The earliest portrayals of Medusa show a grotesque part human, part animal creature with wings and boar-like tusks. By the fifth century BCE, that figure from Greek myth began to morph into an alluring seductress, shaped by the idealization of the body in Greek art. Her writhing hair of serpents became wild curls, with maybe a couple of serpents beneath her chin to hint at her more bestial origins. Today Medusa, with her snake hair and stare that turns people to stone, endures as an allegorical figure of fatal beauty, or a ready image for superimposing the face of a detested woman in power. For more often than not, she’s depicted just as a severed head — a visual that even has its own name, the Gorgoneion — sculpted, painted, or carved being held aloft by her slayer Perseus. [...] “Medusa, in effect, became the archetypal femme fatale: a conflation of femininity, erotic desire, violence, and death,” writes Kiki Karoglou, associate curator in the Met’s Department of Greek and Roman Art and organizer of Dangerous Beauty, in an issue of the Met’s quarterly Bulletin on the show. “Beauty, like monstrosity, enthralls, and female beauty in particular was perceived — and, to a certain extent, is still perceived — to be both enchanting and dangerous, or even fatal.”
Allison Meier, The Beauty and Horror of Medusa, an Enduring Symbol of Women’s Power
