(MENAFN- The Conversation) The image is stark and shocking. A decapitated head, her eyes open, her mouth agape in a silent scream, her hair a nest of still-hissing snakes. Blood pours out from her severed neck. She is not quite alive, but she is not yet dead either.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's Head of Medusa (1597) remains one of the most memorable images of Italian baroque art. Now in Florence's Uffizi gallery , it tells the story of the“monster” Medusa, the snake-headed Gorgon whose stare turns whoever dares look at her to stone.

In classical mythology, it is the dashing young hero Perseus who manages to slay the monster, avoiding her deadly gaze by using his shield as a mirror and beheading her in one fell swoop. Caravaggio's Head of Medusa portrays the moment just after the beheading, Medusa's eyes wide in anguish, her brows furrowed, still seemingly in disbelief at her death.

What is clever about the painting is that Medusa's gaze is cast slightly downwards, so that she does not look directly at the viewer and turn us to stone. Rather, we are the ones given the power to look at her.

Intriguingly, Caravaggio's work is also reputed to be a self-portrait . In this way, Caravaggio – like the viewer – manages to escape the Gorgon's fatal gaze, and the painting itself becomes a meditation not only on violence but also on the artist's power of immortality – his features frozen in time forever.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

In a feat of technical prowess, Caravaggio painted Medusa onto an actual shield, the very object of her own demise. Its convex surface means that, as you walk around it, you see different angles. Depending on your viewpoint, some elements are hidden while others are revealed.

This choice echoes the layers of the Medusa story. This fictional femicide tells more than the simple story of man kills monster and saves the day.

As the Roman poet Ovid tells it in book four of his epic poem Metamorphoses (where it is, in fact, Perseus who gets to tell her story, the man speaking for the woman as he brandishes her impotent head around for all to see), Medusa was transformed into a monster as a punishment. Her crime? That she was raped by the sea god Poseidon. The woman punished for her own rape, deemed monstrous, while the male perpetrator gets off scot-free. It's the ancient equivalent of“she was asking for it”.

Unmasking Medusa

It was Medusa's own story – the face of the woman behind the monster's mask – that I aimed to re-collect and re-frame in my dance piece Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments) , which I made for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 2018.

This performance work forms part of my wider research investigating the radical power and potential of dance in the museum as an innovative way of reading, viewing and understanding ancient history and culture differently. It's something I term “radical archaeology” .

The author's dance performance.

Medusa has been appropriated by both psychoanalysis and feminism (see, for example, French second-wave feminist Helene Cixous' powerful 1975 essay The Laugh of the Medusa ). She is, as classics scholar Helen Lovatt puts it ,“a pin-up for female objectification”. Medusa is monstrous and petrifying, but also raped and objectified.

Her story continues to resonate in our post-MeToo times. In her book Women and Power (2017), classicist Mary Beard points to Medusa's decapitated head as a defining image of the radical separation – real, cultural and imaginary – between women and power in western history.

Beard brings the image up to date with an exploration of how it is still used today to separate women from political power. She cites, as one example, the nastier merchandise on offer to supporters of Donald Trump during the US election campaign of 2016. Mugs and T-shirts bore the image of Trump as Perseus brandishing the dripping head of Hillary Clinton as Medusa.

Beard also points to the occasion when Dilma Rousseff, a former president of Brazil, opened a major Caravaggio show in São Paolo. She was asked to stand in front of the Medusa at a photo opportunity the baying press could simply not resist .

Interestingly, Medusa's head was itself popularly represented in antiquity on an object known as a gorgoneio – an amulet designed to avert evil. It was a powerful image, one of protection, able to ward off danger.

I believe it's time to reclaim this symbolism – to see Medusa as a symbol of female empowerment, of legitimate rage and resistance. So take another look at Medusa – dare to look her in the eyes and perhaps even, like Caravaggio, let her face take on your own features.

Beyond the canon
Pan Macmillan

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we're asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn't (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Marie-Louise Crawley's suggestion:

Readers wanting to know more about Medusa might enjoy Natalie Haynes' novel Stone Blind (2022).

A classicist and comedian, Haynes can often be found“standing up” for the classics as part of her lively BBC Radio 4 series of the same name, here offers an energetic feminist retelling of the Medusa and Perseus story.

Pointing to the male violence at the centre of the story, Haynes' novel bitingly flips the question of who is the hero and who is the real monster.

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