Medusa Rondanini

Dark yellow alabaster; deeply corroded on the exposed surfaces, smoothly preserved on the protected ones and whitish on the abraded ones; both wings and a curl on the right temple broken off, as well as the snakes, as far as they were worked free-standing; fractures of the snakes below the neck abraded; snout of the left snake completed;

The back is hollowed out; a candle could have been placed on the flat base, as evidenced by the blackening of the upper bulge; furthermore, at the back, two later narrow clasps made of iron, which were embedded with plaster over cracks in the thinnest parts of the wall;

Many copies of the Medusa Rondanini - Buschor assumes six forgeries among the copies - here none is assumed. Möbius sees no evidence for this, and the hollowing out for a candle corresponds for him more to 'the bad taste of the Roman imperial period' than to a later origin. Georg Knetsch informed him that the alabaster rather comes from North Africa and would need at least 200 years to be so eaten away by the rain. Among other things, he says about the style of the curls that they compare well with the hair of the Sphinx on the copies of the groups on the Olympic throne of witnesses from Ephesus.