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Trees and Ancient Stories three Trees and Ancient Stories he stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses are among the most influential and persistent in literary and art history. Publius Ovidius Naso was born in 43 bc in modern Solomona to the east of Rome, and started Twriting Metamorphoses when he was in his forties. He had almost finished the work when he was associated with an unknown scandal which infuriated Augustus so much that Ovid moved to the distant edge of the Roman Empire on the Black Sea and never returned to Rome. Several of the transformations in the extraordinarily vivid, lengthy poem in fifteen books became popular and well-known subjects for painters from the fifteenth century onwards. Their intense analysis of grief, love, power, loss and jealousy allows constant reinterpretation. The classical scholar Denis Feeney tells the entertaining story of a Princeton undergraduate who, halfway through a course Feeney was teaching on Ovid, visited the Metropolitan Museum Art in New York and ‘returned after the weekend intoxicated by her rediscovery of the familiar collections: “It’s all Ovid!”’1 Several of Ovid’s stories concern the transformation of people into trees, while others tell of the creation of trees by gods. One of the best known, from Book 1, concerns Daphne who was loved by Apollo, the son of Jupiter and god of music, literature and medicine. Although she had many aspirant suit- ors ‘Daphne fled from the very thought of a lover’ and instead enjoyed living 45 Attr. Master of the Judgement alone in the forests. She rejected all her admirers and ‘Stubbornly single, she’d of Paris, Daphne Pursued by Apollo, roam through the woodland thickets, without concern for the meaning of c. 1450, tempera on wood. marriage, or love, or physical union.’ Apollo falls desperately in love with her 46 Attr. Master of the Judgement and, chasing her through the woods, almost catches her. In order to escape of Paris, Metamorphosis of Daphne, from Apollo she pleads with her father, the river god Peneus, to change her c. 1450, tempera on wood. 64 TREES IN ART form and almost immediately ‘her soft white bosom was ringed in a layer of bark, her hair was turned into foliage, her arms into branches. The feet that had run so nimbly were sunk into sluggish roots; her head was confined in a treetop; and all that remained was her beauty.’ However, although she was now a tree ‘Apollo still loved her. Caressing the trunk with his hand he could feel the heart still fluttering under the new bark. Seizing the branches, as though they were limbs, in his arms’ embrace, he pressed his lips to the wood; but the wood still shrank from his kisses.’2 Apollo’s chase of Daphne is depicted in two mid-fifteenth-century wooden panels painted in Florence, probably by two different artists work- ing in the same workshop (illus. 45, illus. 46). The panels are likely to have come from a highly decorated wooden chest or cassone, often designed as a wedding chest used to hold a bride’s dowry. The paintings follow the story closely; the first panel shows Apollo almost catching up with Daphne. In the distance there are bare mountains but the chase is set against trees that are closely spaced and in a row, with a gap in the middle of the painting which encourages us to focus on the figures. The sequence of trees helps to provide a sense of rhythm and movement to the chase. The lower branches of the trees have been cut off, carefully indicated by the branch stubs, and Daphne and Apollo run across short grass that has been closely grazed: this is an intensely managed landscape. The second scene shows the end of the chase, and the line of trees stops, allowing us to focus on Apollo’s failure and disap- pointment. Daphne’s arms are already transformed into branches and dense foliage that is of the same scale as the row of trees on the left. Paolo Veronese’s (1528–1588) Apollo and Daphne (illus. 47) was painted in Venice a century after the anonymous panels. Apollo and Daphne are framed by two large tree trunks and there are glimpses of a landscape of grazed wood pasture. The figures are so beautifully painted here that the transformation appears more ghastly. The faces of Apollo and Daphne express astonishment and pain and the transformation of Daphne’s limbs into ‘sluggish’ roots and branches is realistically distressing. Daphne’s left arm and fingers have become like a small pollarded tree, which is duplicated by the small low-cut pollard set to the left of Apollo. Once Apollo realises his first love has become a tree he tells her that ‘since you cannot be mine in wedlock you must at least be Apollo’s tree’ and intimately ‘twined in my hair’. The tree into which Daphne was transformed was Laurus nobilis, the bay tree or daphne, whose leaves were entwined into wreaths and presented at the Phythian Games held every four years at Delphi in honour of Apollo. Apollo tells Daphne: ‘your evergreen leaves are for glory and praise everlasting’ and poignantly, ‘With a wave of her new-formed branches the laurel agreed, and seemed to be nodding her head in the tree- top.’ Apollo adds that Roman generals will be wreathed by bay leaves ‘when 66 Trees and Ancient Stories 47 Paolo Veronese, Apollo and Daphne, c. 1560–65, oil on canvas. the jubilant triumphal paean of triumph is raised and the long procession ascends the Capitol’. Ovid flatters Emperor Augustus here by emphasizing that ‘On either side of Augustus’ gates your trees shall stand sentry, faith- fully guarding the crown of oak-leaves hanging between them.’ This refers to the two laurel trees that grew at the entrance to the emperor’s palace and the oak wreath over the doorway which had been awarded to Augustus as saviour of Rome.3 The birth and death of Adonis appear on two wooden panels of a chest around 1510 attributed to the Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1485– 1547; illus. 48 and illus. 49). Sebastiano moved to Rome in 1511, where he became friends with Michelangelo, but earlier works, like these, were strongly influenced by Giorgione. The tale of the birth and death of Adonis is told in Book 10 of Metamorphoses and concerns the lust of his mother Myrrha for her father Cinyras and her subsequent punishment. Myrrha falls passionately in love with Cinyras and successfully plots with her nurse to have sex with him under cover of darkness. When her father realizes what has happened he is speechless with rage and she flees. When she is due to give birth she is living at Saba in southwest Arabia and is so full of horror at the incest she has committed that she pleads with the gods to change her form. Ovid tells 67 Trees and Ancient Stories how ‘Her bones became wood, and the marrow inside them survived as her blood was turned to sap. Her arms were converted to branches, her fingers to twigs, and her skin was hardened to form new bark.’ When ‘the developing tree had encompassed her pregnant belly’, Myrrha plunges her head into the bark, but ‘she still continues to weep and her warm tears drip from the new tree.’ Ovid moralizes that ‘Even trees can have honour’ and that her tears were transformed into resin, which ‘is given the name and fame of myrrh in lasting remembrance’. Myrrh is still usually harvested from Commiphora myrrha, which grows in southwest Arabia including Yemen.4 But what about the baby? The young Adonis continued to grow inside the myrrh tree, and had some difficulty ‘trying to find a way of leaving his mother and issuing forth. Inside its prison the pregnant belly swelled and stretched with its load.’ The tree began to resemble ‘a woman in labour; bent double it groaned again and again’. Eventually, assisted by Lucina, ‘Cracks appeared on the tree; the bark split open, and out came a living baby, a wailing boy, whom the naiads at once laid down on the soft green grass and anointed with myrrh from his mother.’ The first of the two paintings shows the baby being helped from the myrrh tree by three women. Adonis ‘was soon a youth, then a man, and now more handsome than ever’ and so attractive that Venus, goddess of love, became completely infatuated with him. She worried about him being injured when hunting and told him to avoid the ‘bristly boars’ with their ‘sharp-hooked tusks’, but his hounds ‘followed a well-marked trail and roused a boar from its lair’. Adonis ‘pierced its flank with his weapon. The creature at once dislodged the bloodstained point of the spear with the crook of its snout. As Adonis backed for safety in panic, the animal savagely charged and buried its tusks deep into his groin, so bringing him down on the gold sand, fatally wounded.’ Sebastiano del Piombo’s second painting shows the youthful Adonis being gored by a huge boar, not in this case a wild boar but a domesticated Tuscan pig (suino cinto toscano) with the char- acteristic broad white band around its body. Venus, in her grief, transforms his blood into the anemone, with its short-lived flowers. Behind the dying Adonis and the boar looms a large, unidentifiable tree, which immediately reminds us of the myrrh tree, his mother, in the first panel.5 One of the contributors to Giorgio Vasari’s small gallery or cabinet of curiosities (1570–75) designed for Francis i, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, was Santi di Tito (1536–1603), who painted a fresco of the transformation of the Heliades to poplars (illus.
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