Change is fundamental to every natural process we know. We are born, reproduce, grow old and die, and then our bodies are recycled into other forms of life. We suffer illnesses and injuries, which heal. Living on a changing planet among multifarious species, we are the product of mutations and natural selection operating over millions of years. And out of the resulting human minds there grow myths, stories, ritualsand art, many of which return again and again to tales of transformation and creation.

"All things are always changing."
Ovid

"Everything flows and nothing stays."
Heraclitus

"Things ain’t what they used to be."
Ted Persons

Change in all its forms - in art, myth and science - is the theme of the new Wellcome Trust exhibition at the Science Museum, ‘Metamorphing’. The exhibition brings together some of the most extraordinary treasures from the Wellcome Library as well as exhibits from the British Museum, the London Library, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and other sources, together with works from 25 contemporary artists. There are werewolves, witches, butterflies, frogs, mermen, lizards, sumo wrestlers, and much more, all touching in different ways on the metamorphic theme.

Highlights from the Wellcome Library's own collections include two beautiful paintings: the late 15th-century ‘Saints Cosmas and Damian’, in which a leg is transplanted from a Moor to a white crusader, and the Boschian ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’, showing a magical garden where humans mix and cavort with all sorts of fruits, flowers and egg-like beings. Eggs and hatching turn up again in a Cornelius Bos engraving loaned from the British Museum, which reconstructs the lost Michelangelo painting ‘Leda and the Swan’: in Ovidian mythology, Zeus took the form of a swan to seduce the mortal woman Leda, and she later hatched their children out of eggs. Metamorphic gods like Zeus abound in Eastern as well as Western traditions: an illustration from a Wellcome Panjabi manuscript shows Krishna multiplying himself into numerous clones so he can dance with all the women who desire him.

In myths, humans often take animal form, or have it imposed on them by a witch or a mischievous god, but there are other ways in which human bodies seem to merge with those of other animals, and the exhibition explores some of these. A 16th-century manuscript of Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses (designed as a gift for Queen Elizabeth I, although she was apparently not amused and did not keep it) illustrates among other marvels the Biblical story of King Nebucchadnezzar III. He degenerated after many years in the wilderness: he grew shaggy feathers and claws, started moving on all fours, and ate grass - but continued to wear his crown. A very similar figure, this time a shapeshifter of a type destined to make a big splash in Hollywood, appears in the woodcut ‘Der Werwolf’ by the German artist Lucas Cranach, also from the British Museum.

Hairy, semi-animal figures turn up again in 19th-century satires mocking the theories of Darwin, who seemed to his contemporaries to be relegating humanity to the realm of the animal: Darwin himself was portrayed as a hairy monkey, or as a naked figure caught in a circular dance with other species. Hair and fur are usually symbols of animalistic degeneration - but not always: images of St Mary Magdalene sometimes show her with a tremendous growth of hair covering her down to her ankles, a divine miracle granted to preserve her modesty, and this story is the inspiration of one of the largest and most stunning modern artworks in the show, Alice Maher’s ‘Magdalene’.

Other artists’ work explores insect transformations both real and fictional: in a new piece specially created for ‘Metamorphing’, Paula Rego conjures up an insect-human hybrid based on Gregor Samsa waking as a beetle in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Other artworks feature butterflies as symbols of spiritual rebirth - their dramatic cycles of pupation and re-emergence have a perennial appeal for the human imagination. But real butterflies appear in the show, too. From the Natural History Museum, there are species that have gradually evolved a perfect resemblance to dried leaves or to owls’ eyes, and from the Wellcome Library there is a volume of engravings by Maria Sibylla Merian, who travelled to Surinam in the 18th century to study and paint butterflies and moths. Her compositions of caterpillars, cocoons and adult insects were the first to treat all the stages as of equal importance. A different and more alarming kind of insect transformation is portrayed by the contemporary artist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, who collects and paints mutant insect specimens from the vicinity of nuclear power stations.

The extraordinary Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons has provided some fascinating scientific exhibits, especially relating to embryology and growth: a Surinam toad, the male of which carries the babies buried in the skin of his back until they are ready to hatch, a series of goslings at different stages of fetal development, and a lizard that has repeated the trick of tail regeneration one time too many, so it has ended up with two of them.

And from the Science Museum, there are all sorts of medical and scientific devices for amending the body: tweezers, scalpels, knives, magical amulets, medicines, prosthetic limbs, organs for transplantation, and drugs for changing moods and perceptions. Such altered states of consciousness are also explored in other material in the show: a drawing by the Belgian poet and artist Henri Michaux seeks to communicate his sensations after taking mescaline; and an extraordinary set of photographs of voodoo rituals taken by Cristina García Rodero in Haiti captures the uncanny transformations undergone by the human body in intense religious or spiritual experience.

The resulting exhibition combines art, myth and science in - we hope - a fertile, exciting and thought-provoking mixture.

’Metamorphing’ was at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London from 4 October 2002 to 16 February 2003.

See also

• ‘Metamorphing’, the latest Wellcome Trust exhibition at the Science Museum: Visit the online gallery
• Press release (24 September 2001): Marina Warner co-curates new Science Museum exhibition
• Wellcome Library

External links

• National Museum of Science and Industry: Science Museum
• Science Museum: Details on the ‘Metamorphing’ exhibition
• The British Museum
• The London Library
• Victoria and Albert Museum