V. I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock

Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Translated by Alison Anderson), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, coll. "The Louise Smith Bross Lectures", 2008. viii, 252 pages ; 12 p. of plates.

• ISBN 9780226775210
• $45.00

Recension par David Cast (Bryn Mawr College) dans Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.04.20. Extraits en ligne sur amazon.com.

Présentation de l'éditeur:

Between life and the art that imitates it is a vague, more shadowy category: images that exist autonomously. Pygmalion's mythical sculpture, which magnanimous gods endowed with life after he fell in love with it, marks perhaps the first such instance in Western art history of an image that exists on its own terms, rather than simply imitating something (or someone) else. In The Pygmalion Effect, Victor I. Stoichita delivers this living image—as well as its many avatars over the centuries—from the long shadow cast by art that merely replicates reality. Stoichita traces the reverberations of Ovid's founding myth from ancient times through the advent of cinema. Emphasizing its erotic origins, he locates echoes of this famous fable in everything from legendary incarnations of Helen of Troy to surrealist painting to photographs of both sculpture and people artfully posed to simulate statues. But it was only with the invention of moving pictures, Stoichita argues, that the modern age found a fitting embodiment of the Pygmalion story's influence. Concluding with an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock films that focuses on Kim Novak's double persona in Vertigo, The Pygmalion Effect illuminates the fluctuating connections that link aesthetics, magic, and technical skill. In the process, it sheds new light on a mysterious world of living artifacts that, until now, has occupied a dark and little-understood realm in the history of Western image making. Victor I. Stoichita is professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His many books include Goya: The Last Carnival and A Short History of the Shadow.

Table des matières:

Acknowledgments
Introduction                             
1. Modifications
Bones and Flesh    Caresses    Blush
2. Amplifications
The Arrow    Living Stone    Songs, Tubas, and Cymbals
3. Variations
Joys and Sorrows of an Artist's Model    Vive Figure
4. Doubles
Helen and the Eidolon    Helen and the Statue
The Talking Statue in the “Gallery” of the Cavalier Marino
“Like an old tale”
5. The Nervous Statue
The Step
The Sculpture in Painting/The Sculpture in Sculpture    Knots
“An ethereal fluid / Into the softened stone has already penetrated”
6. Photography/Sculpture
The End of the Sitting (Photography and Sculpture)
The Rise of the “Very lifelike ghost” (Photosculpture)
7. The Original Copy
The Pygmalionian Relationship   

Madeleine's Chignon
Judy's Face   

The Transformation
In Guise of a Conclusion               
Appendix: Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.238–97      
Notes                                              
List of Illustrations                         
Index