Perseus

Joseph Blanc painted this in Rome, and in the spring of 1870 it went to the Paris Salon, where it won a medal. The state bought it that summer for the Musée du Luxembourg, in the same month France went to war with Prussia. His first drawings for it, now at the Musée d'Orsay, follow Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus in Florence, the hero holding up the Gorgon's head. Blanc then added the winged horse Pegasus, which in the myth sprang from Medusa's blood. Look at the wing on Perseus' helmet, and at the pearls caught in Medusa's golden hair. The canvas is three metres tall, and it spent most of its life far from Paris. From 1894 to 2014 it was on deposit at the fine arts museum in Nîmes.