The Roman poet Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) is a classic of instruction about intimate relating, and even though written two thousand years ago (it is thought in 2CE) many of Ovid’s ideas about love (which for him pretty much equates with sex) remain more or less pertinent today. If his voice seems amazingly contemporary, it is largely because of his frank pleasure in sex for its own sake.

Here is an extract from Book 1, Advice to Young Women:

     Avoid those men who profess to looks and culture,
        who keep their hair carefully in place.
     What they tell you they’ve told a thousand girls:
        their love wanders and lingers in no one place.
     Woman, what can you do with a man more delicate than you,
        and one perhaps who has more lovers too?
     You’ll scarcely credit it, but credit this: Troy would remain,
        if Cassandra’s warnings had been heeded.
     Some will attack you with a lying pretence of love,
        and through that opening seek a shameful gain.
     But don’t be tricked by hair gleaming with liquid nard,
        or short tongues pressed into their creases:
        don’t be ensnared by a toga of finest threads,
        or that there’s a ring on every finger.
     Perhaps the best dressed among them all’s a thief,
        and burns with love of your finery.

Willi Sitte’s 1970 portfolio of eight coloured lithographs illustrating Ovid’s text demonstrates that he was as proficient and original with his engraving skills as he was with a paintbrush.

In addition to the thirteen prints included in the Ars Amatoria portfolio we have included several other of Sitte’s lithographs in the same vein.

Ars Amatoria, translated and adapted from the Latin by Friedrich Walter Lenz and illustrated by Sitte, was published by Akademie-Verlag in Berlin, in a limited numbered edition of 600 signed copies.