In 1598, the Medusa by Caravaggio, today in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, was donated to the Duke of Tuscany Ferdinando de Medici by Cardinal del Monte. The cultivated Cardinal, true discoverer of Caravaggio’s talent and ambassador of the Medici family in Rome, knew that the Duke would have particularly appreciated the ancient Ovidian subject. The myth of Perseus slaying the head of Medusa, the monstruous Gorgon with the power to turn humans into stone through eye contact, had been effectively incorporated (from Leonardo da Vinci to Benvenuto Cellini) into Florentine iconography. Medusa had become the subject of poets who made Caravaggio’s painting a true protagonist of the paragone debate, the discussion about the comparison among the arts. It was not the first time Caravaggio tried to show the superiority of painting over sculpture, especially in its evocative sisterhood with poetry. In this lecture we will not only explore the tradition, meaning, iconography and affectivity of Medusa, but we will also try to explore how Caravaggio could have technically painted the Gorgon with the help of a mirror.

Paolo Alei is an art historian from Rome. He is Professor of art history at the University of California (the UCEAP academic program in Italy) and Curator of the Museum of the Castle of Bracciano near Rome. He has a Master from Columbia University where he specialized on Venetian Renaissance Painting and a PhD from Oxford University where he completed a dissertation on the influence of the Natural History by Pliny the Elder on Italian Renaissance art. He has published several essays on Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, and a book on the history of the Venice Carnival. Recently, he coedited a monumental book about the patronage of the Orsini family in Central Italy. He is co-organizer of EMR (Early Modern Rome), one of the greatest conferences about Renaissance and Baroque culture.