Perseus Triumphant - Marchetti

A print of Marchetti's Perseus Triumphant — a 19th century Italian reproductive engraving of the Greek hero standing victorious with the severed head of the gorgon Medusa, the climactic image of one of the oldest stories in the Greek heroic corpus.

The Perseus story is archetypal. Son of Zeus and the mortal princess Danaë, sent on what is meant to be a fatal errand by a king who wants his mother, Perseus is given tools by the gods — the winged sandals and cap of invisibility from Hermes and the nymphs, the polished shield from Athena, the sickle from Hermes — and sets out to kill Medusa, whose gaze turns men to stone. He flies to the gorgons' lair at the edge of the world, catches her reflection in the shield, beheads her, and flies home with the head in a sack. Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi is the defining Renaissance image of the triumph; it set the template for three centuries of later variants.

The reproductive engraving tradition to which this print belongs — line-engraved plates after celebrated paintings and sculptures — was the 19th century's primary way of disseminating great art to households that would never see the original.