Il mito di Pigmalione. Una riflessione sulla creatività artistica e letteraria nella poesia epica in lingua latina

This paper treats of the story of Pygmalion’ love for his statue from Ovid’s version, one of the best known myths of the classical antiquity. In Metamorphoses X, 243-297, Ovid makes a brilliant reflection about the artistic and literary creativity. Pygmalion, a devotee sculptor of Venus, despises the women and he falls in love with the statue that he maked, representing an idealized female image. He is the artifex par excellence: the sculptor, refusing the reality, prefers to realize one analogous and shapes the ivory with admirable and extraordinary art that can reach the aesthetical perfection. The Pygmalion’ art overcomes the reality about beauty and changes, in such way, the very idea of ancient art: the myth becomes allegory of the ability of the art’ sublimation and, to the meantime, with subtle self-referential implication inside Ovidian verse, of the literary poetic creativity.