Even Odysseus was afraid of Medusa. This crafty
Greek hero broke off his stay in the Underworld because he was afraid of
being confronted by the decapitated head of the monster, whose glance
turned anyone who saw her into stone. According to the Greek poet Hesiod
(c. 800 ВС), who undertook to organise the myths of the ancient
Greek gods in Theogony, Medusa was one of the three Gorgon sisters
who dwelled beyond the Mediterranean in the far West, which is where
mythology located the powers of evil to be. Due to their odious appearance
and the fatal effect which they had on all who saw them, the Gorgons, like
the goddesses of revenge, were the horror figures of antiquity. They
contemptuously mocked everyone by sticking out their tongues and were
hideous to behold: round faces with baleful eyes and hair and belts made
of hissing snakes. The ancients thought these sisters were immortal,
except for Medusa.
Therefore, Perseus, one of Zeus's numerous offspring,
was charged with killing her. He cunningly reached the home of the Gorgons
and, along the way, assembled the necessary tools: a helmet that made him
invisible, winged shoes that let him glide above the ground and a curved
sword with which he eventually decapitated the sleeping Medusa. After he
succeeded in killing her, Perseus put the ghastly head into a bag as a
trophy for safe keeping, where, however, it did not remain for long. On
his way home from the Gorgons, he fell in love with the beautiful
Andromeda in Ethiopia and defeated a sea monster in order to save her. It
was then that he felt he simply had to show his beloved the head of Medusa
— though only the reflection of it in water — to prove his heroism and
divine descent, which obliged him to battle evil.
Intrigued by this ancient myth in the late nineteenth
century, the English painter
Edward Coley Burne-Jones
executed a Perseus cycle which concluded with a work entitled The
Baleful Head. Originally intended for a church, the painter may
have viewed Perseus as a forerunner to the Christian dragon-slayer St
George, and the idyllic and tranquil garden scene as a symbol of the
desire for a perfect world, free of evil and the taint of industrialism,
which was rapidly growing in the nineteenth century.
Burne-Jones grew
up in the industrial city of Birmingham at a time when the slums were
increasing. His contemporary, William Morris, a writer and critic, stated
in a 1891 lecture that artists in industrial society had to "look back"
for inspiration: "When an artist has really a very keen sense of beauty, I
venture to think that he can not literally represent an event that takes
place in modern life. He must add something or other to qualify or soften
the ugliness and sordidness of the surroundings of life in our
generation." Against a background of retrogressive aestheticism,
Burne-Jones
formulated the following creed: "I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic
dream, of something that never was, never will be — in a light better than
any that ever shone — in a land no one can define or remember, only desire
and the forms divinely beautiful." Perhaps The Baleful Head
represents a visionary prescription for dealing with a world out of
control.
