Wikipedia
The Gradiva, The woman who walks, has become a modern 20th century mythological figure. As she has sprung out of the imagination of a fictional character she may be considered unreal twice over. The fictional character in question is a young archaeologist, the protagonist of a novella by the German writer Wilhelm Jensen He is fascinated by a female figure in an antique bas-relief and gives her the name "Gradiva" after Mars Gradivus, the Roman god of war walking into battle; later, not quite certain whether he is awake or dreaming, he meets her in the ruins of Pompeii.
Sigmund Freud famously analysed the actions and dreams of this young archaeologist in his 1908 study, Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva. Through this study Freud not only saved the novella from being forgotten but caused the Gradiva to become a modern mythical figure.
The relief itself is not fictional but exists; it is now known by the name "Gradiva". The relief was described by Hauser as a neo-Attic Roman bas-relief, probably after a Greek original from the fourth century BCE. It shows in its complete state the three Agraulides sisters Herse, Pandrosus und Aglaulos, deities of the dew. Hauser reconstructed the Agraulid-relief from fragments scattered over various museum collections. The Gradiva fragment is held in the collection of the Vatican Museum Chiaramonti, Rome, its complement in the Uffizi in Florence.
Gradiva is a novel by Wilhelm Jensen, first published in instalments from June 1 to July 20, 1902 in the Viennese newspaper "Neue Freie Presse". It was inspired by a Roman bas-relief of the same name and became the basis for Sigmund Freud's famous 1907 study Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva . Freud owned a copy of this bas-relief, which he had joyfully beheld in the Vatican Museums in 1907; it can be found on the wall of his study (the room where he died) in 20 Maresfield Gardens, London – now the Freud Museum.