cliterature

I recent picked up a copy of Lovers in Art, a small book with color plates showing paintings of lovers.  In the whole it is a nice collection and does not avoid more sexual depictions so long as they have a fine art provenance.

One particular painting, excerpted to the right, is Jean-Leon Gerome’s Pygmalion and Galatea.  The basic story of Pygmalion is that he was disgusted by the women in his town.  The back story is that a man in the town had refused to worship Venus, and so his daughters had become (according to this fable) the first prostitutes.  Pygmalion was so disgusted by women being so sexually active that he would have nothing to do any women–and just occupied himself carving, um, life sized realistic nude females.  One of which he fell in love with.

So, quick recap, because some of the women in town were selling their bodies he wouldn’t touch them (or any other woman), but he fell in “love” with a simple depiction of physical beauty that he himself created.  I mean I understand wanted a lover who isn’t sleeping with every other man in town, but isn’t it something of a leap to go from avoiding hussies to only wanting a woman that you created to match your exact physical ideal?

Pygmalion starts giving gifts to the statue, “caressing” it and decking it up in jewellry, laying it on a couch, and referring to it as his wife.  So, basically he had created a precursor to the ‘realdoll’.  He then prayed to have a real wife just like the statue.  Venus saw the statue and thought it look rather like her, and perhaps partly from that flattery brought the statue to life to be his real wife.

 I understand this myth was written by and for people from a very different culture so the strands of moral condemnation of female sexuality, desire to completely control and actually create your wife from scratch, not to mention that the closest biological equivalent of marrying your creation would be daughter-incest…. well, that’s put that all to one side.

This book was assembled in the 90’s and is is meant to depict people in love.  I would argue that of Galatea was in love upon her creation it was not of her free will, if indeed she possessed any.  And Pygmalion may have thought he was in love with a non-sentient ivory statue but that is lust at best and more like puritanical insanity.  I just do not see that, for a modern book, this picture qualifies as depicting what we would define as people freely and romantically in love.  And yet, looking online, I see this myth often listed as one fo the ‘great romance’. 

Really?

(And on a minor note I find the description of the painting rather coy.  Specifically “Galatea was only colored above the waist”.  I don’t know about you, but that is not where I keep my waist.)

For a bonus point: in what way was the artist Gerome just like the mythical figure of Pygmalion?

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