Ovidio - Metamorphoseon - 1670

THE GREAT WESTERN BOOK OF CHANGES: THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING TO THE MOST IRONIC OF POETS
A edition of extraordinary refinement, this splendid tome of Publio Ovidio Nasone’s Opera Omnia, printed at Lugduni Batavorum in 1670 by Hackiana’s workshop, gathers the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses in a guise that transforms mythological poetry into allegorical vision. The full-page copper engravings illustrate the poem’s most famous passages, restoring the symbolic force of metamorphosis as a cosmic principle: the universe in perpetual change, matter becoming image, the word becoming form. The Hackiana edition, one of the most refined of the Dutch Seventeenth Century, consecrates Ovid as a poet of light and eternal transformation.
MARKET VALUE
Hackiana editions of Ovid’s Opera Omnia, particularly the volume dedicated to the Metamorphoses, are among the most valued by scholars and collectors of illustrated classical texts. Complete copies, in contemporaneous parchment bindings, today command in the antiquarian market between 1,200 and 2,000 euros, with higher figures for copies in excellent condition with sharp plates and full margins. This copy, complete, fresh, and with inked plates precisely, falls into the high end of value.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION AND CONDITION - COLLECTOR'S COPY
Contemporary full parchment stiff binding with handwritten title on the spine: Opera Omnia. Typographic title page in elegant Roman type, numerous full-page plates depicting mythological episodes drawn from the Metamorphoses. Normal signs of use, some marginal reddening. Pp. (2); 806; 10nn; (4).
In old books, with a long history, a few imperfections may be present, not always noted in the description.

FULL TITLE AND AUTHOR
Metamorphoseon.
Lugd., Ex Officina Hackiana, 1670.
Pub. Ovidii Nasonis.

CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE
The Hackiana workshop, among the most prestigious of the Dutch Seventeenth Century, continued Elzevier’s tradition in printing Latin classics, offering philologically accurate texts enriched with baroque-style engravings. This edition of the Metamorphoses stands out for the balance between typographic elegance and iconographic splendor. The plates, of Dutch school, are not mere illustrations but true figurative dramas: they translate into image the exact moment of transformation, the threshold between human and divine, matter and spirit.
Ovid’s poem, in this guise, becomes a manual of poetic alchemy, a journey through the grades of change that unites the universe and reveals the continuity of all forms.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Publio Ovidio Nasone (Sulmona, 43 B.C. – Tomi, 17 A.D.), a Latin poet of extraordinary refinement, was the author of the Metamorphoses, the Amores, the Heroides, the Ars Amatoria, and the Tristia. His poetry, elegant and learned, blends myth and introspection, eroticism and philosophy of fate. Exiled by Augustus for reasons not fully clarified, he transformed his personal experience into an art of memory and desire. The Metamorphoses, written in dactylic hexameter, represent the summa of his thought: reality as a flow of forms, life as perpetual transfiguration.

PRINTING HISTORY AND CIRCULATION
The 1670 Hackiana edition fits into the great Dutch tradition of Latin classics, inaugurated by the Elzeviers and continued with philological rigor by Hackius. The Metamorphoses are highly appreciated for the richness of the illustrative apparatus and for the elegance of the typeface. The edition was distributed throughout Europe, often included in aristocratic and academic libraries of the North, and became a model for reissues in Leiden and The Hague in the early eighteenth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
Brunet IV, 237; Graesse V, 108; Schweiger, Handbuch der klassischen Bibliographie, II, 666; Willems, Les Elzevier, p. 486 (note on the Hackiana workshop); Moss, Manual of Classical Bibliography, II, p. 417; Gaskell, Dutch Printing and Bookmaking, 1968; BnF Rés. P-Y 3945; Ovid, Opera Omnia, Hackiana 1670, WorldCat OCLC 45834592.