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Ovid's Metamorphoses in Latin and English Translated by the Most Eminent Hands.

First Edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses Illustrated by Picart

Amsterdam: Printed for the Wetsteins and Smith, 1732.

$7,200.00

In Stock Item Number: RRB-149005

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First English edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses with Picart's illustrations. Folio, two volumes in one, bound in full in early mottled calf with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in seven compartments within raised bands, double gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins, engraved title vignette. Illustrated with a copper-engraved frontispiece, 130 half-page copper engravings by Philip à Gunst, Jacob Folkema, and others, after Bernard Picart and others, with woodcut head- and tailpieces. In good condition with the binding worn in several places, numerous sections and leaves detached, rubbing, and toning. The text is written in Latin beside the English translation, with commentary by the Abbott Banier also translated from the French into English.

"In the Metamorphoses Ovid attempts no less a task than the linking together into one artistically harmonious whole all the stories of classical mythology. And this he does, until the whole range of wonders is passed in review, from the dawn of creation, when chaos was changed by divine fiat into the orderly universe, down to the age of the poet himself… Every important myth is at least touched upon… The poem thus forms a manual of classical mythology, and is the most important source of mythical lore for all writers since Ovid's time" (Miller, Ovid III:xi-xii, Loeb Classical Library). "It is at once a comprehensive account of Latin mythology and a feat of fictional construction which taught innumerable later writers, among them Chaucer and Dante" (Clute & Grant, 739). Shakespeare, Marlowe, Drayton, Spenser, and Chapman were all deeply indebted to Ovid's "collection of legends of transformations" (Peck, 1151).