The lover is thus an artist; and [her] world is in fact a world reversed, since in it each image is its own end.
— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

When did artists first start modeling humans out of clay, sketching shadows roughly cast on stone? In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder tells the story of Butades, a potter from Sicyon, whose daughter falls in love with a nameless young man on the eve of his sojourn abroad. The depth of her passion has caught her off guard; the pending threat of separation even more so. Kora (sometimes also called Butades, or Dibutades, or The Corinthian Maid) seeks to preserve a trace of her beau’s beautiful features, which inspire such feeling. She traces the silhouette of his shadow, cast by the warm light of an oil lamp. He departs as promised, leaving Kora as empty as that outline on the wall. Her father intervenes. Using the earthen clay with which he makes his pots, Butades raises up a face from the traces, which he hardens “by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery”. (He later pioneered a similar technique for making personified roofing tiles in various degrees of relief.) And in this design, says Pliny, we find the beginning of the plastic arts intersecting the origins of drawing and painting. All spring from the shadows of life.

It’s a strange story, to say the least. Is there a moral here regarding desire and grief? A proto-psychoanalytic parable about how the outlines of our lovers get filled in — and hardened — with models set by our parents? Or is this a tale about eros and art, the way desire transforms clay and shadow into a sumptuous aesthetic experience? To expand Rousseau’s claim in the Essay on the Origin of Languages, love was not only “the inventor of drawing” but also our impetus for mimesis in three dimensions. “Pliny’s tale presents that mythic moment when imminent loss drives the impulse to record and remember”, writes Liza Saltzman.

While Pliny attends to clay, artists with neoclassical leanings reimagined the story as the primal scene of drawing and painting, often leaving father Butades behind altogether. The tradition flourished, writes art historian Robert Rosenblum, between the 1770s and the 1820s, and then tapered off. (Marina Warner suspects that the topos actually lived on through the 1840s and met its death “just as appearances began to be created and fixed by the new instrument of light, the camera.”) Perhaps the first work from this period to seize upon the theme was Alexander Runciman’s The Origin of Painting (1773). Here, Kora finely paints her lover’s shadow with a hand guided by Cupid. The man either nods off or squints down at the cherub god; Kora is immersed in a reciprocal exchange with her artwork, which comes into being where shadow meets light. Close enough to touch, the lovers seem to miss each other completely, as art and desire, represented in divine form, intervene. Cupid does not wear his traditional blindfold, but nonetheless the couple seems blinded. Kora’s lover is already a memory, even as he sits right there before her. The shadow proves that she “already loves in nostalgia”, writes Jacques Derrida, for “detached from the present of perception, fallen from the thing itself—which is thus divided—a shadow is simultaneous memory, and [her] stick is a staff of the blind.”

We find a similar diffraction of gazes in Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s The Origin of Painting (1785), where Kora’s shadow-work takes place within a prism of unmet eye contact. A dog seems to look up at its master, Kora, who is focused on tracing the shadow, while her lover stares directly out at the viewer. Or perhaps the dog is already fooled by the nascent mimesis, a birds-of-Zeuxis redux, and leans in to be nuzzled by the shadow man. (An 1834 drawing by Johann Erdmann Hummel swaps in a terrified cat.) Joseph Wright of Derby’s Corinthian Maid (ca. 1782–84) takes this unreciprocal equation further, drawing upon Athenagoras’ retelling of Pliny’s tale, which envisions the inamorato asleep and unaware of his lover’s scheme. There is a kind of Platonism in these images, notes Victor I. Stoichita in his Short History of the Shadow. “A representation of a representation (an image of the shadow), the first painting was nothing more than a copy of a copy.” Are we, the audience, then, aligned with the sleeping male figure in Wright’s image — another form of blindness, as in the Runciman — barely conscious of the fact that we are beholding a simulacrum raised to the third degree?

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.

And perhaps there is another sense of afterlife and survival at work behind the scenes. George Didi-Huberman has demonstrated how these secular images of representation have a predecessor in Christian icons known as acheiropoieton (made without hands), like the Manoppelo Image and the Holy Shroud of Turin, miraculously emblazoned with the face of Jesus Christ, as if his shadow could leave a stain. “What has touched the god often becomes untouchable par excellence”, he writes, “it withdraws into the shadow of the mystery (and is constituted forever as an object of desire).” A similar process seems at play in the images collected here, which are themselves comprised of what Aby Warburg called survivals: the “knot of anachronisms” that endure in images and their heterogeneous debts to ancient cultural worlds. The male lover may see a premonition of his own shadowy fate cast upon the wall, yet he is also witnessing the creation of an image that will no longer follow him, as his shadow does, but have a unique afterlife all its own. (According to Pliny, Butades’ clay model was preserved in a nymphaeum in Corinth for centuries, until its wartime destruction in the second century BCE.)

Seeking to memorialize her lover, Kora loses him through representation — a process both archival and annihilating — and her desire withdraws into the mysterious sublimation of artistic creation. Nowhere is this sublimation seen more acutely than in the most feminist revision of this image-making tradition, Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet’s 1810 swerve on Pliny’s story. Here the lover has already left and the father is nowhere to be found. In their place is only the briefest of outlines, painted on a wall that looks more like a tombstone than a canvas. Kora is blissfully content. She gazes upon her eyeless representation and seems to lean in for a kiss. The source of her desire will never leave again.