This volume is the record of a conference jointly sponsored by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute on 6 and 7 March 2013. It consists of twelve papers on the reception of Ovid from Dante to Abraham Cowley on topics both literary and art historical, as is only to be expected at an event hosted by these two institutions. The topic of Ovidian reception is vast and this collection makes no pretence of an exhaustive treatment, offering instead sample vignettes of how Ovid's influence is reflected in a range of authors and artists from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries. In spite of the variety of topics treated, the volume has a thematic coherence in so far as each of the contributors focuses on specific examples of texts or artifacts for interpretative analysis, upon which readers may draw as models for their own approach to the legacy of Ovid.

The volume opens with a succinct, workmanlike introduction by the two editors and proceeds directly to individual case studies. In the first paper, ‘Dante's scriptures: Metamorphoses, Bible, Divina commedia’, Ingo Gildenhard explores the intertextual nexus of Dante's epic through an illuminating comparison of the opening of the Metamorphoses and the Book of Genesis. It was not necessary to take the improbable leap to suggest that Ovid read Genesis in the Septuagint (6–7) to argue that Dante might see reflections of it in Ovid's poem. But Gildenhard's reading is none the less compelling in its outcome. A similar interpretation of Ovid's pagan narratives by Christian poets is the subject of John Miller's paper on ‘Ovid's Janus and the start of the year in Renaissance Fasti sacri’. Miller traces the imprint of the Fasti in the Latin poetic calendars of Lodovico Lazzarelli (1484), Battista Mantovano (1516), Ambrogio Fracco (1547) and Girolamo Chiaravacci (1554). Miller's paper, focusing on how each poet presents the first day of the year, is a model demonstration of how examination of particulars can illuminate the broader implications of adapting an Ovidian intertext to ‘the project of a Christian Fasti sacri’ (83).

The poet as artist is the subject of Caroline Stark's paper, ‘Reflections of Narcissus’, in which she sees Ovid's version of the myth as representing ‘the power of art to immortalize the transient beauty of nature … and to arouse such insatiable desire in the viewer that it consumes all other desires’ (25). Against this background she examines reflections of the myth in Dante, Ariosto and Tasso, illustrating how these poets read the story as an admonishment ‘to reject sensory pleasure in favour of the rational reflection that leads to a transcendent aesthetic experience’ (41). Philip Hardie pursues a different track in his paper on ‘Milton as a reader of Ovid's Metamorphoses’, following the trail not of a single narrative of metamorphosis, but exploring multiple patterns of allusion. Following on the work of Mandy Green in Milton's Ovidian Eve (2009), Hardie illustrates Milton's ‘combinatorial imitation’ of a variety of characters in his portrayal of Eve. English poetry is represented as well in the paper by Maggie Kilgour, who argues in ‘Importing the Ovidian Muse to England’ that Ovid provided a model for Elizabethan poets in ‘transforming the classical inheritance into a new native tradition’ (182). Kilgour traces this influence in the development of the English epyllion through Thomas Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) and John Weever's Faunus and Melliflora (1600). Abraham Cowley's little studied but fascinating poem Plantarum libri sex (1668) is the subject of the final paper in the collection by Victoria Moul. Her paper is a succinct statement of the case for reconsidering this curious fusion of the classical tradition with modern science in its earliest stage.

Ovid's place in the literature of the Italian Renaissance is represented in two contributions, the first of which by Frank Coulson opens a vista onto the world of the humanists, who found in Ovid's Ibis a subject on which they demonstrate their philological prowess for contemporaries and rivals to admire. His paper on ‘Bernardo Moretti: A newly discovered commentator on Ovid's Ibis’ admirably elucidates the issues that attracted the attention of this Bolognese predecessor of Domizio Calderini. A second contribution by Hélène Casanova-Robin considers how Ovidian myth offered Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503) ‘a way to apprehend nature’ in his own poetry. Gesine Manuwald's essay on ‘Letter-writing after Ovid: his impact on Neo-Latin verse epistles’ treats as test cases the verse epistles of two northern Renaissance writers, the German humanist Helius Eobanus Hessus (1488–1540) and the Scottish poet Mark Alexander Boyd (1562–1601), both of whom drew on Ovid's Heroides as a model. Her treatment of Boyd's second collection of heroic epistles highlights the rich ironies of his version of a letter from Julia to her father Augustus.

Three illustrated chapters on the Ovidian tradition in visual imagery round out the collection. Fátima Díez-Platas treats fifteenth- and sixteenth-century book illustrations of the Metamorphoses, tracing how the images that accompanied the text of the poem ‘reacted to the value assigned to the poem at each particular time’ (116). In her splendid paper, ‘The Io in Correggio: Ovid and the metamorphosis of a Renaissance painter’, Hérica Valladares explores the unconventional iconography of Correggio's painting as an instance of his interest in ‘the way in which images could trigger a search for meaning that went beyond the identification of iconographic types to involve viewers in a dynamic pursuit of literary allusions’. Finally, Elizabeth McGrath traces the sources of Rubens’ mythological iconography not only in his own readings of Ovid in the original, but in illustrated Ovidian compendia.

A volume of this sort inevitably mirrors the variegated patterns of Ovid's poetry and of necessity will lack unity and comprehensiveness. But there is only one effective way to illuminate the reception of Ovid or any classical author, and that is to explicate each instance in detail. The papers in this volume exemplify this approach admirably and deserve a prominent place in the burgeoning literature on Ovid's reception.