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Lauren Roussillon
Université de Grenoble

' "Aspecta Medusa": the Many Faces of Medusa in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Art'

The excavations of Pompeii in the 18th century that led to the discovery of colourful mosaics and frescoes illustrating the myths of Ovid fuelled both the Romantic and Victorian imagination, an influence that we are able to identify in the pre-Raphaelites' reinterpretation of these myths in their poetry and painting. This paper focuses on the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and analyses the way in which he borrows certain aspects of the story of Medusa from classical antiquity to create his own version of the myth. As early as 1868, Rossetti, commissioned by C.P. Mathews, endeavoured to paint a picture of Perseus and Andromeda in which Perseus, having slain the Gorgon, holds the severed head over a fountain so that Andromeda might safely consider its reflection. Although the project was abandoned shortly afterwards, the poet nevertheless wrote a sonnet, Aspecta Medusa, in which he explores the meaning of Perseus' act of showing Andromeda "the baleful head", as Burne-Jones was to refer to it. Starting from a close analysis of the sonnet, the paper will move on to show how in Rossetti's hands Medusa first appears to be not only a descendant of Eve but an actual femme fatale, who later becomes a paradigm of the New Woman that emerges towards the end of the Victorian age. Embodying fear and desire, his Medusa/Lilith figures are indeed variations of the Eternel Féminin. In Rossetti's work, however, the Medusa myth ultimately reveals how classical mythology operates as a kind of kaleidoscope through which reality may be perceived and mediated. Gazing out from its prominent position on Athena's shield, the mask of Medusa offers to the Victorian viewer a new form of vision liberated from the limitations of morality.