Ivory Statue Research Articles

Will to the Original: Platonism in Henry James’ Roderick Hudson

Will to the Original: Platonism in Henry James’ <i>Roderick Hudson</i>

Spaces in Between in the Myth of Myrrha: A Metamorphosis into Tree

Abstract Within the larger context of metamorphoses into plants in Greek and Roman mythology, the paper aims to analyse the myth of Myrrha and her metamorphosis into a tree, focusing on the triggering cause of the transformation as well as the response given to her newly-acquired form of life. Myrrha’s transformation into a myrrh tree takes place as a consequence of her transgressive incestuous act of love with her father, Cinyras. Her metamorphosis occurs as a consequence of sinful passion – passion in extremis –, and she sacrifices her body (and human life/existence) in her escape. I will look at Ovid’s version of the myth as well as Ted Hughes’s adaptation of the story from his Tales from Ovid. My discussion of the transformation into tree starts out from the consideration that metamorphosis is the par excellence place and space of in-betweenness implying an inherent hybridity and blurred, converging subjectivities, a state of being that allows for passages, overlaps, crossings, and simultaneities. I am interested to see in what ways Myrrha’s incestuous desire for her father as well as her metamorphosis into a tree can be “rooted” back to her great-grandfather Pygmalion’s transgressive love for the ivory statue Galatea.

Why Does Aphrodite Have Her Foot on That Turtle?

Why Does Aphrodite Have Her Foot on That Turtle? CAROL L. DOUGHERTY τὸ δὲ πρὸ ποδὸς ἄρειον ἀεὶ σκοπεῖν / χρῆμα πᾶν. It is always better to look at what lies before one’s foot, in every case. —Pindar, Isthmian 8.12. For thousands of years a certain statue of Aphrodite has puzzled its viewers—the goddess stands with one foot delicately balanced atop a turtle.1 By all accounts a spectacular work of gold and ivory fashioned by the famous classical Greek sculptor Phidias in the 420s bce (see fig. 1), the original no longer exists. However, 700 years later, we have the following account of it by the second-century ce geographer Pausanias: “Behind the portico built from the spoils of Corcyra is a temple of Aphrodite. . . . The goddess in the temple they call Heavenly (Ourania); she is of ivory and gold, the work of Phidias, and she stands with one foot upon a turtle.2 Pausanias then throws up his hands at the significance of the turtle under Aphrodite’s foot: “the meaning of the turtle . . . I leave to those who care to guess.” His contemporary, Plutarch, however, has no such qualms. In an advice book for brides and grooms, he explains that, “Phidias represented the Aphrodite of the Eleans stepping on a turtle as a symbol for women of staying home and keeping silent.”3 While Plutarch explains the significance of the turtle, his interpretation fails to account for why Aphrodite (and not Hera or Hestia, goddesses more often associated with a woman’s place in the home) has her foot on this iconic turtle. arion 27.3 winter 2020 26 why does aphrodite have her foot on that turtle? Fig. 1: Aphrodite with a tortoise, III century ce marble, Temple of Artemis Syria, Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Carol L. Dougherty 27 What’s her connection to this lowly creature, or, even more puzzling, to women as domestic creatures?4 Conspicuously absent from Plutarch’s account of the statue is any attention to the sensual beauty of Phidias’s Aphrodite or consideration of how the domestic symbolism of the turtle relates to her own famed sexuality. Although Phidias’s gold and ivory statue no longer survives, it appears to have inspired a series of copies that exemplify the lovely, seductive, and radiant beauty for which the goddess was typically celebrated in poetry and song.5 In fact, Kenneth Lapatin describes the Brazza Aphrodite—one of the surviving statues that imitated the Phidian original—as “a sensuous work: the left foot resting atop the tortoise creates a rhythm that surges up the body, along the dominating mass of the himation toward the suggestively distended right hip and through the animated, yet revealing drapery of the chiton across the abdomen and breasts.”6 And peeping out from under her diaphanous drapery is the head of a turtle upon which Aphrodite lightly rests her foot, leading me to rephrase the question—why does this seductive Aphrodite, goddess of sexuality and desire, have her foot on that domestic turtle? Fast forward another 900 years, and we find that in the seventeenth century ce, European emblematists are, in fact, asking just this question. As we will see below, Phidias’s statue (as well as the turtle alone) has an extended afterlife in early modern emblem books. An art form uniting word and image, the emblem combined a brief but challenging motto with a pictorial device (an impresa) drawn from a classical or Egyptian prototype, both of which were followed by an epigram , again of classical origin. Phidias’s statue of Aphrodite Ourania appears to have been of particular interest to these artists.7 Fascinated not just with Phidias’s rendering of Aphrodite and the turtle but also with Plutarch’s interpretation of it, early modern emblematists and even painters bring statue and text together to explore the relationship between Aphrodite and the turtle. They take a mischievous delight in expos- 28 why does aphrodite have her foot on that turtle? ing (rather than erasing) the obvious contradictions between the sexy Aphrodite that Phidias carved into gold and ivory and Plutarch’s stay-at-home turtle, suggesting that a similar tension might be in play in the ancient world...

Pygmalion’s Wax: “Fruitful Knowledge” in Bacon and Montaigne

This essay documents the mutual interactions of philosophy and poesis in early modern theories of knowledge. It does so by following the trajectory of the wax image, or simulacrum, from Greek philosophy to Roman rhetoric and onwards to early modern philosophy and poetry. Ovid’s fable of Pygmalion—the artist who brings an ivory statue to life—evokes the wax simulacrum and thereby makes explicit the shared terrain of philosophy, poetics, and rhetoric around questions of knowledge and representation. Consequently, this essay uses Pygmalion as a hinge that links these disparate periods and discourses. Culminating in an analysis of works by Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne, the essay claims that the figure of Pygmalion is a vehicle by which the softening tendencies of poesis shape the theories of knowledge put forward in early modern philosophical writing.

Naturalized Desires and the Metamorphosis of Iphis

Introduction The story of Iphis and Ianthe is the sole mythological account of female same-sex desire, not only in Ovid but in all of classical literature. (1) In the Metamorphoses (9.666-797), Ovid tells the tale of Iphis, a girl raised as a boy. At marriageable age, Iphis is betrothed to a girl, Ianthe, with whom she falls madly in love. All would be well, except that she realizes, with great sadness, that her desire is 'unnatural' and cannot be consummated. However, on the day before the wedding, the goddess Isis intervenes, transforms Iphis into a young man, and the marriage proceeds as planned. In this article, I integrate two of the main scholarly approaches to the Iphis story--namely, closely reading the myth itself, and exploring its relationship to its neighboring stories--in order to see what the surrounding narrative (Met. 9.450-10.739) reveals about Roman sexuality more broadly. (2) Early scholarship on Iphis tried to deduce a pattern underlying the types of desire catalogued within this narrative set. The framing of this story is in fact significant, as I argue below. The Iphis myth (9.666-797) is preceded by a story in which a girl named Byblis tries, unsuccessfully, to seduce her brother (9.450-665), and is followed by the tale of Orpheus, who turns to a love of boys after losing his wife Eurydice (10.1-85). Next is the brief story of Cyparissus, a boy who accidentally kills his pet deer (10.86-147). Orpheus himself then tells a number of tales, including those of the Cerastae and Propoetides, women punished for their impiety (10.220-42); Pygmalion, who falls in love with an ivory statue (10.243-97); Ganymede and Hyacinthus, both beloved by gods (10.148-219); Myrrha, who knowingly sleeps with her own father (10.298-502); and Venus and her beloved Adonis (10.503-739). It has been variously suggested that Ovid assimilates Iphis to everyone but Byblis and Myrrha on the basis of a generalized unnatural desire (Otis 1970); that he assimilates Iphis to precisely these girls on the basis of their shared forbidden desire (Galinsky 1975); or that he assimilates Iphis to the boy-lovers on the basis of a shared homoerotic desire (Makowski 1996) (3)--though whether Ovid (or 'Ovid') disapproves of or is sympathetic toward female homoerotic desire has been a point of contention. (4) In the past ten years, scholars have investigated primarily what the Iphis story itself can tell us about Ovidian/Roman concepts of gender and sexuality; (5) these enquiries have yielded a number of different, but often complementary, interpretations. Thus, for example, Diane Pintabone (2002) has argued that Ovid simultaneously presents a positive and a negative portrait of woman-for-woman passion, thus appearing (at least temporarily) to question normative gender/sexuality but ultimately reinforcing it. Shilpa Raval (2002) contends that the Iphis story shows, on the one hand, that gender is performative and not necessarily tied to biological sex, and on the other, that social institutions (including heterosexual marriage) depend on and reinforce the notion of stable gender identity predicated on sexual difference. (6) Jonathan Walker (2006) argues that the Iphis story both gives and revokes lesbianism: while the possibility of something like is allowed to emerge in readers' minds, Ovid never allows it to fully materialize. According to Kirk Ormand (2005), Ovid's myth is ultimately not so much about female deviance or lesbianism as it is about the vexed relationship between masculine gender performance and a supposedly stable male sex. (7) Finally, a few scholars have called attention to the impossible or incomprehensible nature of Iphis and Ianthe's desire, whether because it is mutual and lacks hierarchy (Ormand 2005; Boehringer 2007,257-8), because it lacks penetration (Walker 2006), or because it lacks a masculine element (Boehringer 2007, 257-8). My argument focuses on what the Iphis story, read in context, can tell us about Roman conceptions of sexual acts. …

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

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.

The Two Authenticities of The Photographic Media

dramatic episode in a recent court trial in Los Angeles has made us explicitly aware of the juridical, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of authenticity in the use of the photographic media. videotape taken of the action of four white police officers who had stopped and manhandled a black motorist was used as evidence to show whether the police had used unacceptable violence or whether behavior was appropriate to what duty required. During the trial the truthfulness of the tape was challenged because it had been modified by such means as slow motion and stop action. This had been done to inform the jury most clearly of the decisive facts. The same modifications, however, were challenged because they changed decisive qualities of the crucial event. motion minimizes the violence. In the real world, a faster blow is a harder blow; a slower blow is softer. ... Slow motion also makes the beating seem less real and more fantastic.' Stop motion also broke the dynamic impact of the action, and the removal of the soundtrack diminished the presence of the event even further. Quite apart from the political drama of the trial, the episode could not but remind us of an ambiguity that has plagued the aesthetic and epistemological theory of the figurative arts. To the extent that the arts were representational, they aspired to a faithful rendering of the facts of reality; but in order to make images comprehensible to the human mind they had to select and shape and organize the material taken from reality-they had to find and impose form. By doing so, however, they had to partially reshape the facts of nature perceived by the eyes. Hence aesthetic theory had to put up with a compromise. Another way of putting the problem is to say that the figurative arts are always dealing with two kinds of authenticity. They are authentic to the extent that they do justice to the facts of reality, and they are authentic in quite another sense by expressing the qualities of human experience by any means suitable to that purpose. The latter, the aesthetic function of representations, is greatly helped by the former, which offers recognizable images of creatures and objects. But the latter hampers rather than supplements the former: the fancies and liberties of the human imagination are anything but authentic when taken as documents of physical reality. This dilemma was sharpened by the advent of photography. The mechanically obtained pictures revealed more clearly than the handmade images of artists ever could that when the imitation of nature was taken literally it could not fully meet the requirements of art in its usual sense. In his Salon de 1859, Charles Baudelaire had published a section on Le Public Moderne et la Photographie, where he praised the ability of the new medium to serve the sciences and the arts, but only as their very humble servant without any further pretenses, just as the printing press and shorthand have neither created literature nor added to it.2 But he warned against the popular craze for photography as the ideal fulfillment of what painting had always aspired to. A vengeful God has answered the prayers of this multitude; and Daguerre was his Messiah. The competition between the two aspirations of authenticity has characterized Western figurative art ever since antiquity. On the one hand, great painters were praised for imitating nature so perfectly as to deceive humans and animals, and the sculptor Pygmalion's ivory statue was suitable to be transformed into a real woman.

A Seventeenth-Century Ivory Figure in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden

JAN SMITS professor of theology and Hebrew at Groningen University in the Netherlands, published a selection of his theological studies under the title Selecta Sacra. One of these studies, De planctu ob Thammuz, was an extensive treatise on the ancient Hebrew god Tammuz, whom he considered to be the predecessor of the patriarch Joseph. In this treatise Braun developed the thesis that Tammuz could be equated with the Egyptian god Osiris, whose wife (who was also his sister) Isis was sometimes depicted with a bushel container and suckling her son Horus at her large breasts (Smits 1988). He therefore identified a Yoruba-like ivory statue of a kneeling woman with massive breasts and a bushel container on her head as

THE SELF‐FULFILLING PROPHECY LEADER: ACHIEVING THE METHARME EFFECT

ABSTRACTSelf‐Altering Prophecies are expectations by a source person that when communicated lead to behaviours of a target person that would not have occurred had the prophecy not been made. When the prophecy is confirmed it is called a Self‐Fulfilling Prophechy (SFP), when it is disconfirmed it is named a Self‐Defeating Prophecy (SDP). The most well‐known example of an SFP is probably that of Pygmalion, a sculptor who carved an ivory statue of a woman so beautiful that his treating it as it were alive caused it be become so. The living statue was named Galatea, and she became the wife of Pygmalion. The overall conclusion of literature reviews of the SFP in education is that an SFP effect undeniably exists. In management contexts there is some evidence that the SFP effect exists. In this article an SFP leader model is presented that may be prescriptively used by leaders in organizations to produce a group social situation of high expectations. Members of the group may then subsequently act with positive expectations towards others in the organization to create a new and energized organizational climate and culture. This change is named the Metharme effect, after the daughter of Pygmalion and Galatea.

"The Blank Page" and the Issues of Female Creativity

Previous articleNext article No Access"The Blank Page" and the Issues of Female CreativitySusan GubarSusan Gubar Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 8, Number 2Winter, 1981Writing and Sexual Difference Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448153 Views: 62Total views on this site Citations: 31Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1981 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Peter Mortensen Witches’ Milk: Queer Breastfeeding and Alternative Kin-Making in Isak Dinesen’s “The Caryatids”, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 130 (Aug 2022): 1–14.https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2100824Peter Mortensen “The Juices of the Body”: Ecomasculine Fluidification in Two Stories by Isak Dinesen, Men and Masculinities 25, no.11 (Jun 2021): 106–125.https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X211025578Ieva Steponavičiūtė Aleksiejūnienė, Jacob Bøggild, Ieva Toleikytė Guard Always Your Honor: “Ehrengard,” Karen Blixen’s Last Tale, Scandinavian Studies 93, no.33 (Oct 2021): 303–328.https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.93.3.0303Inmaculada Plaza-Agudo Mito, historia y testimonio: Tragedia de la perra vida (1960), de María de la O Lejárraga, Romance Studies 39, no.11 (Jun 2021): 21–34.https://doi.org/10.1080/02639904.2021.1923968Alison Sharrock Noua … corpora: New Bodies and Gendered Patterns in the Metamorphoses, Dictynna , no.1717 (Dec 2020).https://doi.org/10.4000/dictynna.2277Sophus Helle The birth of the author, Orbis Litterarum 75, no.22 (Apr 2020): 55–72.https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12250Susan Waller The corset, the bicycle and the Hottentot: Alexandre Falguière’s The Dancer and Cléo de Mérode’s modern feminine body, Feminist Modernist Studies 1, no.1-21-2 (Sep 2017): 157–184.https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2017.1370258Nancy Caronia Resisting Displacement in Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe, (Nov 2017): 19–50.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58127-9_2Emily Hauser IN HER OWN WORDS: THE SEMANTICS OF FEMALE AUTHORSHIP IN ANCIENT GREECE, FROM SAPPHO TO NOSSIS, Ramus 45, no.22 (Dec 2016): 133–164.https://doi.org/10.1017/rmu.2016.8King-Kok Cheung (S)wordswoman versus (S)wordsman: Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin, (Feb 2017): 29–66.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44177-5_2Rocki Wentzel Classical Reception in Edith Wharton’s Late Fiction, Edith Wharton Review 29, no.11 (Apr 2013): 20–32.https://doi.org/10.5325/editwharrevi.29.1.0020Katerina Koutsantoni Women's Letter-Writing and Intersubjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Common Reader, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2007).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1032159 Prolepses, (Jan 2006): 1–10.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387169-001 Always Already Queer (French) Theory, (Jan 2006): 13–30.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387169-003 Undoing the Histories of Homosexuality, (Jan 2006): 31–50.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387169-004 Queer Nation, (Jan 2006): 51–66.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387169-005 Queer Spectrality, (Jan 2006): 69–104.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387169-007 Notes, (Jan 2006): 105–148.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387169-008 Bibliography, (Jan 2006): 149–172.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387169-009Anne G. Sabo REVAMPED WOMAN AND THE UNTRUTH OF TRUTH: UNRAVELING THE ANTIFEMINISM OF NIETZSCHE AND DINESEN, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 16, no.11 (Mar 2005): 41–73.https://doi.org/10.1080/10436920590914386Ann Suter Beyond the Limits of Lyric, Kernos , no.1818 (Jan 2005): 17–41.https://doi.org/10.4000/kernos.868Cecile Cazort Zorach, Charlotte Ann Melin Observations: Collaborative Expeditions in the Academy: Housekeeping and the Art of the Infinite, NWSA Journal 13, no.11 (Apr 2001): 126–138.https://doi.org/10.2979/NWS.2001.13.1.126Vicky Rimell Epistolary Fictions: Authorial identity in Heroides 15, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 45 (Feb 2013): 109–135.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068673500002364Catherine Jagoe Krausism and the Pygmalion Motif in Galdós's La familia de León Roch, Romance Quarterly 39, no.11 (Feb 1992): 41–52.https://doi.org/10.1080/08831157.1992.10543855Paula Lewis Les Textes Dramatiques Radiophoniques De Marie-Claire Blais, Quebec Studies 10 (Apr 1990): 37–44.https://doi.org/10.3828/qs.10.1.37Rebecca A. Pope Writing and biting in Dracula, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 1, no.33 (Mar 1990): 199–216.https://doi.org/10.1080/10436929008580030Marguerite De Huszar Allen Denial and Acceptance. Narrative Patterns in Thomas Mann's Die Betrogene and Kleist's Die Marquise von O, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 64, no.33 (Mar 2016): 121–128.https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.1989.11674222Kathryn Hellerstein “A Word for My Blood”: A Reading of Kadya Molodowsky's “Froyen Lider” (Vilna, 1927), AJS Review 13, no.1-21-2 (Oct 2009): 47–79.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009400002294Meena Alexander Dorothy Wordsworth: The grounds of writing, Women's Studies 14, no.33 (Oct 1987): 195–210.https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1988.9978699FRANCES E. MASCIA-LEES, PATRICIA SHARPE, COLLEEN B. COHEN Double Liminality and the Black Woman Writer, American Behavioral Scientist 31, no.11 (Sep 1987): 101–114.https://doi.org/10.1177/000276487031001007Mary Jean Green, Paula Gilbert Lewis, Karen Gould INSCRIPTIONS OF THE FEMININE: A CENTURY OF WOMEN WRITING IN QUEBEC, American Review of Canadian Studies 15, no.44 (Nov 2009): 363–388.https://doi.org/10.1080/02722018509480827

Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook

Lucian, looking inside a gold and ivory statue by Phidias, was shocked ' to see “one tangle of bars, bolts, nails, planks, wedges, with pitch and mortar and everything that is unsightly; not to mention a possible colony of rats and mice.” And Lamb, on seeing the Cambridge manuscript of Milton's minor poems, swore never again to go into the workshop of a great artist. For behind the poem often lie the “unsightly” dictionary of rhymes, the thesaurus, the dictionary of synonyms—all the helps which collectively we call the poet's handbook. Perhaps because of its unsightliness it has never been studied, but it is obviously no less important for an understanding of the poet's craft than the planks and wedges are for the sculptor's.

A Fragment of an Ivory Statue at the British Museum

About three years ago I sent some slight notes on chryselephantine sculpture to the Journal, but withdrew them again for expansion. In the main they were intended to bring out the value, as evidence of the methods used in working ivory for statues, of a small ivory mask in the British Museum. The article by Signor Carlo Albizzati on an ivory mask in the Vatican, published in the last part of the Journal, offers a new occasion for calling attention to the London fragment. In the ‘Guide to the Second Vase Room’ by Newton and Murray (Part I. 1878) it was described thus: ‘No. 15, Part of a Mask. The forehead, cheeks, chin, and nose cut off with smooth joints; the sockets of the eyes empty: the base of the nose is broad, and the lips full and prominent, as in the Egyptian type; inside the nostrils are the remains of vermilion. The mask has probably been completed with other carvings fitted on at the joints and with eyes in some other material. Height 3½ inches. Bequeathed by Sir Wm. Temple.’ The wording of this suggests that the fragment was supposed to be a part of some ornamental composition, but it will not now be doubted, I believe, that it is a part of a head in the round which was made up of several pieces. Our fragment—the central part of the face—had next to it two side pieces to complete the cheeks and another for the chin.

The Argive Hera of Polycleitus

Of all the renderings of the goddess Hera, the gold and ivory statue by Polycleitus in the Heraeum near Argos was the most famous, and was considered by the ancients one of the most beautiful works of Greek art. It certainly held its place beside the masterpieces of Phidias, and is even called by Strabo the most beautiful of all.As in the case of the Zeus and Athene of Phidias, and the Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles, it is most natural that numerous attempts were made in the past to identify this Polycleitan Hera with some extant monument. And, as the most beautiful Aphrodite extant, the Melian Aphrodite in the Louvre, was at once singled out as representing the most famous statue of which there is record in ancient authors, so the famous colossal mask of Hera, known as the Juno Ludovisi, was the first to be identified with the great Polycleitan statue. This identification has been abandoned. Then followed the so-called Farnese Hera, the claims of which were powerfully upheld by Brunn.