The Spectacle of Appearances
Ovid thematizes the gap between appearance and reality, which also is represented on the linguistic level through an insistent, systematic discordance between the literal meaning of the language and the figurative one. The metamorphic and spectacular nature of language therefore becomes a mirror of the whole reality, which is subject to the law of continuous change, and gives rise to the game of illusions and deceptions in which humans are involved and often overwhelmed. Ovid’s verbal pyrotechnics, long dismissed as a fatuous rhetorical exercise, is actually a highly conscious key to representing reality with its paradoxes; and the distinctive visual, ekphrastic style of his poem (destined to become the ‘Bible of painters’) is the mark of Ovid’s continuous intense reflection on his own representational strategies.