ABSTRACT
‘Here is a little nearer approach to life . . . yes—yes indeed she seems an ethereal being with her blue eyes fixed upon me!’ These words, supposedly uttered by the sculptor John Gibson when he first contemplated his finished Tinted Venus (1862) reflect the ongoing fascination with the Pygmalion myth in the Victorian age. But by the 1860s–1870s, the accumulation of material evidence concerning the polychromy of ancient Greek statues and temples, soon followed by the discovery of colourful Tanagra statuettes in Boeotia, gave a new dimension to artistic as well as literary illustrations of the metamorphosis of Galatea. This chapter explores how complex receptions of the Ovidian story by major nineteenth-century writers and artists, such as William Morris, Thomas Woolner, Edward Burne-Jones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, G. F. Watts, James McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde brought about a subversive change in Victorian conceptions of classical nudity. I thus show how archaeological finds helped these Hellenophiles break away from a purely philological approach to Greek antiquity so as to embrace more colourful sculptural bodies, in keeping with Owen Jones’s pioneering explorations in the field of Hellenic colours, from his polychrome decoration for the Greek Court of the Crystal Palace in 1854 to his 1866 chromolithographed illustration of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale.
