Showing posts with label Perseus and Andromeda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Perseus and Andromeda. Show all posts

Blood of Medusa

Bob Georgeson, Blood of Medusa, 2012, Digital photo.

Bit of a lull in posts this week as the artistry of mother nature takes centre stage. Violent storms and huge swells make art and ideas seem somewhat irrelevant. And how invigorating it is for the soul to be at close hand on a deserted beach where the sound of wind and surf make conversation pointless (maybe it always is!). Occasionally coral is found after such storms. Reminded me of an earlier post about its origins in the story of Perseus and Andromeda from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Even though there are spectacular rocks where I live Andromeda was nowhere to be found. I will keep looking...

Perseus and Andromeda

By way of contrast to the complexity, subtlety and mystery inherent in Olympia, Giorgio Vasari's Perseus and Andromeda (or Story of the origin of coral) is a classic example of Renaissance pseudo-eroticism...

Giorgio Vasari, Perseus and Andromeda, 1550-52, oil on slate, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

What is going on here? Beheadings, bondage, bathing nymphs, exhibitionism, lesbianism, drownings, sea monsters. Never meant for public view this painting appears a veritable feast or perversions, or is it? Originally designed as a door to a cupboard whose contents would be in some way related to the subject matter (perhaps a collection of coral which was seen as a good luck charm), it is in fact illustrating the myth as told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. Perseus...

...made a bed
Of leaves and spread the soft weed of the sea
Above, and on it placed Medusa's head.
The fresh seaweed, with living spongy cells, 
Absorbed the Gorgon's power and at its touch
Hardened, its fronds and branches stiff and strange.
The sea-nymphs tried the magic on more weed
And found to their delight it worked the same,
And sowed the changeling seeds back on the waves.
Coral still keeps that nature: in the air
It hardens; what beneath the sea has grown
A swaying plant, above it, turns to stone....
Then to his heart he took Andromeda,
Undowered, she herself his valour's prize.