It’s a crisp afternoon, and in a darkened room in central Amsterdam a woman is being smothered in snakes. Projected on to three walls is a massive video close-up of her face. She is young and beautiful and remarkably composed: just a nose twitch here, an eyelid flutter there, as a python wriggles across her mouth or languidly caresses her cheekbone with its tail.

In the room behind me, another woman stares fiercely back. Her shoulders are bunched with muscle, arms stiff at her sides, like a nightclub brawler about to nut someone. But it’s the bull’s horns sprouting from her forehead, and the mane of matted fur marching down her back, that make it hard to meet her gaze.

As the exhibition shows, Ovid puts today’s ‘radicals’ in the shade

As the exhibition shows, Ovid puts today’s ‘radicals’ in the shade

A few miles away, in the city’s red light district, you pay good money to see such confrontational sights. Here, they are part of a package deal, included in the admission price for the Rijksmuseum’s blockbuster spring exhibition Metamorphoses. A collaboration with the Galleria Borghese, it runs in the Dutch capital until May 25, and reopens in June in Rome. The Rijksmuseum are good at the pyrotechnics required to get punters in through the door – its 2023 Vermeer exhibition brought together an unprecedented 28 of the artist’s 35 known paintings. And its curators have an apparently inexhaustible supply of “lost” Old Masters up their sleeves. Early this month, they announced the rediscovery of a new Rembrandt, authenticating “Vision of Zacharias in the Temple” as by the17th-century artist, rather than a student of his school.

Yet Metamorphoses displays ambition, and risk, of a different sort. Alongside the Bible, the epic work by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso – “Ovid,” to posterity – was once one of the twin pillars of western artistic inspiration. Now the work is seen as a specialist subject: the niche of scholars at the unfashionable end of university humanities departments, or the kind of schools it’s unwise to admit attending in civil service job interviews. In fact, the Rijksmuseum’s curators claim this is the first major exhibition dedicated to artworks inspired by the poem. It ranges across 2,000 years of art history, taking in 9th-century hunting trophies and contemporary........

© The Spectator