Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(30)

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The objectification of Medusa is nowhere more obvious than when we consider what happens to her head after her death. Perseus uses her to assist him against giants, monsters and assorted human irritants: her lethal gaze creates far more carnage after her death than it ever did before. Perseus apparently doesn’t share Medusa’s desire to minimize the harm she causes. Once he has seen off the sea-monster and rescued Andromeda, he stops for a rest on the shore. He washes his hands (cleanliness is next to demi-godliness), but pauses before putting Medusa’s head down on the dura harena – ‘hard sand’,33 in case he damages it. He makes a small cushion for it, out of leaves. It is a horrible moment in the story: the concern Perseus takes to avoid harming Medusa’s head – which has proved so useful to him – could not be more different from the way he treated her when she was alive. She is more valuable to him as a weapon than she was as a living creature.

But what happens to Medusa after she has been used to kill everyone Perseus has taken exception to? She becomes what her artistic antecedents always were: a gorgoneion. Not only because she is now just a head, but because her head is given by Perseus to Athene. We can see the exact moment this happens on a vase held in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and attributed to the Tarporley Painter,34 which was made in southern Italy in the early fourth century BCE. On the left-hand side of the scene is Perseus, still sporting his winged boots and fancy hat. He has just handed Medusa’s head to Athene; she holds it in her right hand. On the right, Hermes leans on a tree trunk, his legs idly crossed. But we shouldn’t be deceived by his casual body language: all three figures are looking down at the ground as Athene holds the head up. They clearly believe Medusa’s gaze would turn them to stone, gods or not. Athene holds a spear in her left hand which is so long that its tip extends beyond the parameters of the painting. Propped against her right hip is her round shield. Because it is at an angle, it catches the reflection of Medusa’s head. The artist had obviously studied reflections, because he has painted her head upside down in the shield face, as it would be. Pseudo-Apollodorus tells us that Athene fastened the Gorgon head to the centre of her shield,35 in which case this reflection is showing us exactly what’s to come.

This story, then, takes us all the way back to where we began – in literary terms – with the earliest representation of a Gorgon in Homer’s Iliad. There, Athene wore the Gorgon head on her aegis (although Medusa is not specifically named by Homer, and nor does he mention Perseus in relation to beheading a Gorgon). But is it really possible that the whole Perseus saga was created to explain why Gorgons are so often shown as only heads, gorgoneia? Why not? Greek storytellers created a monster. As so often with female deities, she becomes tripled, acquires two sisters (there are three Seasons, three Furies, three Graiai, three Graces . . .). Then they needed an explanation for why she was so often depicted as just a head. So the decapitation story develops.

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If Ray Harryhausen’s animated Medusa is the (relatively) modern incarnation that most of us knew best growing up, that may have changed in recent years, thanks to a pair of memes. One well-known image of Medusa and Perseus is the statue carved by Antonio Canova at the end of 1800, called Perseus Triumphant. It is held in the Vatican, at the Pio Clementino Museum.36 There is also a copy at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.37 Perseus is depicted as a formidably handsome hero. He is naked, his weight is on his left leg, his right leg trails slightly behind him, like a dancer. He holds a short sword in his right hand: near the tip, it has an extra curved blade arcing upwards. He wears the winged cap we’ve come to expect and has ornately worked sandals on his feet. His cloak is hanging off his left arm, and with his left hand he is grasping the hair of Medusa, which is a combination of snakes and curls. Her mouth is slightly open and we can just make out her tongue behind a neat row of teeth: a nod to those early Gorgons with their huge mouths and lolling tongues, perhaps. Perseus looks coolly proud of his trophy.

The statue is part of a long tradition showing Perseus in this way. Benvenuto Cellini’s extraordinary bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa – which was made around 1550 and now stands in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence – is a much gorier affair than the Canova marble. This Perseus – all mottled green muscles – holds aloft a head of Medusa whose eyes and mouth are slightly open, as though she has just exhaled her final breath. The mass of snakes and curls mingle with a mass of dripping flesh beneath her sliced neck. Perseus stands on top of Medusa’s headless corpse in a repulsively triumphalist posture. His winged feet trample her ruined torso, her right arm hangs limp over the statue’s plinth, her left hand grasps at her foot, the sole of which faces us as we look at the statue head-on. There is something disturbingly intimate about seeing the bare feet of her corpse. This image was notoriously reworked to feature the two contenders for the 2016 US presidential election, in what was first an ugly cartoon and later a hugely successful meme: you could buy the image printed onto T-shirts and tote bags. To some people, a woman with power and a voice is always a monster. And for some of these people, death and disfigurement are an appropriate response to such women.

The second Medusa meme appeared two years later, and its origins are somewhat more complicated. Ostensibly, it is a photograph of a statue made in 2008 by the Argentine-Italian artist Luciano Garbati. But it is extremely difficult to find any trace of the statue prior to the existence of the meme, which appeared at around the same time as Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault to the US Senate Judiciary Committee. The image is striking and extremely sharable: a statue of Medusa stands alone in front of a completely black background. She is naked, just like Perseus in the Canova and Cellini images, and is lithe, young, strong. Her hair is a mass of snakes, but they are beautiful, not grotesque: they look more like curling dreadlocks. Her expression is calm, her eyes gaze out at us unapologetically. Her arms are by her side and she holds a sword in her left hand. In her right hand is the decapitated head of Perseus, which she holds by the hair. It is an exact reversal of the Canova image. Some versions of the meme came with an accompanying text. ‘Be thankful we only want equality’, it reads, next to Medusa’s head. Below Perseus’ decapitated neck, it continues, ‘and not payback.’38