Figure 3. Antonio Canova, Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1804–1806). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1927.

      For Foster, the vanquishing of Medusa is nothing less than the foundation of art. He calls the scene of Perseus’s encounter with the gorgon the “ur-painting, an originary model of art,” taking Antonio Canova’s rendering in Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1804–1806) as his primary example (fig. 3).³² In Canova’s sculpture, the hero stands contrapposto, his left hand holding aloft Medusa’s head, to see it directly for the first time. Her body is nowhere to be seen. His shoulders are relaxed, though in his right hand the sword is still slightly raised; this combination of tumescence and release suggests an immediately postcoital moment.³³ The deed is done, and Perseus appears to be admiring his conquest. In this scene, repeated countless times in the history of Western art, Foster sees the genesis for the model of all art: Perseus’s vanquishing of the gorgon is the triumph of art over feminized nature.³⁴

      To decapitate Medusa is Perseus’s destiny—Adriana Cavarero reminds us that the name Perseus means “he who cuts”³⁵—and the scene stages, for Foster, the central conflict within art. He adopts Nietzschean terminology to describe how the Apollonian forces associated with order and rationality, aligned with Perseus, conquer the unruly Dionysian forces of nature, assigned to Medusa: “Perseus-Apollo triumphant” stands over “Medusa-Dionysus subdued.”³⁶ Perseus, in his victory, affirms the capability of art to bring order and purpose to nature. Foster associates Medusa with the threatening force of reality, understood in terms of Lacan’s theory of the real. As with the staging of Perseus/Apollo versus Medusa/Dionysus, the symbolic order is opposed to the real, which precedes and exceeds it. Art negates and mediates the real, and so has the effect of taming it.³⁷ Perseus’s mirror screens and screens out—it shows, but also filters—the appearance of Medusa, so that her deadly force is mitigated, if not entirely repressed. The real, meanwhile, invariably threatens. Foster writes: “the uncivilized is not eradicated … because the symbolic order also requires the power of the uncivilized, or the power that is projected there.”³⁸ The gorgoneion loses its gender in the process. It comes into being independent of any original female body, simply as a symbolic object of male conquest: a “prized trophy.”³⁹

      Once severed from the body, the Medusan visage becomes a weapon mounted to Athena’s shield, and the emblem of the goddess’s military might. Medusa is no longer nature, but nature repurposed: as art and ornament, and, closely related to it, as an object invested in creating and maintaining civilizational order.⁴⁰ This fulfills what Foster identifies as art’s apotropaic mission: to ward off those irrational forces by appropriating them for a different purpose: “this apotropaic transformation of weapon into shield is fundamental to art, perhaps its originary purpose.”⁴¹ This is manifest in the gorgoneion, a seemingly genderless object (insofar as gender has been sublimated) that is no longer suggestive of the body to which it was once attached. In Canova’s sculpture and Foster’s account, the body has disappeared altogether.

      For Foster, the force of the repressed real lingers in the power of the gorgoneion, somehow preserved and harnessed there. There is still more conspicuous evidence of this repression of the bodily remains of Medusa in a completely different sculpture, Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545). Here the scene is not as sanitized, and the traces of violence have not been as thoroughly scrubbed away. Though Foster makes passing reference to Cellini’s work, he does not comment on its chief difference with Canova’s rendering—namely, the use of Medusa’s headless body as the sculpture’s base (fig. 4). Cellini and Canova offer strikingly divergent depictions of the same scene. While the hero shares the same pose, counterbalanced with the head of Medusa held out by his left hand, sword cocked in the right, the sculptures’ differences are significant. In contrast with the clean, neo-classical base of Canova’s sculpture, Cellini’s mannerist rendering shows the hero standing atop the grotesque remainder of Medusa’s body. Curled rivulets of blood stream out from her open neck, matching the ones dripping from her bodiless head. This is a moment of reflexivity: Michael Cole interprets the blood that is so realistically dripping from Medusa’s severed neck as a figure for the sculpture’s poured bronze.⁴² Though her face is expressionless in death, her body is dynamically convulsed in reaction: her torso twisted, her body curled into a tight ring, and on her left hand, the index finger half-extended, as if to identify and incriminate Perseus for his terrible deed. Canova’s work, by contrast, keeps Perseus’s feet planted on a clean and even floor, and instead of blood pouring from her severed neck, his Medusa shows no neck at all, its chin instead neatly collared by a few coiled snakes. Where in Cellini the head maintains a visceral connection to the body that forms its base, in Canova, the head is already the gorgoneion, the face alone. Foster, we see, has selected as the basis of his aesthetic theory a moment of the myth where the woman’s body has been decisively carted offstage. Cellini’s sculpture posits a counter-narrative, where the underlying material of art keeps its gender.

      The literary practice of ekphrasis, as discussed by Mitchell in his reading of Shelley’s poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” (1819), would seem to be far removed from the dynamic of gender and materiality in film. Yet ekphrasis offers an instructive counterexample for an artistic medium’s distancing and protective functions, which are relevant to the play of repression and sublimation of film vis-à-vis its materiality. Ekphrasis does not replicate the visual in its own terms as does, by comparison, a photograph of a painting. Rather, it sublimates an artistic image into descriptive language, and therefore is a practice of dematerialization. The Medusa myth as read by Mitchell animates issues of aesthetic origin, gender, and materiality. Here the threat posed by Medusa remains in anxious proximity to an ineliminable but also unincorporable presence. Not surprisingly, this problematic turns around the nonrepresentation of a woman’s body.