ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the reasons for association between statuphilia, unnatural attraction to statues, and homosexuality. It explains the myth's resonances within the Renaissance period and it examines the story within fuller context in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of a sequence of tales narrated by the poet Orpheus after the death of Eurydice, and potential affinities between the tales of these two melancholy artists, Orpheus and Pygmalion. It is also useful to go back still further, to Euripides' play Alcestis, a text which has become entangled with the Orpheus/Pygmalion sequence in later literature. John Lyly presumably named his heroine after one of myth's more obscure Galateas, the mother of Leucippus, a boy whose story is essentially the same as that of Iphis, although in his case the miracle-working goddess was Leto. In several Renaissance texts, most notably The Winter's Tale, Pygmalion's statue of a perfect woman is invoked within a context of veiled or overt homoeroticism.
