Self, Beauty and Horror: Shelley’s Medusa Moment

Abstract

Shelley’s On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery has always been something of an odd-man-out among his poems. He probably drafted it at the end of 1819, but when he drowned two and a half years later he still had not bothered to fine-tune it and supply the two missing words. Mary, however, thought highly of it, and included it in her first collection of his works, Posthumous Poems (1824). At the time of its conception, the Shelleys were living in Florence and, having just finished The Cenci and, as he thought then, Prometheus Unbound, Shelley was much engrossed in the contemplation of classical sculpture, not of painting. He seems, indeed, never to have been deeply taken with Renaissance painting or sculpture. Given his keener responsiveness to sculpture, one would expect that the Florentine Medusa head most likely to catch his creative eye would be the one held by Cellini’s beautiful Perseo in the Loggia dei Lanzi, too close to the Uffizi for Shelley to miss it, and too near in name not to chime in his ear. Yet it was the painting, then attributed to Leonardo, that inspired his finest pictorial poem.