The head of medusa
She is a marvel of the classical imagination: a woman whose hair is a floating mane of asps and whose gaze turns men to stone. In some versions of the myth, Medusa is a beautiful nymph until she is raped by Poseidon. It is her rage and horror that cause the monstrous transformation. “The gorgon does not inspire terror,” as Homer puts it, “terror inspires the gorgon.”
Medusa was slain by Perseus. In what is for me the most terrifying part of the story, he approaches her backwards, holding a mirror, so that he does not see Medusa but only her reflection and the reflection of his sword as he thrusts it at her behind his back. Vipers slither out from the sand where her blood falls and when Perseus cuts off her head, her head, monstrously, does not die. Perseus carries it with him and uses it as a weapon. On the island of Seriphos, he holds it up like a baneful lantern, and its gaze petrifies the flesh of Polydectes, his enemy. The story helps to explain why Caravaggio's painting, below, is so arresting. The Medusa's face expresses a banding together of horrors: of her rape, transformation, and the supreme horror that necessarily indwells a conscious but decapitated head. Adding to the power of the painting is the fact that, incredibly, this last element of the story is not entirely fictional but merely an exaggeration: The human brain does retain consciousness for a short time after decapitation. A French chemist caught up in the Revolution, Antoine Lavoisier was beheaded in 1794. A scientist to the very end, he asked his friends to help him with one last experiment: He would try to blink for as long as possible after the guillotine fell to indicate how long consciousness was retained after decapitation. Lavoisier’s severed head blinked for 15 seconds. The French doctor Beaurieux conducted a similar experiment with a difference irrelevant to science but of great importance to Beaurieux: This time the head did not belong to the experimenter. The criminal Languille was guillotined at 5.30 am on 28 June 1905. Here are Dr. Beaurieux's observations on the freshly severed head:
Surely there is no more potent image of horror and suffering than a severed but conscious human head aware of its predicament. One other such image of which I am aware is worth mentioning, though neither human nor real. It is the last head of the Lernaean Hydra slain by Hercules. In The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges we are told that when Hercules had cut off the Hydra's many heads, Iolaus seared the stumps with a torch so that they would not grow back. But the last head was immortal and so Hercules buried it under a huge rock. Borges concludes, “And there, where he buried it, it still lies today, hating and dreaming."
In the end Perseus gave the Medusa head to Athena, who placed it upon her shield, as depicted by Caravaggio. |