In Pliny’s time, Kora’s act of tracing may have been overshadowed, as it were, with the cluster of associations swirling around the word eidolon, which, according to Hagi Kenaan, “held together the symbolic connection among images, shadows, phantom phenomena, apparitions of the dead, and dreams”. With this in mind, we glimpse the darker side of the Butades motif in Joseph Benoît Suvée’s Invention of the Art of Drawing, debuted at the Paris Salon of 1791. Here, the male lover is all-too-awake, grasping Kora’s waist and looking up at the source of his desire while she remains unmoved. Her attention is completely absorbed in representation: the promise held by the shadow seems to have displaced any interest in unmediated, light-drenched life. The man’s agony is perhaps less about sex, more about death. “A Greek understood his shadow as a premonition of his shadowy existence in the underworld”, writes Hans Belting, “when he would no longer be able to cast a shadow but would himself be a mere shadow.” Kora’s lover becomes a kind of Galatea, and she, a necromantic Pygmalion, but instead of infusing the inanimate with life, the living seems to become consigned to the shadow realm by her steady hand.
