Vivae dixisses virginis ora: the discourse of color in Hendrick Goltzius's Pygmalion and the Ivory Statue

Abstract

The Pygmalion and Galatea or, more accurately, Pygmalion and the Ivory Statue, invented, engraved, and published by Hendrick Goltzius in 1593, depic ts an early episode from the story told by Orpheus in Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses (figure I).1 Repelled by the shameless Propoetides, who had lost the power to blush, having been compelled by Venus to prostitute themselves, Pygmalion fashions a female effigy more beautiful and chaste than any mortal woman. With wondrous art he carves her from snowwhite ivory, giving her the features of a true virgin, whom, Ovid avows, “you would think living and desirous of being moved, were she not so modest.2 The splendor of her feigned body, its seeming ruddiness (simulati corporisignes), her implied ability to blush astonishes and enflames him. Deceived by the art that conceals art (ars adeo latet arte sua), he succumbs to his enlivening artifice, falling in love with the statue whose ivory substance he declines to accept (nec adhuc ebur esse fatetur), addressing it with a lover's blandishments, proffering many-colored flowers, and adorning it with a necklace and robes. Ovid insists that Pygmalion's desire operates at the very threshold of artifice, where the sculptor's art, embodied by the ivory maid (eburnea virgo), takes on the appearance of nature, and nature is heightened by the art to which no natural woman can aspire; and so, Pygmalion must constantly assure himself that the statue is no statue, kissing, addressing, and touching it.