Stealing Callisto: Reclaiming Maternal Mythologies in the Work of Grossi Maglioni 

Marta Balzi, PhD
Independent scholar    

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Abstract

This article examines Grossi Maglioni’s Beast Mother project (2015–ongoing) as a feminist reappropriation of classical maternal mythology. Through a comparative reading of Beast Mother and Titian’s Diana and Callisto (1556–59), based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it argues that the Italian artist duo reclaims Callisto’s punitive transformation into a bear as a site of maternal agency, collective strength and resistance. Drawing on feminist theories of motherhood, monstrosity and the maternal symbolic, the article “steals” Callisto from patriarchal myth in order to expose the structures that have historically cast pregnant and maternal bodies as shameful, vulnerable or monstrous. It focuses on three interconnected strands of Grossi Maglioni’s practice: Gesti di relazione, which re-enacts gestures of judgement and submission embedded in Western visual culture; Beast Mother, which transforms maternal monstrosity into a feral and generative counter-mythology; and Occupazioni, which brings care labour into public space as artistic and political action. By placing Renaissance mythological painting in dialogue with contemporary feminist art, the article reconceptualizes motherhood not as private burden or biological destiny, but as a collective, creative and transformative practice.

Keywords: Callisto, maternal mythology, feminist art, motherhood, monstrosity, care labour, contemporary Italian art, Ovid; Titian.