Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan Page B

species have a considerable fear of snakes. “The west coast of Tanzania has lots of really dangerous snakes. Cobras, black mambas, green mambas are everywhere,” explains primatologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf, director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. “People always ask me, ‘Don’t you ever worry about stepping on them?’ and I always say no, because I follow the chimpanzees and they just seem to know to avoid them. When the chimpanzees see snakes, they climb a tree and make a very specific vocalization that sounds like a questioning ‘hoo’ while staring intently in the direction of the snake. All of us in the field learn the call real fast.”
    So why are snakes in Medusa’s hair? Because snakes are immediately recognized as a potential threat and generate fear that naturally weaves its way into monster mythology.
Medusa modernized
    Whether the concept of Medusa was scary to ancient humans is not much of a question. If people believed that fossils were the result of her actions and if the feelings associated with psychogenic shock were related to what they believed becoming petrified must feel like, then she would have seemed like a real threat.
    During the long journey from the days of the ancient Greeks to modern times, Medusa is never forgotten. She is often depicted in art, with particularly famous presentations of her hideousness by Michelangelo Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Benvenuto Cellini, and even Pablo Picasso. But was she frightening to these artists?
    Cellini’s sculpture shows the hero Perseus, who slew Medusa, holding her severed head in victory. She is not alive and threatening but decapitated. In Rubens’s painting her snakes are hissing frantically as the blood pours from her neck, and Caravaggio’s Medusa hasa perfectly human face, admittedly ringed with snakes, that looks distressed. Her expression almost stirs a sense of pity. The decapitation is gross, but it isn’t really scary or threatening. A painting could easily have been made showing Medusa about to attack Perseus or fighting with him in the shadows, ready to gaze into his eyes, but such works were never made. This is not to say that ancient art never showed her beheaded. Many works did present Perseus victorious, but they were balanced out by art showing Medusa and her sisters alive and dangerous. That from the Renaissance onward, Medusa is always shown as beheaded, beaten, and dying hints that while she continued to be a fascinating subject for artists to paint and sculpt, she was no longer a widely feared monster. In contrast, Medusa’s decapitated head remained an object of fascination and, arguably, fear.
    Medusa, by Caravaggio. Oil on wood covered with canvas, 1570–1610. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY.
    Late in the mythology surrounding Medusa, Perseus went on to marry the princess Andromeda, and during their ceremony a jealous suitor named Phineus 35 led an attack to claim Andromeda for himself. Phineus was a tough opponent and the battle was fierce, but it was never one that he was going to win. Aside from the fact that Perseuswas part god, he was carrying around Medusa’s severed head in a silk bag. 36 As Phineus lunged at the couple with his sword, Perseus shoved Medusa’s head in his face, turning him and his minions to stone. Many artists from the Renaissance and later periods painted this scene, including Jean-Marc Nattier, Sebastiano Ricci, and Luca Giordano, and most made the transformation of Phineus’s flesh from a healthy pink to a lifeless stone gray a focus of their work. In Ricci’s art, men hold up shields to reflect the horrific sight, some lose their balance, and many are frozen in place as they attack. Similarly, in Nattier’s painting, men scramble to hide their eyes from the petrifying gaze of the dead monster. There is an obvious sense of desperation that hints at