A MEDUSA FOR MANHATTAN: LUCIANO GARBATI'S 'MEDUSA WITH THE HEAD OF PERSEUS'

 

A MEDUSA FOR MANHATTAN: STATUE OF THE MONTH, NOVEMBER 2020

As the bizarre and frustrating year that has been 2020 draws to a close, I’d like to consider one of the more positive aspects of this year’s events: a renewed interest in public sculpture.  One of the most memorable pieces of news footage this year was the toppling of the bronze statue of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol.  Suddenly public sculpture stopped being invisible street furniture and became a topic for discussion, particularly in terms of the purpose of such sculpture: who should we (and shouldn’t we) be commemorating in this way, and what form should such memorials take?     

One of the most controversial sculptures to be erected this year (although the original resin version of the statue actually goes back to 2008) is Medusa with the Head of Perseus, a bronze sculpture by the Argentinian sculptor Luciano Garbati depicting a beautiful, naked Medusa holding a sword and the head of Perseus (modelled on that of the sculptor himself, in a rather nice in-joke).  In interviews, Garbati has explained that he created his sculpture as a response to a famous Renaissance work: Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence.  Having seen the Cellini statue as a child, he wondered what would happen if the situation were inverted, and Medusa had killed Perseus (although if we’re being pedantic here, presumably she would have petrified him and would therefore have had no need to decapitate him).  

                                           Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545), Florence

  Photo Credit: Paolo Villa, Wikimedia Commons (Paolo Villa - own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The idea of inverting the image is an intriguing one, but the reason why the statue has received so much attention is its location: Collect Pond Park, directly opposite the Criminal Courthouse in Manhattan – the courthouse where Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to twenty-three years’ imprisonment for rape and sexual assault in February 2020.  Although the application to site the statue in the park (through the Art in the Parks programme) was made long before the trial, events at the courthouse have enabled the statue to be repurposed as a symbol of female empowerment and as a symbol of justice for rape victims.  

The statue was unveiled in October 2020, but it hasn’t attracted universal approval.  Some feminist commentators have complained that a statue by a male sculptor should not have been chosen as a symbol of the #MeToo movement – unlike in the UK, where the panel commissioning the new monument to the feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft on Newington Green seem to have felt uncomfortable about giving the commission to a male sculptor (Martin Jennings), instead deciding in favour of a design by a female sculptor (Maggi Hambling).  Other objections have focused on other issues:  Medusa’s physique; the choice of a European myth for a movement started by an African-American woman; and claims that Garbati is ‘mythologically illiterate’ (more of which later). 

Let’s start by looking at the statue itself.  Medusa is seven feet tall – a scale that ancient Greek viewers would certainly have understood, as it was routine to show gods and monsters as being taller than mortals.  She’s conventionally attractive, from a modern audience’s perspective, but arguably she’s also an airbrushed nude from the pages of a comic book.  As a figure from Greek mythology, I somehow feel she should look like a Classical nude, but she doesn’t have the right body-shape; she looks too lean, compared to the voluptuous thighs and buttocks and more rounded stomach of famous ancient nudes such as Praxiteles’s Knidian Aphrodite (c 330 BC), supposedly modelled by Phyrne, a top Athenian courtesan of her day.  Medusa’s snaky hair is beautifully imagined, but I’d have to agree with Chloe Esslemont (in her essay in the digital art magazine Dazed - see link below) that Garbati has missed a trick by failing to extend Medusa’s snaky follicles to her pubic hair – or, come to that, given her any pubic hair at all (unlike Maggi Hambling’s rather Fascist-era nude on the Mary Wollstonecraft tribute, whose pubic hair is an obvious feature). 

                         Cast of Roman copy of Praxiteles's Knidian Aphrodite (Two Temple Place, London)

There are certainly Classical precedents for images of an attractive, even sexy Medusa.  In the art of the Archaic period, in the sixth century BC, Gorgons are shown as grotesque monsters, with dinner-plate eyes, boar’s tusks, long slobbery tongues and of course living snakes in lieu of hair.  Images of Gorgons were often used as apotropaic terror-symbols on Greek temples, to scare away evil spirits, as in this terracotta temple plaque here. 

                                    Gorgon terror-symbol (Hancock Museum, Newcastle)

In sixth-century black-figure Athenian vase-painting the usual convention was to depict all faces in profile; Gorgons were the exception to this, as it seems to have been felt that their true horror couldn’t be conveyed without showing them full-face, as on this vase from the British Museum’s collection.

             Black-figure olpe showing Hermes, Medusa & Perseus by the Amasis Painter, c 530 BC

                                                   Picture Credit: Trustees of the British Museum

By the Classical period the presentation of Medusa was beginning to change, and we find several ancient images of Medusa as a beautiful woman, particularly the Rondanini Medusa (now in the fabulous Glyptothek museum in Munich) which you may recognise as the basis for the Versace logo. 

                        Rondanini Medusa, Glyptothek, Munich                          Versace logo

Here, the bug-eyed monster of the Archaic period has become a serene face, although there are still some clues that she’s not entirely human: her eyes are unusually large and wide apart; she has wings sprouting from the top of her head; the upper row of teeth is visible through the slightly-parted lips; and the snakes are still there, coiling under her chin.  The date and original context of this sculpture is still disputed; one possibility is that it’s a Roman copy of the head of Medusa which was fixed to the shield of Pheidias’s giant chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of Athene Parthenos (the cult image in the Parthenon), although it is also possible that it’s a copy of a later Greek work from the Hellenistic period.    

Even if we accept that Medusa can be shown as an attractive woman, Garbati’s statue still manages to look bland, despite the potentially gory subject-matter.  Much of this is due to the expression – or lack of expression – on the faces of the two characters.  Perseus’s looks ruminative rather than grimacing in his death-agony; Medusa herself looks sulky, rather than vindicated or triumphant. To create a true inversion of the Cellini statue, Medusa should be holding the head aloft, with an outstretched arm.  In fact, if we were following the Cellini model closely, she should be trampling on Perseus’s headless body – but perhaps that might be considered rather strong meat for modern sensibilities?    

Another possibility might have been to make her look haunted by the act she’s just committed – an emotion which comes out very strongly in an ancient statue known as the Youth of Antikythera (found in the sea off the coast of the Peloponnese in 1900, and now displayed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens).  Although there’s still some dispute over who this statue represents, I think there is no doubt that this was a statue of Perseus holding up the head of Medusa in order to petrify Polydictes, tyrant of Seriphos, who was forcing Danae, Perseus’s mother, into marriage.  Although the object he’s holding up is now missing, we can see from the position of his hand that it’s pretty disgusting – something that he wants to keep as far away from him as possible, which would certainly fit if it were the bloodied head of a Gorgon.  The deep-set, inlaid eyes and the serious expression suggest that Perseus knows this is something which has to be done, but he’s all too aware of the horror and the weirdness of his situation.      

 

           Youth of Antikythera, c 360 BC (National Archaeological Museum, Athens)

As one of the complaints made about Garbati’s statue is that he’s failed to understand the Medusa myth, I think it’s worth trying to reconstruct the story from the original Greek sources.  Much of the controversy surrounding the statue has focused on the perception of Medusa as rape victim, violated by the sea-god Poseidon in a temple dedicated to the goddess Athene.  Garbati’s own application to the Art in the Parks programme stated that he wanted to challenge the assumption, which the Medusa story had “communicated to women for millennia, that if they are raped, it’s their fault”.  And in that case, several commentators have argued, wouldn’t it make more sense for Medusa to exact revenge on her rapist rather than her killer?  Shouldn’t she be holding the head of Poseidon rather than the head of Perseus?  

Greek myth is notoriously fluid, which makes it difficult to track down a ‘definitive’ version of any Greek myth, but the Greek sources give little explicit support for the narrative that Medusa was raped by Poseidon. Whilst it is certainly the case that many sexual interactions between gods and mortals in Greek myth are cases of rape and abduction (the story of Leda and the Swan, for example), some sexual encounters in Greek mythology are consensual.  Our earliest surviving source, Hesiod’s Theogony (from the 7^th century BC) simply states: ‘The sable-haired one [Poseidon] lay with Medusa in a soft meadow among spring flowers’ – so no temple of Athene there (it’s a bit early for Greek temples, as we know them, in Hesiod’s day). 

Our next source, The Library, a 1^st-centry BC compendium of Greek myth for ancient nerds (attributed, probably incorrectly, to Apollodorus, a librarian at the famous library in Alexandria) emphasises that Medusa was born a monster (rather than being a woman who was monsterised by the intervention of Athene).  In this version, Medusa was the daughter of the shape-shifting sea-gods Phorcys and Ceto, and a sister of the Graiae (the three crones who share a single tooth and a single eye between them).  Medusa and her sisters ‘had heads with scaly serpents coiled round them, and large tusks like those of swine, and hands of bronze and wings of gold, which gave them the power of flight; and they turned all who beheld them to stone’ (Apollodorus, The Library, Robin Hard’s translation for Oxford World’s Classics). 

Apollodorus says that Athene assisted Perseus in his quest to decapitate Medusa because ‘the Gorgon had claimed to rival the goddess in beauty’ and that after Perseus had used Medusa’s head to petrify his mother’s unwanted suitor, Athene fixed the head to the centre of her shield (although in ancient images of Athene it is more commonly affixed to her aegis, the goat-skin shawl she wears across her chest.)

So where did the element of Medusa as rape victim come from?  This isn’t the work of a Greek author, but a Roman one: Ovid, whose poem-cycle Metamorphoses has probably contributed more to our modern perception of Greek myth than any other ancient writer (he’s also responsible for the ‘classic’ version of the Pygmalion myth, in which Pygmalion creates a female statue which comes to life and becomes his sexual partner).  In examining Ovid’s version of the Medusa story it’s worth remembering the theme of Metamorphoses: that he’s primarily interested in emphasising myths where gods or humans are transformed into another form, including trees and animals, so it suits his agenda to claim that Medusa was originally a human woman who was made hideous by Athene.  It is Ovid who says that Medusa’s hair was her most beautiful feature, which is why Athene turned it into a mass of ‘revolting snakes’, as a punishment for defiling her temple by having intercourse there with Poseidon – and it’s also Ovid who suggests that Medusa’s encounter with Poseidon wasn’t consensual: ‘the lord of the sea robbed her of her virginity in the temple of Minerva’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses Book IV, Penguin Classics translation by Mary Innes)

I must admit that I've always favoured an alternative explanation for Athene's jealousy of Medusa, in which in which incel-Athene, condemned to remaining in a state of permanent virginity, punishes Medusa for sacrilegiously enjoying sex in a temple – an environment in which sexual activity (and indeed, even the act of giving birth) was banned. 

But there’s another element of the myth which seems to have been completely ignored in the discussion of Garbati’s statue, and that is that Medusa, as a result of her liaison was Poseidon, was actually pregnant when she was killed by Perseus.  Apollodorus states that Medusa had previously conceived the children by Poseidon, (without giving any details of where/when this took place).  After Perseus cut off her head, she gave birth (possibly from her neck-stump: Greek myths are full of people producing children from strange parts of the body) to two offspring: Chrysaor (‘the man with the golden sword’) and Pegasus, the winged horse - as Poseidon, in addition to his heavy portfolio as god of oceans, tsunamis and earthquakes, is also the god of horses.  This pediment sculpture from the Temple of Artemis at Corcyra (Corfu) shows Medusa with her arms around her two offspring (modern viewers will complain that she shouldn’t have both her head and her children, but this type of synchronic presentation of a story was quite common in ancient Greek art). 

               Reconstruction drawing of the pediment of the Temple of Artemis, Corcyra (Corfu), c 580 BC

                                 Picture Credit:  Susan Woodford, An Introduction to Greek Art

So how’s this for a radical suggestion: a statue of a heavily-pregnant Medusa, nearly at full term, with swollen breasts and belly.  Now that really would make a thought-provoking statue.    

 

Alfred Gilbert's Perseus in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff 

(I don't know why Mary Beard keeps photo-bombing my photos!)

Where to See It: Collect Pond Park, Manhattan, until April 2021

Further Reading

Chloe Esslemont, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Statue Shouldn’t Represent Womanhood Past or Present’, Dazed, 11 November 2020 (https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photogrpahy/article/51061/1/mary-wollstonecraft-feminist-statue-london-represent-womanhood-past-present )

Kiki Karoglou, ‘Dangerous Beauty: Medusa in Classical Art’, The MMA Bulletin, Winter 2018, Volume LXXV, Number 3.  Very detailed exhibition notes, with excellent illustrations, accompanying an exhibition on changing Classical images of Medusa held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (https://issuu.com/metmuseum/docs/dangerous_beauty_winter_2018_bulletin)