The question of women and our ability to reclaim power is the stuff of Greek myth — and real-time controversy, thanks to a new statue in New York marking the #MeToo movement’s third anniversary.
Last week, a recasting of a statue by Argentine-Italian sculptor Luciano Garbati was unveiled by New York’s public art commission. Garbati’s original work, created in 2008, was intended to be a straight reversal of Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze “Perseus with the Head of Medusa,” a Renaissance masterpiece depicting a valiant, wing-footed Perseus standing over the decapitated corpse of Medusa. Cellini’s Perseus holds Medusa’s gory head in one hand, a sword in the other. Garbati flips the script: He gives us a slender, chill-looking Medusa casually holding Perseus’s head.
