This groundbreaking exhibition will challenge your idea of art and museums. The brainchild of the Rijksmuseum’s director Taco Dibbits and Frits Scholten, the carefully curated pieces have been gathered from all over the world to exhibit works within a theme, Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid, 43BCE-17CE). Described as a ‘Bible for artists’ by Karel van Mander in his 1604 Schilder-boeck, this eponymous exhibition links classical to modern art.
Feast your eyes on 80 masterpieces, spanning two millennia. Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rodin, the list of geniuses is breathtaking. Since its conception in February 2023, the curators have created an exhibition that will challenge how you view art. The exhibition starts and ends with Apollo and is centred around Bernini’s sculpture Sleeping Hermaphroditus, from the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. You are led on a journey, ‘how humans and nature can be entwined.’
Left: Caravaggio, Narcissus (ca. 1597–1598), Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Middle: Michele Tosini, Leda (ca. 1560–70), Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Right: Auguste Rodin, Pygmalion and Galatea (1908–9). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Wander through each room, curated to the tales of ‘a world filled with transformations of gods and humans into animals, plants and stones.’ Tiziano Vecellio Titan (1489-1526) was commissioned by Phillip II of Spain and given complete freedom to radiate visual poetry of this fatal encounter between gods and mortals, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. One of these paintings, Danaë, sits in this show next to The Sleeping Dana Prepared to Receive Jupiter (Hendricks Goltzius 1558-1617). Danaë being showered with golden coins refers to the power and desire that would resonate with his patron, a Leiden art collector, pawnbroker and financier and gives the viewer a brief insight into the relationship between the artist and patron.
Never have these pieces been shown together, 2000 years of art in one exhibition, drawn from galleries from all over the world, exploring a single concept, Metamorphoses. This exhibition bridges antiquity to modern mediums, from the 2nd-century Roman sculpture in white marble Leda and the Swan, which was unearthed in a vineyard near Francati in 1821, to the Juul Kraijer, (1970) untitled archival pigment print. This work, sits alone in its own room, does not refer to Ovid’s poem directly, but such unions rarely unfold so harmoniously in the myths told by Ovid, but evokes the classical myth of Leda the swan allowing you a moment of hypnotic piece.
The exhibition exceptional has been developed through close collaboration between the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and Galleria Borghese in Rome, where about 30 of the pieces will travel next to be shown in a different configuration around the same theme. The exhibition leads you on a journey conveying Ovid’s message in Metamorphoses is “All things change, but nothing dies.”
Metamorphoses
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
6th February – 25th May 2026
More information and tickets, HERE.
Author: Rebecca Dickson
Lead image: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Sleeping Hermaphroditus (1620). The original life-size ancient marble sculpture depicting Hermaphroditus dates back to the 2nd century AD. Bernini made the mattress on which the figure rests.
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