7/17/2023 0 Comments Medusa statue![]() Madeleine Glennon in a 2017 essay on “Medusa in Ancient Greek Art” for the Met notes that “Classical and Hellenistic images of Medusa are more human, but she retains a sense of the unknown through specific supernatural details such as wings and snakes. Terracotta pelike (jar) with Perseus beheading the sleeping Medusa, attributed to Polygnotos (Greek, 450–440 BCE), terracotta, height: 18 13/16 inches, diameter: 13 1/2 inches (courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1945) The Classical period of Greek art - from 480 to 323 BCE - further associated beauty with danger when Medusa, the sirens, sphinxes, and Scylla all got a little hotter, losing some scales and wings as their bodies were more and more humanized. A 450–440 BCE red figure pelike container is among the earliest depictions of Medusa as an innocent maiden, with Perseus creeping up on the sleeping Gorgon. In a later version, as told by the Roman poet Ovid, Medusa is a beautiful human woman, who is turned into a monster by Athena as punishment after she is raped by Poseidon ( woe to mortal women in mythology). He then employs her head and its stony glare as a weapon, a tool he subsequently gives to the goddess Athena who wore it on her armor. ![]() In Greek mythology, she is one of the Gorgon sisters (derived from the Greek gorgós for “dreadful”), and Perseus uses a reflective bronze shield to defeat her. The story of Medusa shifted over time along with her visage. “Beauty, like monstrosity, enthralls, and female beauty in particular was perceived - and, to a certain extent, is still perceived - to be both enchanting and dangerous, or even fatal.” “Medusa, in effect, became the archetypal femme fatale: a conflation of femininity, erotic desire, violence, and death,” writes Kiki Karoglou, associate curator in the Met’s Department of Greek and Roman Art and organizer of Dangerous Beauty, in an issue of the Met’s quarterly Bulletin on the show. Meanwhile, a rotation of 1990s Versace fashions presents Medusa as a modern luxury logo. On a 570 BCE terracotta stand, Medusa is comically hideous, and fully bearded, sticking out her tongue between two tusks. Rosen, 1991)ĭangerous Beauty: Medusa in Classical Art now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art draws on around 60 works from the Manhattan museum’s collections to explore the transformation of Medusa and other classical female hybrid creatures, from sphinxes to sirens to Scylla, a sailor-eating sea creature with twelve legs and six necks who makes an appearance in Homer’s Odyssey. For more often than not, she’s depicted just as a severed head - a visual that even has its own name, the Gorgoneion - sculpted, painted, or carved being held aloft by her slayer Perseus.īronze greave (shin guard) for the left leg with Medusa head (Greek, 4th century BCE), bronze, width: 4 7/8 inches length: 15 3/4inches (courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. Today Medusa, with her snake hair and stare that turns people to stone, endures as an allegorical figure of fatal beauty, or a ready image for superimposing the face of a detested woman in power. Her writhing hair of serpents became wild curls, with maybe a couple of serpents beneath her chin to hint at her more bestial origins. By the fifth century BCE, that figure from Greek myth began to morph into an alluring seductress, shaped by the idealization of the body in Greek art. The earliest portrayals of Medusa show a grotesque part human, part animal creature with wings and boar-like tusks. Chariot pole finial with the head of Medusa (detail) (Roman, Imperial, 1st–2nd century CE), bronze, silver, and copper, height: 7 1/4 inches, width: 7 inches diameter: 4 1/4 inches (courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Rogers Fund, 1918)
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