Medusa Rondanini

Medusa Rondanini
Copy of an original of about 440 (?) BCE. Height 0.39 m. Glyptotek 252, Munich.

The Gorgon Medusa head, for the first time here shown as a beautiful woman, with wings in her hair and snakes around her face.
The style is Classical or classicising.
If the former, it might be associated with an Athena-aegis on one of the great statues, or the centerpiece of her shield, but other copies of these heads have her still semi-grotesque; if the latter, it might be from a gilt aegis dedicated on the Acropolis in about 200, but the type is always treated as head alone, not on an aegis.
Scholars of style tend now to place it in the 4th cent BCE.

Athena Shrine