The illustration of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' in Lyon (1510-1512) - The circulation of pictorial art between France and Italy during the Renaissance

Etienne Gueynard's 1510 Lyon edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses contains a sequence of sixteen woodcuts that may safely enough be ascribed to Guillaume II Le Roy, a son or nephew of the Guillaume Le Roy who had contributed to bringing the printing press to Lyon in the 1470s. The woodcuts were long popular, since they kept emerging over several decades in products of the Lyon press. They wee no original creations: the engraver had sought inspiration from two Italian editions of the Metamorphoses (Venice 1497 and Parma 1505). The Italian illustrations themselves were probably derived from earlier pictures, some of them French, thus exemplifying the connection between printers at Lyon and in Italy at the turn of the 15th century. Such borrowings, however, never amounted to faithfully exact copies. The different style in which certain subjects, such as the Creation, were represented, may suggest that Lyon tended to fall away from the Italian reading, more directly imbued with the spirit of the Renaissance.