The Terrible Face of Eternity: The Screaming and Numbing Mask of Medusa

The focus of the article is the plot of the transformation of the horrible screaming gorgon Medusa into impassive and silent, singled out from many aspects of the archetypal image studied in the special art history literature. On this transformation path, the Medusa mask loses its apotropaic functions and profanes its iconic and emblematic component, instead acquiring ‘added meanings’ — artistic, aesthetic, and ethical meanings (inversion, allegorism, symbolisation, suffering, voicelessness, detachment, impassivity, etc.), as well as paraphilosophical (hermeticism, Saturnianism, infernality, existentialism) and socio-political ones (propaganda, otherness, hostility, appeal), initiated by this or that epoch according to the corresponding interests. This turn occurs in early modernity and can be considered a marker of the cultural processes of the Modern Age which has the form of a series of coherent plastic formulas that entered the lexicon of modernism.