Beware of those who look at Medusa, they will be petrified in return! However, it is difficult to resist the invitation of the Museum of Fine Arts in Caen, which has assembled more than sixty representations of this mythological figure from antiquity to the present day, including the Renaissance. This creature was invented in Archaic Greece in the 8th century and was originally called the Gorgon. “Like the gulping sound of a monster devouring you”emphasizes with humor the art historian Alexis Merle du Bourg, who staged this fantastic anthology.
Painted on Attic pottery, the Guardian of the Underworld initially has a bearded face, large eyes, and a hanging tongue. It is the very image of fear that so petrifies people on the battlefield that they… L’IliadeThe warrior goddess Athena wears it on her chest and Agamemnon on her shield.
From monstrous she becomes seductive
It was the poet Hesiod who first gave it the name Medusa, which was promised to posterity. A millennium later, a Roman door knocker adorned with the winged head of our creature shows that its beauty has supplanted the first monstrosity; its dangerousness has become the protection of the house. The very Christian Middle Ages made Medusa a figure of sin, as in this illuminated manuscript, which revisits a text by Boccaccio, where she is enthroned like a princess whom Perseus, riding Pegasus, is about to behead.
With the Renaissance becoming enthusiastic about ancient culture, the Gorgon experienced an extraordinary revival. It reappears on the chest of Leaderlike in this great one Scipio carved in marble in a bas-relief, attributed to Andrea del Verrocchio and loaned to Caen by the Louvre. The Norman Museum could not borrow from Italian museums either the impressive shield with the head of Medusa painted by Caravaggio, nor the bust of this creature created by Bernini, which gave her the features of her beloved (!), but she is mentioned in the exhibition one 18th century copy.
Medusa is “the nuclear weapon”
On the other hand, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna granted Caen a remarkable loan: the very macabre Medusa head, decapitated by Rubens, bloody and angry at the same time, full of snakes devouring each other. One of the most terrifying paintings in art history, one of its owners once hid behind a curtain to better amaze visitors upon unveiling.
Later, classical painting passionately dealt with the adventures of Perseus, the victor of Medusa, on whose head he walked like one “nuclear weapon” (after A. Merle du Bourg), who here petrified the giant Atlas and there the unfortunate Phineus, from whom he stole the beautiful Andromeda. Which Jean-Marc Nattier depicts in his reception piece at the Royal Academy of Painting.
Franz von Stuck, “Medusa”, autour de 1892, Museums of the City of Aschaffenburg. / Museums of the City of Aschaffenburg / Ines Otschik
The Caen exhibition also features Medusa’s children: Pegasus and Chrysaor, emerging from her decapitated body and being grasped by her Edward Burne Jones, in sketching a grand setting for future British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. The course also protects us from its clones, also adorned with snakes: Envy personified in the guise of an old woman, the three Erinyes, unleashed vigilantes of the Greek world, finally Pestilence, incarnation of the plague…
To this terrible cohort, the 19th century will prefer the myth of the beautiful Medusa, who petrifies with love those who look at her, a literal deadly woman. However, Franz von Stuck and Arnold Böcklin remembered that beauty was in Ovid “disgraced by Neptune in a temple of Minerva, who, to avoid such an attack going unpunished, transformed the Gorgon’s hair into hideous serpents” ? Her two jellyfish, with phosphorescent green eyes, mouths open in a silent scream and ensnared in reptilian webs, already seem less like executioners and more like victims…
A petrified gaze in response to the “male gaze”
This inversion of the myth is sanctified by modern feminism. It was Hélène Cixous, who from 1975 in Medusa’s laughter, his dignity and his anger at the outraged beauty. During the #MeToo movement, a statue of Luciano Garbati shows – in a somewhat superficial reversal – Medusa holds the head of Perseus will cause a stir on social media and will even be installed by the City of New York in criminal court during the rape trial of producer Harvey Weinstein in 2020.
The mythical creature, believed to be of Libyan origin, has also become iconic for certain African-American artists, such as the young Laetitia Ky, exhibited in Caen, who proudly photographs her braided hair in the shape of snakes. As if Medusa, the queen of metamorphoses, never stopped dying and being reborn.
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A sea line…
Granddaughter of Gaïa, Earth and Pontos, the original river, Medusa, the guardian of the underworld, is connected to the underwater world of the abyss.
It has been associated with red coral since ancient times, which the ancients believed arose from a seaweed petrified by its blood after Perseus placed the decapitated head of Medusa on a bed of seaweed. The prophylactic effect once attributed to the skeleton of this sea creature, which was given to children as a pendant or rattle, dates back to this legendary origin.
Marine invertebrates from the cnidarian family also received his name., in the 18th century, by the naturalist Carl von Linnaeus. This time in analogy between her filaments and Medusa’s reptilian hair.
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