4.9/5
Caravaggio, a Shield, and the Face He Gave Medusa
A severed head screams from the middle of a round shield. Snakes twist where the hair should be. The mouth hangs open and the eyes are wide. This is Medusa, painted by Caravaggio around 1597. [1] The support is not a flat canvas at all: it is canvas laid over a convex wooden shield. [1]
Caravaggio caught the instant right after the blow. Blood still runs from the neck. [2] The face is lit hard from the left, so the cheek and the open mouth glow against a flat green-brown ground. Everything else falls into shadow.
The face is his own. Caravaggio painted himself as the dying Gorgon, which let him look straight out at a viewer that the myth says should be turning to stone. [1] A shield that is meant to protect carries the head of the monster whose stare killed.
A Cardinal's Gift to the Grand Duke of Tuscany
Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte ordered the work. [1] It was meant as a present for Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. [1] A painted parade shield was a court object, made to sit among armour rather than hang on a wall.
Caravaggio painted this subject twice. The earlier one is known as the Murtula and stayed in private hands; it carries the signature Michel A F, while the later shield is unsigned. [1] The curved surface was not only practical. Painting the head on something convex pushes the face forward, toward whoever leans in. [2]
The shield is in Florence today, at the Uffizi Galleries, where it sits in its own case against a large red panel. [2] Caravaggio's hard light and blunt realism run through the rest of his work as well, and through the wider Baroque painting we reproduce — the same lit figure against swallowing dark that you meet in his John the Baptist and in the Basket of Fruit, where the drama is only fruit and a wall.
Choosing the Size of Your Medusa for a Wall at Home
Our painters copy this head by hand, in oil, on museum-grade linen canvas, stroke after stroke. The picture is square, so it hangs well alone on a narrow stretch of wall where a landscape format would fight the space. Prices start at $350.
Seven sizes are listed on this page. If none of them suits the wall you have in mind, the painting can be made to a size you give us, including the proportion of the original shield. Caravaggio is one of the artists in our hand-painted Caravaggio reproductions, itself part of the hundred most famous paintings we paint to order.
