Perseus turning Phineus and his Followers to Stone

Around 1660 painters and sculptors in Italy were still arguing over which of their two arts was the greater, and Giordano, not yet 30, answered with a painting about people turning into statues. The story comes from Ovid. At the wedding of Perseus and Andromeda, her former fiancé Phineus bursts in with armed men. Outnumbered, Perseus holds up the severed head of Medusa, whose gaze turns anyone who meets it to stone. Several poses in the crowd are borrowed from famous ancient sculptures, the Borghese Gladiator and the Laocoön among them, so the painter quotes marble inside a scene of bodies becoming marble. He catches the change halfway, flesh draining from pink to grey. Phineus himself, in the ornate helmet and breastplate at the far left, is only partly gone, one arm and leg still warm while his mouth has already set in a scream.