Le performance di Pigmalione tra letteratura, arte e teatro

Abstract

Pygmalion, a disappointed artist because of the audacity and the vices of the Propoetides who dared to challenge Venus’s divinity and who consecrated themselves to prostitution, feels disgust at the female sex and so, after a long period of abstinence and loneliness, he finally decides to mould a statue of a woman which corresponds to his feminine ideal and falls tenderly in love with it. He gets out of Venus that this simulacrum would be changed to a real flesh-and-blood woman and he marries her. The goddess becomes in this way the true artifex of this exceptional metamorphosis that, instead of petrifying life, vivifies the stone in order to allow the perfect union of the two lovers. From this famous myth told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, some modern variations and/or hybridizations among literature and music (Rousseau, Pygmalion, scène lyrique), literature and painting (Balzac, Le chefd’oeuvre inconnu), literature, art and theatre (Pirandello, Diana e la Tuda) will be presented. In these rewritings the promethean artist does not always have the lucky possibility to realize his performance.