The Landscape of Desire: The Tale of Pomona and Vertumnus in Ovid's "Metamorphoses"

Gentilcore, R. Louis

doi:10.2307/1192628

Cited by 22 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As Roxanne Gentilcore argues, Ovid's sexual metaphors of walled gardens and ripe apples also equate Pomona with her orchard; she never speaks, and the story can be read in terms of man subjugating nature. 91 In his gloss on Ovid, Van Mander identified Pomona with virtue, and Vertumnus with the effort required to attain it; additionally, since Vertumnus stands for Goltzius (as Sluijter points out), the god's conquest, fashioning a reluctant virgin into a fruitful vine, is analogous to the artist's shaping of the female body into ideal form. 92 However, these allegorical conceits rest uneasily with the tale's erotic content and Goltzius's titillation of male viewers, who, like Vertumnus, are positioned uncomfortably close to Pomona's alluring body.…”

Section: Returning Home: the Protean Artist In The 1590smentioning

confidence: 99%

Van Mander's Protean Artist: Hendrick Goltzius, Mythic Masculinity and Embodiment

Hults¹

2021

Art History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Detail from HendrickGoltzius, Mucius Scaevola from Roman Heroes, 1586 (plate 7). IntroductionKarel van Mander's 'Life of Henricus Goltzius' is a crucial part of his Schilder-boeck (Book on Painting, Amsterdam, 1604), which consists of various texts. It begins with a didactic poem, The Groundwork of the Noble and Free Art of Painting, and finishes with two sections on iconography: a gloss on Ovid's Metamorphoses and a list of emblems, personifications, and their meanings. Sandwiched between are biographies of ancient, Italian, and northern artists that form the core of the book. As Walter Melion has argued, Goltzius's biography (Schilder-boeck, fols. 281v-287r) is intertextually related to the other parts of the book and serves Van Mander's overall goal of establishing the northern tradition of art as different from, but equal to, that of Italy, as presented by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists (1550; second edition 1568). Certainly, the northern biographies distinguish the two traditions by highlighting, for example, northern landscape painting, Jan van Eyck's development of oil painting into a meticulous 'mirror' of nature (Schilder-boeck, fol. 201r), and the inventive graphic works of Van Mander's close friend Goltzius (plate 1). Beyond comparing artistic traditions, the Schilder-boeck promoted (as did Vasari's Lives) the liberal status of the visual arts and their relationship to poetry. It also provided moral and practical advice for young artists with the Groundwork and the exemplars in the biographies. 'The Life of Goltzius' is central to these aims. 1 In numerous publications, Melion has discussed the construction of Goltzius as the epitome of the virtuous artist-hero, a trope rooted in the profession and techniques of art, and Jürgen Müller has stressed Christ-like allusions in Van Mander's account of his friend. 2 In this essay, I raise new questions about the 'Life of Goltzius' from a feminist and materialist perspective. How are the superhuman, masculine attributes of the artist-hero inflected by early modern concepts of gender, and how do they relate to the artist's work and embodied life?Van Mander based his 1604 biography on first-hand knowledge, making it central to research on the artist. Goltzius, born in 1558 in the German town of Mulbracht, moved to Haarlem in 1576 and met Van Mander shortly after the latter's arrival in 1583 as a Flemish refugee. With the painter Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem, they formed what was described in an anonymous biography of Van Mander, appended to the 1618 edition of the Schilder-boeck, as an 'academy' to study 'from life', and clearly Van Mander's knowledge of classical and European art (especially Bartholomeus Spranger's drawings) was important for Goltzius. 3 Although Van Mander knew Goltzius well, he also based his biography, surely with his friend's input, on an elevated construction of the artist that served as self-fashioning for both men: Goltzius emerges as the

show abstract

Section: Returning Home: the Protean Artist In The 1590smentioning

confidence: 99%

Van Mander's Protean Artist: Hendrick Goltzius, Mythic Masculinity and Embodiment

Hults¹

2021

Art History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Such relentless repetition of action is a typical characteristic of advertising since the pre-modern era (Beard, 2017). The Americans display showmanship including Wild West shows that would amaze and dazzle their audience into acceptance (Friedman, 1996), while the Italian itinerant migrants entertained their customers by creating laughing situations that attract customers to buy their medicines (Gentilcore, 1995). Tales of shipwrecks and fires were commonly used to explicate the low prices; entertaining the crowds and increase sales (Brown & Ward, 1990).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Retailing Strategies of West African Itinerant Immigrant Traders in Ghana

Yendaw¹,

Asitik

Dare

2021

JPLM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While Ghana remains a key destination for West African itinerant immigrant traders, studies examining their retail strategies appear missing in the Ghanaian migration literature. Applying the mixed methods design, quantitative and qualitative data were obtained from 779 immigrant vendors and 9 immigrant key informants. In tandem with this design (mixed methods), interview schedule and in-depth interview guide were employed to collect the data for analysis. The results indicate that most of the respondents exhibited their entrepreneurial prowess by constructing a network of clients around their business. The findings indicate that they sustained their clients by selling their wares at reduced prices with the supplier price being the determinant. Such traders usually prefer cash payments for their products with street vending being their main itinerant retail strategy. Primarily, most of them advertised their wares by shouting to draw attention to what they sell while others increased their sales using flattery and persuasive language. The Chi-square test results revealed a significant nexus between the immigrant vendors’ countries of origin and the various techniques they used to retail their goods. The study unveils the fact that aspiring entrepreneurs and shop retailers could experiment the pricing strategy of these immigrant traders, to increase sale values.

show abstract

“…This paper contrasts the representation of Vertumnus in Propertius 4.2 with Ovid's clear re(-)dressing of the figure in Metamorphoses 14. Through striking echoes of the Propertian original, 8 Ovid challenges Propertius' radical claims that representation creates gender, suggesting instead that his predecessor's view remains overly simple. At stake, the Roman construction of masculinity, which both poets pronounce unstable, but in different ways.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

I Am Dressed, Therefore I Am?: Vertumnus in Propertius 4.2 and in Metamorphoses 14.622-771

Lindheim

1998

Ramus

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent interpretations of Propertius 4.2 see in Vertumnus' shifting costumes a programmatic statement about the new poetics of Propertius' fourth book of elegy. The statue's ability to assume and shed identities with a simple wardrobe change mirrors the poet's desire to challenge the traditional generic boundaries of love elegy, dressing it up now in Roman themes, now in amatory ones. No doubt this is so. And yet, more generally, recent criticism finds elegy as a genre hospitable to interpretations that focus on issues of gender and identity. Indeed, as Marilyn Skinner has succinctly summarised, ‘texts of the late first century BCE are notorious for the phenomenon of “gender dissonance”…boundaries between ‘male’ and ‘female’ as essential categories of psychosexual identity fluctuate wildly and eventually break down.’ Propertius' fourth and final poetic collection provides fertile territory for an interrogation of gender, since it both highlights female voices—for example Arethusa, Cynthia or Cornelia—and explores moments of transvestism—for example Vertumnus and Hercules. I argue that when Propertius cloaks the speaking statue, Vertumnus, alternately in ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ attributes, he lays bare not simply poetics, but, further, he questions the very constitution of gender. In other words, Propertius probes the relationship between self-representation and identity and reveals that both are fluid and, more surprisingly perhaps, that the former gives rise to the latter.

show abstract

The Landscape of Desire: The Tale of Pomona and Vertumnus in Ovid's "Metamorphoses"

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

Van Mander's Protean Artist: Hendrick Goltzius, Mythic Masculinity and Embodiment

Van Mander's Protean Artist: Hendrick Goltzius, Mythic Masculinity and Embodiment

Retailing Strategies of West African Itinerant Immigrant Traders in Ghana

I Am Dressed, Therefore I Am?: Vertumnus in Propertius 4.2 and in Metamorphoses 14.622-771

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About