Medusa
Over de sculptuur
The severed head of Medusa stares out from the convex face of a two-sided relief. Its psychological realism reveals the conflicting yet symbiotic emotions of attraction and repulsion. The gaze of Medusa--transformed by the goddess Athena into a creature with snakes for hair--turned anyone who would look at her into stone. The sculptor Vincenzo Gemito derived his composition from the famous antique cameo, the *Tazza Farnese,* but transformed it into an entirely new kind of sculptural object. He revived Renaissance techniques of lost-wax casting to make the relief. Although he concentrated on the face of the two-sided, glistening metallic relief, he textured the back with snakeskin.
J. Paul Getty Museum
