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A Whole Out Of Pieces: Pygmalion's Ivory Statue In Ovid's Metamorphoses
Abstract
The story of Pygmalion's love for his statue is best known from Ovid's version in Metamorphoses 10.243–97. Ovid tells how Pygmalion, an artist from Cyprus, disgusted with the licentious sexual conduct of the Propoetides, created a statue of a most beautiful woman and fell in love with it. After Venus granted his wish to bring the statue to life, Pygmalion and his maiden had a child named Paphos and lived happily. This paper discusses how Pygmalion seems to have made his statue, what it was made of, and why the artist chose ivory as his medium. Various contentions are put forward: that ivory is an appropriate material for an idealistic (rather than mimetic) work of art; that its pliability echoes the "change-ability" of forms in Metamorphoses; that Pygmalion's maiden as ideal woman is a construction made of different parts and not a whole; and that the creation of the ivory maiden "out of pieces" resembles and acts as a symbol for Metamorphoses, also a "whole" epic made out of smaller narrative segments, and for Ovid's conception of ars, and erotic ars in particular.1
Although Ovid gave the myth of Pygmalion its literary form, the tale existed before him. The Christian authors Clement of Alexandria and Arnobius recall the story of a Cypriot named Pygmalion who fell in love with a statue of the goddess Aphrodite. Their source is Philostephanus of Cyrene, a prose writer of the early Hellenistic period and author of a lost cycle of Cypriot stories (Rosati 1983.54–55). Clement says (Protrepticus 4.57.3):
Pygmalion of Cyprus fell in love with an ivory statue. It was a naked statue of Aphrodite. The man from Cyprus is captivated by its shapeliness and joins sexually with the statue.2
Similarly, Arnobius, citing Philostephanus, says that Pygmalion was a Cypriot king who fell in love with a statue of the goddess and used to join with her as if she were his wife (Adv. Nat. 6.22):
Philostephanus in Cypriacis auctor est, Pygmalionem regem Cypri simulacrum Veneris, quod sanctitatis apud Cyprios et religionis habebatur antiquae, adamasse ut feminam mente anima lumine rationis iudicioque caecatis solitumque dementem, tamquam si uxoria res esset, sublevato in lectulum numine copularier amplexibus atque ore resque alias agere libidinis vacuae imaginatione frustrabiles.
Philostephanus tells in his Cypriaca that Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, fell in love, as if she were a woman, with an image of Venus that was considered sacred and venerated by the Cyprians from old times. His mind, his soul, the light of his reason, and his judgment were blinded, and in his madness, as if it were his wife, having lifted the divinity to the couch, kissing and embracing her, he used to have intercourse with her and do other vain things, carried away by his foolish and lustful imagination.
Both versions probably refer to a single original found in Philostephanus. The story is always set in Cyprus, and its likely origin is in a local cult involving a fertility goddess corresponding to the Greek and Roman Aphrodite/Venus. The very name Pygmalion is Phoenician.3 Critics have seen in this story a Cypriot legend relating to the practice of sacred prostitution. Gianpiero Rosati believes that it is possible that Ovid read Philostephanus directly and took the idea of the story from him (1983.56).4
Two other ancient stories of agalmatophilia, or the love of statues, are relevant intertexts of the Ovidian account.5 Pseudo-Lucian tells that a young man fell in love with the famous statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles in Knidos, locked himself in the temple, and had sex with it. After this event, a mark appeared in the goddess's thigh (Ps.-Lucian Amores 13–16).6 Likewise, in Euripides' Alcestis (348–53), Admetus says that he will ask a sculptor to make an image of his dead wife in marble and that he will lie with it in their bed and hold it in his arms.
Ovid says that Pygmalion, with great art, made a statue of ivory. But here the statue is not of Venus, but, apparently, of a woman. Likewise, in the...
In his Metamorphoses, Ovid created a world of alternating images that reflect both the significance of visual communication and the importance of movement. In these stories, vision and movement are closely related to the characters’ genders, the plot, and the final transformations. The relationship between Ovid’s literary text and a movie as a narrative, wherein the medium of storytelling differs, allows for the application of feminist film theory, especially that of Laura Mulvey. This approach can be applied to the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s piece of art that combines both text and image in an exemplary manner. Atalanta’s story, which will be discussed, is chosen precisely because it highlights the multidimensional function of vision and movement, combined with the gender of the observer and the object of the gaze, as well as the transformation process.
The paper proposes a framework that combines behavioral and computational experiments employing fictional prompts as a novel tool for investigating cultural artifacts and social biases in storytelling both by humans and generative AI. The study analyzes 250 stories authored by crowdworkers in June 2019 and 80 stories generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in March 2023 by merging methods from narratology and inferential statistics. Both crowdworkers and large language models responded to identical prompts about creating and falling in love with an artificial human. The proposed experimental paradigm allows a direct comparison between human and LLM-generated storytelling. Responses to the Pygmalionesque prompts confirm the pervasive presence of the Pygmalion myth in the collective imaginary of both humans and large language models. All solicited narratives present a scientific or technological pursuit. The analysis reveals that narratives from GPT-3.5 and particularly GPT-4 are more more progressive in terms of gender roles and sexuality than those written by humans. While AI narratives can occasionally provide innovative plot twists, they offer less imaginative scenarios and rhetoric than human-authored texts. The proposed framework argues that fiction can be used as a window into human and AI-based collective imaginary and social dimensions.
Viele der rezenten Studien zur Ästhetik des Monströsen nehmen auf Michel Foucaults Vorlesungsreihe Les anormaux Bezug, in der er u. a. der diskursiven Transformation des Monsters von einem somatischen hin zu einem moralischen Abweichungsphänomen nachgeht. Dass Foucaults Ausführungen mitunter nur unzureichend differenziert sind, soll der vorliegende Beitrag nachweisen. Auch wenn die Literatur in Les anormaux eine untergeordnete Rolle spielt, eher als peripheres Beleg‐ oder Anschauungsmaterial dient denn als Gegenstand einer eigenen Untersuchung, ist gerade sie es, die Foucaults genealogische Analyse der notwendigen Komplexitätssteigerung zuführen und ihre Leerstellen ausfüllen kann. Zu diesem Zweck werden exemplarisch Ovids Lykaon‐Mythos aus dem ersten Buch der Metamorphosen sowie Mary Shelleys Roman Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus herangezogen. Neben der gebotenen Korrektur von Les anormaux vermögen beide Texte Foucaults Befund von der diskursiven Produktivität des Monströsen zu bestätigen und anzureichern: Sowohl Ovid als auch Shelley dokumentieren eine Wertschätzung und Wertschöpfung des Monströsen und stehen damit quer zu konventionellen Narrativen, die das Monster als etwas rein Destruktives und Dämonisches oder als das radikal Andere des Menschen in Szene setzen, ohne auf die kulturellen Profite und anthropologischen Einsichten zu reflektieren, die sich aus jenem gewinnen lassen.
Cambridge Core - Classical Literature - Ovid on Screen - by Martin M. Winkler
This chapter critiques the persistence of Ovid’s Pygmalion myth in screen narratives of the creation of the ideal woman. Sculptor and statue have found everlasting life in stories about the challenge of shaping unpromising raw material into a culturally determined notion of female beauty. In the new millennium television and cinema continue to resonate with Ovidian themes and tropes. James discusses the ethics and aesthetics of designing artificial life in science and technology, especially the advent of the robotic sex slave. She argues that a classical text can be enriched by and contribute to our experience of the fiction and facts about cyborgs, CGI-generated personae, and biologically engineered creatures, including our desire to extend and adapt ourselves with mechanical parts and alien substances.
This thesis examines the social and economic context for so-called’ origin brands’ (products referred to and associated with a particular town, region or country) in ancient Rome, and develops a hypothetical model of how a Roman brand’s reputation might grow. This thinking is illustrated by four detailed case studies of luxury brands. Chapter 1 examines the role of brands in the Roman world in the light of modern thinking on the nature of brands and branding. I discuss the role of the consumer, in relation to brands, both modern and ancient, leading into an explanation of how brands are adopted by consumers, and how this might apply to a Roman luxury brand. Finally, I introduce and develop the concept of ‘origin brands’ in the Roman world, and relate the phenomenon of the origin brand to the consumer context. Chapter 2 sets out the élite socio-economic context in which Roman brands developed. The last part of this chapter examines the potential role of literature and its performance in élite households in the communication of brand information. Chapter 3 examines the nature of brand communication in the Roman world. In ancient Rome this was primarily word-of-mouth. This is analysed in a structured way to reflect the entire process from the production of a commodity to its ultimate purchase and consumption, leading to the formulation of a schematic model of the process. The second half of the thesis consists of four extended case studies that narrate the history of selected luxury origin brands and how they achieved their success in the Roman élite marketplace. The four examples – Corinthian bronze, ivory, silk and fine wines – represent different competitive marketplaces, and differing ways in which the brands concerned developed.
By taking statues in the Portico of Pompey as a point of departure, the present investigation centres on the less known poet Antipater of Thessalonica, who composed epigrams in Greek in Augustan Rome, as well as the famous Augustan poets Horace and Vergil. Representations of male figures in the object position that go back to Homer will be important as a contrast to representations of female agency in Augustan Rome. As will be shown, Antipater, Horace and Vergil highlight female agency in subject as well as object positions that resonate with a number of the female figures in the Pompeian Portico, thus contributing to a richer understanding of how women may be represented in ancient art forms.
Ovid’s story of Pygmalion contains allusions to the diatribe against women in Euripides’ Hippolytus, particularly Hippolytus’ comparison of a wife to a statue. These allusions underscore shared and unusual attributes of Pygmalion and Hippolytus, the only obvious examples of adult male celibacy in Graeco-Roman literature. Although Orpheus’' misogyny distorts the story, Pygmalion and his family mimic the narrative of Euripides’ play. Pygmalion acts as a second Hippolytus while Myrrha is a doublet of Phaedra, similarly tortured with incestuous lust because of her male relative’s insult to Venus. Adonis’ death, promised by Artemis at the end of Hippolytus, punishes Venus for her cruel treatment of both Phaedra and Myrrha.
In this article, I want to consider how the elegiac poet (particularly Ovid) uses the imagery of venal sexuality and the negative metaphoric associations of poems with prostitutes and poets with pimps as means to poetic empowerment within the historic and social climate of the establishment of the Augustan principate. The recent work of various classical scholars emphasizes how prostitution serves as a powerful metaphor for patronized poets. 1 Such studies show how these poets attempt to situate themselves within models of venal sexuality (hetaira/meretrix, porne/scortum) that are either validated or denigrated from the perspective of aristocratic culture. In this manner, patronized poetic composition can be seen as struggling to embed itself in aristocratic culture and thus demonstrate “the dilemma of the artist in a money economy” (Carson 1993.75).
Women are ‘perceived’. We speak often not just of ‘women’, but of ‘images’, ‘representations’, ‘reflections’ of women. Woman perceived is woman as art-object; and paradigmatic of this phenomenon is the myth of Pygmalion.
This article will consider Ovid's version of the myth, the story of the artist who loved his own creation. I shall suggest that the story reflects on the eroto-artistic relationship between the poet and his puella explored in Latin love elegy. The Metamorphoses myth of the art-object which becomes a love-object mirrors the elegiac myth of love-object as art-object. The elegists represent the puella as both art and flesh. Pygmalion deconstructs the erotic realism of elegy and by its frankness about the power of the male artist discloses elegy's operations. It tells us how to read the puella — as a work of art; and the lover — as an artist obsessed with his own creation. Pygmalion reflects and exposes the self-absorption of elegy, the heroization of the lover, and the painted nature of the woman presented in eroto-elegiac texts, that is, the way in which she is to be seen as an art-object.