My Latin and Greek teacher was very passionate about her job. She loved what she taught and she managed to transmit her passion for the Latin and Greek classics even to those students in my class who didn't seem to be so interested in these subjects.
I must admit that the high amount of gore, murders and other assorted violent acts featured in some of the texts analysed was probably what generated an interest in many of my schoolfellows, and, while not all of us were performing well when asked to translate philosophical texts, we were all perfectly able to make theories and conjectures about the bloodiest tragedies or the most bizarre mythological stories.
I remember I had developed a serious and almost incurable addiction for Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Thyestes (and used to annoyingly going around showing verse by verse where and how Shakespeare had pilfered Seneca's works...), while most of us were fascinated by specific characters such as Medusa.
Who could indeed resist a female monster with snakes for hair and the power of turning to stone whoever looked at her?
To our eyes Medusa was the perfect human oxymoron: she was terrifyingly beautiful and attractive, in a nutshell, in our imagination, jealous Athena had done her a favour transforming her into a repulsive creature (as Ovid recounted).
In fact, while we felt rather angry with Perseus for beheading her, after she died Medusa seemed to turn into an even more powerful monster.
Two creatures were indeed generated from her severed head, Pegasus and Chrysaor, while her blood spilling on seaweed gave life to the Red Sea corals and the poisonous vipers of the Sahara.
Medusa’s image inspired many artists, but also turned into a subject of psychoanalytic and feminist studies that projected on this legendary character different meanings.
The character became indeed a symbol of the castrating woman, a femme fatale endowed with dangerously lethal powers representing rage or an hybrid monster conceived as a metaphor for gender ambiguity.
One of the earliest and best representations of Medusa as a powerful and scary woman is the portrait of Mrs Edward Mayer as Medusa by Madame Yevonde.
The pioneer of colour in portrait photography and an admirer of surrealist artists such as Man Ray, Madame Yevonde took this photograph in the mid-30s as part of her exhibition entitled “Goddesses and Others” and she picked Mrs Edward Mayer since her eyes had the strangest and most intense blue.
In Yevonde’s imagination, Medusa was a cold voluptuary sadist and it proved somehow difficult to represent this mythological character well, first and foremost because it was rather hard to find the perfect make up needed.
Madame Yevonde's friends made adders in black tape and wire, but they weren’t convincing enough, then one day, the photographer found a few rubber green snakes with a hole in their tails for inflation and a friend fashioned a headdress out of them.
"Having thus perfected the snakes, we painted the lips of Medusa a dull purple and made her face chalk-white,” Yevonde wrote in her 1940 biography In camera. “The background was vaguely sinister and unevenly lit and over one light I put a green filter. The effect was excellent.”
Decades later Cindy Sherman showed a different representation of this legendary character, a scary and perverted visions of Medusa with an alarmingly looking vagina, while for the May 1993, issue of Harper's Bazaar, the artist used some designs from the 1993 Spring/Summer collections to create ambiguous characters, among them also a bored Medusa with a protruding belly.
In fashion the most obvious representation of Medusa is the familiar logo for Gianni Versace's house.
An almost obvious choice for Versace, a designer fascinated by classical art and architecture, the Medusa figure in this logo is a twisted representation of the fierce and scary character.
Apart from evoking the repulsive fascination of the monstrous
becoming desirable, Medusa represents in this case a kitsch metaphor, an almost over-glamorous prostitute, an oxymoronic combination of good and bad, elegant and redundant, the perfect symbol for looking and being looked at.
In recent times we have seen technologically advanced representations of this mythological character on the big screen with Uma Thurman starring as a modern Medusa in The Lightning Thief while in fashion the physical features of this character have somehow been disembodied and transformed into prints and accessories.
Dresses with prints of California Mountain Kingsnakes that seemed to be writhing on the models' bodies (crisscrossed by sadomasochistic leather straps) appeared in Alexander McQueen's A/W 2009-10 collection that, you may remember, also featured oversized knitwear designs coiling around the neck or piled up on the heads of the models in perfect snake-style.
Lanvin included instead in the Spring/Summer 2010 collection metal snake necklaces decorated with crystals and semi-precious stones.
Maybe focusing on just one part of the character - that is the snakes - is a way to exorcise the frighteningly attractive yet perverse ambiguity of the Medusa character.
Yet I think it would be very intriguing to see where new fashion representations of this character, of her powers and of the metaphors connected with her would lead us.
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