Head of Medusa

Rubens had just come back from eight years in Italy, and Vienna was still a Catholic frontier bracing against the Ottomans when he took on this severed head around 1618. He painted the face himself, caught in the instant after the sword falls, the eyes still half aware. The tangle of snakes below her, though, he handed to a friend, the animal specialist Frans Snyders, who knew exactly how a grass snake coils and how a viper differs from it. Look closely and the writhing is almost a naturalist's catalogue, right down to a two-headed creature from old myth called an amphisbaena. For roughly three centuries nobody was even sure Rubens had a hand in it. His name was only attached in 1899, and confirmed by restorers in the 1940s, who found his brushwork under the horror.