Perseus has left the scene. Medusa’s head lies on the ground, and the snakes are still moving. Rubens gives us the aftermath of a famous victory, but very little reason to celebrate it.
That is where the trouble with Medusa begins. The hero’s story is straightforward: kill the monster, take her head, escape. The pictures are less obedient. Artists keep returning to her face, finding beauty, terror or distress where the story seems to promise an enemy safely defeated.
Her meaning was never settled. Ancient Greeks placed her image on buildings and armour to ward off danger. Much later, she became a figure through whom artists explored their fascination with threatening women. Today, she can stand for resistance to the very violence that once made Perseus a hero. These different Medusas have never entirely displaced one another.
A monster with more than one history
Medusa is one of the three Gorgon sisters of Greek mythology, and the only one who is mortal. Looking at her turns a person to stone. Perseus survives by watching her reflection as he cuts off her head. Even then, her gaze retains its force.
Many people now know a different beginning to the story: Medusa was once beautiful, Neptune violated her in Minerva’s temple, and the goddess turned her hair into snakes. That account comes from Ovid’s Roman Metamorphoses. It is a later version of the myth, not the origin story behind every ancient image.
Early Greek Gorgons can look startlingly unlike the women in the paintings below. They have tusks, protruding tongues and sometimes beards. Later faces become more recognisably human and beautiful, while preserving their confrontational stare. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art explains, Medusa also served a protective purpose: a fearsome face intended to frighten other dangers away.
Medusa was a symbol of power long before she became a modern symbol of resistance. The question is who gets to use that power: Medusa herself, the man carrying her head, or the goddess wearing it on her shield.
Rubens: the life around a severed head
The first thing to notice in Rubens’ Head of Medusa is how busy it is. Snakes knot together, lift themselves from the earth and spill away from the face. Small creatures occupy the foreground. Medusa is dead; almost everything surrounding her appears to be in motion.
Her head lies sideways, the pale cheek catching the light. The open eyes and parted mouth have the dreadful immediacy of an expression interrupted. There is no Perseus standing over her to tell us how to feel about his achievement. Rubens leaves us close to the ground, looking at its consequences.
The extraordinary attention given to the snakes makes the picture harder to dismiss as a spectacle of gore. You follow their bodies almost before you realise what you are doing. The Kunsthistorisches Museum discusses the collaboration with animal painter Frans Snyders that helped produce this unnerving abundance of life.
We can admire the painting’s invention while recoiling from its subject. That awkward combination is part of its hold on us. The monster has been defeated, yet the picture still has the upper hand.
In the collection: Head of Medusa — fine art print.
Athena’s shield: putting Medusa to work
In Pallas Athena, Medusa has become a detail. Gold catches on the armour, a rich red fabric crosses the warrior’s body, and the helmet rises into an elaborate crest. The Gorgon’s head sits lower down, on the shield.
The Museu Calouste Gulbenkian identifies Medusa and the owl on the helmet as attributes of Athena. It dates the work to about 1657 and describes it as the work of Rembrandt and a pupil. The canvas was cut down, so the shield once occupied more of the composition.
The change from Rubens is telling. There, we are confronted with the head as a physical thing. Here, it belongs to someone’s armour. The face that Perseus could not safely look at has become a defence against the people looking towards Athena.
Medusa has lost her body, but not her usefulness. Her enemies understand her power well enough to keep it.
In the collection: Pallas Athena — fine art print / framed print.
Franz von Stuck: a stare that gives nothing away
Stuck brings us much closer. A pale face hangs in darkness, framed by thick black snakes. The eyes are wide and glassy, the lips slightly open. There is almost nowhere else to look.
At first, the stare seems to belong to someone frightening. Then it begins to look like the stare of someone frightened. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum’s discussion of Stuck’s Medusa draws attention to this double effect: she inspires terror and seems to experience it herself.
The snakes are heavy enough to feel like a frame around the face. They mark her out as Medusa, but the expression underneath them is harder to name. Alarm, shock, disbelief: none quite settles the matter.
It is an economical way of painting a myth. Stuck leaves out the chase, the sword and the victorious hero. A pair of eyes carries the encounter. His other paintings often work through similarly direct confrontations, as we explore in Franz von Stuck: Beauty, Terror and the Power of a Gaze.
In the collection: The Head of Medusa — fine art print / framed print.
Lévy-Dhurmer: Medusa in the breaking water
There is nothing still about Lévy-Dhurmer’s Méduse. Foam breaks across the foreground. Blue-green strands and branching red forms gather around a face with an open mouth. A hand rises out of the confusion.
The picture is also called Vague furieuse, or “Furious Wave”. The Musée d’Orsay records it as a pastel and charcoal work from 1897. Its surface has a restless, tangled quality: hair seems to become seaweed, and the face almost disappears into the water.
Compared with Stuck’s fixed stare, this Medusa looks caught in an event. Her expression suggests anguish more readily than menace. Even the wave seems to threaten her as much as it threatens us.
It would be too neat to claim her as a modern heroine in advance of her time. What the picture gives us is less tidy, and more affecting: a mythological monster whose distress is difficult to ignore.
In the collection: Méduse — fine art print / framed print.
After Medusa: the hero’s next adventure
Two other prints in the collection take the story beyond Medusa’s death. Both show Perseus rescuing Andromeda from a sea monster. Medusa herself is absent, but these pictures are worth looking at beside her portraits: the man responsible for her death has become another woman’s rescuer.
Joachim Wtewael’s dangerous shore
Wtewael gives Andromeda a strangely lavish place to await death. Shells and bones lie around her feet; a monster waits in the water; Perseus approaches on a winged horse. The rescue unfolds beyond her, while her body dominates the foreground.
The bones interrupt the pleasures of the setting. The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts resource at Brigham Young University notes their reminder of mortality among the carefully painted shells. This shore has a history of danger before the hero arrives.
Andromeda is the person we are invited to fear for. Looking back at Rubens or Lévy-Dhurmer, it becomes harder to accept that sympathy must stop at the boundary between the woman to be saved and the woman called a monster.
In the collection: Perseus and Andromeda by Joachim Wtewael — fine art print.
Frederic Leighton’s last-minute rescue
Leighton presses the danger closer. The creature’s dark wing curves over Andromeda, enclosing her pale body. High above, Perseus appears against the light on Pegasus. The arrow has already struck, although the monster has not let go.
That arrow is important. The Walker Art Gallery’s account describes the moment Leighton chose: this is not a scene in which Perseus holds up Medusa’s head to turn the creature to stone. Artists adapted the myth rather than illustrating every episode in the same way.
Pegasus provides another connection. In ancient accounts, the winged horse is born at Medusa’s death. Her story lingers at the edge of a picture in which the attention has moved entirely to somebody else.
In the collection: Perseus and Andromeda by Frederic Leighton — fine art print.
Looking at Medusa again
Modern interpretations often begin with a change of allegiance. Instead of following Perseus, they stay with Medusa. Ovid’s account of sexual violence and punishment becomes central, and the petrifying gaze can be read as a means of refusing further harm.
The British Museum’s Feminine Power exhibition guide recognises her more recent place as an emblem of feminist resistance and rage. That does not make every historical Medusa a feminist image. It does explain why viewers can return to an old picture and find their sympathies have changed.
Stuck’s startled eyes and Lévy-Dhurmer’s anguished mouth leave room for that return. Even Rubens’ horrifying head refuses to become an uncomplicated trophy. The artists did not need to agree about Medusa for their pictures to make her harder to dismiss.
Perhaps that is why she survives so well on a wall. You recognise her immediately, then find yourself reconsidering the face. She is supposed to punish the person who looks. Centuries later, we are still looking.
A few questions about Medusa in art
Why does Medusa appear on shields?
Her face was used as a protective image, intended to frighten danger away. In Pallas Athena, the head on the shield turns the Gorgon’s power into the goddess’s defence.
Why is Medusa sometimes beautiful?
Her appearance became more human and idealised in ancient art. Later painters continued to explore the disturbing possibility that a beautiful face could also be dangerous.
Is The Raft of the Medusa about the same figure?
No. Géricault’s painting concerns a shipwreck. The Medusa in its title is the ship, rather than the mythological woman.
Browse the fine art print collection for the works illustrated here and more paintings drawn from myth and folklore.