This play in turn inspired a 1938 film adaptation, as well as the 1956 musical My Fair Lady and its 1964 film adaptation. In George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, a modern variant of the myth with a subtle hint of feminism, the underclass flower-girl Eliza Doolittle is metaphorically "brought to life" by a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, who teaches her to refine her accent and conversation and otherwise conduct herself with upper-class manners in social situations. In the final scene of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, a statue of Queen Hermione which comes to life is revealed as Hermione herself, so bringing the play to a conclusion of reconciliations. Goethe calls her Elise, based upon the variants in the story of Dido/ Elissa.Ī variant of this theme can also be seen in the story of Pinocchio, in which a wooden puppet is transformed into a "real boy", though in this case the puppet possesses sapience prior to its transformation it is the puppet and not its creator, the woodcarver Geppetto, who beseeches the divine powers for the miracle. At an unknown date, later authors give as the name of the statue that of the sea- nymph Galatea or Galathea. The basic Pygmalion story has been widely transmitted and re-presented in the arts through the centuries. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's impact on popular culture, providing citations to reliable, secondary sources, rather than simply listing appearances. This article appears to contain trivial, minor, or unrelated references to popular culture. An example of this trope appears in William Shakespeare's play, The Winter's Tale, where the king of Sicily is presented with an extremely lifelike statue of his wife (which is actually his long-presumed dead wife). This trope was inherited by writers on art after the Renaissance. The trope of a sculpture so life-like that it seemed about to move was a commonplace with writers on works of art in antiquity. The moral anecdote of the " Apega of Nabis", recounted by the historian Polybius, described a supposed mechanical simulacrum of the tyrant's wife, that crushed victims in her embrace. The story of the breath of life in a statue has parallels in the examples of Daedalus, who used quicksilver to install a voice in his statues or to make them move of Hephaestus, who created automata for his workshop of Talos, an artificial man of bronze, and (according to Hesiod) of Pandora, who was made from clay at the behest of Zeus. In the story of Dido, Pygmalion is an evil king. Perhaps he drew on the lost narrative by Philostephanus that was paraphrased by Clement of Alexandria. Ovid's mention of Paphos suggests that he was drawing on a more circumstantial account than the source for a passing mention of Pygmalion in Pseudo-Apollodorus' Bibliotheke, a Hellenic mythography of the 2nd-century AD. In some versions, Paphos was a son, and they also had a daughter, Metharme. In Ovid's narrative, they had a daughter, Paphos, from whom the city's name is derived. Pygmalion married the ivory sculpture, which changed to a woman under Aphrodite's blessing. He kissed it again, and found that the ivory had lost its hardness. When he returned home, he kissed his ivory statue, and found that its lips felt warm. There, too scared to admit his desire, he quietly wished for a bride who would be "the living likeness of my ivory girl". In time, Aphrodite's festival day came and Pygmalion made offerings at the altar of Aphrodite. Pygmalion kisses and fondles the sculpture, brings it various gifts, and creates a sumptuous bed for it. He made a sculpture of a woman that he found so perfect he fell in love with it. He determined to remain celibate and to occupy himself with sculpting. Post-classical sources name her Galatea.Īccording to Ovid, when Pygmalion saw the Propoetides of Cyprus practicing prostitution, he began "detesting the faults beyond measure which nature has given to women". In book 10 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. He is most familiar from Ovid's narrative poem Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved. In Greek mythology, Pygmalion ( / p ɪ ɡ ˈ m eɪ l i ən/ Ancient Greek: Πυγμαλίων Pugmalíōn, gen.: Πυγμαλίωνος) was a legendary figure of Cyprus, who was a king and a sculptor. Pygmalion Adoring His Statue by Jean Raoux, 1717
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