We have so far looked at examples of ancient ‘art theory’ and ‘art history’ – the extracts from Plato and Pliny – to explain what might be understood by classical realism, and thus how Gilbert & George and Wallinger may be seen as breaking away from that classical ideal. The analysis of the Apollo Belvedere and ‘Dying Seneca’ / Old Fisherman has equally revealed some of the diverse manifestations of realism in antiquity and the Renaissance, showing how idealised and naturalistic styles of representation might work in tandem.
We have seen how the intercession of the medium is central to the experience of visualising realist sculpture as sculpture; and it is in this way that Pygmalion’s equivocation between corpus and ebur may be read as a caricature of the experience of looking at any realist artwork. Before returning to the contemporary artworks with which this chapter began –
162 Squire, 2011, 65.
163 Danto, 1981, 82.
164 On the role of historical context, see Danto, 1997, 50. Cf. Danto, 1981, 44-47.
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artworks which make no claim to illustrate or quote the myth of Pygmalion – this section looks briefly at a post-classical depiction of the Pygmalion story. It shows how, in the hands of a Baroque sculptor, the metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s statue is anything but a myth of illusionist art. It might better be seen as a myth of what illusionist art cannot do – that is, dispel its own illusion.165
For the purposes of this chapter, it would have been possible to look any number of paintings of the Pygmalion myth: the medium of painting has produced countless variations on the theme.166 This may be because the painter’s ability to suppress the physical medium (the paint) in the service of a pictorial illusion has been felt best to serve the fable of masterful illusionism.167 Yet in all painted representations, the story fails to ‘come to life’ except in a strictly metaphorical sense. Without the divine help that Pygmalion received, pigment on canvas cannot materialise into a living entity.168 Paintings confess to their own fiction in the same way as Ovid’s poetic text: just as we never cease to be aware of the picture’s flatness, we never forget that we are reading a poem.169
But what of the physical stuff of sculpture, Pygmalion’s own medium? This might seem to offer a more direct and literal means of bodying forth a subject.170 Yet there is something inescapably tautalogous about trying to render in marble or bronze a story of sculpture’s own transfiguration. It is for this reason, surely, that there have been relatively few sculptural depictions of the metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s statue. One of the most ambitious attempts, that of Etienne-Maurice Falconet (figs. 34-35), offers telling insights into why sculptors have avoided the subject. Unveiled at the Paris Salon in 1763, this stone tableau typifies the iconography of the myth, familiar from numerous paintings. The maiden rises above her worshipful maker in a pyramidal mass. She stands atop a dais which rests in turn on a square block, before which Pygmalion crouches (on the lowest and broadest tier of the assemblage), his hands clasped in wonder. Cupid nibbles at the fingers of her right hand, testing their fleshiness.
165 Cf. Elsner, 2007, 131.
166 Barolsky, 2014a, 81-92; Davidson Reid, 1993, vol. 2, 955-962.
167 Greenberg, 1940, 28-29. Cf. Herder, 2002 (1778), 40-45.
168 Cf. n. 84, above.
169 Cf. Squire, 2010, 592, 601. On ancient (especially Hellenistic) conceptions of realism, and their component of knowing duplicity, see ibid, 600-608.
170 See Herder, 2002 (1778) on the depth of sculpture versus the fiction of the painted surface: ibid, 40-52.
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For all that the sequence of internal pedestals in Falconet’s sculpture may imply the
gradations between art and reality (thus supplying what Victor Stoichita terms a “paratextual element”),171 the medium engulfs and negates the message. A contemporary critic of
Falconet’s was apposite in his conclusion that “the subject is superior to the possibilities of art”.172 The myth is subsumed by the stillness and blankness of the object purporting to embody it – whether the marble version at Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, or the biscuit porcelain in which the composition was extensively reproduced.173 When viewed from the side, the materiality of the object is laid bare: the cloud on which Cupid perches presents an amorphous face, harking back to the rough lump of stone from which the carving emerged.
Falconet’s work is squarely in the same category as the carved ivory girl that Pygmalion wishes could be real. In his marble version of 1908-9 (fig. 36), Auguste Rodin embraced the dilemma of materialising the myth by further magnifying that quality of stoniness. His figures appear either to rise from the globular hunk or to melt back into formlessness, in a
dramatisation of Michelangelo’s notion of the form immanent in the unhewn block (“Nothing the best of artists can conceive / but lies, potential, in a block of stone, / superfluous matter round it.”)174 This magnification of the medium – unthinking in Falconet’s piece, overt in Rodin’s, but ineluctable in both – counteracts the implied metamorphosis.
Realism, according to a view which has dominated Art History since antiquity, is bound up with illusionism. The art historian W.J.T. Mitchell describes illusionism in terms which (recalling Plato) emphasise its suppression of our critical faculties – as “the capacity of
pictures to deceive, delight, astonish, amaze, or otherwise take power over a beholder”.175 But as we have seen, from the distinct examples of ancient and Baroque statues, such a summary of realism does little justice to the ways in which realist works of art are experienced.
Realism is not simply a faculty to beguile. Nor is it a representational gold-standard, measurable in terms of proximity to ‘nature’.176 Rather, it is the process by which a viewer apprehends the interface between art and reality (or fails to apprehend it, in Pygmalion’s case). Realism is equivocal; it points doubly to the artifice of the work and to what Mitchell summarises as the work’s “capacity to deceive, delight, astonish …”.177 We have also seen
171 Stoichita, 2008, 131.
172 Mercure de France (November 1763). Quoted in Blühm, 87. Cf. Stoichita, 2008, 130-140.
173 Another marble version is in the Louvre: Sahut and Volle, 1984, no. 131, 451-454.
174 Michelangelo, 1998, 96.
175 Mitchell, 1994, 325.
176 This notion becomes circular, inasmuch as nature is a construct. See n. 106 and 140.
177 Mitchell, 1994, 325.
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how the myth of Pygmalion as told by Ovid draws out a narrative of progressive realism (a narrative that finds striking analogies in Art History) only to expose, in the end, the
farcicality or impossibility of such a narrative reaching its logical conclusion. In the drive towards realism, art continues to assert its own artificiality.178 This is the case for all realist works of art – including the many examples of ‘hyperreal’ sculpture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which artists have continued to narrow the gap between
representation and reality.179
In the following section, I return to the more radical embraces of the ‘real’ which were the starting point of this chapter, in order to show how contemporary artists have come closer than their forbears to achieving the metamorphosis from art to life. Once again, the
underlying tone of Ovid’s story – specifically, the anticlimactic aspects of the metamorphosis – will provide a means of analysing the contemporary examples.