Pygmalion and Galatea 1890
When I saw this one it took my breath away. I remember it very well. I studied it intently as a child, and I do believe it is this nude, that made me fall in love with the nude.
It is perfect! She is perfect! I just want to touch her stone feet and feel it become flesh! HOW COOL!
From Wikipedia.. A love story...
Pygmalion is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton, he is most familiar from Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, in which Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has made.
In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides prostituting themselves, he is 'not interested in women', but his statue is so realistic that he falls in love with it. He offers the statue presents and eventually prays to Venus (Aphrodite). She takes pity on him and brings the statue to life. They marry and have a son, Paphos, and, according to the author of Bibliotheke, a daughter, Metharme.
When I saw this one it took my breath away. I remember it very well. I studied it intently as a child, and I do believe it is this nude, that made me fall in love with the nude.
It is perfect! She is perfect! I just want to touch her stone feet and feel it become flesh! HOW COOL!
From Wikipedia.. A love story...
Pygmalion is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton, he is most familiar from Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, in which Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has made.
In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides prostituting themselves, he is 'not interested in women', but his statue is so realistic that he falls in love with it. He offers the statue presents and eventually prays to Venus (Aphrodite). She takes pity on him and brings the statue to life. They marry and have a son, Paphos, and, according to the author of Bibliotheke, a daughter, Metharme.
Ovid's mention of Paphos suggests that he was drawing on the same sources as the brief account of Pygmalion and Galatea in Bibliotheke, a Hellenic mythography of the second-century CE that was formerly attributed to Apollodorus. Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton, and Galatea figures in the founding legend of Paphos in Cyprus.
3 comments:
My Lord, that is a beautiful painting.
Yes it is. And very intriguing. You almost feel like a voyeur of an intimate moment. Well, that's what we are I guess.
Yes, definately vouyer stuff, but... for me it is not so much the passion of it as it is the perfection of her, and the concept, the very image of a statue coming to life is just such a powerful image.
I think it is universal, we all look at beautiful statues and think, 'What would they look like in real flesh?' But we never really ever see an image of that concept.
In this painting it is done perfectly. Coupled with incredible skill and a fantastic emotional passion... it is just all around a perfect nude.
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