Perseo y Medusa

Title: Perseus and Medusa Reimagined

This digital painting emerges as a response to Benvenuto Cellini’s Renaissance sculpture Perseus with the Head of Medusa—the classic image of the triumphant hero, body resolute, sword raised, trophy in hand. But in my version, that scene no longer signifies glory: it becomes a wound.

Here, the story unravels and opens up: Medusa is not a vanquished monster, but a woman turned into one because she was raped. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Medusa was violated by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Athena’s reaction was not to punish the aggressor, but the victim—transforming her into a feared being, condemned to live in isolation, cast as the monstrous Other. This mythic injustice, far from belonging only to the past, still speaks to us today with a harshness we must refuse to normalize.

We remain immersed in a patriarchal culture where the masculine dominates the feminine as if it were an inherited custom. Forms may change, but the essence remains: power still bears a male face, and when women raise their voices, they are doubted. Centuries later, being a woman still carries risk: many feel afraid to speak, afraid they won’t be believed, afraid of judgment or retaliation by those who harmed them. And often, that fear silences them.

Violence does not always arrive with a sword: sometimes it comes as doubt, suspicion, or indifference. When a woman speaks out, she must often prove she is telling the truth beyond all doubt. Speaking isn’t enough; she must justify her voice. And frequently, that voice finds no safe place to land.

In this work, Perseus’s body appears muscular and heroic, as in classical tradition, but that presence no longer inspires admiration—instead it creates discomfort: how can we continue to celebrate the one who holds aloft a head that should never have been severed?

Around him, I painted screaming male faces—no noble or idealized figures, but grotesque, deformed visages incapable of self-reflection. They represent unacknowledged shame, unrecognized violence, the fear of power when confronted by someone who refuses to be erased. Because that is Medusa: not a monster, but a woman who will not disappear, a gaze that keeps returning the stare.

I also thought of Athena—not as villain or cruel goddess, but as a figure trapped in a system she could not change. A female divinity in a world made by and for men. Perhaps she, too, felt fear. Perhaps she chose silence, adaptation, protecting her own power within a structure that left no room for compassion. Her punishment of Medusa can be read not as wickedness, but as a desperate decision imposed by an order demanding hardness to survive.

This painting does not attempt to reconstruct the myth: it tears it apart, questions it, turns it inside out. It is an unsettling, feminist image engaged with the present. Because the place of women in the classical narrative—and in so many narratives, ancient and modern—is still marked by guilt, distrust, a monstrosity imposed from the outside.

Antigone and Medusa stand centuries apart, yet share the same punishment: acting from conscience and being punished for it.
Medusa, made monster because she was raped.
Antigone, condemned to die for burying her brother.
Both confronted a power that tolerates no female voice that challenges imposed rules.
And both, in some way, still look at us today—reminding us that a woman’s disobedience, even when born of love or justice, has always been treated as a threat.

And yes, all of this is my opinion.
But I wonder why we still tell the story the same way.
Why does no one rewrite it from Medusa’s perspective?
Why does her pain remain a trophy in other hands?

Perhaps art cannot change the world, but it can look at what so many prefer not to see. And that is where everything begins.