Pygmalion (mythology) Pygmalion (mythology) Pygmalion (; Ancient Greek: Πυγμαλίων "Pugmalíōn", "gen".: Πυγμαλίωνος) is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though "Pygmalion" is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name "Pumayyaton", 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 Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides he was "not interested in women", but his statue was so beautiful and realistic that he fell in love with it. In time, Aphrodite's festival
Greek mythology in western art and literature for all things Greek, including Greek mythology. In Britain, it was a great period for new translations of Greek tragedies and Homer's works, and these in turn inspired contemporary poets, such as Keats, Byron, and Shelley. The Hellenism of Queen Victoria's poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, was such that even his portraits of the quintessentially English court of King Arthur are suffused with echoes of the Homeric epics. The visual arts kept pace, stimulated by the purchase of the Parthenon marbles in 1816; many of the "Greek" paintings of Lord Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema were seriously accepted as part of