Transposing Ovid’s Story of Myrrha: The Ideology of the Woman-Tree Figure in Early Modern European Visual Arts

The article discusses some early modern visual transpositions of the story of Myrrha’s transformation into a tree and of the birth of her son Adonis, which is contained in Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses. With a focus on the different ways in which artists combine the human and the vegetal in their representations of Myrrha’s body, the article offers a reading of the visual texts, especially with respect to early modern cultural constructions of the female body.