Pygmalion

Pygmalion at the Gardner Museum (c. 1576–78) illustrates Ovid's extraordinary myth of creative desire: the Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion, disgusted by the immorality of real women, carved a perfect female figure in ivory and fell in love with his creation. Venus, moved by the sincerity of his passion, granted his prayer and transformed the statue into a living woman, Galatea. The myth had particular resonance for visual artists — it suggested that beauty rendered with sufficient skill and passion might transcend the boundary between representation and reality, vindicating painting and sculpture as practices of divine creative power. Veronese would have appreciated this dimension of the myth, given his own career-long ambition to create images of such sensuous completeness that they seemed to breathe. The Gardner Museum's mythological Veronese series includes this as a complement to the other Ovidian subjects, presenting a coherent program of classical myth for an educated viewer who would have read the Metamorphoses in Latin.

The composition captures the moment of transformation with characteristic Venetian refinement. Veronese's luminous flesh tones and the contrast between the still-stone and living figures create visual drama.