Changing Forms: Metamorphosis in Myth, Art, and Nature, 1650–1700

This Focus Gallery exhibition explored the rich concept of metamorphosis—with links to art, myth, science, and the exchange of knowledge—in the late seventeenth-century Netherlands. The paintings, drawings, prints, and illustrated books on view included artists’ renderings of Ovid’s "Metamorphoses" from around 1600 by Virgil Solis, Abraham Bloemaert, and Hendrick Goudt. This tradition contributed to a dynamic moment later in the 1600s, when painters such as Godefridus Schalcken, Willem van Mieris, and Samuel van Hoogstraten created their own mythological imagery. Meanwhile, the book market for Ovid kept pace and contemporaries explored biological metamorphosis in lavishly illustrated insect studies like those by Johannes Goedaert, Jan Swammerdam, and Maria Sibylla Merian. Works in the exhibition came from Vassar collections and include significant loans from Cornell University, Bard College, Lehigh University, and The Leiden Collection—the preeminent private collection of Dutch art in the United States.

"Changing Forms: Metamorphosis in Myth, Art, and Nature, 1650–1700" was made possible by generous support provided by the Mellon Foundation and Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. This project received funding through a grant from the Netherland-America Foundation. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.