Pygmalion2.0018_Bargellini

Giulio Bargellini, "Pigmalione," 1896, Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna

Pygmalion recoils in shock, as his sculpture comes to life and gestures toward him. She is still marble from the sternum down; but, all that will soon change. The progressive vivification from marble to flesh was familiar since Raoux's 1717 Pygmalion and articulated especially by Gérôme in several versions from about 1890 onward.

A. Celebonovic, Some Call it Kitsch: masterpieces of bourgeois realism, ed by S. Tolstoï (New York: Abrams, 1974): "Pygmalion stands out against a wall of smooth marble, whose role is to emphasize the unusual attitude in which the first shock of amazement has caught him. Straight as a column, the statue, which no longer bears any relations to classical sculpture, changes into a flesh-and-blood woman who offers him a flower. On the ground, a hammer fallen from the sculptor's hand, and a wrinkled carpet, underline the movement of Pygmalion, stunned at the product of his labours, and help the spectator to reconstruct in his mind the moving picture of all the movements and gestures that have preceded the instant fixed by the artist." 80 - 81.