The Medusa decorative wall display features a three sword background with the Gorgon head. Medusa was a monstrous chthonic female character; gazing upon her could turn onlookers to stone. She was beheaded by the human hero Perseus, who thereafter used her head as a weapon until giving it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield. In classical antiquity and today, the image of the head of Medusa finds expression in the apotrope known as the Gorgoneion.
The three gorgon sisters — Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale — were children of Phorcys and Ceto, or sometimes, Typhon and Echidna, in each case chthonic monsters from an archaic world. Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in Aeschylus's Prometheus Unbound, who places both trinities of sisters far off "on Kisthene's dreadful plain":
"Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged
With snakes for hair— hated of mortal man—"
While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as a being beautiful as well as terrifying. In an ode written in 490 BCE Pindar already speaks of "fair-cheeked Medusa". In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a beautiful nymph, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," but when she was raped by the "Lord of the Sea" Poseidon in Athena's temple, the goddess transformed her beautiful hair to serpents and she made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn a man to stone.
In some versions, while Medusa was pregnant by Poseidon, she was beheaded in her sleep by the hero Perseus, who was sent to fetch her head by King Polydectes of Seriphus. With help from Athena and Hermes, who supplied him with winged sandals, Hades' cap of invisibility, a sword, and a mirrored shield, he accomplished his quest. The hero slew Medusa by looking at her reflection in the mirror instead of directly at her to prevent being turned into stone. When the hero severed Medusa's head, from her neck two offspring sprang forth: the winged horse Pegasus and the giant Chrysaor who later became the hero wielding the golden sword.
Jane Ellen Harrison argues that "her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body later appended... the basis of the Gorgoneion is a cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood." (Harrison 1922:187). In Odyssey xi, Homer does not specifically mention the Gorgon Medusa,
"lest for my daring Persephone the dread :From Hades should send up an awful monster's grizzly head"
Harrison's translation states "the Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon (Harrison 1922: 187).
According to Ovid, in North-West Africa Perseus flew past the Titan Atlas, who stood holding the sky aloft, and transformed him into stone. In a similar manner, the corals of the Red Sea were said to have been formed of Medusa's blood spilled onto seaweed when Perseus laid down the petrifying head beside the shore. Furthermore the poisonous vipers of the Sahara, in the Argonautica 4.1515, Ovid's Metamorphoses 4.770 and Lucan's Pharsalia 9.820, were said to have grown from spilt drops of her blood.
Perseus then flew to his mother's island where she was about to be forced into marriage with the king. He cried out "Mother, shield your eyes", and everyone but his mother was turned into stone by the gaze of Medusa's head.
Then he gave the Gorgon's head to Athena, who placed it on her shield, the Aegis. Some say the goddess gave Medusa's magical blood to the physician Asclepius, some of which was a deadly poison and the other had the power to raise the dead. Historically accurate
Bronzed steel
Weight: 10lbs 11oz
Width: 22 1/2"
|
Medusa Shield Wall Display
