Medusa as Guy’s redemptrix!

Swinburne (1837-1909) insisted that Medusa’s presence is another Venus “grown diabolic in ages that would not accept her as divine“.

“Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon (her) lips and eyelids seems to lie loveliness like a shadow … Yet it is less the horror than the grace which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone “… Shelley (1819) from his ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery Shelley.’

Swinburne: “She is no benevolent and sympathetic Christian deity or Pieta, but a rough beast come to exorcise the world of its pale Christian phantoms.”

This so called ‘monster’ initiates Guy on his path to redemption.