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The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock

by Victor I. Stoichita
translated by Alison Anderson

University of Chicago Press, 2008
Cloth: 978-0-226-77521-0 | Paper: 978-0-226-77522-7
Library of Congress Classification NX650.M48S76 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification 700.45

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Between life and the art that imitates it is a vague, more shadowy category: images that exist autonomously. Pygmalion’s mythical sculpture, which magnanimous gods endowed with life after he fell in love with it, marks perhaps the first such instance in Western art history of an image that exists on its own terms, rather than simply imitating something (or someone) else. In The Pygmalion Effect, Victor I. Stoichita delivers this living image—as well as its many avatars over the centuries—from the long shadow cast by art that merely replicates reality.

Stoichita traces the reverberations of Ovid’s founding myth from ancient times through the advent of cinema. Emphasizing its erotic origins, he locates echoes of this famous fable in everything from legendary incarnations of Helen of Troy to surrealist painting to photographs of both sculpture and people artfully posed to simulate statues. But it was only with the invention of moving pictures, Stoichita argues, that the modern age found a fitting embodiment of the Pygmalion story’s influence. Concluding with an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock films that focuses on Kim Novak’s double persona in Vertigo, The Pygmalion Effect illuminates the fluctuating connections that link aesthetics, magic, and technical skill. In the process, it sheds new light on a mysterious world of living artifacts that, until now, has occupied a dark and little-understood realm in the history of Western image making.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Victor I. Stoichita is professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His many books include Goya: The Last Carnival and A Short History of the Shadow.

REVIEWS

“Victor Stoichita is one of the most brilliant art historians of his generation, and The Pygmalion Effect is his most wide-ranging book to date. Dazzling in his scholarship, Stoichita successfully excavates the core of the Pygmalion myth for the art and literature that invoke it.”

— Joseph Leo Koerner, author of The Reformation of the Image

“This is a book of real imaginative scope—from Pygmalion to Bacchus to Helen of Troy, from classical philology to contemporary visual poetics, from narrative to sculpture to photography to cinema. Stoichita manages to touch all these bases with both erudition and grace.”

— Leonard Barkan, author of Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture

"[The Pygmalion story and its 'effect'] are the exhibits before Professor Stoichita's judicial bench. And what fascinating work he makes of them, once again spanning the history of the theme from the classical world to cinema. . . . The illustrations are apt and glorious. In short and in sum, the book is an intellectual thriller."

— A.C. Grayling, The Art Newspaper

"This is a fascinating and extremely well-researched study of the Ovidian myth. . . . The book is well illustrated and the experience of the shift from images of Pygmalion in medieval manuscripts and later painting to the film stills from Vertigo is utterly compelling."

— Howard Hollands, The Art Book

"At every stop the remarkable erudition of the author is evident. The works themselves—be they sculptures, paintings, poems, photographs, or film—receive insightful analysis that alone justifies the reader’s effort, and the illustrations are gorgeous. . . . Originality and subtlety are expected of Stoichita, and his efforts in The Pygmalion Effect do not disappoint."

— Charles G. Salas, CAA Reviews

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Modifications
Bones and Flesh    Caresses    Blush

2. Amplifications
The Arrow    Living Stone    Songs, Tubas, and Cymbals

3. Variations
Joys and Sorrows of an Artist’s Model    Vive Figure

4. Doubles
Helen and the Eidolon    Helen and the Statue
The Talking Statue in the “Gallery” of the Cavalier Marino
“Like an old tale”

5. The Nervous Statue
The Step
The Sculpture in Painting/The Sculpture in Sculpture    Knots
“An ethereal fluid / Into the softened stone has already penetrated”

6. Photography/Sculpture
The End of the Sitting (Photography and Sculpture)
The Rise of the “Very lifelike ghost” (Photosculpture)

7. The Original Copy
The Pygmalionian Relationship    Madeleine’s Chignon
Judy’s Face    The Transformation

In Guise of a Conclusion
Appendix: Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.238–97
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index

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See other books on: Metamorphosis in literature | Mimesis in literature | Ovid | Sculpture & Installation | Stoichita, Victor I.
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