I had read about it in passing, the oldest pediment sculpture in all of Greece or whatever, but I wasn't interested. I'd seen pictures of it now and then, pictures of the kneeling woman with her plaits of snakes and her blank saucer-shaped eyes. It all seemed so crude, her form as bland and shapeless as a Cabbage Patch Kid in a toga. Surely there were better things to do on the island of Corfu.

Even so, I saw no reason to give up on a whole museum over one over-hyped exhibit. So after the swimming and the candied kumquats and the day-trips to Albania, I gave an afternoon over to the Corfu Archaeological Museum. It's a polished and well-kept affair, full of funerary urns and earth-bitten coins and early slabs of text carved "as the ox plows," from left to right then right to left and then left to right again. There is a lot of sculpture, a whole row just of heads and faces. The galleries link in a U-shaped chain, and the room half-way through, the place where you enter through one doorway and then turn around to leave through another, is home to the gorgon.

I had read about it in passing, the oldest pediment sculpture in all of Greece or whatever, but I wasn't interested. I'd seen pictures of it now and then, pictures of the kneeling woman with her plaits of snakes and her blank saucer-shaped eyes. It all seemed so crude, her form as bland and shapeless as a Cabbage Patch Kid in a toga. Surely there were better things to do on the island of Corfu.

Even so, I saw no reason to give up on a whole museum over one over-hyped exhibit. So after the swimming and the candied kumquats and the day-trips to Albania, I gave an afternoon over to the Corfu Archaeological Museum. It's a polished and well-kept affair, full of funerary urns and earth-bitten coins and early slabs of text carved "as the ox plows," from left to right then right to left and then left to right again. There is a lot of sculpture, a whole row just of heads and faces. The galleries link in a U-shaped chain, and the room half-way through, the place where you enter through one doorway and then turn around to leave through another, is home to the gorgon.

I first saw her obliquely, from the right side, and my jaw dropped, stayed there. She was nothing I had expected. She was, in a word, tragic. Her eyes were blind and beseeching, her wrath barely controlled. Her knees bent as if in supplication and yet tensed to leap. Pegasus and panthers flanked her, smaller than she, diminutive protectors, an impoverished power. I saw her for the first time not as the monster Perseus slayed but as the rape victim, the martyred saint.

As I approached the sculpture, the panthers seemed to flex, to tower and loom. The gorgon, her mouth open, seemed to wail. It was excruciating and exquisite. I could not move. Even the memory of that moment still pierces and rings.