ABSTRACT

Nothing could provide more of a contrast than Alciato's image of "fell Medea", the statue in a niche with a bird's nest on its head and Delacroix's 1838 Mde furieuse. But "the mouth of the cave", although properly, romantically spelunkular, and removing Medea from the city, its laws and cruel angles, seems not to be how Delacroix saw it. Some of the early sketches link with Saint Sebastian, and art historians tell us that among Delacroix's references are Andrea del Sarto's great La Charit in the Louvre and the figures of the women protecting their children in an engraving after Raphal's Massacre of the Innocents. She seems, in her sheltering of the babes, her knifing of them, indeed to be history escaping the clumsy historian, too slow to understand, or any text that resists the interpreting gaze, too quick to love her.