Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Medusa.
The gallery
Medusa
Caravaggio, c. 1597
Painted in oil on a convex poplar shield mounted on a wooden frame, this celebrated tournament-piece freezes the very instant of Medusa's decapitation. Blood still spurts from the severed neck while the face, mouth agape in a final scream and crowned with writhing serpents, registers the horror of its own death. Caravaggio is said to have used his own features for the Gorgon's. Commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte as a gift for Ferdinando I de' Medici, the shield-shape turns the viewer into a Perseus safely beholding the monster's reflection. It is held in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
Perseus with the Head of Medusa
Benvenuto Cellini, 1545–1554
A bronze masterpiece of Florentine Mannerism, Cellini's statue shows the victorious Perseus standing astride Medusa's collapsed body, raising her severed head aloft as twisting locks of serpents and rivulets of bronze blood pour from both head and trunk. Commissioned by Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, it was cast in a single dramatic pour and unveiled in 1554 beneath the Loggia dei Lanzi on the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, where it still stands as a pointed dynastic emblem of the Medici triumphing over their enemies.
Medusa
Arnold Böcklin, c. 1878
The Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin renders the Gorgon as a disembodied, masklike head, her serpent hair coiling outward and her eyes wide with a terror that seems to belong as much to the viewer as to the doomed creature. Stripped of any narrative of Perseus, the image isolates the apotropaic Gorgoneion itself—the petrifying gaze that turns onlookers to stone—and treats it as a study in dread and fascination, in keeping with the nineteenth-century Symbolist obsession with the femme fatale and the monstrous feminine.
Perseus beheading Medusa (Boeotian relief pithos)
Unknown (Boeotian), c. 660 BC
On this Archaic Boeotian relief storage jar (pithos), one of the earliest surviving depictions of the myth, Perseus turns his face away as he plunges his blade into a Medusa whose form is rendered as a hybrid creature with the body of a centaur—an early, fluid iconography before the canonical winged, serpent-haired Gorgon was fixed. The molded relief decoration captures the decisive moment of the beheading from which Pegasus and Chrysaor would spring. It is preserved in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. CA 795).
Surviving stone & clay
Rondanini Medusa
SOURCE ↗Glyptothek, Munich
Roman marble copy after a Greek original of the 5th century BC
The Gorgon's face made classically beautiful — calm, symmetrical, winged, with snakes knotted beneath the chin. The type is often connected with the gorgoneion on Phidias' Athena; this copy, named for the Palazzo Rondanini in Rome where Goethe admired it, defined the 'beautiful Medusa' for the modern imagination.