The metamorphic imagination : the art of transformation and enchantment in the Mediterranean and North Africa (c. 300 BCE - 300 CE)
Keywords: Art and Art History.

This dissertation examines the art and imagination of metamorphosis in the Mediterranean and North Africa (c. 300 BCE -- 300 CE). My approach explores the perceptual culture of change—the imaginative and sensory encounters of images of mythical change—while focusing on the imagination's disenchantment or enchantment. The study tells a new story about the metamorphic image; not just how static images might represent changing forms (into plants, animals, new genders, etc.) in a rationally ordered way, but how images depicted paradoxical and wonderous relationships between body and soul. It shows how images enticed viewers to imagine visible skins yet hidden souls, bodily materiality yet spiritual incorporeality, and unchanging identity amid a world of changing forms. More broadly, this study demonstrates how the metamorphic image became entangled in ancient debates about the enchantment or disenchantment of the gods, bodies, and the natural world. On the one hand, rationalist philosophers and historians often clashed with mythical tradition, pitting changes in the natural world against supernatural change. Engaging with rationalist discourses about sensory experience, motion, and myth reveals a new approach to rationalist polemics of the metamorphic image. Disenchantment occurred not simply through the creation of new artistic scenes or iconoclastic pursuits but as a perceptual stratagem, which employed optical tricks (anamorphosis, distant versus close looking, etc.) to debunk the strange or miraculous. On the other hand, I show how many images of metamorphosis enticed viewers into a state of enchantment, that is, a kind of revery in magical, metaphysical, or irrational possibilities. We witness material qualities that envision embodiment and flux; shifting conditions of light and shadow that elicit spirits or phantoms; and how formal prototypes and drunkenness might conjure hallucinatory illusions of metamorphosis. The narrative also shows how enchantment spread abroad. Roman subjects fell under the spell of Egyptomania and masqueraded as embodied icons of mythical change. Meanwhile, travelers imagined freakish petrified faces amid windswept rocky landscapes. Examining the perceptual culture of metamorphic imagery ultimately reveals its fraught position amid contests over rationality and enchantment, bodily change and soulful presence, natural change and supernatural wonders. This narrative unfolds in four chapters. Chapter one explores two different types of metamorphic imagery. First, I examine how an image's materiality could envision the soul's ascension during its apotheosis. Second, I explore how artworks could prompt viewers to imagine souls hidden within animal forms through an image's physiognomic qualities. Chapter two probes the relationship between rationalism and the metamorphic imagination, showing how some metamorphic images allowed for the disenchantment of the miraculous. Chapter three investigates metamorphic imagery represented primarily in the spectator's imagination. During symposia, Bacchic imagery prompted viewers to imagine hallucinatory delusions of animality and transformation. In the wilderness, travelers encountered pareidolia: they imagined faces and forms in the landscape's chance imagery and debated whether these were the relics of petrifications or other miraculous changes. Lastly, chapter four takes its inspiration from Apuleius's Metamorphoses by exploring the mysterious qualities of masquerades and their relationship to metamorphic change in Greco-Roman Egypt