Medusa, the meta-monumentum

First premise: monument and memory are terms extremely linked even from an etymological point of view, since the first derives from the Latin monere, the second from the Latin memor. Both have the meaning of remembering, and in a certain sense the monument is the external material form of the mental faculty of memory. In fact, when man wants to preserve the memory of something he monumentalizes it, he petrifies it. It has a greater chance of withstanding time than man can.
Second premise: the mythological symbol of petrification is Medusa in Greek mythology, one of the three Gorgons. In the myth, Perseus, son of Zeus, cuts off her head, using it to save Andromeda.

Considering the aforementioned premises, it can therefore be said that in this work – inspired by Caravaggio’s painting – Riccardo Toso Borella portrays the highest symbol of petrification – and therefore of memory – and does so through glass. The artistic operation carried out is in fact that of portraying the supreme agent of “monumentalizing”, and by portraying it, monumentalizing it itself. However, there is a further dynamic linked to the medium, which from gravitating around the granite, crystalline and rocky element is translated into the amorphous and fragile element of glass.

This passage of meaning as well as of matter, is further explored in the gaze, which is precisely vitrified. It is the gaze that charges Toso Borella’s work with drama compared to the Caravaggio model, since Medusa has not only had her head cut off but has also been deprived of her own prerogative. Medusa is no longer vigilant as she contemplates her being decapitated but seems to all intents and purposes dead. To perish with her gaze is therefore also her power. The process of reification has therefore come to an end.

On closer inspection, however, it was Perseus’s enterprise that immortalized the figure of Medusa: it was Perseus’s story that made Medusa eternal as a symbol of “preserving memory”. The witness, the torch of this eternalizing power therefore returns to man, where it has always been, who with his deeds does nothing but re-appropriate his own monumentalizing power, which he had previously relegated to a mythological figure of his own creation.
The artist therefore portrays the emptiness of what in the end is only a symbol of a power not divine, but all too human, and the emptiness is given, in addition to the loss of Medusa’s gaze, by the transparency of the glass, in which the meaning is confined, and yet free to show itself.

Gold finally, the incorruptible element par excellence, further consolidates this dimension of transcendence and fixity, and preserves the features of a figure that has exhausted its meaning in the horizon of human meaning, a figure whose funeral moment is celebrated in this meta-symbolic work.