Here’s a nice love story for Valentine’s Day – it comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a poem written in the 8th century in Rome that is based on a story from Greek mythology. Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with his statue of Galatea, so the goddess Venus answered his prayers and brought the sculpture to life and the two married.
This subject has been represented in painting and sculpture many times, but one of the more famous versions is by Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French artist known for the academic style that he taught as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. We see the hallmarks of this style not only with the Classical subject matter, but also with the hard-edged smoothness of the rendered forms of the two figures that embrace as Galatea comes to life when Cupid shoots his bow and arrow.