The Gorgoneion: Medusa's Head as a Shield Against Evil

The face of the Gorgon, with staring eyes, protruding tongue and snakes in place of hair, is one of the most widespread motifs in Greek art. The ancients called it the gorgoneion and placed it on shields, temples, coins, vases and jewellery. Its function was clear: to repel evil with the same gaze that, according to myth, turned to stone anyone who met it, turning against enemies a power born to destroy.

The myth of Medusa

Hesiod, in the Theogony, tells that the Gorgons were three sisters, Stheno, Euryale and Medusa, and that only Medusa was mortal. The hero Perseus beheaded her with the help of Athena and Hermes, avoiding looking at her directly. From her neck sprang the winged horse Pegasus and Chrysaor. Perseus then used the head as a weapon and finally gave it to Athena, who set it on her aegis. The versions of the myth vary in detail from one author to another.

Already in the Iliad the shield of Agamemnon bears at its centre the grim-faced Gorgon, “glaring terribly”, and the aegis of Athena carries her head. The motif was therefore familiar from the Archaic age, and its presence on the weapons of Homeric heroes anticipates the protective use it would have for centuries. Heracles too, in the Shield attributed to Hesiod, is described with armour on which the Gorgons appear in flight, pursuing Perseus.

From monster to beauty

The Archaic gorgoneion, in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, is grotesque: a broad, flat face, tusks, a tongue sticking out of the mouth, sometimes a beard. A famous example is the great Gorgon on the pediment of the temple of Artemis at Corfu, around 580 BC. During the fifth century the face softens, and in the Hellenistic age Medusa becomes a young woman with a beautiful, melancholy face, as in the so-called Medusa Rondanini, known from a Roman copy in the Glyptothek in Munich.

An amulet for warriors and houses

The Gorgon's head appeared on shields and breastplates. In the Alexander Mosaic, found at Pompeii in the House of the Faun, the Macedonian king wears a gorgoneion on his cuirass. Antefixes with the face of Medusa adorned the roofs of temples and houses in Greece, Magna Graecia and Etruria, ideally protecting the buildings. Pendants, cameos and medallions with the gorgoneion were worn as personal amulets in the Roman period too, in gold, silver and hardstones.

Some Athenian wine cups of the sixth century BC, known as eye cups, also carried a gorgoneion on the inner floor: the drinker saw it appear as he emptied the cup, in a play between the pleasure of the symposium and a threatening gaze. The eyes painted on the outside of the cup heightened its protective value.

The legacy of the face

The gorgoneion did not vanish with the pagan world. It appears in late antique mosaics and on Byzantine gems, and in modern times it was revived as a decorative motif in palaces and the applied arts, from the Renaissance to Neoclassicism. Sicily took as its emblem the Trinacria, the head from which three legs radiate, with a face at its centre derived from that of the Gorgon.

Few symbols better illustrate ancient apotropaic logic. What is terrible is captured, put at the service of its bearer and turned outwards: the gaze that petrified becomes a shield, and the defeated monster is transformed into the most faithful of guardians. The same reversal can be found in many other figures of ancient art.