Pygmalion
Πυγμαλίων
The Cypriot sculptor who fell in love with the ivory woman he carved.
Disillusioned with women, he lived alone — until he carved his ideal woman with his own hands.
At Aphrodite's festival he prayed for "a wife like my statue," and when he came home and kissed it, the ivory grew warm.
Psychology calls it the Pygmalion effect: the phenomenon of expectation actually transforming the one it is placed upon.
SourcesOvid, Metamorphoses
Commonly confused
The statue's name, Galatea, is not in Ovid's original text. It was attached only after the eighteenth century.