving, as the divine fowl entangles its victim in an invasive sensuous stranglehold; Caravaggio’s Narcissus, not idly inspecting his pretty face in the pool but actively, desperately enamoured of the self as other: such works channel the uncanny terror of becoming after a divine desire attacks.

What’s justice, let alone love, got to do with it? Notoriously, the Metamorphoses roll out one incident of victim-blaming after another. Medusa, shown here decapitated by Perseus in Hubert Gerhard’s chilling life-size bronze, acquires her snake-hair because Neptune raped her in the temple of Minerva, and the outraged goddess decreed that such blasphemy ‘should not go unpunished’. So Medusa wrongly suffered – and recent feminist reversals have sought to overturn the verdict. At the exit to the exhibition, we meet Luca Giordano’s Apollo and Marsyas. For the crime of challenging the god to a musical competition, the satyr Marsyas is graphically flayed until (as Charles Martin’s Ovid says) ‘his pulsing veins were flickering, and you/ could number all his writhing viscera’. The gallery text glosses this punishment as the ultimate example of rebirth through ordeal: Marsyas becomes a clear river, a popular disposal in Ovid for the prey of the gods. But Giordano reminds us with lacerating intensity of the frequent agony, and occasional ecstasy, that convulsive change inflicts in the Metamorphoses.

A few exhibits, however, seem to soft-pedal the trauma of transformation. A series of photographic self-portraits taken at different stages of his life by Polish-French artist Roman Opałka reminds the viewer that time wreaks irreversible changes on us all. But the impression they leave is contemplative, melancholy, rather than tragic. Despite the dynamism that the greatest artists here invest in scenes of overwhelming change – such as Rodin’s sculpture of Pygmalion’s statue breaking through into flesh and blood – the pre-film visual arts themselves may tend to halt, or freeze, the poem’s relentless flow.

We might imagine another sort of exhibition that put some of these works in dialogue with Ovid’s narrative, either in its original or through the spin-off versions that have enriched English and several other literatures since the Middle Ages. For instance, the feminist pushback against the mistreated or manipulated women of the Metamorphoses arguably begins in English in the 1380s, with Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. It continues into the 21st century in such guises as Ali Smith’s 2007 exuberant retelling of the story of Iphis, Girl Meets Boy. (Iphis is the Cretan maid, raised as a boy and treated as one, who aches with ‘hopeless desperation’ to marry Ianthe and finally has her yearning for gender reassignment satisfied by the goddess Isis.)

In the English language alone, the history of literature over six centuries often appears as a series of footnotes to the Metamorphoses. Poets in particular sharpened their wits against Ovid’s tough, glittering verse from Chaucer and Shakespeare (all the way from Venus and Adonis and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Tempest) to Ezra Pound and Ted Hughes. Shakespeare seldom quotes directly, but he does – drawing both on Ovid’s Latin and Golding’s translation – when Prospero in The Tempest abjures his magic arts in the farewell speech that begins ‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves’. In an incantation, Golding’s sorceress Medea speaks almost exactly those words.

What the most powerful verbal iterations of the tales can achieve is precisely an immersion in the violence – physical or spiritual – of change. Take Diana’s makeover of the presumptuous hunter Actaeon into a stag to be pursued and dismembered by hounds. In Hughes’ sinewy and compressed verse (in Tales from Ovid), we feel what the finest painting may struggle to communicate: the inner panic of the changed creature. ‘What has happened to me?’ Actaeon tries to say, but ‘His only voice was a groan’. Then ‘Human tears shone on his stag’s face/ From the grief of a mind that was still human’. In contrast, the Baroque drinking vessel of antlered Actaeon in the exhibition (made by Jeremias Ritter of Nuremberg) is simply a virtuoso conceit.

Ovid, and his vigorous later interpreters, can be most unsettling when they focus on the excruciating process of transformation, not as some magic-wand trick but a rending, wrenching drag from one condition to another as mind and body enter different realms. Like a birth, or like a death. When Juno (victim-blaming again) punishes the nymph Callisto for having been raped by Jove and borne the god a child, Callisto turns into a shaggy bear. But not with painless instantaneity: in Hughes’s words, as her divinely kissed lips became ‘fanged jaws’ and her voice a ‘shattering snarl’, ‘her mind was unaltered. Her lament/ Was the roar of a bear – but her grief was human’. This mingled or doubled state thrusts some of Ovid’s changelings into a special sort of hell.

The Rijksmuseum show has prompted some valid reflections on the ability of Ovid’s epic – and the artworks it incubated – to address questions that trouble readers or viewers today. Gender identity and sexual violence figure prominently in this search for Metamorphoses to match our time – as does the ecological vision that has Pythagoras, in his valedictory sermon, insist that ‘Everything changes and nothing can die’ as Nature mutates, creates, destroys while things ‘stay constant in their sum total’ (Charles Martin). Ovid’s philosopher – a character, remember, not an authorial mouthpiece – further warns humanity not to interfere in the Earth’s delicate homeostatic system by consuming the flesh of other animals. That entails ‘this expulsion by slaughter of spirits so like you’. The entire epic hymns the unity of creation through perpetual exchange between forms of life.

One other contemporary resonance perhaps merits more attention than the Amsterdam show or its critics have so far given it. Ovid’s pitiful creatures often find themselves trapped in unchosen forms that bring havoc and ruin to their physical and social beings. That sense of coerced displacement into an alien body can surely illuminate an era that poses, for unprecedented numbers of sufferers and carers, the challenge of advancing age. Long-term illness, physical and mental, is the form of which most people now will encounter metamorphosis as tragedy. Dementia itself can descend like the divinely-decreed estrangement from human identity displayed in Ovid’s tales. At the Rijksmuseum I was reminded of John Bayley’s poignant description of his wife, Iris Murdoch, as the novelist-philosopher’s mind slipped away. He wrote in his memoir that she had developed ‘a lion’s face’, noble but blank and absent.

Works in the exhibition, made in periods before many people lived long enough to risk losing their thinking, feeling selves, seldom hint at this torment. However, the 17th-century sculptor Giusto Le Court depicts Invidia, the female embodiment of envy, as a snake-locked old woman. Through pinched, stretched marble, her wrinkled features express the uncomprehending rage of a sentient being wrecked by sickness and time. Perhaps what she most envies – what any of us may envy – is her own unruined self.

Yet, in images or words, the Metamorphoses can also charm shock into joy. A minority of pieces capture the ecstatic pleasure or rapture of change: from Rodin’s Pygmalion as his beloved artefact grows humanly soft, to Ghirlandaio’s flirtatious Leda, who welcomes the heavenly swan not as some vicious raptor but a cute pet she cradles to her breast. For Ovid, and some later interpreters, excitement and exhilaration as well as danger arise from the universal principle of metamorphosis. Writing in the 21st century, Ali Smith (in Girl Meets Boy) channels Ovid’s paean to endless flux in the 15th book as fervently as Arthur Golding had in the 1560s. Her retelling of Iphis’ god-blessed gender-switching ends with a homage to ‘the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one thing into another, and nothing lasts, and nothing’s lost, and nothing ever perishes’. That passage is itself a translation; a re-invention; a metamorphosis.

Across its four-score works, the Rijksmuseum show can only suggest a fraction of the riches that later creators have mined from Ovid’s poem. Still, the items chosen do illustrate the joy of making that artists in many media have harvested from Ovid’s stories of the pain of changing. The supreme poetic artisan, Ovid celebrates human craft and skill even as he registers the blows delivered to it by superhuman, or subhuman, powers.

In Tintoretto’s brilliantly angled Minerva and Arachne, from the late 1570s, we look up to see the loom on which the human weaver’s impeccable art outshines the goddess herself. While Minerva has woven pompous scenes of Athenian grandeur, defiant Arachne – in this most artfully self-referring of epics – depicts the rapes and abductions of Jupiter. On the reader’s page, or here in the gallery, those very stories lie all around us. ‘Since’ (as Ted Hughes has it), ‘neither the goddess/ Nor jealousy herself/ Could find a stitch in the entire work,/ That was not perfect. Arachne’s triumph/ Was unbearable’. The humbled goddess lashes out, drives the nimble-fingered artist to attempt suicide, then relents so that Arachne’s miniaturised spider-form spins in nature with touches ‘Deft and swift and light as when they were human’. In the poem, or in these galleries, passion-driven change may bring panic and pain. Yet we never lose sight of the transformative triumph of art.

Metamorphoses is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam until  25 May 2026, then at Galleria Borghese, Rome, from 22 June to 20 September 2026.