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. I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.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) In some countries this may not be legally possible if so: I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain.
Licensing Public domain Public domain false false This vector image was created with an unknown SVG tool. įor another symbol with related meaning, see Image:Labrys-symbol.svg. Internationalen Frauentages - Transparent der Sozialistischen Jugend.jpg. I chose the color to be kind of equally intermediate between red, pink, and lavender (without being any one of the three.).įor other versions of the basic symbol concept, see Image:Womanpower logo.jpg, Image:Womanpower logo.svg, Image:Stub_femminismo.png, and File:Aktionstag anlässlich des 100.
Made by myself, based on a character outline in the (PostScript Type 1) "Fnord Hodge-Podge Discordian fonts version 2" by toa267 (declared by them to be Public Domain).