According to the Roman poet Ovid, the sculptor Pygmalion created a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell desperately in love with her. Venus, goddess of love, heard Pygmalion’s pleas and transformed his creation into a woman named Galatea. Emmanuel de Ghendt used a series of prints to tell the story of Galatea’s transformation, something more difficult to achieve in a single, sculpted work. Employing changes in viewpoint and pose— note, for example, the shifting placement of the statue’s arms— de Ghendt allows the viewer to experience Galatea’s metamorphosis and share in the astonishment of her creator, Pygmalion. The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea appealed to artists because it plays with the power of artistic illusion. The classical tradition, revived during the Renaissance, perceived art as a rival to life, able to equal or even better the beauty of the natural world.