After Ovid has told of the tragic death of Hyacinthus, he moves on to one of his most unusual myths. Almost all the myths of transformation gathered in his Metamorphoses involve one or more people changing into animals, plants, or inanimate objects. The ultimate function of his stories may thus be to explain the origin of something, such as the hyacinth flower, or as a salutary example of punishment for disrespect of the gods. The story of Pygmalion reverses the usual direction of transformation, in that it centres on an inanimate object transformed into a person, and it is neither about punishment nor a story of origins.

Ovid prefaces this with contrasting tales. He tells first of the shameful memories of the Cerastae, who desecrated an altar, for which Venus turned them into bulls. Venus is then the link to mention of the Propoetides, women who denied the divinity of Venus. For that, the goddess first hardened their hearts by turning them into prostitutes, and finally into hard flint rocks.

Pygmalion had seen the Propoetides, and became celibate as a result of his revulsion towards their behaviour. He still wanted married love, and carved himself the most perfect and lifelike statue of a woman in ivory. He kissed it lovingly, spoke to it, and dressed it in fine clothing.

When the festival of Venus arrived, Pygmalion prayed that he should have a bride who was the living likeness of his statue. Venus heard this, and the sacred flame rose to signify her response. Pygmalion returned home, rejoicing that his prayer might be answered, and went straight to the statue and kissed it repeatedly. As he did so, it transformed from cold, unyielding ivory to warm, soft flesh. His marriage to the former statue was blessed by Venus, and nine months later they celebrated the birth of their daughter, whom they called Paphos, after whom the island was named.

Telling the story of this transformation in a single painting proved too great a challenge for artists before the late nineteenth century.

Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s The Origin of Sculpture (Pygmalion Praying Venus to Animate His Statue) (1786) is one of the best of these traditional versions, but lacks any visual clue that this statue will shortly turn into a flesh-and-blood woman. It does, though, hint at another story of great interest to the arts, of Pygmalion as the original sculptor, which isn’t told by Ovid.

Edward Burne-Jones’ solution was to paint a series titled Pygmalion and the Image. He did this twice, once between 1868-70, and again in 1878. I show here the paintings from his second version of the series, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1879, that helped secure his position as one of Britain’s leading artists.

The Heart Desires shows Pygmalion in his celibacy. In the left background are Propoetides, or other women engaged in debauchery. They’re echoed by and contrasted with Pygmalion’s statues of the three Graces on the right. He stands alone, pondering his next sculpture.

The Hand Refrains shows Pygmalion’s statue of the perfect woman. He stands back, his tools still in his hands and scattered at the foot of his work. Too scared to touch the statue now, he looks longingly at it, as if falling in love.

In The Godhead Fires, Venus (left) comes to Pygmalion’s statue while he is praying to her at the temple. The goddess transforms the inanimate marble, rather than Ovid’s ivory, into a living woman, and their arms interlace.

The final painting in the series, The Soul Attains, shows Pygmalion’s discovery that his statue has come to life, and him seeking her hand in marriage, with a symbolic pink rose on the floor by her left foot.

Just over ten years later, it was Jean-Léon Gérôme who devised the best narrative approach. Known principally now as a realist painter of fine detail, Gérôme was also a sculptor, and in a series of paintings he explored relationships between the sculptor, model, and sculpture. Among these were his first studies for what must be the most brilliant narrative painting of Ovid’s myth.

This study for Pygmalion and Galatea from 1890 was an early attempt at the composition, where Pygmalion’s future bride is still a marble statue at her feet, but very much flesh and blood from the waist up. That visual device was perfect, but Gérôme recognised that his painting could be shunned because of its full-frontal nudity, so he reversed the view.

Gérôme’s finished Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890) extends the marble effect a little higher, and by showing Galatea’s buttocks and back and concealing the kiss, it stays on the right side of contemporary standards of decency. His attention to detail is as delightful as ever, with two masks against the wall at the right, Cupid ready with his bow and arrow, an Aegis bearing the head of Medusa, and a couple of statues about looking and seeing. For Gérôme too recognised the other stories about sculpture and seeing that could be brought in to enrich Ovid’s original narrative.

Book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ended with several obscure myths that have been painted little, but Book 10 opens with one of the greatest and most enduring stories of the European canon: that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Ovid links to this through Hymen, the god of marriage, and the wedding of Eurydice to the outstanding musician and bard Orpheus. It was a wedding marred by tragedy: after the ceremony, just as the bride was wandering in joy with Naiads in a meadow, she was bitten by a snake on the heel, and died.

Among the earliest paintings of this story in the post-classical era is Jacopo da Sellaio’s superb panel showing Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus from 1475-80. This is one of a series that’s now dispersed across continents. It employs multiplex narrative to show the start of the story, with Orpheus left of centre, tending a flock of sheep, as his bride is bitten by the snake. At the far right, Orpheus, with the assistance of Aristaeus, puts Eurydice’s body in a rock tomb.

One of Poussin’s most famous narrative works, Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice (c 1650-53) shows Orpheus with his lyre at the right, and Eurydice standing in white, as a snake approaches from the left. Poussin had a thing about snakes, and painted other landscapes with snakes threatening people, and his enigmatic Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c 1648). Here his normally peaceful rustic landscape is showing ominous signs of falling apart: the distant castle is on fire, with smoke billowing into the sky.

In Eurydice and the Serpent, a pastel from 1915, Ker-Xavier Roussel shows them just a moment before the bite, with the snake seen on the ground in front of her.

Ary Scheffer’s moving painting of Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice is one of his early works from about 1814. The snake is still visible at the far left, and Orpheus cradles the limp body of his new bride, and breaks down in grief. Scheffer’s handling of complex limb positions is masterful, with the symmetry of their right forearms, and the parallel of her left arm with his left leg. His lyre rests symbolically on the ground behind his left foot.

Orpheus was heart-broken, and mourned her so badly that he descended through the gate of Tartarus to Hades to try to get her released from death. He came across Persephone and her husband Hades, and pleaded his case before them. He said that, if he was unable to return with her to life on earth, then he too would stay in the Underworld with her. He then played his lyre, music so beautiful that those bound to eternal chores were forced to stop and listen. Tantalus, Ixion, the Danaids, even Sisyphus paused and sat on the rock that he normally tried to push uphill. The Fates themselves wept with emotion.

Henri Regnault’s Orpheus in the Underworld (1865) was probably based more on the popular opera by Offenbach, first performed in 1858. Orpheus is seen at the left, his lyre in his hand, singing to the dead. Behind him, at the left edge, are two of the heads of Cerberus, who guards the entrance to the Underworld, and sat on the double throne at the upper right are Persephone, who only spends half the year in the Underworld, and Hades himself.

Persephone summoned Eurydice, and let Orpheus take her back, on the strict understanding that at no time until he reached the earth above could he look back, or she would be returned to the Underworld for ever.

Peter Paul Rubens’ atmospheric painting of the flight of Orpheus and Eurydice (1636-38) was made during his later years of retirement, a few years before his death. Orpheus, clutching his lyre, is leading Eurydice away from Hades and Persephone, as they start their journey back to life. He opts for an unusually real-world version of Cerberus at the bottom right corner.

Camille Corot’s Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861) shows the couple as they near the light at the exit of the underworld. He is instantly recognisable by his lyre held high in front of him, and both are moving towards the right edge of the painting, the edge of the dark wood. Rather than use an abstract form to represent the underworld, Corot has used a wood, with a pool in the middle distance. Behind that are spirits of the dead, some still grieving their death.

Edward Poynter’s Orpheus and Eurydice (1862) takes the couple on an arduous journey, striding past snakes and along a dizzying path on the mountainside. While he looks straight ahead, she seems to be struggling to keep up.

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Orpheus and Eurydice on the Banks of the Styx (1878) takes the couple further still, onto the bank of the River Styx, where Orpheus is summoning Charon the boatman to take them back across the water. He clutches her closely and still looks straight ahead, the couple bound together by the black sash of the Underworld.

The couple trekked up through the gloom, and were just reaching the brighter edge of the Underworld when Orpheus could resist no longer, and looked back to make sure that his wife was still coping with the journey. The moment that he did she melted away back into Hades’ realm. As he tried to grasp her, his hands clutched at empty air. She was gone.

It’s hard to know whether George Frederick Watts’ undated painting of Orpheus and Eurydice shows Orpheus embracing the dead body of Eurydice immediately after she has been bitten by the snake, or (more probably) Orpheus clutching in vain at her spirit as it melts away back into the Underworld, after he has looked back.

Orpheus tried to persuade the ferryman to take him back across the River Styx into the Underworld, but was refused. For a week he sat there in his grief. He then spent three years shunning the company of women, despite their attraction to him, and brought shade to an exposed meadow with his singing, leading to the next myth.

The final painting in this series is Gustave Moreau’s Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice (c 1891), showing the bard, his ghostly lyre slung from the dead treestump behind him, lamenting the loss of Eurydice after his failed attempt to bring her back from the Underworld. Moreau painted this dark and funereal work to mark his own inconsolable grief at the death of his partner, Alexandrine Dureux.