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
Pygmalion (Rousseau) of the libretto for Gluck's opera "Orfeo ed Euridice", premiered later that year, in which Orpheus gives his dead wife Eurydice life through song, instead of losing faith in the gods. Unlike "Pygmalion", the opera still insists on divine intervention to give life, again via Eros, who intervenes to rescue her and bring her back to life after Orpheus turns around and condemns her back to death. Even so, "Orfeo" and "Pygmalion" both demonstrate the 1760s theme of an apparent failure by overturning an artist's success, which arose again around the time of Beethoven and then held sway until the