Galatea

In Ovid's Metamorphoses (in a song sung, within the poem, by Orpheus), the sculptor Pygmalion of Cyprus, disgusted by the women around him, chooses to live alone. He carves a woman from snow-white ivory with such skill that, as Ovid puts it, his art conceals his art: she looks alive, as if only modesty keeps her still. He falls in love with her. He kisses her and talks to her softly, brings her shells and pebbles and flowers and amber, dresses her in rings and pearls, and lays her on a couch spread with Tyrian purple as though she could feel it.

At the festival of Venus he prays for a wife, loses his nerve, and asks only for one “like my ivory”. Venus understands. When he gets home and kisses the statue, she is warm. Under his hands the ivory softens like Hymettian wax in the sun, and she lifts her eyes and sees, in the same moment, the sky and her lover. They have a daughter, Paphos.

Ovid never names her. The name Galatea (“milk-white”), borrowed from a sea-nymph who appears elsewhere in Ovid, attached itself to the statue in the 18th century and was popularised by Rousseau's Pygmalion (written 1762, first staged 1770). There, the statue touches herself and says her first word, “Moi” (“Me”). She touches marble: “Ce n'est plus moi” (“That is no longer me”). Then she touches Pygmalion and sighs: “Ah! encore moi.” Ah, me again.