Ovid was the most important literary source for mythological subjects in the art of the Renaissance and the subsequent centuries. 'No other classical author,' as Panofsky wrote, 'treated so great a variety of mythological subject matter and was so assiduously read, translated, paraphrased, commented upon and illustrated.' No other great poet of antiquity, indeed, had made the recounting of myth the main purpose of his work. The carmen perpetuum of the Metamorphoses, which will be the focus of this essay, became a kind of handbook whose influence can be found everywhere in the painting and sculpture of the early modern period. Svetlana Alpers goes so far as to say: 'The “painter’s bible”, as the name implies, was first of all the most popular and convenient source for mythological narratives. In this sense, “Ovidian” is simply synonymous with mythological, although some of the frequently represented myths, such as Cupid and Psyche, and Diana and Endymion, are not found in Ovid’s compendium.'

As these last remarks suggest, however, the apparent ubiquity of Ovidian influence can disguise the difficulty of explaining precisely what we mean by an ‘Ovidian subject’. To put the matter schematically, we could say that the field of mythological painting is both broader and narrower than the field of the Ovidian text. It is broader because Ovid may be supplemented by material from other authors (including his own sources), and even stories he does not tell may find themselves generically grouped under his label.