ABSTRACT
The visual changes experimented by the Gorgon Medusa between the seventh and the fifth century BC have been widely discussed since the very beginning of Art History as an academic field of study. Those metamorphoses were traditionally limited to formal and iconographic aspects, but something seemed to be lost in their different assumptions: the absence of details about her physical features in the earliest literary sources, mainly Homer and Hesiod, and the urge to understand the implied polysemic values behind her artistic depiction. This chapter will make use of visual iconotropy, agency and an “iconology of connotations” to approach those issues. Besides that, any iconotropic approach demands the analysis of images recollected from a wider time spectrum: taking the west pediment of the Temple of Artemis at Corcyra as a relevant node, it will be also dealing with her display in architectural sculpture and vase painting throughout the Archaic period.
