The turn-of-the-century interest in bringing inert objects to life circulated across media from the fine arts to vaudeville, as well as in technological experiments, such as automata. Ovid’s metamorphosis story of Pygmalion and Galatea, a classical Roman narrative in which a sculpture modeled by an artist comes alive, provided the basis for many of these plays between the inanimate and animate, as did the tableau vivant (living picture). These staged productions of well-known paintings enjoyed enormous popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.