Scribbling, Scraping off, Painting over

The quarrel as to primacy among the arts and the question as to the vivifying power of art have been intimately bound up with one another since the Renaissance. The debate concerning the “Paragone”—”Qual sia più nobile, o la scultura o la pittura”—is exemplified by Jacopo da Pontormo’s painting Pygmalion (1529–30). ¹ Here the configuration of artist and creation, of observer and art-object in the image of the mythical sculptor Pygmalion, is made to interact with the question of the animation of what is represented through the process of representation. ² Pontormo’s painting portrays Ovid’s myth of the artist and the animation of his statue—as a transition between the media of picture and sculpture. The painting stages the triumph of painting over sculpture and simultaneously the representation of the act of bringing to life. The painting thus becomes a stage on which the artist and his creation appear before another in a theatrical configuration. Throughout the history of its transformations—in the eighteenth century from Condillac and Rousseau to Herder—this scene from the myth of Pygmalion may be read as an allegory of the act of artistic creation as such: as the animation of the inanimate. ³