Medusa: il mito, l'antico e i Medici (Florence, 12/16/08-1/31/09)

Medusa: il mito, l'antico e i Medici
Florence, Uffizi Gallery, from Dec. 16, 2008 to Jan. 31, 2009

"The Christmas 2008 appointment with the “Never seen before” of the Uffizi Gallery and its ‘Friends’ hinges on a painting conserved in the repositories that has a very singular history. A work by a Flemish seventeenth-century artist, it portrays in a highly naturalistic manner the severed head of the Medusa. The exceptional aspect is the extraordinary fame that the painting enjoyed from the eighteenth century on, when it was identified as a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci described by the sources, and became a lodestone for art lovers from all over Europe.
The painting entered the Medici collections in 1668.
At the end of the eighteenth century the painting was identified with the head of the Medusa that Vasari recorded among the works by Leonardo comprised in the collection of Cosimo I de’ Medici. The attribution was then rapidly taken up in the guides written in the eighteenth century and in the first nineteenth-century works on Leonardo. Visitors consequently considered it to be a work by Leonardo, including famous writers such as Stendhal, Walter Pater and Shelley. The poem written by the latter on the Medusa illustrates how the Flemish painting fitted perfectly into the Romantic concept of the beauty of death, positing once again the duality of terror and beauty that had pervaded the myth of the Medusa since antiquity.
It was not until the early twentieth century that the critics attempted to verify Leonardo’s autograph and discover whether the work was a copy of the original or an illustration of Vasari’s description. Then, again in the early years of the last century, Corrado Ricci identified the undated document that accompanied the object on its entry into the Guardaroba Medicea, clarifying the fact that it was a Flemish painting, and dating the paper to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The fate of Leonardo’s painting, all trace of which was lost at the end of the sixteenth century, remains unknown.
Gravitating around this topic, the exhibition curated by Valentina Conticelli constructs an itinerary designed to illustrate the popularity of this particular mythological subject in the collections of the Medici in various guises: archaeology, graphics, jewellery, paintings, coins and medals and military accoutrements." [Polo Museale Fiorentino]