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‘Pygmalion and Galatea’: The Metamorphosis of a Metamorphosis Myth
‘‘Myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology’’
(Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment)
- Aphrodite of Knidos
The famous sculptor Praxiteles was said to have created a statue of a nude woman so beautiful that it inspired desire in every man who saw it. His statue, the Aphrodite of Knidos, a representation of the Greek goddess of love and fertility, may have inspired Ovid to write his story of Pygmalion.
Athenaeus writes that the Knidian Aphrodite was modeled on the artist’s lover, Phryne, a famous courtesan who was seen by the artist rising naked from the sea in the manner of Aphrodite herself. At that moment, Praxiteles fell in love with her and soon after, represented her as Aphrodite in his sculpture.
In Ovid’s Hellenistic sources, Pygmalion was a king and not a sculptor who orders a statue which then comes to life as herself, not a sculptor who brings to life a maiden through Aphrodite’s intervention. But this pre-Ovidian myth has already provided the links between artist, the model and the work of art created in whatever medium. But there is also a more ominous side to these associations in the myth, when Pliny the Elder reports:
