Perseus and Medusa

Perseus has just done the hard thing in the Medusa story. He has cut off her head without once looking at her. Maffei puts the trick right there in the painting: Athena's polished shield, angled so the hero fights by reflection and never meets the stare that turns living men to stone. He stages the struggle by moonlight and paints it so quickly and loosely that the figures lose their solidity and come apart at the edges, half body and half apparition, as if they too were caught in the middle of changing. He holds the scene at the confused last instant of the killing. From the blood running out of Medusa's severed neck, in Ovid's telling, the winged horse Pegasus will spring.