Pygmalions's Power: Art and Illusion A Study in The Psychology of Pictorial Representation by E H Gombrich

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ART AND ILLUSION A STUDY IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION

BY E·H·GOMBRICH
Pygmalions’s Power
Once there was an old man whose name was Nahokoboni. He was troubled in his mind because he had no
daughter, and who could look after him if he had no son-in-law? Being a witch doctor, he therefore carved
himself a daughter out of a plum tree… - A fairy tale of the Guiana Indians
Ever since the Greek philosophers called art an 'imitation of nature' their successors have been busy
affirming, denying, or qualifying this definition. The first two chapters of this book have the same purpose.
They try to show some of the limits of this aim toward a perfect 'imitation' set by the nature of the medium on
the one hand and by the psychology of artistic procedure on the other. Everybody knows that this imitation
has ceased to be the concern of artists today. But is this a new departure? Were the Greeks right even in their
description of the aims of the artists in the past?
Their own mythology would have told them a different story. For it tells of an earlier and more awe-inspiring
function of art when the artist did not aim at making a 'likeness' but at rivalling creation itself. The most famous
of these myths that crystallize belief in the power of art to create rather than to portray is the story of
Pygmalion. Ovid turned it into an erotic novelette, but even in his perfumed version we can feel something of
the thrill which the artist's mysterious powers once gave to man.
In Ovid, Pygmalion is a sculptor who wants to fashion a woman after his own heart and falls in love with the
statue he makes. He prays to Venus for a bride modelled after that image, and the goddess turns the cold
ivory into a living body. It is a myth that has naturally captivated the imagination of artists, the solemn and
somewhat maudlin dreams of Burne-Jones [62] no less than the irreverent mockery of Daumier [63]. Without
the underlying promise of this myth, the secret hopes and fears that accompany the act of creation, there
might be no art as we know it. One of the most original young painters of England, Lucien Freud, wrote very
recently: 'A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is
felt in the act of creation, but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter
realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might
spring to lite.'
62. BURNE-JONES: Pygmalion. 1878 63. DAUMIER: Pygmalion. 1842. Lithograph
'Only a picture', says Lucien Freud. It is a motif we find in the whole history of Western art; Vasari tells of
Donatello at work on his Zuccone [66] looking at it suddenly and threatening the stone with a dreadful curse,
'Speak, speak-favella, f avella, che ti venga il cacasangue!' And the greatest wizard of them all, Leonardo da
Vinci, extolled the power of the artist to create. In that hymn of praise to painting, the 'Paragone', he calls the
painter 'the Lord of all manner of people and of all things'. 'If the painter wishes to see beauties to fall in love
with, it is in his power to bring them forth, and if he wants to see monstrous things that frighten or are foolish
or laughable or indeed to be pitied, he is their Lord and God.' [64, 65].
01 Readings 4 *Property of STI

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64, 65. LEONARDO DA VINCI: Grotesque heads. About 1495. Leda. About 1509. Pen and ink
Part Two: Function and Form
66. DONATELLO: 'Lo Zucco11e'. 1423-1425.

Marble
67.(Auributed to) LEONARDO DA VINCI: Bacchus.

About 1508-1513
Indeed, the power of art to rouse the passions is to

him a token of its magic. Unlike the poet, he writes,
the painter can so subdue the minds of men that
they will fall in love with a painting that does not
represent a real woman. 'It happened to me,' he
continues, 'that I made a religious painting which
was bought by one who so loved it that he wanted to
remove the sacred representation so as to be able
to kiss it without suspicion. Finally, his conscience
prevailed over his sighs and lust, but he had to
remove the picture from his house.' If we think of a
work like the St. John and its transformation into a
Bacchus [67], we may accept the plausibility of Leonardo's at count.
And yet Leonardo, if anyone, knew that the artist's desire to create, to bring forth a second reality, finds its
inexorable limits in the restrictions of his medium. I feel we catch an echo of the disillusionment with having
created only a picture that we found in Lucien Freud when we read in Leonardo's notes: 'Painters often fall
into despair ... when they see that their paintings lack the roundness and the liveliness which we find in
objects seen in the mirror ... but it is impossible for a painting to look as rounded as a mirror image ... except if
you look at both with one eye only.'
Perhaps the passage betrays the ultimate reason for Leonardo's deep dissatisfac-tion with his art, his
reluctance to reach the fatal moment of completion: all the artist's knowledge and imagination are of no avail,
it is only a picture that he has been painting, and it will look flat. Small wonder that contemporaries describe
him in his later years as most impatient of the brush and engrossed in mathematics. Mathematics was to help
him to be the true maker. Today we read of Leonardo's project to build a 'flying machine', but ifwe look into
Leonardo's notes we will not find such an expression. What he wants to make is a bird that will fly, and once
more there is an exultant tone in the master's famous prophecy that the bird would fly. It did not. And shortly
afterward we find Leonardo lodging in the Vatican-at the time when Michelangelo and Raphael were there
creating their most re-nowned works-quarrelling with a German mirror-maker and fixing wings and a beard to
a tame lizard in order to frighten his visitors. He made a dragon, but it was only a whimsical footnote to a

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Promethean life. The claim to be a creator, a maker of things, passed from the painter to the engineer-leaving
to the artist only the small consolation of being a maker of dreams.
Reference:
Gombrich, E. (1960). Pygmalion’s power. Art and illusion: a study on the psychology of pictorial
representation, pp. 80-83.

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ART AND ILLUSION A STUDY IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION

62. BURNE-JONES: Pygmalion. 1878 63. DAUMIER: Pygmalion. 1842. Lithograph

01 Readings 4 *Property of STI

Part Two: Function and Form

66. DONATELLO: 'Lo Zucco11e'. 1423-1425.

67.(Auributed to) LEONARDO DA VINCI: Bacchus.

Indeed, the power of art to rouse the passions is to

01 Readings 4 *Property of STI

01 Readings 4 *Property of STI

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