Françoise Létoublon* The Decisive Moment in Mythology: The Instant of Metamorphosis Borrowing from French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson the notion of the de- cisive moment,¹ we intend to show in this article that the ancient authors who narrate metamorphoses mainly seek to capture the fugitive moment when a per- son or animal is changed from one form to another, and sometimes from one realm of nature to another, most often from human form to animal, plant or wa- tercourse. Artists also try to capture this instant through several devices, for in- stance Bernini in his well-known sculptural group of Apollo and Daphne. A girl who becomes a tree or a spring, or a young hunter who becomes a bird or anoth- er kind of animal are shown in visual arts with different features relevant to her/ his previous and new form.² The text corpus chosen for this study consists of the so-called Greek ‘myth- ographers’,³ Antoninus Liberalis and Parthenius, collectors of myths living in the first or second century AD.We chose them because of the amount of myths they tell with a relative stylistic and linguistic unity. Although Antoninus Liberalis * I want to express my warm gratitude to the organizers of the conference in Patras and the ed- itors of this volume, particularly Athina Papachrysostomou and Menelaos Christopoulos. My thanks also go to Stephen Rojcewicz and to the anonymous reviewer who corrected my English. Every remaining error is my responsibility  In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English edition was entitled The Decisive moment. It included a portfolio of 126 of his photos from the East and the West. The book’s cover was drawn by Henri Matisse. For his ‘philosophical’ (so called in the Eng- lish wikipedia notice on Cartier-Bresson) preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote from the 17 th century French author Cardinal de Retz: “Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment déc- isif ” (“There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment”). Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said: “Photographier: c’est dans un même instant et en une fraction de seconde reconnaître un fait et l’organisation rigoureuse de formes perçues visuellement qui expriment et signifient ce fait” (“To me, photography is the simultaneous rec- ognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as a precise organiza- tion of forms which give that event its proper expression”).  Let us recall that Nicander’s work, the model for both Ant. Lib. and Ov. Met., was known under the title Heteroioumena, meaning – more or less –‘becoming other’, ‘made other’.  For mythography and mythographers, see mainly Henrichs 1987; Dowden 1992; Calame 2004; Higbie 2007; Dowden 2011; Dowden and Livingstone 2011; Bremmer 2011. Ant. Lib. and Parth. are available in good specific modern editions whereas, apart from [Apollodorus], other mythog- raphers are fragmentary (see Fowler 2000; Higbie 2007). Boyle 2007 appears to be a very insight- ful study on Ovidian poetics of metamorphosis, with several echoes on our theme. DOI 10.1515/9783110535150-021 Bereitgestellt von | Universitaetsbibliothek Basel Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 07.12.17 12:16