Ovid’s Metamorphosis in Dante Alighieri’s Comedy
R. Mori writes:
“The liric poet Ovid
Every time I start to write and every time I craft a verse, I cannot help but think of where I come from and who created the wonders that surround me. With the true origins of the world unknown to me, I am not able to get beyond the doubts and questions that my bizarre mind puts in front of me. I respond that I have always been fascinated by true fables yet this question is too much for me. There is one thing in life I learned it because it continually repeats itself: without a doubt love and hate are the two perennially generating and renewing forces of the Universe.
Everything about this imaginative poet attracts me, but what inspires me are the METAMORPHOSIS that I have illustrated in pictures – not so much the date of birth in Sulmona 43 years before Christ; or the wonders of his works, the wealth of goods and money, the magnificent family, or the misfortune of the exile imposed by jealousy or whatever else by the Roman emperor who relegated the poet to the extreme lands of the empire – but the wit of the nickname PUBLIO OVIDIO NASONE. The nose derived from one of his ancestors for the volume of the nose handed down to posterity. I struggle to learn to write in a piece on the HISTORY OF NOSES from Dante Alighieri, Cyrano, Leonardo da Vinci and others. In the meantime for the sake of immediacy, I will draw his big nose and then we’ll see if the question will go forward in my mind.”
