ARS ADEO LATET ARTE SVA: WHAT IS ART'S ART?

Textual difficulties as well as problems of content are sometimes prone to being overlooked in famous passages, because their very familiarity tends to stifle reflection on their actual meaning. orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano (Juv. 10.356) escaped detection as an interpolation until 1970. In di, coeptis (nam uos mutastis et illa) | aspirate meis (Ov. Met. 1.2–3), the reading illas has held its place against the correct illa until 1976.¹

In the present contribution I would like to show that the words cited in the title are a similar case. The context is as follows (Ov. Met. 10.247–53):

interea niueum mira feliciter arte

sculpsit ebur formamque dedit, qua femina nasci

nulla potest, operisque sui concepit amorem.

uirginis est uerae facies, quam uiuere credas

et, si non obstet reuerentia, uelle moueri;

ars adeo latet arte sua. miratur et haurit

pectore Pygmalion simulati corporis ignes.²

The fame which the phrase enjoys is apparently fairly recent and due to the present fascination with the poetological aspects of Augustan poetry. In this context, it has been understood as a brillant self-description of Ovid as a poet at least since the late 1950s.³ Whether this understanding is correct, I shall not discuss. My question is much more elementary: what is ars adeo latet arte sua supposed to mean on the verbal level? More precisely, what does sua mean? How can art be concealed by its own art? What is the art of art presupposed by this expression?

The manuscripts unanimously give the reading as cited. Grammars fail to point out any special use of suus that would elucidate the passage. The commentaries are silent. The translations discount sua altogether. To give just a few examples from the major European languages:

‘Art hid with art.’ (S. Garth, J. Dryden, et al., 1717)

‘So war Kunst umhüllet mit Kunst!’ (J.H. Voß, 1789)

‘so his art concealed his art.’ (B. Moore, 1922)⁴

‘tant l'art se dissimule à force d'art.’ (G. Lafaye, 1955)

‘So lässt Kunst nicht sehen die Kunst.’ (R. Suchier and E.G. Schmidt, 1986)

‘L'arte era tanto grande da non apparire addirittura.’ (G. Faranda Villa, 1994)

‘art concealed artfulness.’ (C. Martin, 2004)

‘è un’ arte cosi grande che non si vede.’ (G. Chiarini, 2013)

No one seems to know what sua is supposed to mean here.

Is Ovid making use of the rhetorical figure of distinctio, the pointed repetition of the same word within a short space with two different meanings?⁵ Should we take ars as ‘art’, arte as ‘work of art’: ‘To such a degree art lies hidden in its work of art [that is, in the work of art created by it]’? At least one translator understands the sentence with this sense: ‘So vollkommen verbirgt sich im Kunstwerk die Kunst!’ (M. von Albrecht, 1981). At first glance, this solution looks attractive. Ovid is no stranger to distinctio—one may think of his play with coire in the story of Narcissus and Echo (Met. 3.385–7)—and if the passage could be understood in such a way it would make perfect sense. However, there are unsurmountable obstacles. To take sua as ‘created by it’ is hard (even von Albrecht does not seem confident that the pronoun can be understood thus, as he still does not translate it). The necessary change of meaning from ars to arte is difficult to guess for the reader, especially so given its position a few lines after the very same distinction has been expressed by ars and opus (Met. 10.247, 10.249). Finally, there is no plausible example for ars in the sense of ‘work of art’ in Ovid, and none for the singular of the word in this sense before Late Antiquity.⁶

So emendation is called for. In the Metamorphoses, forms of suus occur as corruptions of nearly a dozen different words, most of which are not very close palaeographically.⁷ In the present case, the frequency of arte sua and related phrases in Ovid⁸ as well as the occurrence of arte and sui in lines 247 and 249 respectively may have further contributed to provoking scribal error. However, an emendation that is unobjectionable and clearly superior to all others is hard to find. The true solution presumably still remains to be found, but it seems at least worth listing the range of options available. sua could be replaced by another word such as noua (‘to such a degree art is concealed by art never seen before’) or ipsa (‘to such a degree art is concealed by art itself’). Unfortunately, the exact kind of novelty expressed by arte noua would remain unclear,⁹ and the paradox ars latet arte would be somewhat weakened by the addition of an adjective. ipsa would provide good sense, as it would underline this very paradox, and the respective corruption would be paralleled in Met. 9.317 (see n. 7 above); but the rare cases of elision after the third arsis in Ovid are apparently restricted to -que,¹⁰ and neither arte nor any other form of ars is ever elided despite the word's frequency. Alternatively, one may think of … latet artificem (‘the artificiality slips even the artist's attention’), but the necessary meaning of adeo has no exact parallel among the comparatively few instances of the word in Ovid.¹¹ Finally, one could also try to punctuate after arte and to continue with an object—but which?—governed by miratur. ¹²