Coral: from Medusa's blood to childhood amulets
Red coral in the myth of Perseus, in Pliny, in medieval lapidaries and in fifteenth-century painting: the history of a Mediterranean amulet.
Few materials have accompanied the history of Mediterranean amulets for as long as red coral, which grows on rocky seabeds from Sardinia to Tunisia. For the ancients it was a puzzle: a soft plant under water that, once brought up, seemed to harden like stone. This ambiguous nature, halfway between the vegetable and the mineral kingdoms, made it an object full of meaning, which passed over the centuries from ancient tombs to Renaissance paintings and to the little horns still sold today.
The myth of Perseus and the Gorgon's head
Ovid, in the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, tells the origin of coral with a famous image. After freeing Andromeda, Perseus lays Medusa's head on a bed of seaweed; the sea plants absorb the Gorgon's power and turn to stone. The nymphs, amused, repeat the marvel with other twigs and scatter their seeds in the sea. Ever since, the poet concludes, coral hardens on contact with the air. The tale linked the red stone to a power able to overcome the gaze that kills.
Pliny and the protection of childhood
In the thirty-second book of the Natural History, Pliny the Elder devotes detailed pages to coral. He records that sprigs were hung around children's necks because they were believed to protect them. He also reports that the Gauls decorated swords, shields and helmets with coral, and that in India, where it was prized as highly as pearls were in Rome, soothsayers and seers regarded it as a sacred amulet against danger. Indian demand was so great, he notes, that coral was becoming rare where it was gathered.
This tradition crossed the Middle Ages without a break. Marbod of Rennes, in his Liber lapidum, credits coral with the power to keep lightning, storms and evil influences away from fields and homes, and the motif returns in later lapidaries. These were widespread beliefs, recorded by scholars as part of the inherited tradition and handed down together with the mythological tales.
Coral in Renaissance painting
In fifteenth-century Italian art coral often appears beside the Christ Child. In Piero della Francesca's Brera Altarpiece the sleeping Child wears a string of coral around his neck; in Andrea Mantegna's Madonna of Victory, now in the Louvre, a large branch hangs above the Virgin's throne. These details joined a domestic custom well known to contemporaries, the amulet hung around a newborn's neck, to a religious meaning: the red recalled the blood of the Passion.
At the same time a refined craft developed. In Trapani, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, workshops produced nativity scenes, crucifixes and liturgical objects in coral and gilded copper, while in Torre del Greco coral working became a thriving industry in the nineteenth century. Coral was also carved into the little hands, horns and small pendants that the popular culture of southern Italy associated with defence against the evil eye.
Coral thus tells a story of long continuity: from Ovid's myth to Pliny's encyclopaedic prose, from medieval lapidaries to Renaissance canvases. In every age its protective value rested on belief, not on proven properties. Today we know it is a colony of tiny marine animals, protected by fishing regulations, and coral is above all evidence of how shape, colour and mysterious origin could turn a living organism into a symbol.