In Greek myth, Medusa's face turns whoever sees it to stone. Artists have spent two and a half thousand years showing it anyway. Along the way, a sculptor cast a live snake for her hair, and an anonymous panel passed for a lost Leonardo for more than a century, long enough to fool a famous poet.
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How We Chose
In Greek myth, Medusa is the one mortal among the three Gorgons. Snakes grow from her head, and anyone who meets her eyes turns to stone. Perseus beheads her by watching her reflection in his shield, and even severed, the head keeps its power.
That sets every artist the same problem: how to show a face that kills whoever looks at it. Over two and a half thousand years, the answer moved from a grinning monster to a calm young woman, then to a victim and a femme fatale.
Each work here changed the way Medusa looks or shows a moment of the story no other entry shows. There is one work per artist, and from number 12 down to number 2 they run from the newest to the oldest.
12. Franz von Stuck, Medusa (1892)
Snakes coil through the hair of this Medusa, and her eyes lock on whoever stands in front of the canvas. Her lips have just parted. Franz von Stuck, a German painter not yet thirty, made her in 1892, at a moment when Symbolism was spreading through European art.
That movement explains the stare. The Symbolists wanted a picture to carry an idea or a feeling, where the Realists and the Impressionists had set out to record the visible world. Their favorite idea was a woman who draws men in and ruins them, a type they called by a French name, the femme fatale. Gustave Moreau had already made her familiar through Salome, who asks for the head of John the Baptist.
Medusa suited the type even better than Salome, since her danger lies in her face alone. Stuck took that literally. He left out the hero, the sword and the story, and kept only the head, in a picture modeled closely on a Medusa that the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin had painted in 1878.
Stripped of everything else, the face becomes harder to read. I see as much fear as menace in that stare, and the parted lips could open on a scream as easily as on a last breath. That doubt keeps the canvas from being a simple portrait of a trap.
Stuck kept the subject close to him at home as well. On the wall of the hall in his house in Munich hung a cast of the ancient Roman mask at number 3.
At a Glance
Artist: Franz von Stuck (1863 to 1928)
Painted: About 1892
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Gentil-Haus, Museen der Stadt Aschaffenburg, Aschaffenburg, Germany
11. Edward Burne-Jones, The Baleful Head (1885 to 1887)
In this painting, Medusa's head appears only as a reflection, floating on the water of an octagonal marble well. Perseus and Andromeda lean over the rim, each gripping the other's right wrist, and neither looks up at the real head he holds above the water.
Edward Burne-Jones painted the scene between 1885 and 1887. The idea of looking came from Andromeda, just after Perseus had saved her from a sea monster: she wanted to see the one face that could still kill them both.