Medusa Rondanini

It was much admired, nevertheless, by Goethe,[3] who was struck by its "unspeakable anguished stare of death" and said of it, when first bringing it to the attention of art historians in 1786,[4] that "the mere knowledge that such a work could be created and still exists in the world makes me twice the person I was.

"[5] When Antonio Canova made a marble Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1798-1801), to take the place of the Apollo Belvedere sent to Napoleonic Paris, it was the Medusa Rondanini that served as the model for the gorgon's head in Perseus' outstretched hand.

[6] The Medusa Rondanini may be a Roman copy of a classical work of the fifth century BC,[7] a model attributed to one or another Athenian sculptor of the age of Phidias.

Alternatively, it may have been modeled after a classicising Hellenistic work of the late fourth century BC.

[10] Janer Danforth Belson has made a case for its model to have been the gorgoneion on a gilt-bronze aegis that was an ex-voto of Antiochus IV and was hung on the south retaining wall of the Acropolis of Athens about 170 BC, where it was noted by Pausanias in the late second century AD.