"Statues and their legends catch for us the gesture of life, life’s animation. Kenneth Gross has drawn their story into a fascinating account of the human spirit, captured and brought to life as the sculptor animates recalcitrant stone. This is a brilliant, beautifully rendered account of art and vision, presented on the highest level of scholarship and intuition." —Angus Fletcher, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate School

"Kenneth Gross conveys with acumen, passion, and originality the fascination that statues have exercised over the imagination since antiquity. His exploration of mythology and legends - from the petrifying stare of the Gorgon Medusa to the figure that comes to life when Pygmalion kisses his handiwork - reveals their psychological complexity and philosophical richness. Effigies, puppets, and replicas open up questions about reality and unreality, and lead us to consider the ontology of representations. Indeed The Dream of the Moving Statue, first published in l992 when computer simulations and virtual reality were still unfamiliar, was prophetic in its concerns." —Marina Warner, novelist, critic, historian, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, author of Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, and Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media

"Kenneth Gross's The Dream of the Moving Statue is by now a classic work of the literature on ekphrasis. Beautifully written and imaginatively organized, the book addresses the recurring human dream of animating stone through a range of works from the Hebrew Scriptures and classical mythology to 20th century cinema.” —Susan Stewart, Professor of English, Princeton University, author of Poetry and the Fate of the Senses and Columbarium.

"Exploring a perennial fascination with the idea an animated statue and its converse (petrifaction of living individuals), Gross both delights and instructs the reader through an exploration of a quite astonishing number of significant examples that include poetry, film, drama, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, to say nothing of a few famous statues themselves" —Froma I. Zeitlin, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Princeton University, author of Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greece

We live among the images we have made, and those images have an uncanny life. They seduce, challenge, trap, transform, and even kill us; they speak and remain silent. Kenneth Gross's The Dream of the Moving Statue offers a far-ranging and probing exploration of how writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined the power and life of statues, real and metaphoric, taking up examples from antiquity to modernity, from Ovid, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare to Freud, Rilke, and Charlie Chaplin. The book is about fate of works of art and about the fate of our fantasies, words, and bodies, about the metamorphoses they undergo in our own and others’ minds.