I suoi principali interessi riguardano l’epigramma greco e latino, letterario ed epigrafico (dalle origini fino ad Ausonio), l’elegia ellenistica e romana, la Appendix Vergiliana e il dramma senecano.

Ha organizzato diversi Convegni internazionale, pubblicandone gli Atti (

Pygmalion’s Inspiration and Pygmalion as Inspiration

Sophia Papaioannou

https://doi.org/10.60983/003-2.2

ABSTRACT

The chapter discusses Ovid’s treatment of the Hesiodic myths of Prometheus and Pandora in the story of Pygmalion and his ivory maiden. The latter, deprived of speech and the ability to think, stands as the perfect ‘anti-Pandora’. Pygmalion’s blurring of the boundaries between reality and art, makes him a representative case of the creator who fails to acknowledge that art cannot and does not mean to replicate nature but only to interpret it, because he sees his work as an extension of himself. His case is contextualized, further, inside a set of stories about artists obsessed with verisimilitude, and engages in discourse with the aesthetics of Hellenistic art and the art-vs.-nature binary. The last part of the chapter discusses the politics of artistic verisimilitude in relation to the Roman ritual of the parade of the imagines during the Roman aristocratic funerals.