Medusa on Her Throne

What you are looking at

The image is a digital sculpture: a crowded group of figures modeled in 3D software and rendered in a uniform matte gray, so that every body looks carved from the same stone. At the center sits Medusa. Instead of legs she has a long, thick serpent's tail that coils down over a fluted column base and across the floor, and her hair is a mass of snakes. She leans back calmly, one hand raised to her head, the other resting on the hair of a bearded man who kneels beside her.

Around her, the scene is all violence. Greek warriors in crested Corinthian helmets rush in from both sides: one raises a sword, another draws a bow, a third screams with his blade drawn, and an old man swings a club or scepter above her head. None of them seem to have reached her. Rendered in the same gray as the stone they stand among, they look less like attackers than like the victims of her gaze, petrified in the act of striking.

At the far left sits the figure the original caption singles out: a young man with a lyre, eyes covered by a band, playing as if nothing were happening. According to the description that accompanied the image when Academia Aesthetics first published it, he was added later and is incidental to the commission. A blindfolded musician is a witty addition all the same. In the myth, only someone who does not look at Medusa survives her.

Who made it and why

The image is credited to Reza Sedghi, a 3D character artist and digital sculptor from Iran who has worked from Turkey. It is dated 2021 and was made as an illustration for a video game in development. Further details, such as the title of the game or the software used, have not been confirmed. Sedghi is also known for a digital reconstruction of a Pietà that won a 3D Total Excellence Award.

Medusa enthroned

Ancient and Renaissance art usually shows Medusa as a severed head, the trophy of Perseus, as in Caravaggio's Medusa or the struggle of Perseus and the Gorgon. Recent artists have tended to turn the story around and show Medusa as a figure of power rather than a victim. Sedghi's composition belongs to that turn: she is enthroned, unhurried and at the center, and the heroes are the ones frozen in place. More versions of the myth are gathered in Greek Mythology in Art.