Eroticism under a watchful eye. Censorship and alteration of xylographs in Ovid’s Metamorphoses between the 15th and the 16th centuries

The aim of this paper is to analyze the ambiguous reception of woodcuts that decorate some printed editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, published in Italy between the 15th and the 16th centuries. Some blocks of prints were arbitrarily reused in different editions, other times they were reproduced with slight modifications or in some cases colored with watercolor. In particular, we intend to examine the complex phenomenon of the modification of images, generated by public and private censorship as for the prints regarded as erotic. A few days before the publication of the first illustrated edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, printed in Venice in 1497, the patriarch of the city threatened that he would excommunicate the publisher and the printer, if they published those woodcuts portraying male and female nudes. In this first edition which had already been printed, the publisher was forced to modify the prints, by covering up the nudities manually, with a strange dark color, while he had to change the wooden mold in all the following editions. Despite the amendments required by public censorship, these woodcuts subsequently became victims of private censorship when they entered libraries: in some books, decorated with the series of 1497, the prints were covered or defaced with showy signs of Indian ink. This same phenomenon can also be found in some specimens of the Trasformationi by Lodovico Dolce (1553), in which some prints made by Giovanni Antonio Rusconi and considered erotic prints, were covered with black spots. Within this phenomenon, a sample of the Metamorphoses edited by Raffaele Regio (1505) together with one of them translated by Niccolò degli Agostini (1522) are mentioned as notable exceptions: many prints, instead of being censored, are made more sexually explicit by a mysterious reader by means of some funny insertions in Indian ink.