Legend has it that, after slaying Medusa, Perseus attached her head to his shield in order to turn his enemies to stone. Her decapitated, snake-covered head, dripping with blood, was such an over-the-top image that Caravaggio apparently painted it twice. One version hangs in Florence's Uffizi Museum, and the second, in a private collection, has just been identified as a Caravaggio by a team of researchers who applied x-ray technology to the painting.
Mina Gregori, one of the specialists who examined the painting, announced the team's conclusions on Friday, Le Journal des Arts reports. The painting, called the "Medusa Murtola" because poet Gaspare Murtola wrote about it during Caravaggio's time, is slightly smaller than the Uffizi version, and was thought to be the work of an imitator. But x-rays revealed preparatory drawings, corrections, and variations, indicating that it is "a creation and not a copy," according to Gregori. In fact, it is thought to predate the Uffizi Medusa by one or two years. Italian collector Ermanno Zoffili purchased the work twenty years ago, but, unfortunately, died just three days before the researchers' public announcement.
When a painting of Saint Augustine in a private British collection was identified as a Caravaggio last June, the attribution was met with some skepticism, since the quiet nature of the religious portrait was thought to be out-of-step with the artist's energetic style . The same cannot be said of the dramatic Medusa. In fact, the Italian newspaper Blitz Quotidiano speculated that Caravaggio's patron Cardinal del Monte may have been so struck by the first version that he commissioned another one and offered it as a gift to Ferdinand de' Medici. Caravaggio liked severed heads, painting "Judith Beheading Holofernes," "Salome with the Head of John the Baptist," and "David with the Head of Goliath" — the last two with the artist's own features on the decapitated heads.