At some point, everyone has mistaken a statue for a living person. Artists have dreamt about such an effect for millennia. Stories about art works ‘coming to life’ say a lot about the most secret human aspirations.
“If you saw the heifer of Myron you would swiftly cry out: is this lifeless nature, or art filled with life?” Even today, we judge works of art in a similar way to the ancient epigram. The most perfect artworks seem to be alive; we get the impression that the sitter follows us with their eyes, smiles, winks, is about to jump out of the frame. We credit the artist with a talent for imitation which is so perfect that the image seems to be a person, disguising its inanimate, material shell. It seems agile, full of life, ready to stand in for a living being. Greek philosophers maintained that an artist’s task is the perfect imitation of nature. There is a famous story about a contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. The first one depicted grapes in such a way that birds came to peck on them. His rival painted a curtain that was so three-dimensional that Zeuxis tried pulling it aside to check what was behind it. Both painters were experts in illusion and able to hide the ‘seams’ of their work; their paintings seemed real. But Greek mythology suggests a more ambitious creative task – artists are not just to imitate nature and compete with it, but to replace and create it.
Pygmalion, the king of Cyprus, lived on his own, because he thought the women around him were promiscuous. As Ovid wrote in Metamorphoses, the picky king “carved / a statue out of snow-white ivory, / and to it exquisite beauty, which / no woman of the world has ever equalled: / she was so beautiful, he fell in love / with his creation.” Seeing his insane feelings towards the inanimate statue, Aphrodite turned the deception into reality. “When he returned, / he went directly to his image-maid, / bent over her, and kissed her many times, / while she was on her couch; and as he kissed, / she seemed to gather some warmth from his lips. / Again he kissed her; and he felt her breast; / the ivory seems to soften at the touch, / and its firm texture yielded to his hand, / as honey-wax of Mount Hymettus turns / to many shapes when handled in the sun, / and surely softens from each gentle touch. // He is amazed; but stands rejoicing in his doubt; / while fearful there is some mistake, again / and yet again, gives trial to his hopes / by touching with his hand. It must be flesh! / The veins pulsate beneath the careful test / of his directed finger.”
This mythological scene was repeatedly painted by the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. In his version, the miracle takes place in the artist’s studio. The statue is starting to turn pink from the top, while the stunned and excited artist is on the verge of fainting. The myth of Pygmalion brings to mind one of the most important ambitions of art: to create something that will stir authentic emotions.
The lover of lies
According to Aristotle, no body can live without a soul (in fact, he used the same term, psyche, for both ‘soul’ and ‘life’). Without it, perception, movement and desire are not possible. A man is not able to create anything living out of inanimate matter: “Suppose that the eye were an animal – sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye which corresponds to the formula, the eye being merely the matter of seeing; when seeing is removed the eye is no longer an eye, except in name – it is no more a real eye than the eye of a statue or of a painted figure.” The philosopher leaves no doubt: you can not turn an image into a living thing. Nonetheless, a perfect illusion created by an artist can trigger mistakes.
Not much is needed to interpret certain configurations of shapes as faces. The Renaissance architect and theoretician Leon Battista Alberti even claimed that this kind of illusion was at the basis of representational art. He wrote in his treaty On Sculpture, “that they by chance happened to see in some tree stumps, or in clay, or in various other materials, some features which could, with a little work, be transformed into something similar to faces made by Nature.” Such delusions can inspire artists. The problem starts, however, when viewers get deluded and treat the phantom like a living person.
“As for scarecrows and witches which our Fauns and Numa Pompiliuses established, they (i.e. the ignorant) tremble at them, and think that they are all-important,” jeered the Roman poet Lucilius. “Just as little children believe that all bronze statues are alive and are men, so they think fictions of dreams are real, and believe that bronze statues have hearts and souls in them. But these things are the painter’s gallery, nothing real, all fiction and make-believe.” As Lucilius suggests, only children and simpletons could mistake a statue for a living person. A similar conclusion can be drawn from Lucian of Samosata’s story, who in The Lover of Lies, or the Doubter lists a cult of images among other superstitious practices. To secure good health for his dear ones, a certain Eucrates makes offerings to the statue of a Corinthian general playing the role of the house god. At night, this bronze man prances about, “he gets down from the pedestal on which he stands and goes all about the house; we all encounter him, sometimes singing, and he has never harmed anybody. One has but to turn aside, and he passes without molesting in any way those who saw him.”
As Tychiades says, the antidote for such superstitions is truth (aletheia) and sound reason (logos). Eucrates provides a negative example of how not to approach images. Treating a statue as if it were alive, he clearly lost his reason and is a superstitious, benighted person.
In folk tradition, from antiquity to contemporary times, it is not difficult to find stories about extraordinary representations that produce sweat, tears, blood or secrete miraculous oils. But it is not just peasants who have a tendency for such delusions. “These are not just quaint practices and charmingly iterative tales,” confirms David Freedberg, who studies the psychology of paintings, “they tell us about the constitutive powers of men and women.” This is how the 11th-century scholar and monk Bernard of Angers described a particularly revered, gold and richly jewelled reliquary: “The peasants in prayer before it believed that it saw and encouraged them through its expressive gaze. It listened to their petitions, and they even imagined that the figure nodded to them in answer.” As Freedberg notices, learned Bernard was relieved to assign such longing to simpletons, even though, “however silently, Bernard recognised in himself similar forms of behaviour, belief, and sentiment; but like so many after him, felt more comfortable if he could relegate such apparently irrational and inexplicable things to people with less education and who were by implication less critically thoughtful.”
The hand of a master
It’s not just peasants and children who treat images as if they were alive. Even the master of the nude and portrait, Lucian Freud, admitted that he shared Pygmalion’s desires. Upon finishing a piece, instead of total happiness, the artist was frustrated, “for it is then that the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life.” The literary trope of an image coming to life has taken root in language and the shared imagination. It’s possible that conventional praise influences the viewer’s imagination, provoking such delusions. According to David Freedberg, “the merest suggestion of living potentiality will trigger the process whereby the trope becomes cognitive reality.” This is how the ‘Pygmalion effect’ works, a phenomenon known to psychology – we will be treated nicely if we assume from the beginning that it will be the case…
According to ancient rhetoric, the pinnacle of artistic achievement is permeating the artwork with life, energeia. Pliny wrote about a painting by Famulus, who most likely lived in the time of Nero: “He painted an Athena, whose eyes are turned to the spectator from whatever side he may be looking.” The miracle of a statue coming to life solves the complications of the plot in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Hermione, previously immortalized in stone, leaves her pedestal and blushes.
POLIXENES:
Masterly done!
The very life seems warm upon her lip.
LEONTES:
The fixture of her eye has motion in’t.
As we are mock’d with art.
PAULINA:
I’ll draw the curtain:
My lord’s almost so far transported that
We’ll think anon it lives.
Moved Leontes is dazzled with the likeness of his wife, whom he wrongly accused of unfaithfulness years before. He can’t believe that this is just an inanimate figure in front of him, the work of an artist. “What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?” He wants to caress and kiss her, regardless of the fact that “the rudiness upon her lip is wet.” Leontes is ready to give in to the illusion even at the price of madness. But thanks to magic, the figure indeed steps down from the pedestal. Desire and love cause a miracle, recovering love that was lost. Passion is an ingredient of almost all stories about statues or paintings coming to life. Erotic fantasies, responsible for directing the desire onto objects, betray a certain arrogance and alienation. Pygmalion created an idol for himself because he held real women in contempt. A similar pattern was used in the novel Gradiva by the Romantic Danish writer Wilhelm Jensen (made famous by Sigmund Freud’s interpretation). The title character is a beautiful ‘walking’ woman or, in fact, her depiction in an ancient bas-relief. A young archaeologist for whom “marble and bronze were not dead, but rather the only really vital thing” obsessively watches the feet of women he meets, searching for the reflection of his ideal. Driven by his obsession, he goes to Pompeii where he meets his dreamed-of beloved in a half-dream.
Longing and desire
Leonardo da Vinci boasted about his ability to create the appearance of life. As he reported, even his religious works aroused passion. One collector fell in love so deep with a painting that he wished to remove the pious context, so that he could kiss it and desire it without feeling guilty. Decency won in the end, but the enthusiast had to remove the piece from his home, to avoid being led to temptation.
The fantasy of a moving, living image merges with the dream about a lost or unattainable object of desire. This motif was used in a perverse way by Petrarch. He is jealous of the mythical Pygmalion who managed to move the stone, while his Laura, though she is a flesh-and-blood woman, coldly rebuffs his advances. The same motif allowed the poet to praise the Sienese artist Simone Martini. The portrait painted by him is so convincing that the obsessed lover succumbs to the illusion. It’s a pity, though, that Laura won’t speak:
“If, when Simone laboured to depict
the noble concept that I had in mind,
he had but given to the work designed
as well as form a voice and intellect.”
It’s revealing that the first sign of Galatea coming to life is not a gesture or a wink. The ivory figure gets warm, woken by a kiss; as if the erotic dreams of the idolizer were coming true when he completely loses his head, disregards reason and starts caressing inanimate curves. The figure created by Pygmalion turned pink from his kisses, the feeling brought life, but a blush can also symbolize embarrassment and distancing – Galatea resisted the advances of her creator. When we see a statue that looks ‘alive’, we want to touch it, of course.
In other myths, touch turns living people into objects: Gorgon Medusa turns everything into stone, Midas – into gold. Niobe became stone upon losing her children. And Daphne was transformed into a laurel tree when fleeing from Apollo. The Pygmalion myth reverses this pattern – an inanimate object, an outcome of human fantasy and an artist’s skill, gets stirred by the stroke of a tender hand. On the other hand, the idea that a sculpture could move remains part of the foreplay. A slightly more embarrassing example of love for a stone woman is related by Pliny and Lucian. Some young man from Knidos fell in love with an Aphrodite created by the sculptor Praxiteles; the boy covered the cold marble with kisses and even left evidence of his elation on its surface. Art lovers are in danger of similar idolatry. A dismayed Walter Pater wrote about Winckelmann that the scholar and connoisseur “fingers those pagan marbles with unsigned hands, with no sense of shame or loss.” Flaubert similarly forgot himself upon seeing Canova’s sensuous sculpture of Cupid and Psyche. He leant to kiss the “snow-white marble”, with a sense that he was caressing pure beauty and paying homage to the artist. Goethe watched people kissing the statue of Athena Giustiniani and, even though he distanced himself from such ‘reverence’, he admitted that he couldn’t pull himself away.
Miraculous paintings
The Byzantine tradition introduced a distinction between the person and the person’s image. But in the 11th century, supporters of images argued that they were ‘life-like’. By saying this, they were defending art against the old iconoclasts’ argumentation that a painting is an inanimate matter that tries to imitate life in vain. An icon, just like poetry, can be ‘living’ and can ‘speak’.
In the Western Christian tradition, things looked a bit different. The presence of saints was seen first in relics and then similar status was gained by paintings. The 12th-century Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach in the Dialogue on Miracles wrote about an image of St. Nicholas from the monastery in Burscheid near Aachen. “Now the face in the picture is long and emaciated, very earnest and venerable. The brow is bold, the hair of the head and beard quite white.” This good-hearted saint was helping women in labour. He handled it exceptionally discreetly and with coyness. One time, “in the sight of all who were present, the picture turned its face to the wall, as though to avoid seeing the woman in her labour.” Stories about images coming to life worked as confirmation of the truths of the faith and justification for pious practices. A painting was treated as if the saintly person was present in it and performed miracles through it.
Terrible eyes
Collectors of non-Western art are often under the impression that masks are looking at them, that they have their own personality and even that they themselves chpose the collectors. Some admit that in moments of anxiety they hug them and even take them to bed with them. But a work of art coming to life is not always a wonderful, sensuous woman, the fulfilment of male fantasies. In 1790, the French playwright Michel de Cubières described his visit to Villa Borghese. He fell in love with the statue of the Crouching Venus and treated it like a living woman. He was under the impression that her body was breathing and moving under his fingertips. In the next room, a less pleasant experience awaited him: the statue of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus also looked alive, but its sexual ambiguity made the Frenchman uneasy. Je ne serai jamais tenté de coucher avec lui (“I would never be tempted to sleep with him”), he admitted.
It’s not uncommon that somebody appreciates a work of art, but stresses that they wouldn’t want to have it at home, because its ‘presence’ would be overwhelming. Treating paintings as if they were alive didn’t always mean caresses and kisses. During the Roman Empire, statues of hated Caesars were mutilated. Damnatio memoriae – condemnation of memory – was a punishment worse than death. The need to destroy or deface images is deeply rooted in the human psyche; there are surviving statues of Marie Antoinette that were damaged during the Revolution. But profanation acts also attest to the power assigned to representations. In 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson cut the famous Rokeby Venus by Velázquez with a chopper. More than 100 years later, an enraged Russian tourist hurled a mug at Mona Lisa, threatening to “wipe this smile off her face”. Perhaps the woman was suffering from the Stendhal syndrome, a psychosomatic condition caused by excessive artistic experience? Nonetheless, aggression directed at works of art means that they are taken seriously, as if alive.
In the Byzantine tradition, damned characters, such as Judas, were not represented in such a way that they could ‘look at us’ from the painting. People feared the effect of the ‘evil eye’. Paintings not only have the qualities of living people; they move and follow with their eyes. They can also have feelings and opinions. The black magic of a cursed image was perfectly described by Gogol. A portrait of a greedy old man was more than just art, “they were living, human eyes! It seemed as though they had been cut from a living man and inserted. Here was none of that high enjoyment which takes possession of the soul at the sight of an artist’s production no matter how terrible the subject he may have chosen.” The portrait of the moneylender who wanted to live forever in this image, crossed the line demarcated for works of art and that was why it brought misery. As its creator confessed: “I tried to force myself, and, stifling every emotion in a hard-hearted way, to be true to nature.” Gogol’s cursed portrait was stolen from an auction: “And those present long remained in a state of surprise, not knowing whether they had really seen those remarkable eyes, or whether it was simply a dream which had floated for an instant before their eyesight, strained with long gazing at old pictures.”
Many a lover of old paintings will admit to similar moments of bewilderment. You think you are having a conversation with old Rembrandt, or you comfort Van Gogh, who is on the verge of madness. But if after a visit to a big museum you worry that you might be suffering from Stendhal syndrome, think of a relaxing anecdote about Henri Matisse. One lady visited him in his studio and kept insisting that “this woman’s arm is too long.” The French master listened to her critique and replied: “But this is not a woman, it’s a painting.”
While working on this piece, I used the following sources: Aristotle, “An Anthology of the Works of Aristotle”; Ovid, “Metamorphoses”; Lucian of Samosata, “Lucian’s Dialogues”; Francesco Petrarch, “Canzoniere”; Leon Battista Alberti, “On Sculpture”; William Shakespeare, “The Winter’s Tale”; Nicolai Gogol, “The Mysterious Portrait”; Caroline van Eck, “Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object”; David Freedberg, “The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response”; Ernst H. Gombrich, “Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation”; Kenneth Gross, “The Dream of the Moving Statue”.
Translated from the Polish by Anna Błasiak
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