Poets Inspired by Titian - Lavinia greenlaw - Metamorphosis - Titian 2012 - The national gallery
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I knew the painting [Diana and Callisto] and I’ve always been very interested in the
fact that Callisto is one of those people who get caught up. I’ve always been interested
in those characters in stories that aren’t the hero or the villain, they are just the
person who gets caught up, and I think that’s often the human role in the stories of the
gods. I was also interested because of the way she’s depicted so that her head is almost
out of sight. She’s not there as a person, she’s there
as a question. Titian captures the moment of exposure. The other nymphs are holding
her really roughly and pulling back the cloth around her belly, the veil over her story
I suppose, and so it’s actually a really live action picture.
I think if people call Titian’s work poetic that they’re talking about poetic in the
right way, which is that he uses enormous precision and depth to bring about something
very, very human, rather than to create something romantic or epic.
He’s drawn down these gods and made them human and that’s what my poem’s about.
It’s about these gods being as susceptible to themselves as we are, and so when I say
that Callisto’s growing belly is a question to the gods, she is there as evidence that
they give into themselves and cross boundaries and do all the things that humans do. Her
problem is that once she becomes this question she cannot be part of either the gods’ world
or the human world, but she’s there as a kind of awkward fact.
