Pygmalion
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Pygmalion ( Greek Πυγμαλίων ) is both the name of a Cypriot king in Greek mythology and the Greek name for the king Pumayaton of Tire , to whom the mythical story may go back.
Ancient representations
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ovid
The most detailed ancient description can be found in Ovid :
The artist Pygmalion of Cyprus has become a misogynist due to bad experiences with propoetides (sexually unruly women) and lives only for his sculpture. Without consciously thinking about women, he creates an ivory statue that looks like a living woman. He treats the image more and more like a real person and finally falls in love with his fictional character. On the feast day of Venus, Pygmalion pleads with the goddess of love: Although he doesn't dare to say that his statue may become a person, he asks that his future wife be like the statue he created. When he returns home and starts caressing the statue as usual, it slowly comes to life. A daughter named Paphos emerges from this connection , after whom the city will later be named. Another daughter of Pygmalion is called Metharme. Aphrodite or Venus grants Pygmalion a long life. In the 18th century the statue was given the name Galatea .
Virgil
In Virgil's case , Pygmalion is the son of King Belus of Tire and the brother of Dido , who later founded Carthage . He murdered Dido's husband Sychaeus out of greed.
middle Ages
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In the second part of Jean de Meung's 13th century rose novel , Pygmalion is the theme.
Modern times
The material received literary treatment in Johann Jakob Bodmer's Pygmalion and Elise (1749), Johann Elias Schlegel's cantata Pygmalion (1766), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's melodrama Pygmalion (1770), Joseph von Eichendorff : Das Marmorbild (1818) and Gottfried Keller's novella Regine ( 1881).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's youth poem Pygmalion (1767) and Franz von Suppé's operetta The Beautiful Galathée (1865) are variants of the subject that show a conversion of the misogynist Pygmalion. The material was modified in ETA Hoffmann's story The Sandman .
In WS Gilbert ( Pygmalion and Galatea , 1871) and Georg Kaiser ( Pygmalion , 1948) the motif of renewed petrification is played out.
A similar transformation can be found in Carlo Collodi's “ The Adventures of Pinocchi o” at the end of the 19th century, where a wooden figure becomes a living boy.
The Irish-British author George Bernard Shaw used the material for his play Pygmalion in 1913 to caricature London society. He shifts the point of view from the artist Pygmalion to his work, which, in contrast to earlier versions of the material, leaves him. Pygmalion's statue is a flower girl who is taught the language of fine people by a linguist . The play was made into a film several times, including 1938 in England by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard ( The novel of a flower girl ). Shaw received an Oscar for Best Screenplay for this adaptation of Pygmalion . In 1956, the play and film formed the basis for Alan Jay Lerner's musical My Fair Lady , which was also successfully filmed . Also based on Shaw's Pygmalion is the play Educating Rita by Willy Russell . Set in Liverpool in the 1970s, this play was filmed in 1983. The German title of this feature film was Rita finally wants to know .
Also worth mentioning is the novel Galatea 2.2 (1995) by the American Richard Powers , in which a cyberneticist and a writer jointly develop a supercomputer to which they try to teach methods of literary interpretation.
In addition to the musical My Fair Lady , Pygmalion was also the musical theme of Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera Pigmalion (1748), Karl Wilhelm Ramler's Pygmalion. A cantata (1768, music by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach ), the opera Il Pigmalione by Gaetano Donizetti (1816), the burlesque Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed by Wilhelm Meyer Lutz (1883) and the musical One Touch of Venus by Kurt Weill (1943 ).
The English Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones produced a series of four pictures in 1875–78 that had the Pygmalion / Galatea motif as their theme: The Heart Desires, The Hand Refrains, The Godhead Fires, The Soul Attains.
The German sculptor Antje Tesche-Mentzen created a life-size bronze sculpture Galatea in 2008 . It shows the moment of transformation from a lifeless figure to a living, beautiful woman. In 2013 this figure was exhibited at the Venice Biennale as part of the collateral exhibition Overplay in the Palazzo Albrizzi .
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The Austrian cabaret artist Lisa Eckhart composed a continuation of the story about Pygmalion and his statue. In this the awakening of Galatea reveals itself as a disappointment for the sculptor, which is why he - plaintively and mourning its former perfection - poured it in concrete.
See also
- Pygmalion effect
- Agalmatophilia (pygmalionism)
- ELIZA
literature
- Achim Aurnhammer, Dieter Martin (ed.): Myth Pygmalion. Texts from Ovid to John Updike . (Reclam Library 20053). Leipzig 2003, ISBN 3-379-20053-0 (anthology).
- Gereon Becht-Jördens, Peter M. Wehmeier: From an art object to a living person. Ovid on the possibilities and limits of art. In: Hans Förstl et al. (Hrsg.): Metamorphosen (series of publications of the German-speaking society for art and psychopathology of expression e. V 25). Edition GIB, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-00-019592-0 , pp. 37-45.
- Andreas Blühm : Pygmalion. The iconography of an artist's myth between 1500 and 1900. (European university publications, series 28, art history, volume 90). Lang, Frankfurt 1988, ISBN 3-631-40797-1 (also Diss. FU Berlin 1987).
- Annegret Dinter: The Pygmalion Stuff in European Literature. Reception history of an Ovid fable (= studies on the continued effects of antiquity , vol. 11). Winter, Heidelberg 1979, ISBN 3-533-02775-9 (also Diss. Bonn 1977).
- Heinrich Dörrie : Pygmalion. An impulse from Ovid and its effect up to the present day. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1974, ISBN 3-531-07195-5 .
- Joshua Essaka: Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature. Ashgate 2001.
- Sonja Fielitz : The Pygmalion Myth as a Mirror of Literary-Cultural Discourses from Antiquity to the Present. In: C. Uhlig / WR Keller (Ed.): Europe between antiquity and modernity. Contributions to philosophy, literary studies and philology (= contributions to recent literary history , vol. 334). Heidelberg 2014.
- Franz-Josef Hücker: The Pygmalion mythology in psychotherapy. In: Psychotherapy Forum. Vol. 16, No. 3, 2008 (Springer Vienna), pp. 128-135, doi: 10.1007 / s00729-008-0238-1
- Dieter Martin: Pygmalion. In: Maria Moog-Grünewald (Ed.): Mythenrezeption. The ancient mythology in literature, music and art from the beginnings to the present (= Der Neue Pauly . Supplements. Volume 5). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2008, ISBN 978-3-476-02032-1 , pp. 631-640.
- Mathias Mayer, Gerhard Neumann (ed.): Pygmalion. The history of myth in western culture. Rombach, Freiburg 1997, ISBN 3-7930-9141-4 .
- Inka Mülder-Bach : Under the sign of Pygmalion. The model of the statue and the discovery of the "representation" in the 18th century. Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7705-3189-2 .
- Bettina Hawlitschek (B. Scholz): Paul Delvaux 'apparent reversal of the Pygmalion myth'. In: Bettina Hawlitschek: Escape routes from patriarchal petrification. Centaurus, Freiburg 1995, ISBN 3-8255-0140-X (also Diss. Freiburg, 1995).
- Gustav Türk : Pygmalion 2) . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 3.2, Leipzig 1909, Col. 3317-3319 ( digitized version ).
- Birgitt Werner: The Pygmalion motif in the Enlightenment. In: Wolf Dieter Scholz, Herbert Schwab (Hrsg.): Education and society in transition. Balance sheet and perspectives of educational science. Friedrich W. Busch & Jost von Maydell on their 60th birthday. BIS, Oldenburg 1999, ISBN 3-8142-0701-7 .
- Claudia Weiser: Pygmalion. From artist and educator to pathological case. A material historical investigation. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-631-33311-0 .
- Lisa Eckhart : Metric tactlessness - An introduction to political correctness. Stage poetry by Lisa Eckhart, Chapter III. Herzkammerspiele, Galatea. , 2nd, corrected edition. Schultz & Schirm Bühnenverlag, Vienna, ISBN 978-3-9503907-6-6 .
Web links
- The story Pygmalion by Theodor Herzl on Wikisource
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.243-297
- ↑ Library of Apollodor 3,14,3,2
- ↑ Nonnos , Dionysiaka 32, 212-213
- ↑ Virgil, Aeneid 1, 343-364
- ↑ Burne-Jones's Pygmalion Series
- ^ Sculptures on the homepage of Antje Tesche-Mentzen .