The back of Perseus' headgear and his well-conditioned locks look like a guy with a sweet beard. Cellini copied how Michelangelo wrote his signature on the St.
Peter's Pieta , placing it on the strap across Perseus' rippling pecs. Dude's all core. Goat heads across the top of the pedestal are a nod to Cosimo being a Capricorn. The primo Medici also used Capricorn as a title, a moniker traditionally used by other such level-headed and peaceful folks as Alexander the Great and Emperor Augustus.
Perseus with the Head of Medusa is a bronze sculpture made by Benvenuto Cellini in the period — The sculpture stands on a square base which has bronze relief panels depicting the story of Perseus and Andromeda , similar to a predella on an altarpiece. The second Florentine duke, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici , commissioned the work with specific political connections to the other sculptural works in the piazza. When the piece was revealed to the public on 27 April , Michelangelo 's David , Bandinelli 's Hercules and Cacus , and Donatello 's Judith and Holofernes were already installed in the piazza.
The subject matter of the work is the mythological story of Perseus beheading Medusa , a hideous woman-faced Gorgon whose hair had been turned to snakes; anyone who looked at her was turned to stone. Perseus stands naked except for a sash and winged sandals, triumphant on top of the body of Medusa with her head, crowned with writhing snakes, in his raised hand. Blood spews from Medusa's severed neck.
The bronze sculpture, in which Medusa's head turns men to stone, is appropriately surrounded by three huge marble statues of men: Hercules, David, and later Neptune. Cellini's use of bronze in Perseus and the head of Medusa, and the motifs he used to respond to the previous sculpture in the piazza, were highly innovative. Examining the sculpture from the back, one can see a self-portrait of the sculptor Cellini on the back of Perseus' helmet.
The sculpture is thought to be the first statue since the classical age where the base included a figurative sculpture forming an integral part of the work. Check out the full Wikipedia article about Perseus with the Head of Medusa. Perseus with the Head of Medusa. Average: 5 1 vote.
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He's got the winged sandals here, he's got the winged helmet here, this of course is Medusa's decapitated head, here is her body spurting blood.
The story of this particular sculpture is that Cellini had been working in France for King Francis I, but then he comes back to his hometown of Florence, where Cosimo de' Medici is the duke. There are several different versions of the story. Basically, the story is that Cellini approaches the duke and says, "I have a great project "that you're going to want to fund and have me make.
The duke likes the subject matter a lot, but the duke thinks of himself as an artistic connoisseur, so he says to Cellini, "I like this idea, but it's never going to work. Then what you do is pour in hot molten bronze, and everywhere the wax was, which floods out, the bronze then goes. After the bronze cools off, you then break the outer mold and there, essentially, is your bronze sculpture. When the duke looks at Cellini's designs he says "This is never going to work, "because you have so many things "sticking out in different directions, "the arms, the sword, the hands the feet, "that the bronze is not going to flow fast enough "to all of these places that it needs to fill.
But he quickly realizes that, in fact, the duke was right. The bronze is not flowing fast enough to fill up the whole mold, and so it needs to be hotter. What he does is he instructs all of his assistants and servants to break all of the wood furniture in his house and throw it on the fire so that the fire will burn hotter and the bronze will run smoother and faster. So they do that, and that works, but it's still not fast enough. So they throw in some silverware and some other kinds of pewter things that he has lying around the house, because if you add that to the bronze mixture that also makes it more liquid-y.
Then they wait with baited breath for the whole thing to cool off and they break it open, and there's the whole sculpture complete. No missing parts like the duke had said would happen. And then it needs to be finished off, and also once it's installed on the pedestal it does in fact stand very firmly without toppling over. Without thinking about what the subject matter is, without thinking about how it relates to its surroundings, part of the meaning of this work of art is Cellini was a great sculptor.
In other words, that's practically the subject matter, is that he was able to accomplish what was said to be impossible.
And this makes it Mannerist. It is a statement of the artist's skill at taking on an artistic challenge. Of course, it's also Mannerist because of the rather lithe, elegant, athletic, slim form that corresponds to the dominant aesthetic of the time. But again, it's this issue of the artist's skill that's foregrounded that makes this in part so important. Another part of this sculpture that's so important is how it relates to its setting.
Like I said, this is in front of the town hall in front of the Piazza della Signoria, where at the time there were already several other sculptures, as we can see in this photo, which is sort of taken from the point of view of where the Perseus is located. In other words, this seems to be what Perseus is looking at. The mythological figure of Perseus comes from Greek mythology, Perseus borned from the union of Danae with Giove. The boy later on was collected with his mother in a basket adrift from the king Polidette.
Which, wishing to marry Danae, sent Perseus cunningly to fight Medusa, hoping in the dead of the boy. These instead not only gained and beheaded Medusa, but in the return travel he freed also Andromeda from a horrible monster and returned to house murdered king Polidette.
The statue of Perseus that holding the head of Medusa, monster with snakes in the place of hair, must serve as warning to the enemies of Cosimo I. The statue is 5,19 m. The base is of marble, and is supplied of niches in which Cellini has placed the bronze statues of Mercury, Minerve, Jupiter and Danae the bronze statues are copies, the origianals are today conserved in the Museum of Bargello. Marco Ramerini. Previous: Loggia della Signoria Loggia dei Lanzi : an open-air museum.
Next: Vasari Corridor: a private passage on Florence. Ho fatto ricerche sulla storia delle esplorazioni geografiche e del colonialismo, in particolare sulle isole delle spezie, le Molucche.
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