Caput Medusae

Excerpt

The round shield (upper part of the cover picture), painted by Caravaggio (1571–1610) for his Roman patron, the Cardinal Del Ponte, with the “serpent-covered head” (the denomination of the painting in a 1631 Medici inventory) of the Medusa, was given by the Cardinal to the Medici family as a gift: It can be admired nowadays in the Uffizi gallery in Florence. Medusa’s head is painted on a convex surface, similarly to other masterpieces of the sixteenth-century Mannerists, who experienced various ways to represent a deformed reality and, in particular, liked the subtle changes in shape and color generated by the variations in direction of light strikes on their paintings (metamorphism). The convex surface of the shield creates a nearly three-dimensional nature-like image and projects the ferocious, though agonizing, head in the viewer’s real space. The expedient enhances the frightening aspect of the severed head, which had given Medusa her horrific power to turn anyone who dared to look at her face and her poisonous hair into stone. …