
In 1782, Leonardo da Vinci's biographer Luigi Lanzi, while making a search for his paintings in the Uffizi, discovered a depiction of Medusa's head, which he erroneously attributed to Leonardo, based on an account by Vasari. As late as 1868, Walter Pater (in The Renaissance) singled out Medusa as one of the most arresting works by Leonardo. In the 20th century, Bernard Berenson and other art critics argued against Leonardo's authorship of the Uffizi painting. It is now believed to be a work of an anonymous Flemish painter, active in the 1600s. However, erroneous the attribution,
the painting produced Shelley’s memorable poem.
On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the
Florentine Gallery
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the
cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its
horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.
Yet it is less the horror than the grace
Which
turns the gazer's spirit into stone;
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are
graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
'Tis the
melodious hue of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.
And from its head as from one body grow,
As [ ] grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and
flow
And their
long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions shew
Their
mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.
And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps
idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense,
has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he
comes hastening like a moth that hies
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.
'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from
the serpents gleams a brazen glare
Kindled by that inextricable error, 35
Which
makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror
Of all
the beauty and the terror there—
A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,
Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.
painters and poets
ekphrastic
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