“Pity the monsters” …
those we destroy without loving
those we fear without knowing
the dead gods of other epochs
now made evil… “Pity
the monsters” for soon
the slayers of vengeance
the unyielding ministers
of pain, the furies of fear, will
be monsters for us
to slay in self-righteous
joy… swinging the head of
the Medusa to show our enemies
and turn them
like our hearts
to stone
… Medusa through Athena…
to the hegemony of Zeus…
Prometheus or Lucifer… for those
Christian enough to choose
Perseus to Brutus … or shall we take
Caesar? but who prefers tyrants
to tyrant slayers…. then
Louis or Lenin? Saint Thomas
More or Saint Just?
Marat the Monster
and Corday the modern Judith?
Or Marat the martyr
and Charlotte the Vampire?–
How many monsters turned
to saints and back again?
Yes
Monster’s deserve pity
and all the ironies of history should not
negate the simple request
“Don’t forget to show
my head to the people. It’s well
worth seeing…”
for the crowd
it’s the simple confirmation of death
the satisfaction of desire
for the new tyrant
(or is he our liberator?)
or the mere after thought of the condemned
that this head of mine
separated from that body
lying at your feet
will still
retain the power to turn those people
in the square
faces turned upward
hungry to see
to stone.
Benvenuto Cellini, 1545-1554. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence
Notice that blood gushes from the head of the Gorgon. Imagine holding up the head of Louis Capet or of Danton to the revolutionary crowd standing before the guillotine. Why did Mark Antony have the decapitated head of Cicero nailed to the Rostrum in the Roman Formum? It was proof that the man had gone, and that he had not gone to ground or to the under world. This was truly propaganda of the deed, as the old anarchist phrase used to term it. The crowd saw the decapitated head and some monster was exorcised. But Perseus is showing his head for other reasons. The decapitated head of the Gorgon, Medusa, still had power, but it was a different kind of power than the decapitated head of a Cicero or a Robespierre. The head of Medusa was put into Perseus’s pouch then brought forth to turn his enemies to stone… a very useful decapitation in this case. Similarly, the statue that you see here was a very useful piece of political propaganda. It was commissioned by the Medici after they returned from brief exile. While in exile they had been excoriated as tyrants, but now they were to make sure that their dominance would last. Cellini’s Perseus is holding up the head, displaying it to the potentially Republican crowd, not to confirm the death of the monster, but to turn the crowd itself into stone. The message was that all enemies of the Medici will be destroyed with the seeming ease that Perseus turned his enemies to stone. Of course the Republican’s had other ideas. See Judith below…
Detail of Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus Holding up the bloody head is a political act, meant to inspire fear, a lesson well learned by both tyrants and revolutionaries! (See the note immediately above and also the last note for Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes below.)
Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus Beheading Medusa (from the perspective of sight standing below the statue at Florence (Firenza) the Loggia). Notice that from this angle you can see the body of the Medusa lying at Perseus’s feet. Thus you can see that Cellini conflates two actions of the Perseus story — cutting off the Medusa’s head and showing the head to Perseus’s enemies to turn them to stone.
Another angle, showing the statue, oxidation and all.
Antonio Canova, 1804-1808. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A very modest Perseus — fig leaf and no blood and gore. Mario Praz once described the art of Canova as that of an “erotic frigidaire” I suppose the turned sword is another delicacy, which unlike Cellini’s does not draw attention to the penis by paralleling it. One suspects that Canova was worried that Cellini’s Perseus might reveal too much human reality — sex and blood, revenge and rape — for the eyes of his middle class patrons. We must dismiss our desires and designs from before our eyes when we commit our atrocities at a distance, as the fine nineteenth century folk were learning to do. The Medici and Cellini were not in favor of such delicacies.
This for your amusement is a “still living statue.” Yes , it is a human actor posing as a statue. Fortunately realism is not extended to the head which this Perseus hold’s in his hand.
A limestone metope from a temple at Selinas (on Sicily), 530-510 BCE.
It shows Perseus in the act of cutting off Medusa’s head. Athena stands to Perseus’s right, and Medusa holds Pegasus in her lap. The background shows traces of paint, as does Perseus’ sword.
When looking at the composition of this relief compare it to some of the representations of Judith and Holofernes below. Ancient representations of Perseus and the Medusa, like Renaissance representations of Judith and Holofernes, often represented Perseus in the act of decapitation. It is good to think of the significance here. The ancient represented a Perseus who was in the act of slaying the monster, thus telling us that this act must be completed, must be continued. The implication is that these monsters must be killed in the present of the viewers of the work. The Renaissance representation’s of Perseus do not depict Perseus in the act of slaying the monster, but in the act of displaying the monster’s head to Perseus’s enemies. The political significance for the use of this section of the myth was made explicit by the battle of artistic propaganda between the Medici and their enemies, between Perseus and Judith the Tyrant Slayer, in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Capturing Judith in the act of assassination shows the viewer a representative act of tyrant slaying, an act by implication that must continue in the present (see below). But if you show Perseus beyond the act of slaying the monster, and in the act of displaying the monster’s head to his enemies, the artist has shifted the story from the necessity of destroying a monster to the necessity of inspiring terror in the enemies of the monster-slayer. This is the first step on the road of the monster-slayer becoming a monster.
As “realistic” representation Cellini is my favorite, and when seeing his statue in situ on the square in Florence it is impossible (for me, at least) not to feel the chill of history. But this is by far my favorite Perseus,. It shows that in its time this monster “needed” to be murdered, and that Perseus was the monster-slayer, preferred by those who lived by these myths…. The sense of ritual, the necessity to have a hero to protect the city from monsters, is inscribed in the stones of this old Greek town in Sicily.
The Head of the Medusa – Detail of a Caravaggio.
It took Caravaggio to imagine the Gorgon’s decapitated head in “modern” terms. Here the decapitation is “real”; the head still alive and the eyes and mouth register shock, as if Caravaggio were anticipating all of those decapitated monsters during the French Revolution. Or perhaps the Revolution borrowed some legends from representations of renaissance painters.
The Medusa’s Head – Bernini. The Medusa is still alive here, but Bernini forgot to include the rest of her body, perhaps the body is at the feet of the Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi.
The Gorgon at Corfu Museum
She is in her prime as a monster… but we miss her beauty, before Poseidon raped her.
Medusa by Arnold Böcklin, circa 1878 One of the few head’s of the Medusa where we actually see that before she was cursed for being a wanton slut, she was a beautiful woman. Curses is what you get for being free and more beautiful than the ever-so benevolent current gods.
Danton – the great leader of the French Revolution: Perhaps his head could serve as a model for the modern Medusa. He said to his executioner as he stepped up to the scaffold to be tied to the plank and slid under the guillotine’s blade, “Don’t forget to show my head to the people. It’s well worth seeing.”
The Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat by David. A little more “fangy” than “knifefy” as Buffy Summers said… The implication that Marat was killed by a vampire is probably not out of David’s ken. Nevertheless, Corday no doubt thought of herself as a modern tyrant slayer, a Judith, for our times. But this did not stop the revolutionaries from seeing her as a vampire or a monster.
Judith with the Head of Halophernes, by Christophano Allori, 1613. Judith can show the head to the viewer of the painting. Is there regret here or satisfaction? This beautiful slayer of tyrants was of course a wonderful whore also. So it is perhaps she who is reversing the role of Perseus, and finding revenge for her spiritual mother the monster or goddess Medusa, the raped and scorned, and beautiful Medusa.
Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi (1612-21) Oil on canvas, 199 x 162 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. When I saw this painting in the Uffizi, I thought to myself that this truly must be a self-portrait of Artemisia. If anyone can represent the revenge for the slaying of the wrong monsters surely she can.
Judith by Jan Massys, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.
This Judith is fresh from the act of seduction which allowed her to gain entry to the tent of the General and allowed her to approach the carnal body of Holofernes. But such a portrait as provided by Massys is too intimate for the political act that the Donatello’s statue represents (see below). We cannot help but see the details of desire that led to the act of bloody decapitation. Such a representation of triumph over tyranny by the personification of justice would frighten a burgher republican aristocracy more than any possible tyrant. Any woman in your bed – wife, concubine, slave – could perform such an act of decapitation-castration. This Judith is too much the sister of the Gorgon already. Her beauty is as much an aspect of the monster as the snakes in Medusa’s hair. And as we know from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in order to fight the forces of darkness, it is necessary to interiorise some powers of the demon, even if such powers find their origins in a primal rape. (Is Judith a Vampire Slayer?)
Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio (c. 1598; Oil on canvas, 56 3/4 x 76 3/4 in; Galleria Nazionale dell’Arte Antica, Rome). One of my favorite paintings. The prissy-ness of Judith is not a distraction in this case. Her servant, the old witch eagerly standing by, is just letting her apprentice get used to the blood before graduating to the proper vampire status of Charlotte Corday.
Judith and Holofernes — Donatello, 1460, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio.
This I give to continue the propaganda battle of the sculpture (see above). One monster slayer kills a tyrant and then another monster slayer kills the liberator who is now a new tyrant. The statue was commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici, but when the self-appointed monster slayer Girolamo Savonarola expelled the Medici and set up an austere republic the statue was moved to the he side of main door the Palazzo Vecchio to represent the Repubics desire to slay such monsters and tyrants that may present themselves before the wrath of the single and purest God. Savonarola was of course overthrown himself and slowly roasted alive, not simply burned at the stake as it is usually said. The Medici regained control of Florence and moved the statue of Judith and Holofernes to the courtyard inside the Palazzo Vecchio, to repress the memory of the bad years of Savonarola. But the memory of the monster slayer Savonarola did not die in the hearts of all. The Piagnoni kept his memory alive and briefly expelled the Medici again, restoring the statue once again to public view. This Republic lasted even a shorter time than Savonarola’s Republic. When the Medici once again returned they had enough of the sympathetic magic of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes and decided to get some sympathetic magic of their own. They commissioned the statue of Perseus by Cellini (see above) to show that all future monsters, like Savonarola and his mob in the square will surely be turned to stone. So which monsters do you prefer?
Περσεύς
Jerry Monaco
New York City
26 May 2007
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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