Un tournant dans l’édition illustrée des Métamorphoses d’Ovide : la traduction de Nicolas Renouard (1606)

[Machine translation] The prose translation of the Ovidian Metamorphoses published in Paris by Nicolas Renouard in 1606, accompanied by a rich iconographic apparatus, quickly established itself as a model for the edition and illustration of Ovid in seventeenth-century France, indirectly guiding the reception of the Metamorphoses in the following centuries. The present study, after placing Renouard's translation in its context of elaboration, publication and dissemination, examines the cycle of engravings created by Léonard Gaultier for the first edition, which will be copied for decades by other engravers. The peculiarity of this cycle, based on an Italian model (Giacomo Franco's woodcuts for the Metamorphoses published by Bernardo Giunti, Venice, 1584), is that, instead of illustrating the individual mythical fables as was customary in the French Metamorphoses printed between the 14th and 16th centuries, it brings together the main fables contained in each of the 15 books of Ovidian opus in as many tables in which the different characters come together and interact, populating a single landscape. The continuous narrative technique adopted in these illustrations makes it possible to restore on the iconographic level the Ovidian poetic project, betrayed by Renouard's translation: the metamorphic perpetuum carmen, which in Renouard's text is segmented into autonomous narrative units (in accordance with the dominant use in France since the 14th century) is thus returned to the reader through images.