2025 № 1 (52)
The Terrible Face of Eternity: The Screaming and Numbing Mask of Medusa
UDC 73
LBC 85.133
DOI: 10.51678/2226-0072-2025-1-156-183
For cit.: Vershinina A.Yu. The Terrible Face of Eternity: The Screaming and Numbing Mask of Medusa. Hudozhestvennaya kul’tura [Art & Culture Studies], 2025, no. 1, pp. 156–183. https://doi.org/10.51678/2226-0072-2025-1-156-183. (In Russian)
Vershinina Alla Yu.
PhD (in Art History), Senior Researcher, Modern and Contemporary Art Department, State Institute for Art Studies, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Art Studies Journal, 5 Kozitsky Lane, Moscow, 125375, Russia
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7849-5347
ResearcherID: ABT-7060-2022
The Terrible Face of Eternity: The Screaming and Numbing Mask of Medusa
Abstract. The focus of the article is the plot of the transformation of the horrible screaming gorgon Medusa into impassive and silent, singled out from many aspects of the archetypal image studied in the special art history literature. On this transformation path, the Medusa mask loses its apotropaic functions and profanes its iconic and emblematic component, instead acquiring ‘added meanings’ — artistic, aesthetic, and ethical meanings (inversion, allegorism, symbolisation, suffering, voicelessness, detachment, impassivity, etc.), as well as paraphilosophical (hermeticism, Saturnianism, infernality, existentialism) and socio-political ones (propaganda, otherness, hostility, appeal), initiated by this or that epoch according to the corresponding interests. This turn occurs in early modernity and can be considered a marker of the cultural processes of the Modern Age which has the form of a series of coherent plastic formulas that entered the lexicon of modernism.
Keywords: mask, gorgon Medusa, archetype, gorgoneion, apotropaei, horror, scream, suffering, silence, impassivity
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Received 23.07.2024
Accepted 08.08.2024
