Emily McConkey
Emily McConkey is a recent M.A. grad and a researcher for Mary Arseneau’s Christina Rossetti in Music archive. Her master’s thesis focused on the figure of Medusa in Victorian women’s art and poetry, and in her doctoral work she plans to explore Ovid’s reception among Victorian women. She has held both the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and the Vera Pauline Morrison Scholarship.
Women, Ovid, and Sculpture: Harriet Hosmer and Evelyn de Morgan’s Medusa Busts
Around twenty years apart, two young, female artists – one, an American expatriate sculptor, the other, an English painter – during their respective stays in Rome, began to establish their careers surrounded by the art of the Italian Renaissance. The first, Harriet Hosmer, was 22 when she moved to Rome in 1852; the second, Evelyn de Morgan, was 20 when she visited Rome and Florence in 1875. De Morgan’s sister, Wilhelmina Stirling, describes the artist’s trip to Rome in a way that could also describe Hosmer’s experience:
Alone in lodgings she studied, or paced the ancient city lost in dreams of an impersonal Past and a personal Future. She dwelt, absorbed on the glories of the Renaissance; she drank in the poetry, the pageantry, the haunting antiquity of her surroundings. The beauty of Italy satisfied her soul-hunger; the love of it was to leave her only with life itself.[1]
While in Italy, each artist so happened to arrive at the same subject in the same form: a sculpted bust of the famous Gorgon from classical myth, Medusa.
In a recent presentation, art historian Melissa Gustin argued that these works are not necessarily harbingers of the feminist transformation of Medusa that would occur over the twentieth century.[2] Much more, they each reflect careful attention to the artistic tradition that has generated many depictions of the classical Gorgon. Indeed, sculptures of Medusa are abundant across western art. This is obvious in Rome and Florence, where Hosmer and De Morgan would have viewed Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545-1554), Caravaggio’s Medusa (1597), the Medusa Head thought to be painted by Da Vinci (ca. 1600), and Bernini’s Medusa (1630). Much earlier, the gorgoneion, an apotropaic amulet showing Medusa’s head, was used widely as a decorative motif throughout ancient Greek art and architecture.[3] Hosmer and De Morgan would have been acquainted with each of these Medusas in various media as they developed their own renditions of the mythical figure.
The tradition of representing Medusa in art – particularly through sculpture and particularly by men – bears a certain irony, given that Medusa is, as Joseph Solodow describes her, “the most prolific creator of statuary,” the mythical woman who hardens men’s bodies into marble.[4] The link between Medusa’s ability to change heroic men into stone and the artistic creation of sculpture has its origin in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Medusa’s power is repeatedly described as a creative act. To represent Medusa as a statue, then, could mean to wield her power against her, to transform her into an object frozen in time. And this has become her fate, as the head of snaky curls and terrifying grimace has, despite its dangerous gaze, become one of the most recognizable symbols in the western imagination. Many of the biggest names in the western art tradition – Bernini, Caravaggio, Cellini – have flourished their artistic authority by petrifying the one who petrifies.
Given this transformation of Medusa through her artistic legacy, I am interested in how these nineteenth-century women’s works illuminate the creative Medusa as depicted by Ovid. In her new article, “‘Two Styles More Opposed’: Harriet Hosmer’s Classicisms between Winckelmann and Bernini,” Gustin warns against the tendency in scholarship to analyze women’s art through a biographical lens. Such a mode of interpretation often commits the same errors as the reviews by the artists’ contemporaries that would read patronizing, gender-driven analyses into their work. Rather than speculate on interior motives, then, I instead wish to consider how the artists and their artworks, by virtue of their connections to Ovid’s myths, participate in and shape the trajectory of Medusa’s metamorphic legacy. While I would not suggest that these two women artists manage to avoid petrifying Medusa as they sculpt her image, I am intrigued by the ways they enact Medusa’s precarious position as a female artist, operating in the complicated space of one who both petrifies and is petrified. Before reflecting on this further, I will demonstrate how Ovid presents Medusa’s creative agency in the Metamorphoses.
In The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Joseph Solodow demonstrates that prior to Ovid, Medusa’s ability to change men to stone had not been explicitly linked to the work of a sculptor:
That the statues are not intrinsic in the story of Medusa but special to this version we may confirm by comparison: Apollodorus nowhere refers to or hints at statuary in his handbook summary of the story (2.42–43), neither do Hyginus (Fab. 64) or the First Vatican Mythographer (74), nor does Claudian in an otherwise strikingly Ovidian account of how Minerva wielded the petrifying visage (Gigant. 91–113).[5]
Ovid draws Medusa’s powers into his larger exploration of the purpose of the artist and the metamorphic possibilities of art. Like Orpheus, Arachne, Pygmalion, and Philomela’s creations, Medusa’s changing of bodily forms into statuary parallels Ovid’s broad revision of past myths and literary forms.
The transformative quality of sculpture tends to intersect with one of the other major themes of metamorphosis in the poem: the malleability of women’s bodies. Female figures often transform, or appear to transform, into various kinds of sculpture. Punished for competing with the goddess Latona, Niobe finds all fourteen of her children struck down by the goddess’ son Apollo. Childless, Niobe transforms in her grief into a weeping statue; “even now tears flow from the marble.”[6] When Perseus found Andromeda chained to a rock, “he would have thought she was a marble statue, except that a light breeze stirred her hair, and warm tears ran from her eyes.”[7] The most famous of Ovid’s tales of female statuary is that of Pygmalion, who, repulsed by real women, crafts his ideal from marble and falls in love with his creation. Pygmalion’s whimsy becomes reality when he asks Venus to grant him a bride “like my ivory girl.”[8] Returning home from Venus’ altar, he embraces his statue, and “[t]he ivory yielded to his touch, and lost its hardness, altering under his fingers, as the bees’ wax of Hymettus softens in the sun, and is moulded, under the thumb, into many forms, made usable by use.”[9] Under pressure of a man’s ardent touch, a sculpted female body softens into a living, breathing woman. Pygmalion becomes the sculptor extraordinaire, his sculpture animated and entirely docile to his will.
Described as Pygmalion’s “dark double” by Caroline van Eck, Medusa petrifies where the male sculptor animates.[10] She reverses the dynamic of women changing into and from passive sculpture; with only her gaze she turns men into stone. In Book IV of the Metamorphoses, Perseus, Medusa’s slayer who uses her head as a weapon, tells her origin story and describes the area around her dwelling place as something of a statue garden: “[i]n the fields and along the paths, here and there, he saw the shapes of men and animals changed from their natures to hard stone by Medusa’s gaze.”[11] Later, when Perseus defeats Phineus’ hundred-man army using Medusa’s head as his weapon, the battle scene transforms into a sculpture gallery: “‘[f]ind others, who might be worried by your marvel’ said Thesculus, but as he prepared to throw his deadly javelin, he was frozen, like a marble statue, in the act”; Eryx, determined to knock Perseus and the Gorgon head to the ground, “had started his rush, but the floor held his feet fast, and there he stayed, unmoving stone, a fully-armed statue”; while Astyages gazed at the men-turned-statues, […] the same power transformed him, and he remained there with a wondering look on his marble face.” At last, “[a]s Phineus tried to avert his gaze, his neck hardened, and the tears on his cheeks were turned to stone. Now the frightened face, the suppliant expression, the submissive hands, and the slavish appearance, remained, in marble.”[12]
In changing bodies into statues, Medusa contributes to Ovid’s project of reshaping and subverting generic forms. All through the Metamorphoses, Ovid refigures the epic heroes of old, casting them as impulsive, weak, and often distracted from their primary tasks. In The Epic Gaze: Vision, Gender and Narrative in Ancient Epic, Helen Lovatt argues that “Ovid’s Perseid is the episode of the Metamorphoses in which the poem engages most vigorously with epic” (347). Lovatt demonstrates that “moments of humour ([Perseus’] wings are waterlogged, he almost forgets to fly when mesmerised by Andromeda), his unsympathetic portrayal and his eventual reliance on the head of Medusa to extricate him from an impossible battle all serve to problematise his heroism” (Lovatt 348). That Perseus relies on Medusa’s head to defeat his enemies subverts the paradigm of the epic male battle; the creative gaze of a woman supersedes masculine valor and brawn.
Medusa is indeed the archetypal female artist in the Metamorphoses, but it is often forgotten that her creativity occupies a precarious, ambivalent space. Though Medusa’s gaze turns men to stone in the real-time of the narrative, it is not the living Medusa that does so, but her decapitated head wielded by Perseus, “conqueror of the Gorgon with snakes for hair.”[13] Disembodied, Medusa figures only as an object serving Perseus in his quest. Scholarship equivocally comments on this limit to Medusa’s agency. Even as Solodow points to Medusa as the “most prolific creator of statuary,” he proceeds to refer to the statues as “Perseus’ victims.”[14] Medusa’s creative power may be unrivaled, but it is Perseus who ultimately captures and commandeers that power.
In fact, the living Medusa does not appear in the sequential narrative of the Metamorphoses at all; it is only through Perseus’ boasting tale that we learn of who she was before she became a disembodied head. Perseus explains,
She was once most beautiful, and the jealous aspiration of many suitors. Of all her beauties none was more admired than her hair: I came across a man who recalled having seen her. They say that Neptune, lord of the seas, violated her in the temple of Minerva. Jupiter’s daughter turned away, and hid her chaste eyes behind her aegis. So that it might not go unpunished, she changed the Gorgon’s hair to foul snakes. And now, to terrify her enemies, numbing them with fear, the goddess wears the snakes, that she created, as a breastplate.[15]
It is Perseus, Medusa’s victor, who discloses her story. Perseus learns that Medusa was once beautiful through a man who claims to have seen her. Furthermore, in his description of the event that caused Medusa’s transformation, Perseus appeals to a vague, pronounced authority: “[t]hey say that Neptune […] violated her.” Perseus, and by extension Ovid, attributes this aspect of her story to an earlier source, though the idea that she was raped appears to have been Ovid’s idea. The layering upon layering of (male) voices that disclose Medusa’s story buries our awareness of Medusa’s own experience of the events that befall her. This kind of silencing constitutes another pattern common among the characters whose bodies transform in the Metamorphoses. In the story of Apollo and Daphne, for instance, Daphne’s inability to speak for herself when she changes into a tree allows Apollo to interpret her position according to his own interests and to further objectify her, as he seizes her branches and weaves for himself a crown of victory. That Medusa lacks the voice to tell her own story is another suggestion that she is not entirely in control of her own creative power. And it is from this condition that Medusa’s transformation continues as artists use her power against her, freezing her in time so as to flourish their own creativity.
…
I was prompted to reflect on Medusa’s agency in the Metamorphoses as I began to study Hosmer and De Morgan’s Medusa busts. These nineteenth-century sculptures convey a Medusa locked in an enduring cultural tradition. Yet in their historical context, these works may also sit on the verge of a more liberated transformation. Hosmer and De Morgan, who each created multiple works representing Ovidian female figures in the early parts of their career, appear attuned to the malleability of Ovid’s female figures. Hosmer created her Medusa in tandem with another Ovidian sculpture, Daphne. As Gustin argues, the primary Ovidian theme of the two works is not only female victimization (“this is common enough in both Ovid and nineteenth century art as to be largely meaningless as a unique joining principle”), but more specifically the significance of sculpture in each woman’s transformation: “Medusa and Daphne transform because of the actions of a deity associated with the arts, Minerva and Apollo respectively, and their transformations lead directly to a proliferation of sculptural materials: stone for Medusa, wood for Daphne.”[16] De Morgan’s Cadmus and Harmonia (c. 1877), Ariadne in Naxos (c. 1877), Deianira (1878), and Medea (1889) take their inspiration from Ovid’s stories in the Metamorphoses and the Heroides. Each of these paintings centres the experiences of women who, in other classical texts, are often either vilified or silenced.
Both Hosmer and De Morgan’s Medusa busts capture a living, dignified female figure. Neither a grotesque monster nor Perseus’ object of victory, Medusa appears in each work as a living woman, nude, with snakes atop her graceful head. Hosmer’s bust is a high achievement of the neoclassical style. Gustin describes her own experience of the sculpture, noting that “she found it difficult, upon seeing the work for the first time, to refrain from touching the marble. The stone […] seems to absorb warmth and light like a densely woven velvet and becomes fleshier compared to the glinting polish of the hairband and sandy desert-adder scales of the lowly serpents.” Gustin also observes that “Medusa’s meltingly soft upward gaze refuses to meet the eye of the beholder – perhaps for their safety – and joined with the graceful twist of the neck to turn her cheek towards us, goes towards the application of the beautiful style.”[17] This remark suggests that this Medusa retains her creative ability; her upward gaze may signify a deliberate refusal to turn onlookers into stone. That the snakes in her hair are artfully arranged as a crown may also suggest Medusa’s ability to control her monstrous features, even to transform them into aesthetic attributes.
De Morgan’s Medusa looks downward, similarly refusing to look the viewer in the eye. While such a posture may similarly imply Medusa’s creativity agency, it also contributes to the tragic demeanor of this bust. Unlike Hosmer’s exquisite, professional marble, De Morgan’s Medusa is a heavy bronze, larger than life size. Turned to one side, Medusa appears contemplative, melancholy, resigned. Her mournful expression may signify her recollection of the rape (in Ovid’s version of her story) that caused her monstrosity in the first place. The simplicity of the bust prevents a substantial symbolic analysis, but the snake slithering across the woman’s breast may evoke Neptune’s rape of Medusa in Minerva’s temple. This type of imagery appears in William Morris’ Earthly Paradise, published only a decade earlier; in Morris’ tale, Medusa
moaned aloud, and shrieked in her despair:
Because the golden tresses of her hair
Were moved by writhing snakes from side to side,
That in their writhing oftentimes would glide
On to her breast, or shuddering shoulders white.[18]
Adrienne Munich argues that in this passage, “The snakes perpetually reenact her rape, her transformation from a virtuous maiden to an alluring monster.[19] There is a suggestion of this idea in De Morgan’s bronze, emphasized by the snake’s apparent movement in contrast to Medusa’s passive stillness. This Medusa seems caught in recollection, as though her monstrous transformation has become a constant reminder of the fateful day of her rape. Between these two busts, then, we can see an attentiveness to the two paradoxical elements in Ovid’s telling of Medusa’s story: her creative agency and her subjugation.
The Medusa was Hosmer’s first commissioned work.[20] Hosmer created it during her time in Rome, where she belonged to a transatlantic circle of women artists embarking upon uncharted territory as they pursued professional careers as sculptresses. De Morgan’s Medusa work appears to have been an educational experiment, one that showcases her developing grasp of the artistic tradition she was studying in Italy. Both Medusa busts demonstrate simultaneously the women’s engagements with earlier artistic traditions and their early forays into the contemporary art world. In this way, they echo Ovid’s endeavour to establish artistic authority through engagement with existing myths and traditions. As Gustin mentioned in her presentation on Evelyn de Morgan’s Medusa, an analogy can also be made between Medusa and the growing movement of women artists who begin to claim the authority to view human bodies and render them in stone.[21]
I suggest that this analogy is more potent when we consider the objectification these women faced as artists working in a male-dominated field. Victorian women artists were regularly viewed as art objects beside their creations by tourists visiting their studios. In A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome, Melissa Dabakis shows that in an engraving of Hosmer in her studio, the artist “is as much the center of attention – a spectacle for the touring classes – as her sculptural work,” posed on a stage-like podium in front of an audience, her clothing and figure feminized and idealized in contrast to her real-life “boyish” demeanor.[22] For Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor of mixed African American and Chippewa heritage, this treatment bore racial implications. Margaret Farrand Thorp notes that the tourists who visited Lewis’ studio “thought her a picturesque figure with her Negro features and straight black Indian hair and they were fascinated by the contrast of her black hands working the white marble.”[23] To her audience, the sculptor became an object in her own exhibit. As Dabakis argues, “[a]t the intersection of artistic production, femininity, and the market, their studios were popular destinations; the artists and their sculptures, commodities to be consumed by the touristic eye.”[24]
I am still working out what all of this means for our cultural understanding of Medusa. The feminist Medusa of the last few decades has tended to pivot on her two paradoxical natures proposed by Ovid: she is a victim of sexual assault; she is a powerful creative goddess. The Medusa developed by Victorian women, as I explored in my master’s thesis and continue to ruminate upon, seems to be a cloudier, subdued engagement with the complexities of Ovid’s tale, and with the broader conceptions of the Medusa myth. In response to the histrionically seductive, villainous, Eve-like Medusas highlighted in the wider Victorian imagination, Victorian women including Hosmer and De Morgan certainly cast Medusa in a gentler, more dignified light, as do a few male artists and poets like Shelley and Morris. Yet Hosmer and De Morgan, by virtue of their own precarious yet successful careers as women artists, remind us also of the nuances of Medusa’s story. She is an artist, yes, but her creative power is constrained as men use it against her. She is a victim, but through her suffering she receives newfound strength and meaning. The perpetual cycle of these two natures prevents the possibility of our defining Medusa once and for all; nevertheless, continuing to uncover how our forebears, particularly women, have made sense of this cycle, may bring us closer to hearing her voice.
Endnotes
[1] Wilhelmina Stirling, William De Morgan and His Wife. (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1922), 185. Internet Archive.
[2] Melissa Gustin, “’A Nauseating Lissomness’: Evelyn De Morgan, Rome, and the Snake,” De Morgan Foundation, January 2022.
[3] Madeleine Glennon, “Medusa in Ancient Greek Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 2017, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/medu/hd_medu.htm
[4] Joseph B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 204.
[5] Solodow, 205.
[6] Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by A.S. Kline. University of Virginia Library, 2000, https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Ovhome.htm, VI.312.
[7] Ovid, IV.700.
[8] Ovid, X.270.
[9] Ovid, X.275–76.
[10] Caroline van Eck, “The Sublime and the “The Petrifying Gaze of Medusa: Ambivalence, Ekplexis, and the Sublime,” JHNA, vol. 8, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 6, 7. DOI:10.5092/jhna.2016.8.2.3
[11] Ovid, IV. 776-803.
[12] Ovid, V.198-199, 203-205, 232-235.
[13] Ovid, IV.701.
[14] Solodow, 205.
[15] Ovid, IV.790-803.
[16] Gustin, “‘Two Styles More Opposed’: Harriet Hosmer’s Classicisms between Winckelmann and Bernini,” Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures, no. 6 (December 31, 2021): 6. https://doi.org/10.21825/jolcel.v6i0.11801.
[17] Gustin, “‘Two Styles More Opposed,’” 6.
[18] Morris, 259.
[19] Munich, 203.
[20] William H. Gerdts, “The Medusa of Harriet Hosmer,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 56, no. 2 (1978): 99.
[21] Gustin, “’A Nauseating Lissomness’: Evelyn De Morgan, Rome, and the Snake.”
[22] Melissa Dabakis. A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome. (Penn State University Press, 2014), 65. https://doi.org/10.5325/j.ctv14gp0r7.5.
[23] Margaret Farrand Thorp, “The White, Marmorean Flock,” The New England Quarterly 32, no. 2 (1959): 164. https://doi.org/10.2307/362550.
[24] Dabakis, 63.