*
If Ray Harryhausen’s animated Medusa is the （relatively） modern incarnation that most of us knew best growing up, that may have changed in recent years, thanks to a pair of memes. One well-known image of Medusa and Perseus is the statue carved by Antonio Canova at the end of 1800, called Perseus Triumphant. It is held in the Vatican, at the Pio Clementino Museum.36 There is also a copy at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.37 Perseus is depicted as a formidably handsome hero. He is naked, his weight is on his left leg, his right leg trails slightly behind him, like a dancer. He holds a short sword in his right hand: near the tip, it has an extra curved blade arcing upwards. He wears the winged cap we’ve come to expect and has ornately worked sandals on his feet. His cloak is hanging off his left arm, and with his left hand he is grasping the hair of Medusa, which is a combination of snakes and curls. Her mouth is slightly open and we can just make out her tongue behind a neat row of teeth: a nod to those early Gorgons with their huge mouths and lolling tongues, perhaps. Perseus looks coolly proud of his trophy.
The statue is part of a long tradition showing Perseus in this way. Benvenuto Cellini’s extraordinary bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa – which was made around 1550 and now stands in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence – is a much gorier affair than the Canova marble. This Perseus – all mottled green muscles – holds aloft a head of Medusa whose eyes and mouth are slightly open, as though she has just exhaled her final breath. The mass of snakes and curls mingle with a mass of dripping flesh beneath her sliced neck. Perseus stands on top of Medusa’s headless corpse in a repulsively triumphalist posture. His winged feet trample her ruined torso, her right arm hangs limp over the statue’s plinth, her left hand grasps at her foot, the sole of which faces us as we look at the statue head-on. There is something disturbingly intimate about seeing the bare feet of her corpse. This image was notoriously reworked to feature the two contenders for the 2016 US presidential election, in what was first an ugly cartoon and later a hugely successful meme: you could buy the image printed onto T-shirts and tote bags. To some people, a woman with power and a voice is always a monster. And for some of these people, death and disfigurement are an appropriate response to such women.
The second Medusa meme appeared two years later, and its origins are somewhat more complicated. Ostensibly, it is a photograph of a statue made in 2008 by the Argentine-Italian artist Luciano Garbati. But it is extremely difficult to find any trace of the statue prior to the existence of the meme, which appeared at around the same time as Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault to the US Senate Judiciary Committee. The image is striking and extremely sharable: a statue of Medusa stands alone in front of a completely black background. She is naked, just like Perseus in the Canova and Cellini images, and is lithe, young, strong. Her hair is a mass of snakes, but they are beautiful, not grotesque: they look more like curling dreadlocks. Her expression is calm, her eyes gaze out at us unapologetically. Her arms are by her side and she holds a sword in her left hand. In her right hand is the decapitated head of Perseus, which she holds by the hair. It is an exact reversal of the Canova image. Some versions of the meme came with an accompanying text. ‘Be thankful we only want equality’， it reads, next to Medusa’s head. Below Perseus’ decapitated neck, it continues, ‘and not payback.’38
It was the perfect illustration of what many women felt and continue to feel about the violence they experience at the hands of some men. Not only do these women face it in their daily lives, but they see it all around them presented as a norm, everywhere from newspaper headlines to the walls of art galleries and museums. Thousands of people walk past the Cellini statue in Florence every day; thousands more see the Canova in New York and in Rome. Medusa may have snakes for hair, but she still has the face and body of a woman. The Canova sanitizes this with its gleaming white marble. The name of the statue may be Perseus Triumphant, but it is only a triumphant image if you associate yourself with Perseus. The Cellini shows Perseus defiling Medusa’s body so brutally that it must come from anger or contempt, or a combination of the two. It is no less shocking than when Achilles does the same to Hector in Books Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three of the Iliad: dragging his corpse around the walls of Troy, refusing to bury him or to allow anyone else to do so for days, until the gods finally intervene in Book Twenty-Four. And yet Cellini’s Perseus gazes down at the ground, even as he holds Medusa’s head aloft and in front of him: there is no possibility he might accidentally catch her petrifying eyes. He is still afraid of her, even after he has beheaded her and trodden her down. If you’re looking for a better metaphor for virulent misogyny, I’m afraid I don’t have one.