Perseus and the Gorgon

What you are looking at

Perseus straddles the fallen Gorgon, one foot planted on the rock and the other knee bent over her back. His left hand has twisted into her hair, the snakes writhing between his fingers; his right hand draws back a curved sword, the harpe, for the stroke that will sever her head. He wears only a winged helmet and a length of cloth falling from his hip. Medusa lies sprawled face down, one arm thrown out to brace herself, small wings sprouting from her shoulders. Her face, turned against the base, is twisted in a scream.

Marqueste freezes the fight a split second before its end. The composition is a spiral: the eye climbs from Medusa's outflung foot along her body, up Perseus's bent leg and torso, and out along the blade. Under raking light, as in this photograph, the polished marble of the two bodies reads as two different materials, the taut hero and the slack, heavy monster.

How the group was made

Marqueste, a Prix de Rome winner trained under François Jouffroy and Alexandre Falguière, first modeled the group in plaster in 1875. A bronze was cast in 1877, but the process damaged the original plaster, so he made a second plaster in 1887 (now in the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse). The French state bought a marble version in 1890; after decades in storage it was shown at the Musée d'Orsay and has been in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon since 1999. A second marble, finished in 1903, went to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.

The versions differ mostly in how much drapery Perseus wears. The 1887 plaster shows him fully nude; the 1890 marble adds a flowing cloth; the 1903 marble keeps the cloth but raises it. Like most French sculptors of his generation, Marqueste would have relied on specialist carvers to transfer his model into stone.

The story and its meaning

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Perseus approaches Medusa using a polished shield as a mirror, since her gaze turns onlookers to stone, and kills her as she sleeps. Marqueste chooses a wrestling match instead, closer to the drama of Baroque sculpture than to the myth's stealth. The precedent every viewer would have had in mind is Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus in Florence, which shows the aftermath, the head held high. Marqueste shows the struggle.

Read in the context of the 1880s Salon, the group is a display piece: a heroic male nude, a female nude in distress, and a virtuoso surface. For a quieter Gorgon, compare Caravaggio's Medusa or the enthroned figure in Medusa On Her Throne.

Where to see it

The 1890 marble is in the former chapel of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, and the 1903 marble is in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Which of the two appears in this photograph has not been confirmed. For more classical subjects in stone, see Greek mythology in art.