The Roman poet Ovid tells the story in the Metamorphoses. A sculptor named Pygmalion, disgusted by the women of his city, carves an ivory statue of the perfect woman and falls in love with it. He dresses it, brings it gifts, and prays to Aphrodite. When he kisses it, the statue warms. The ivory softens under his fingers, and she opens her eyes.
Jean-Léon Gérôme painted that exact moment around 1890, and he does something clever with it. The statue is only half alive. Her lower body is still white marble, while the color of flesh rises up her back toward her head. She turns toward the sculptor, who holds her in a kiss, while a small winged Cupid hovers overhead and lights the studio. The painting freezes the change midway.
Gérôme was a sculptor as well as a painter, so this was a personal subject. He made a sculpted version of the theme, and he painted the tools and the studio with a worker's eye. The platform, the mallets, and the chunks of stone are not props. They are an artist's own surroundings.
It was also a very daring subject for the Academic art world of the Paris Salon, which liked its nudes wrapped in myth. Gérôme gave them the myth and made the nude entirely the point.
The story has never gone away. George Bernard Shaw built his play Pygmalion on it in 1913, and from there it became My Fair Lady. Each time, someone fashions a person into an ideal, and each time, the question is what the creation wants.
Gérôme's Pygmalion and Galatea appears on our: