Ovid

It is certain that Dante read Ovid’s works though the filter of a substantial commentary of the kind frequently found in the medieval tradition. Through a reference to the Remedia Amoris, Dante includes him in the canon of auctores in Chapter XXV of the Vita nuova, along with Homer, Virgil, Lucan and Horace. Together with Virgil, Statius and Lucan, he is also acknowledged in De vulgari, II 6 7, this time as the author of the Metamorphoses, and a poetic model also for the vernacular lyric poets. Although by no means absent from Dante’s so-called minor works, Ovid is nonetheless Dante’s valued source of mythological information in the Commedia, which is replete with references to and echoes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Moreover, as Curtius aptly points out, Dante sees Ovid’s Metamorphoses not only as a body of mythology as fascinating as fiction, but also, through allegorical interpretation, as a treasure trove of moral precepts.[1]. Nonetheless, there is more to the complex relationship between Dante and Ovid than imitatio. Each time he picks up an Ovidian theme, Dante remoulds it in a Christian sense: the reference becomes the opportunity to mark both the existence and the discontinuity of the classical pagan tradition. Dante does not only question the veracity of the classical myths, but also points out the difference between a pagan metamorphosis, which modifies nothing and is mere repetition, and a Christian metamorphosis, which is redemptive and palingenetic. Surpassing Ovid is an explicit theme in Inf., XXV 97-102, where Dante describes the transformation of a man into a serpent and a serpent into a man: a double synchronic metamorphosis which the Latin poet had never attempted. Ovid’s metamorphoses were only poetic inventions, whereas those of the Christian poet are real, the manifestation of divine justice, to which Dante, unlike Ovid, is a faithful witness.

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[1] R. Curtius, Letteratura europea e medioevo latino (1948), a cura di R. Antonelli, Firenze, Le Monnier, 1992, p. 26.