Practice question · True or false
The Ovide moralisé read the Metamorphoses as Christian allegory.
Hints
- Consider how a Christian culture accommodated pagan stories.
- The moralising commentary tradition made the myths readable as allegory.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and it is what made mythological painting comfortable in a Christian culture. The myths arrived already interpreted through centuries of moralising commentary, so a fifteenth-century viewer brought that reading with them, and the same picture could be defended as an allegory of virtue and enjoyed as something else entirely.
Practise Greco-Roman Sources I: the Gods and Their Texts
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Greco-Roman Sources I: the Gods and Their Texts
- Why do Renaissance mythological paintings use Roman rather than Greek names for the gods?
- Which are reasons patrons commissioned mythological subjects?
- Sort each attribute by the deity it identifies.
- How many books does Ovid's Metamorphoses contain?
- Complete the account of the classical sources.
- Match each classical text to what painters took from it.
- Arrange the steps of identifying a mythological subject, in order.
- Renaissance patrons commissioned depictions of pagan deities without compromising their Christian faith.…
- Homer reached most Renaissance painters directly in the original Greek.