In Greek mythology the Medusa was a creature who was so frightful you could not look at her. If you did, she turned you to stone. Perseus, before he fell in love with Andromeda and freed her from her sea guardian, slew the Medusa while looking at her reflection on his shield instead of directly at her.
The Medusa image was used throughout history as a symbol of the power to scare off the enemy and any evil. Athene wore it on her breast. In painting it on a ceremonial shield, Caravaggio depicted a face with horribly rolling eyes and screaming mouth, distended in a nasty grimace. In all other images too the drive of the expression goes outward, not inward as in the cleaned head in the Capitoline Museums.
After undergoing years of state-of-the-art restoration, the marble sculpture called Medusa and doubtfully attributed to Bernini went on show in December in the centre of a hall of the Capitoline Museums in all its ancient horror and enigmatic beauty.
The carving first surfaced in 1731 in a collection given to the museum by the Sienese marchese Francesco Bichi. His brother Alessandro was a papal nunzio and his other brother Celio, who had been Bichi’s secretary, was a cardinal; all were intellectuals and fervid art collectors. Why the sculpture was installed in the papal audience hall in the Capitoline or who inscribed its pedestal with the legend “the head of the Medusa in antiquity placed on Roman shields to terrify the enemy… shines with the glory of a most famous master” without mentioning any name, is not known. Only in 1817 one Agostino Tofanelli in his catalogue of the antique statues in the Capitoline Museums suddenly made a splash and astounded the public by revealing he had found “Medusa, testa di Bernini” written on the base. Scholars have been vociferously discussing this attribution ever since.
Some conjecture the statue might very well be a companion piece to Bernini’s bust of Costanza Bonarelli, his girlfriend, sculpted between 1636 and 1638, similar in size and conception. Others contend it was an expression of Bernini’s disenchantment. He had been the most successful sculptor and city planner of any papal court. Urban VIII Barberini let him create the Baroque as we still see it around us today: St Peter’s colonnades, Piazza Navona, Piazza Barberini, etc. After Urban’s death in 1644 Bernini suddenly fell from grace under his successor, Innocent X Pamphilj. Living in a hiatus, it was thought he fashioned the bust in a moment of spite and unhappiness, wielding the mastery of the tools at his command as an expression of disgust and defiance, showing he was ready to smite his enemies.
As we look at the sculpture we see a fine noble face of an anguished woman in white marble, crowned by the most astounding hairpiece in the world: a nest of marble snakes carved into a slithering, hissing meander of curlicues, some biting each other, in an impenetrable writhing and knotting thicket – her fright-wig.
It is a tour de force of sculpture. The wild and imaginative head is made in the style and craftsmanship and taste of the period, and it is certainly by the hand of a master. But what makes it stand out from any other representation of the malevolent Medusa monster in art history is its expression. All other Medusas ray out, they grimace out with as much ugliness and fierce will as they can muster. But by a perverse trick, this Medusa has suddenly perceived her own face in the glass. She doesn’t scare you, but in mortal panic she has scared herself. She has turned herself to stone.
The head, most painstakingly restored, resides in the museums’ Sala degli Arazzi in its new glory. It will soon be reinstalled in its original site, the Sala delle Oche. This is not far from the hall in which stands the patroness of our city, La Lupa, or She-wolf, in all her splendour. A sleek dark animal in fierce attitude guards two plump babies happily reaching up to her. We know Romulus and Remus were added by a sculptor of the baroque period. But the animal in bronze, its head jutting forward with grace, its pelt modelled in regular rows of ringlets, is beautifully Etruscan. Recently someone has tried to make a sensation by declaring it mediaeval. But here is an elegance and stylisation that could only be the Etruscan will.
However, both these outstanding symbols, the Medusa and the Lupa sculptures, whoever their master, whatever their period, are great achievements of the human imagination, wonderful to contemplate.