Pygmalion's Poetics: Nature, Gender, and the Critic

Why, and how, has Pygmalion become a paradigm of artistic creativity? What aspects of Ovid’s story have been marginalised or elided in the process? The paper will suggest ways to read the episode within the context of the Metamorphoses’ broader negotiations between living and inert matter and between life and death, and to assess its gender dynamics through its reception in the iconographical tradition.