2023-05-27 16:45:27
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 brought together more than sixty representations of this mythological figure, from Antiquity to the present day, including the Renaissance. Invented in the 8th century in archaic Greece, this creature was originally called Gorgo, “like the swallowing sound of a monster devouring you”underlines with humor the art historian Alexis Merle du Bourg, who orchestrated this fantastic anthology.
Painted on Attic ceramics, the guardian of the underworld initially has a bearded face, bulging eyes and a hanging tongue. It is the very image of fear, the one that petrifies men on the battlefields, to the point that, in 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 of Medusa, promised to posterity. A millennium later, a Roman knocker, decorated with the winged head of our creature, shows that its beauty has supplanted its first monstrosity; its dangerousness has turned into protection of the home. The very Christian Middle Ages made Medusa a figure of sin, as in this illuminated manuscript taking up a text by Boccaccio where she sits enthroned like a princess whom Perseus, riding Pegasus, will soon behead.
With the Renaissance, passionate about ancient culture, the gorgon experienced an extraordinary revival. It reappears on the chest of leadersas in this superb Scipio sculpted in a marble bas-relief, attributed to Andrea del Verrocchio and lent to Caen by the Louvre. The Norman museum was unable to borrow from Italian museums the impressive shield with the head of Medusa, painted by Caravaggio, nor the bust of this creature sculpted by Bernini who gave it the features of its mistress (!), but it is mentioned in the exhibition by an 18th century copy.
Medusa is “the atomic 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 livid at the same time, teeming with snakes devouring each other. One of the most horrific paintings in the history of art, which one of its owners once hid behind a curtain to better amaze his visitors at the time of the unveiling.
Later, classical painting is passionate about the adventures of Perseus, the winner of Medusa, whose head he walks around like a “atomic weapon” (according to A. Merle du Bourg), petrifying here the giant Atlas and there the unfortunate Phineus, from whom he stole the beautiful Andromeda. What 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 presents the children of Medusa: Pegasus and Chrysaor, springing from her decapitated body, seized by Edward Burne Jones, in the sketch of a grand setting for future British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. The course also protects us against 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, the one who petrifies with love the one who looks at her, a literally fatal woman. Did Franz von Stuck and Arnold Böcklin remember, however, that in Ovid the beauty had been “disgraced by Neptune in a temple of Minerva who, in order not to leave such an attack unpunished, changed the hair of the Gorgon into hideous serpents” ? Their two jellyfish with phosphorescent green eyes, their mouths open in a mute cry, enclosed in reptilian nets, already seem less executioners than victims…
A petrifying look in response to the “male gaze”
This reversal of the myth will be consecrated by modern feminism. It was Hélène Cixous who, from 1975, in The Laugh of the Medusa, his dignity and his anger at the outraged beauty. During the #MeToo movement, a statue of Luciano Garbati showing – in a somewhat facile inversion – Medusa holding the head of Perseus will make the buzz on social networks and will even be installed, in 2020, by the municipality of New York, facing the criminal court, during the trial for rape of producer Harvey Weinstein.
The mythological creature, with presumed Libyan origins, has also become an icon of certain Afro-descendant artists, like the young Laetitia Ky, exhibited in Caen, who proudly photographs her hair braided in the shape of snakes. As if Medusa, queen of metamorphoses, never stopped dying and being reborn.
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A sea lineage…
Granddaughter of Gaïa, the earth, and of Pontos, the original flow, Medusa, guardian of the underworld, is linked with the underwater world of the abyss.
Since Antiquity, it has been associated with red coral, which the ancients believed formed from a sea plant petrified by its blood, after Perseus laid the decapitated head of Medusa on a bed of seaweed. The prophylactic power that was once attributed to the skeleton of this marine animal, offered as a pendant or rattle to children, would come from this fabulous origin.
Its name was also given to marine invertebrates of the cnidarian family., in the 18th century, by the naturalist Carl von Linné. This time, by analogy between their stinging filaments and the reptilian hair of Medusa.
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