Antonio Vivaldi is one of the most famous and fabled musicians to have come from Venice, but for a long time he only garnered recognition as a composer of instrumental works. When Cecilia Bartoli released the first of her hit albums dedicated to Vivaldi in 1999, she ushered in a Vivaldi renaissance that revealed the full breadth of his mastery. For the 2025 Whitsun Festival, Vivaldi’s virtuosic music will be interwoven with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of which a popular edition illustrated with 52 woodcuts was produced in the Venetian workshop of Lucantonio Giunta in 1497. The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, who likely wrote his Metamorphoses sometime between 1 and 8 AD, set out to explore the constant transformation of everything in existence in a mythological poem that has since inspired the themes and motifs of major artworks. Ovid called his work a ‘carmen perpetuum’, an everlasting song. Everything is in flux, always changing — gods, humans, animals…