Pigmalião e Galateia

Girodet worked on this for six years, from 1813, and finally unveiled it at the Paris Salon of 1819. The subject is Ovid's tale of Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with his own ivory statue of a woman and prays for her to be made real. Girodet paints the exact instant the figure warms into flesh, colour rising into her legs while her upper body is still pale as stone, a small winged Cupid guiding her hand toward the sculptor's. Incense smoke drifts around them to mark the miracle. The picture was ordered by a wealthy Italian collector, Giovanni Battista Sommariva, partly as a tribute to the great sculptor Antonio Canova, whose polished marble nudes it deliberately echoes.