Divine metamorphosis and the dangers of mimēsis: interpreting Roman pictures of Jupiter’s erotic metamorphoses through the lens of ancient ekphrasis
Greek and Latin epic poetry is full of elaborate descriptions of fictional artworks (or what is known as ekphrasis). But what might these descriptions of made-up artworks teach us about how the Greeks and Romans approached the real-life artefacts around them?
College of Arts School of Modern Languages and Cultures Stirling Maxwell Centre
Date: Thursday 22 October 2026
Time: 17:00 - 18:00
Venue: TalkLab Seminar Room (University Library, Level 3)
Category: Public lectures,
Divine metamorphosis and the dangers of mimēsis: interpreting Roman pictures of Jupiter’s erotic metamorphoses through the lens of ancient ekphrasis
Albert Bates, University of Glasgow
University of Glasgow Library, TalkLab Seminar Room (Level 3)
Thursday, 22 October 2026, 5 p.m.
This is a hybrid event. To get your dedicated Teams Webinar link, please click here.
Greek and Latin epic poetry is full of elaborate descriptions of fictional artworks (or what is known as ekphrasis). But what might these descriptions of made-up artworks teach us about how the Greeks and Romans approached the real-life artefacts around them? As a test case, this paper seeks to make sense of a fascinating corpus of Roman paintings and mosaics depicting Jupiter preying on unsuspecting women in metamorphic disguise (as a bull for Europa, a swan for Leda, etc.) by putting them alongside ekphrases by two of the Roman empire’s most sophisticated epic poets, namely Ovid and Nonnus. Specifically, I will use Ovid’s famous ekphrasis of Arachne’s tapestry in the Metamorphoses and Nonnus’ less well-known, but equally clever, ekphrasis of Aeacus’ shield in the Dionysiaca — both of which describe fictional artworks depicting Jupiter’s erotic metamorphoses — to recover the surprising self-referential dynamics of such paintings and mosaics. In particular, I will show how studying these ekphrases can alert us to how ancient viewers understood such pictures to contain subtle mise-en-abymes, whereby the visual illusions of the deceptive god provocatively stood in for those of the artist. Ultimately, this paper hopes to show how poetic ekphrasis — even if it describes fictional artworks that find no exact counterpart in the archaeological record — nevertheless furnish the classical art historian with an indispensable tool for recovering ancient ways of seeing.