Pygmalion

The story comes from Ovid. Pygmalion was a sculptor who carved a woman from ivory so lifelike that he fell in love with the statue, and prayed until the goddess of love warmed the ivory into flesh. Schalcken painted the subject young, around 1670, and set it at night, a man leaning close to study the carved face of a woman by the flame of a single candle. Catalogues have never quite agreed on it. Some call it Pygmalion. Others, more plainly, a man examining a bust of a woman by candlelight, with no myth attached at all. The small panel came to the Uffizi in 1784, from the Medici's Pitti Palace across the Arno.