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Home , Andromeda (Rodin), Bargello, Benvenuto Cellini, Breaking wheel, Brutus (Michelangelo), Calliope

CELLINI’S AND : CONFIGURATIONS OF THE BODY OF STATE

by

CHRISTINE CORRETTI

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Advisor: Professor Edward J. Olszewski

Department of Art History

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

January, 2011

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

Christine Corretti candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree.*

(signed) Professor Edward J. Olszewski (chair of the committee)

Professor Anne Helmreich

Professor Holly Witchey

Dr. Jon S. Seydl

(date) November, 2010

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 1

Copyright © 2011 by Christine Corretti All rights reserved 2

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 4

Abstract 9

Introduction 11

Chapter 1 The Story of Perseus and Medusa, an Interpretation 28 of its Meaning, and the Topos of

Chapter 2 ’s Perseus and Medusa: the Paradigm of Control 56

Chapter 3 Political Theory and Paradoxes of 100 Power

Chapter 4 The as Other and Same 149

Chapter 5 The Sexual Symbolism of the Perseus and Medusa 164

Chapter 6 The Public Face of Justice 173

Chapter 7 Classical and Grotesque Polities 201

Chapter 8 Eleonora di Toledo and the Image of the Mother 217 Goddess

Conclusion 239

Illustrations 243

Bibliography 304

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List of Illustrations

Fig. 1 , Perseus and Medusa, 1545-1555, 243 , , .

Fig. 2 , Judith and Holofernes, c. 1446-1460s, Palazzo 244 Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 3 killing an Amazon, red figure vase. 245

Fig. 4 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. 246

Fig. 5 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. 247

Fig. 6 Detail of Cellini’s Medusa. 248

Fig. 7 Cellini, Danae and baby Perseus from the Perseus and 249 Medusa’s pedestal.

Fig. 8 Cellini, pedestal niche of the Perseus and Medusa 250 featuring .

Fig. 9 Cellini, pedestal niche of the Perseus and Medusa 251 featuring .

Fig. 10 Cellini, Mercury from the Perseus and Medusa’s pedestal. 252

Fig. 11 Cellini, Saltcellar, 1543, , 253 , Austria.

Fig. 12 Cellini, Perseus liberating , from the Perseus 254 and Medusa’s pedestal.

Fig. 13 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus. 255

Fig. 14 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. 256

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Fig. 15 Follower of Leonardo , Milanese school, Head of 257 , 1511, National Gallery of Art, London, England.

Fig. 16 Andrea , Head of John the Baptist, 1507, 258 Museum, , France.

Fig. 17 Cellini, Cosimo I, 1545, Museum, Florence, Italy. 259

Fig. 18 Tazza Farnese, interior, second century B.C., National 260 Archaeological Museum, , Italy.

Fig. 19 Tazza Farnese, exterior. 261

Fig. 20 , The Sistine Madonna, 1513-1514, Staatliche 262 Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, Germany.

Fig. 21 , device for Lorenzo de’ Medici. 263

Fig. 22 , The First Fruits of the Earth offered to 264 , 1555-1557, , Florence, Italy.

Fig. 23 Prudentia, , Italy. 265

Fig. 24 , Rape of the Sabine, c. 1574-1580, Loggia 266 dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 25 Cellini, King Francis I on Horseback, medal, reverse, 1537, 267 , London, England.

Fig. 26 , , tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, 268 San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 27 Denarius of Septimius Severus, reverse, 193-211, 269 British Museum, London, England.

Fig. 28 Cellini, of the Perseus, Bargello Museum, 270 Florence, Italy.

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Fig. 29 Caterina Sforza as Fortuna, medal, reverse, 1480-1484, 271 British Museum, London, England.

Fig. 30 Agnolo Bronzino, Cosimo I in Armor, 1545, Museum, 272 Florence, Italy.

Fig. 31 Domenico di Polo, coin of Cosimo I, reverse featuring 273 with the Nemean Skin, Museo degli Argenti, Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 32 Detail of Cellini’s bronze bust of Cosimo I. 274

Fig. 33 Seventh-century cosmetic Gorgo-shaped vase. 275

Fig. 34 Baccio Bandinelli, Cosimo I, 1543-1544, Bargello Museum, 276 Florence, Italy.

Fig. 35 Cellini, detail of the Perseus. 276

Fig. 36 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus. 277

Fig. 37 Perseus slaying Medusa, Boeotian , c. 670 B.C., 278 Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

Fig. 38 , , Florence, Italy. 279

Fig. 39 Crowned lion, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy. 280

Fig. 40 Medici coat of arms, Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy. 280

Fig. 41 Cellini, for Francesco I de’ Medici, c. 1570. 281

Fig. 42 Cellini, and , shield for Francesco I de’ 282 Medici.

Fig. 43 Cellini, Judith and Holofernes, shield for Francesco I de’ 283 Medici.

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Fig. 44 Cellini, Bianca Cappello, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici. 284

Fig. 45 Pinturicchio, Pala di Santa Maria dei Fossi, 1495-1496, 285 National Gallery of Umbria, Perugia, Italy.

Fig. 46 Donatello, David, c. 1440-1460, Bargello Museum, 286 Florence, Italy.

Fig. 47 Bottom view of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. 287

Fig. 48 Breaking with the Wheel, from the Book of Numquam, 288 13th or 14th century, Cathedral Library, Soest, Germany.

Fig. 49 Taddeo Gaddi, Holy Francis appearing to his Disciples, 289 1330-1335, Santa Croce, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 50 Ixion and the Wheel, Roman sarcophagus. 289

Fig. 51 Francesco Bartoli’s drawing of Cellini’s pin for 290 Clement VII, 1530, British Museum, London, England.

Fig. 52 Bartolomeo Ammanati, detail of , 290 c. 1565, Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 53 Francesco di Giovanni Ferrucci del Tadda, Justice, 1581, 291 Piazza Trinità, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 54 Vasari, Allegory of the Quartiere of San Giovanni and 291 , 1563-1565, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 55 Terracotta clipei featuring , 310-240 B.C., 292 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

Fig. 56 Alberghetti family, ‚Furies‛ gun featuring Medusa, 1773, 293 Royal Armouries Museum of Artillery, Fort Nelson, Fareham, England.

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Fig. 57 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Last Judgment, 1537-1541, 294 , Vatican Palace, , Italy.

Fig. 58 , Primavera, c. 1482, Uffizi Museum, 295 Florence, Italy.

Fig. 59 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, The Ditchley Portrait of 296 Queen Elizabeth I of England, 1592, National Portrait Gallery, London, England.

Fig. 60 Ammanati, Ceres, 1555-1563, Bargello Museum, Florence, 297 Italy.

Fig. 61 Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo and son Giovanni, 1545, 298 Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 62 Anonymous, Cosimo and Eleonora with Maps, 1546, 299 Collection of Mrs. A. Erlanger, Connecticut.

Fig. 63 Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy. 300

Fig. 64 Detail of Pitti Palace. 300

Fig. 65 Giambologna, Ops (Florence?), 1565, Boboli Garden, 301 Florence, Italy.

Fig. 66 Athanasius Kirchner, , Aegyptiacus, 1652. 302

Fig. 67 Niccolo Tribolo, Hercules and Antaeus Fountain, after 303 1536, Castello, Italy.

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Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa: Configurations of the Body of State

Abstract

by

CHRISTINE CORRETTI

In one respect Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa (Loggia dei Lanzi,

Florence, Italy) legitimized the patriarchal power of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s

Tuscany. The bronze statue symbolizes the body of the male ruler as the state overcoming an adversary personified as female, but the ’s androgynous appearance (the heads of Perseus and Medusa are remarkably similar) emphasizes the fact that Perseus, Cosimo’s surrogate, rose to power through a female agency – the . Though not a surrogate for the powerful women of the Medici family, Cellini’s Medusa may have reminded viewers of the fact that Cosimo’s power stemmed in various ways from maternal influence. The statue suggests that female power palpable in the Medicean state. Under the Loggia dei Lanzi maternal power assumes, specifically, the form of Medusa as Mother Goddess. In the preceding context it is telling that additional works of art celebrating the duke’s political greatness align Cosimo’s image with

9 maternal agency.

The Perseus’ androgynous nature problematizes the Greek subject’s role as an epitome of virtù (virility). Thus, the statue points up the contingent nature of patriarchal power, which in Cellini’s was synonymous with virtù. I discuss the Perseus as a reflection of Niccolo Machiavelli’s theory that virtù depends upon adversary in the form of Fortuna, a version of the Mother

Goddess, for its political purposes.

The similarity between the heads of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa suggests that Cellini (as Perseus) identified with the Gorgon as a hunted figure.

Thus, the statue reminds one of social, cultural, and legal restrictions imposed upon men who lived in Cosimo’s Florence. Here, the cult of honor and virtù bred more divisions in the absolutist state by perpetuating violence. Similarly,

Cellini’s statue implies that violence may turn against itself by appealing to the aggression of its viewers.

My study concludes with an analysis of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo’s image in art as Mother Goddess, a force who rivals the power of Cosimo I. Thus, the duchess’ image ultimately served as Medusa’s counterpart.

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Introduction

Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s of an absolutist Tuscan state informs much of the art he commissioned while he was in power. Among these works,

Benvenuto Cellini’s statue, Perseus and Medusa (1545-1554, fig. 1) under the

Loggia dei Lanzi, Piazza della Signoria, is the most complicated, as well as highly paradoxical. Critics have perceived the statue, which Cosimo commissioned while Cellini resided in his native Florence, as a propagandistic symbol of

Cosimo’s final expulsion of the republicans from Florence. T. Hirthe has written that the statue of Perseus (the duke’s surrogate, as Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt had also acknowledged) stepping on Medusa’s body while retaining her severed head allegorizes the that Cosimo brought into the city after he took office, while John -Hennessy has proffered his opinion that Cellini’s sculpture touts the stability of Cosimo’s regime.1 In Yael Even’s view the statue symbolized Duke Cosimo I’s absolutist power. The Perseus ‚downplayed‛ the effect of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes under the east arch of the Loggia, which, some contemporaries believed, was distasteful because the heroine dominates a man by trampling his body and severing his head (fig. 2).2 The hierarchical arrangement of Cellini’s figures, which mirrors that of Judith and

Holofernes, has no politically symbolic value, Even has surprisingly proposed.

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However, she has stated that the statue ‚reinforces‛ the defeat of matriarchy in the ancient world, with obvious implications for the societal order of sixteenth- century Florence.3 The ‚titillating sexual fantasy‛ of Cellini’s bronze formulation entices sadistic men with an attractive visage and a nude female body that holds onto the last shred of life.4 Even believes that Medusa’s severed head is sexual.5

Her observation followed Margaret D. Carroll’s article on rape imagery which treats the Perseus as a celebration of sexual violence and male power, and just briefly touches upon how these concerns relate to Niccolo Machiavelli’s notion of virtù.6 Geraldine A. Johnson and Sarah Blake McHam share Even’s view on the

Perseus and Medusa’s counteraction of Donatello’s formulation. McHam has described the Perseus as a ‚thinly veiled allegory of the triumphant Cosimo I.‛7

Corinne Mandel has noted that the ‚defensive‛ nature of Cosimo’s bronze merely allegorizes Florence’s liberation from republican enmity. Margaret A.

Gallucci concurs with Mandel’s stance.8

Henk Th. van Veen has presented a new study of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s image as a ruler which argues that previous assessments of the duke’s patron- age, such as P. W. Richelson’s Studies in the Personal Imagery of Cosimo I de’ Medici,

Duke of Florence (1977), Janet Cox-Rearick’s Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art:

Pontormo, Leo X and the two Cosimos (1984), Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge’s

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Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600 (1992), and Patronage in

Sixteenth-Century Italy (1996) by Mary Hollingsworth are imprecise because they interpret art made in the 1560s as straightforward reflections of his absolute, princely power.9 In van Veen’s view many of the major works of art and architecture that the duke commissioned during his time in office do not reflect his increase of power in a ‚one-to-one‛ fashion.10 Van Veen believes in the propagandistic value of much of Cosimo’s patronage, but he nuanced the matter when he wrote that:

Cosimo preferred emphatically royal, dynastic, and territorial imagery at first, when in fact he was still only an elected whose power, not- withstanding his ducal title, was limited. Then, starting in 1559, by which time his annexation of had taken his power to new heights, he charted a radically different course. He embraced the city’s republican tradition, which prized the bene commune and virtù civile. When he was made duke in 1569, he grafted his new dignity onto the republican, florentinist decorum that he had adopted in 1559.11

Van Veen briefly treated Cellini’s Perseus as a symbol of the

‚decisiveness‛ which Cosimo ‚in the face of formidable opposition, had brought to the city, just as he now offered her protection and prosperity.‛12 The Perseus is a testament, van Veen has asserted, to Cosimo’s ‚invincibility,‛ and he cited the

Capricorns, Cosimo’s chosen zodiacal sign, on the statue’s base as proof that

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Ovid’s referenced the Medici ruler.13

Undeniably, Cellini’s Perseus epitomizes the body of the male ruler over- coming an adversary personified as female. However, the statue’s iconography and style remind one that most of the Greek hero’s power derived from the

Gorgon. That message would have been problematic in the patriarchal society in which Cellini lived. My study proposes that the Perseus and Medusa speaks to the limitations of male power in early modern Florence, while implying Cellini’s awareness that matriarchal influence was palpable in the Medici state.

The sculptural ensemble may have reminded viewers of the fact that matriarchal forces were the root of the political success of Cosimo I, whose visual image as a ruler sometimes overtly, or covertly aligns with maternal power. In this way the bronze Medusa would have been a counterpart to the figures of

Maria Salviati, the duke’s mother, whose machinations resulted in his election, and Eleonora di Toledo, Cosimo’s wife, who helped to build the granducal

‚empire‛ of .

Artists created images of the Mother Goddess, whose ancient cult survived into the Renaissance, as surrogates for Eleonora di Toledo, while Cellini fashioned his Medusa as a version of the Mother Goddess.14 This is not surprising, for ‚Woman’s

14 special prominence‛ in the Renaissance.15 Both the fiery spirit and the solemn profundity of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa compare with iconographies in which the contemporary ‚power of women‛ topos was present.16 In doing so, Cellini’s statue for the Loggia dei Lanzi accentuates that which it aims to overcome. The

Perseus and Medusa’s arresting androgynous appearance proves as much.

‚Androgynous,‛ an ambiguous term in the Renaissance, variously refers in this study to the physical, including sexually symbolic, similarity between Cellini’s

Greek characters.

The conventional critical view that the Perseus celebrates Medicean patriarchism and Cosimo’s political success overlooks insecurities besetting the political and cultural worlds of the Medici state. The Perseus and Medusa’s gendered conflict is a symptom of perceived and real threats to the establishment of Cosimo’s absolutist dominion.17

Florentines, like most Renaissance Italians, believed that male rule was orderly, legitimate, and correct. Conversely, female authority was, they claimed, disorderly, illegitimate, and threatening. I borrow the terms ‚public woman,‛ a woman who wielded political power and influence, from Natalie R. Tomas’ The

Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (2003).18

Despite the belief in male and female as opposites, literary and visual

15 evidence suggests that in the early modern age gender and sexuality were often matters of psychological struggle and tension, which expressed broader social, cultural and even political instability and uncertainties.19 Cellini’s Perseus and

Medusa proves as much. I reinforce Melissa Bullard’s assertion that ‚anxiety can function as a creative psychological ground for culture‛ and that Renaissance images could epitomize the ‚generative‛ and ‚destructive‛ capacities of their culture.20 Indeed, the characters of Perseus and Medusa merit these descriptive terms and blur the line between ‚good‛ and ‚evil.‛

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1 includes a summary of Perseus’ story as well as an anthropological/social-historical analysis of the tale of Perseus and Medusa, including the legend’s significance for matriarchy and for patriarchy’s response to matriarchal power. The same chapter provides a summary assessment of the symbolic value that the topos of decapitation assumed in ancient through early modern times. Here, I locate the head’s historical role as a seat of the life force and therefore of power. The generative capacity of Medusa’s head warrants this discussion.

Chapter 2 relates many of the symbolic components of Perseus’ tale to

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Cellini’s bronze for the Loggia dei Lanzi. In sum, it is a story of solar forces against maternal divinity. I speak of the similar appearances of Cellini’s mythological figures and of how they compare and compete as solar powers.

Chapter 3 examines the figure of Fortuna in ancient through early modern times. The writing of several political theorists, especially Machiavelli, is the focus of my attention here, and I am particularly interested in the personification of the state as a female and of Fortuna as a woman who must be beaten even though she may be loved. Contemporaries, such as Cosimo I, who embraced Machiavellian notions of virtù linked (literally and metaphorically) sexual activity with political and military power. Within this context I discuss

Cellini’s Perseus as a Machiavellian hero whose attack of the Gorgon is not only political, but sexual as well. Cellini’s statue is a simultaneous acknowledgment and denigration of female power and potency.

Chapter 4 focuses on the role of Donatello’s Judith as a type for the

Mary, whose image is found alongside that of Medusa in a fifteenth-century painting for the Medici, and what that role meant for the influential women in

Florence’s leading dynasty. The sexual symbolism of the figure of Medusa is central to the fifth chapter, where I show that the Gorgon’s appearance translates into Woman’s and the Mother’s fearsome sexuality. The sixth chapter treats

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Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa as a public execution and concomitantly an epitomization of Cosimo I’s aims and means to control the Tuscan judicial system and the legal rights of those within his state. Medusa, as a face of the

Mother Goddess, herself a personification of Justice in the ancient Greek world, comes into play as a of judicial power.

The seventh chapter argues that Cellini’s Medusa is an epitome of the grotesque (fragmented) body, while the Perseus is seemingly classical (integral), a symbol of the absolutist state. However, the exceptions to this binary stand for the difficulty of creating and maintaining a holistic Tuscan polity.

Visual and written portrayals of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo as the

Mother Goddess are the main focus of Chapter 8. I treat the duchess’ characteri- zation as a divinity in relation to Francesco Cattani di Diacceto’s panegyric of woman as superior to man, which he penned in the context of praising Eleonora.

Perhaps Cattani’s premise served to remind those at the Medici court of the duke’s political limitations and of the source of his authority. I propose that at least one image of the duchess did just that: Agnolo Bronzino’s state portrait of

Eleonora. Even though Cosimo I aligned his own image as a demi- with that of Eleonora as divine, there is no evidence that he publically refuted contemporary criticism of her. The result was a paradoxical reassertion of her

18 influence within the Tuscan state. Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa likewise indicates the futility of denying the power of the hero’s feminine counterpart.

A Note on Methodology

Although Cellini’s Perseus is the center of this study, this text is not merely a monograph. I consider various works of art that contrast with the Perseus in theme and style, as well as images that complement Cosimo’s bronze in the latter capacities. My endeavor comprises an iconographical inquiry which explores the individual and symbolic meaning and significance of images. Images, , symbols and allegories are, in Erwin Panofsky’s words, complex ‚manifestations of underlying principles,‛ that is, what Ernst Cassirer termed ‚symbolic values.‛21 I demonstrate that different ‚symbolic values‛ from antiquity were highly significant for the culture in which Cellini lived. In the Renaissance symbols -- like myth, images and allegories -- had psychological force, for symbols embodied aspects of reality that encompassed human nature and human experiences of the world.22 Though personal and versatile:

the symbol cannot be created artificially or invented for some purely personal interpretation or whim: it goes beyond the individual to the universal and is innate in the life of the spirit. It is the external, or lower, expression of the higher truth which is symbol- ized, and is a means of communicating realities which

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might otherwise be either obscured by the limitations of language or too complex for adequate expression. <.Although the symbol captures and integrates abstractions and places them in their effective context, it can also be effective on more than one level at the same time.23

The story of Florentines’ reception of Cellini’s Perseus suggests, indeed, that the statue was meaningful in different ways. As van Veen has noted, in the

Renaissance it was common for patrons to have different reasons for commis- sioning works of art.24 The duke must have known that the myth of Perseus offered a multiplicity of interpretations. I propose that, as the unique formula- tion of Cosimo’s statue indicates, Cellini himself knew as much. The sculptor and the duke must have realized that the androgynous aspect of the statue partly comprising a princely surrogate for Cosimo I was particularly multi-dimensional in this regard and that erudite viewers who would study it up close would have different, even conflicting analyses, of what they saw. Van Veen has also stressed the provocative nature of Cellini’s bronze. His article on the Perseus holds that the statue would have elicited diverse, even troubled reactions from contemporaries, for Medusa’s head referred not, as the head of Donatello’s

Holofernes did, to enemies who threatened Florence from outside, but to

Florentine citizens themselves, at least those who had resisted the new Medici ruler’s power. Here, a part of Florence, decapitated, hung in front of 20

Perseus/Cosimo I.25 In my view the personal link between the Gorgon’s head and Florentine rebels points up the personal significance the statue also had for the life of Cellini, who subverted political authority and came back to Florence in

1545 as a politically suspect, anti-Medici .

The Perseus posed a trap for the viewer. As van Veen has stated, the

‚knowing viewers‛ (and there were many, apart from Cellini, with sophisticated knowledge about sculpture) deliberately concealed their feelings for the troub- ling political messages the statue held for them. Showing aversion to the Perseus would have cast Cellini’s viewers as enemies of the state. Therefore, it was safer to remain silent about the political recollection the Perseus provoked and to limit vocal judgment to comments on the statue’s aesthetic value. Although the

Perseus contains a strong political statement, Cosimo indeed got favorable responses, which might have convinced him that the exhilarated community in the city found his despotism intimidating and would keep silent. The event of the Perseus’ unveiling, in van Veen’s mind, is telling. The ruler, looking out a window from the Palazzo Vecchio and down at the Loggia dei Lanzi, first let a few people look at the statue to see if they liked it, but he may have wanted to find if they would give him negative commentaries of a political nature. If they did not, then the statue’s present state would be acceptable to him. However, it

21 is not that Cosimo I wanted the aesthetic appeal of the Perseus to its political charge; rather, each element worked with the other.26

John Shearman had previously noted that Cellini’s Perseus ‚reflected the needs of the closely watched returned ‛ and that contemporaries would interpret neither it, nor other works of art on the Piazza della Signoria in a homogeneous fashion.27 Florentine sculpture reception was ‚independent, unpredictable, and stubbornly inventive.‛28

A curious event predating the bronze Perseus’ construction illuminates the preceding situation. Cellini was in Rome in 1539, when the , the ancient statue of Menelaus that had long served as the of lampooning, was at this time dressed up as Perseus. Surely, Cellini knew about the occurrence.

The Roman poets who donned the statue thus allegorized Medusa’s head as inimical individuals within their city, such as the cardinals’ women, and the

Council.29 It is telling that these men chose the figures of Perseus and Medusa to make their point, for ’s story, the Pasquino episode suggests, spoke in complex ways to the political and cultural fabric of Renaissance Italy. Cellini’s

Perseus and Medusa speaks to that same fabric in a much more complicated manner. The Pasquino episode highlights the potential of public works of art to strike viewers’ sensitivity and imaginations in unpredictable fashions as they

22 come to stand for contemporary concerns that may not have been in the minds of their patrons or .

Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa embodies ideas that are linked concretely, for instance, via iconography, to the power structure of Medicean Florence. The end result of the sculptor’s brilliance shows that the assertion of a main message or ideology, requiring the repression of certain truths and ideas, cannot but bring back the suppressed into Cellini’s frame of vision.

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Notes

1. T. Hirthe, ‚Die Perseus-und-Medusa Gruppe des Benvenuto Cellini in Florenz,‛ Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 29/30 (1987-1988): 197ff. John Pope- Hennessy, Cellini (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985): 185ff. Kathleen Weil Garris, ‚On Pedestals: Michelangelo’s David, Bandinelli’s and the Sculpture of the Piazza della Signoria,‛ Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983): 409-411. Sixteenth-century poems written in honor of the Perseus as a surrogate for Cosimo I are found in I Trattati dell’Oreficeria e della Scultura di Benvenuto Cellini, ed. C. Milanesi (Florence, Italy: Le Monnier, 1857): 403-414.

2. Yael Even, ‚The Loggia dei Lanzi: a Showcase of Female Subjugation,‛ Woman’s Art Journal 12 (1991): 10-14.

3. -----, 11.

4. -----, 11.

5. -----, 11.

6. Margaret D. Carroll, ‚The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence,‛ in The Expanding Discourse, and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper Collins Press, 1992): 139-160.

7. Geraldine A. Johnson, ‚Idol or Ideal: the Power and Potency of Female Public Sculpture,‛ in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, eds. Geraldine A. Johnson and Sarah Matthews Grieco (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 238. Sarah Blake McHam, ‚Public Sculpture in Renaissance Florence,‛ in Looking at Sculpture, ed. Sarah Blake McHam (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 169.

8. Mandel, ‚Perseus and the Medici,‛ Storia dell’Arte 87 (1996): 168ff. Margaret A. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini, Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003): 9.

9. Henk Th. van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 24

10. -----, 5.

11. -----, 5.

12. -----, 11, 16, 51.

13. -----, 11.

14. For information on the importance of the Mother Goddess’ iconography in the Renaissance see Edith Balas’ The Mother Goddess in Italian (Pennsylvania: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002). Renaissance Florence experienced a revived interest in the Mother Goddess which lasted into Cellini’s time and beyond. Some of the city’s premier scholars who publicized her cult were the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino and his followers, whose thinking played an important role at the Medici court. Balas (17) has noted that the Medici Library included ancient and medieval literature concerning the Mother Goddess. By the middle of the sixteenth century, such ancient mythographers as Apollodorus, Hyginus and Antonius Liberalis had joined the stage with classical historians, including Heraclitus and Diodorus Siculus. Many of their humanist compilations included illustrations of the Mother Goddess’ ancient faces, including Medusa as she appeared in ancient art. Thus, early modern artists had ample opportunity to experiment with her image. See as well Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: the Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) for further information on Neoplatonism at the Medici court; the humanist movement; and the allegorization and symbolization of ancient deities, such as the Earth Mother (see, for example, pages 203, 231). Balas’ book also contains an extensive compilation of authors who wrote about the Mother Goddess and whose works were also popular in sixteenth-century Italy.

15. Quotation of Margaret L. King, Women in the Renaissance (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1991): 238.

16. Adrian Randolph, Engaging Symbols; Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002): 242-285 for a discussion of the ‚power of women‛ topos in the fifteenth century.

17. The centralization of power (military, bureaucratic, etc.) within the 25 ’s person was the rationale behind the formation of absolutist states. The sixteenth century used the term ‚stato‛ to refer to both the ruler and the power he/she enjoyed, as well as to his/her dominion.

18. Natalie R. Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2003): 164. Tomas’ book is filled with pertinent discussions of early modern ideas about male and female rulership. See also C. Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 4, 17-18. In Patricia Simons’ terms, patriarchal power, though established in Renaissance Italy, was a construction, not ‚natural and unfettered.‛ See Simons’ ‚Alert and Erect: Masculinity in some Italian Renaissance Portraits of Fathers and Sons,‛ in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History (New York: MRTS, 1994): 167.

19. See, for instance, Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (California: Stanford University Press, 1975) and Sarah Matthews Grieco, ‚Pedagogical Prints: Moralizing Broadsheets and Wayward Women in Counter Reformation Italy,‛ in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, eds. Geraldine A. Johnson and Sarah Matthews Grieco (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 61-87. In making the observation that Renaissance masculinity was unstable I am not suggesting that it was secure in any other era; neither has femininity been.

20. Melissa Bullard, ‚Lorenzo de’ Medici, Anxiety, Image Making and Political Reality in the Renaissance,‛ in Lorenzo de’ Medici: Studi, ed. G. C. Garfagnini (Florence, Italy: Olschki Press, 1992): 40.

21. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1962): 8. Some of Ernst Cassirer’s salient works on symbolic values include Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen: die Sprach (Berlin, Germany: Bruno Cassirer, 1923) and Essay on Man (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1944).

22. See Gabrielle Langdon, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, and Betrayal from the Court of Cosimo I (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2006): 14, where one reads that Renaissance viewers read in visual details ‚a world of meaning and significance: the burnished sphere on the chair that mirrors papal environment

26 and greater world view is simultaneously the abiding Medici symbol, the golden palla or sphere.‛

23. J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols (London, England: Thames and Hudson Press, 2005): 7-8.

24. Van Veen, ‚Wat een Opdrachtgever wil: Cosimo I de’ Medici en Cellini’s Perseus en Medusa,‛ in Kunstenaars en Opdrachtgevers, ed. Harald Hendrix (Holland: Amsterdam University Press, 1996): 49-58.

25. -----, ‚Wat een Opdrachtgever wil: Cosimo I de’ Medici en Cellini’s Perseus en Medusa,‛ 55.

26. -----, ‚Wat een Opdrachtgever wil: Cosimo I de’ Medici en Cellini’s Perseus en Medusa,‛ 49-58. Van Veen believes that when Cosimo looked down from a window in the Palazzo Vecchio at the Perseus’ unveiling he was listening for viewers’ responses. Cellini, La Vita, I Trattati (Rome, Italy: G. Casini, 1967): 376 states that Cosimo I listened to the populace’s reaction to the Perseus from a window above the door of the Palazzo Vecchio (‚una finestra bassa del Palazzo, la quale si è sopra la porta..‛). It may have been, however, that the duke watched for viewers’ facial expressions and body language, for voices are mostly inaudible from the duke’s post. Cosimo was also available to receive responses from viewers after the Perseus’ introduction. Mandel (168) believes that the duke watched for ‚violent outbursts,‛ like those that viewers let out when Baccio Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus was unveiled on the Piazza della Signoria.

27. John Shearman, ‚Art or Politics in the Piazza?‛ in Benvenuto Cellini: Kunst und Kunsttheorie im 16. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Germany: Bohlau Verlag, 2003): 20.

28. -----, 26. Shearman, Only Connect

29. V. Marucci et al., eds., Pasquinate Romane del , vol. 1 (Rome, Italy: Salerno Press, 1983): 433-454.

27

Chapter 1 The Story of Perseus and Medusa, an Interpretation of its Meaning, and the Topos of Decapitation

This chapter’s summary of the tale of will precede a detailed analysis of the historical evolution of Medusa’s image as a maternal deity and what that image meant to ancient . A subsequent section on the symbolism of the head as a life force will be important to this study’s discussion of the value of Medusa’s head as a symbol of power.

The Textual Sources for Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa

Books IV and V of Ovid’s include the version of Perseus’ tale that had the greatest impact upon Cellini. However, ’s and

Lucan’s contain additional information that would have been important to the sculptor. Mention of other Greek authors is also due. What follows is

Ovid’s account, unless specified otherwise.1

Danae was the daughter of King of Argos who feared an that his future grandson would kill him and thus become ruler of the land. So one day Acrisius imprisoned Danae to prevent her from meeting suitors. However,

Jupiter () came to the girl as a shower of gold (he was a sun god) and impreg- nated Danae with the baby Perseus. For years the princess hid her baby, but it was not long before her father found him out and, according to the canonical

28 version of 700-650 B.C., ordered them both to be locked in a chest and thrown into the sea. Luckily, a fisherman called , whose brother, , ruled the island of Seriphos, saved Danae and Perseus and brought them to the island, where Perseus lived until he reached manhood. Polydectes fell in love with

Danae. However, she refused him. Angered by his misfortune, Polydectes ordered Perseus to perform an impossible task so that he would be rid of Danae’s son for good: to bring him the head of Medusa.

At one time Medusa was a mortal whose beauty intrigued

(Neptune), the supreme god of the sea, and incited the jealously of the goddess

Athena (). As a result, the latter turned Medusa’s head into a mass of hissing and her face into a sight so frightful that anyone who would look upon it would be turned to stone. Medusa unleashed a vengeful plan to destroy the world. However, with the aid of the , Perseus was able to overtake the

Gorgon. He came to Medusa’s lair, which, according to Hesiod’s Theogony (274), lay beyond River Okeanos, at the ‚edge of night,‛ where stars and planets vanished for rebirth.2 Cohabiting with Medusa were her two Gorgon sisters, offspring, like their dreadful sister, of and , themselves children of

Earth and Sea. The Graiae, who shared one eye and one tooth among them, lived with the . Perseus snatched the eye at the instant they were passing it

29 from one to another, so the sisters became blind to his presence. He then coaxed information about the Gorgons’ whereabouts from them.

Again employing deceit, Perseus made Medusa gaze upon her own face in

Athena’s bronze mirror-like shield, whereupon she turned herself into stone.

Perseus then decapitated her with the , the saw-toothed . The blood from Medusa’s head spawned the winged horse and Chrysoar, the solar warrior with the golden .3

Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lucan’s Pharsalia (Book IX) emphasize the heights which Perseus traveled on his way home from the Gorgon’s den. ‚Driven this way and that by sparring winds through heaven’s great immensity, as though of no more substance than the dewy mist, he looked down from a great height onto earth as he flew over it.‛4 (Metamorphoses, Book IV, 851-855) Ovid and Lucan tell that during Perseus’ flight blood from Medusa’s head met the earth, where it gave rise to serpents in the Libyan desert.

Air borne in Mercury’s (’) winged sandals, Perseus saw ’ tree,

‚whose leaves of shining gold concealed gold fruit and branches underneath.‛

(Metamorphoses, Book IV, 871-872) Perseus, whose name appropriately means

‚shining,‛ implies a connection between the gold and himself when he asks: ‚Mine host, if the renown of birth is what impresses you, why, I’m the son of Jove!‛

30

(Metamorphoses, Book IV, 873-875) (Hesiod’s ‚Shield of ,‛ similarly says that Perseus was made of gold.) The Metamorphoses states that Atlas immediately recalled an oracle that a son of Jupiter would spoil his tree of gold, so he enclosed his orchard within a wall and set a dragon there to protect it. Countering Atlas’ impertinence toward him, Perseus held up the head of Medusa, thereby turning the giant into a mountain decorated with trees.

Perseus then spied King and his family on the African shore.

Andromeda, the king’s daughter, stood chained to a rock as prey for the sea . Her was made to appease the , angered as they were by Cassiopeia’s boasting that her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful than the Nereids. Perseus flew through the air and the monster attacked his shadow on the water’s surface. An implied comparison of Perseus and Medusa exists here, for the watery reflection mimics that of the Gorgon on Athena’s shield. The youth saved the girl by stabbing the monster with his sword multiple times. After killing Cetus Perseus placed Medusa’s head on the shore, where vegetation ‚soaked up the monster’s force,‛ that is, her blood, and turned to coral.

(Metamorphoses, Book IV, 1016)

Perseus gave thanks to the gods for his success by building three sacrificial altars: one for Mercury, one for Athena, and one for Jupiter. Grateful for his

31 daughter’s life, King Cepheus gave Perseus permission to marry Andromeda.

Their daughter, according to ’ Description of Greece, was named

Gorgophone (‚Gorgon killer‛), which testifies to the fact that Medusa’s power lived on after her demise.

Another test of Perseus’ abilities was his encounter with Phineas, a rival for

Andromeda’s hand, who stormed Perseus’ and Andromeda’s wedding festivities.

Perseus was aghast at the number of men on Phineas’ side. Since the former was not able to slay all of them, he obtained Medusa’s head, held it aloft and turned the enemies he himself had not killed to stone. After returning to Seriphos, Perseus did the same to King Polydectes. Thus, Perseus, as Medusa’s alter ego, shared the

Gorgon’s powers of destruction in the troubling instances after her capture.

When Perseus was finished with the head of Medusa he gave it to Athena, who appropriated its powers by placing it on her shield for protection. The canonical version of the tale states that discovered Medusa’s lasting power when blood from her left side destroyed whoever drank it and that from her right side raised the dead.5

The oracle is fulfilled late in the story when Perseus kills Acrisius with a quoit, as Pausanias’ Description of Greece claims. Pherecydes’ (Book IV) states that Perseus killed Acrisius with a symbol of the sun – the discus. Thus,

32

Perseus was able to become king of Argos. However, since he was Acrisius’ murderer, Perseus chose to rule instead.

Origins and still a Search for Meaning

The close consideration of Medusa’s history which follows is a composite of versions of her story from the ancient Mediterranean world, some of whose authors have been lost to scholarship. Many of these folk traditions dating to as early as the second millennium B.C. formed the basis for the canonical version of the Gorgon’s story, which, as mentioned, developed between the years 700-650

B.C. Renaissance Italy knew the following information, which characterizes

Medusa as a goddess with cosmic power, from such classical sources as Hesiod’s

Theogony and ’ .6 I shall demonstrate that Cellini’s conceptualiz- ation of Perseus and the Gorgon derived from many of the ideas outlined here.

Medusa was the shadow side of Athena’s powerful femininity. Herodotus’

Timaeus (21) and Histories (Book II, 170-175) note that the historical origins of

Athena take one back to the Egyptian goddess Neith, who represented Mother

Death. Medusa’s historical origins come into play here, for to see Neith’s face behind the veil, which signifies the distance between human and divine, was to have died. Here is a clear link to the Gorgon’s destructive visage. In Libya (North

Africa) Neith was known as Athena. Pausanias’ Description of Greece states that

33

Athena’s place of origin was, indeed, in Libya. Herodotus’ History (Book I) acknowledges the same. With the passage of time Libyan refugees emigrated to

Crete and brought with them their Goddess Anatha. By 4000 B.C. she became known as Athena. Her worship passed onto mainland Greece in the

Minoan and Mycenaean periods, when came into contact with the when they invaded North Africa.7

By 700 B.C. the Greeks told the tale that Athena was conceived in a union between the god Jupiter and an infinitely intelligent mother goddess named , or Medusa (meaning ‚mother,‛ ‚ruler,‛ ‚queen,‛ ‚cunning intelligence,‛ and

‚sovereign wisdom‛). Hesiod’s Theogony (Book II, 453-491) states that Metis was wiser than any of the gods and of mortal men. In order to put a stop to the fulfillment of a prophecy that the child of their union would be stronger than the father, Jupiter deliberately destroyed Metis by swallowing her while she was pregnant with Athena. The result was a child solely of the father. Hesiod’s

Theogony (924) and the Homeric ‚Hymn to Athena‛ relate that the child was born from the head of Jupiter. It appears that Metis’ wisdom was so great that it resulted in Athena’s birth. Alternatively, another myth holds that the golden- armored Athena sprung out of Jupiter’s head when it was cleft with a the double- edged sword. Note here that the rise of a powerful female agency is concomitant

34 with a wound to the ’s head. This episode is almost a mirror image of the births of Pegasus and Chrysoar. The generative power of Jupiter’s head indicates that he could rival Medusa’s fertile power.

Athena also displayed her triple nature as Athena, Metis, and Medusa, who corresponded to the new, full, and dark phases of the moon, respectively.

Medusa, the Serpent Goddess of female wisdom, embodied the third aspect as . Indeed, her role as such fed into the ancient perception that the female visage surrounded by serpent hair was an emblem of divine wisdom. The Orphic tradition, which was known at the Medici court, called the moon’s face the

Gorgon’s head, while would later say that referred to the moon as ‚Gorgonios‛ because of the face described on it.8

Serpents were, in keeping, long honored symbols not only of wisdom, cunning and feminine wiles, but also of healing, and they had an affinity with the moon as a reflector of divine intelligence. Serpents were also matriarchal signs, shown with the Mother Goddess, one of whose guises was the Earth Mother, because of their association with water, earth, and the mystery of rebirth and , of which the moon, sloughing its shadow and again waxing, was the sign. Serpents slough and regrow their skin in cycles, as if eternally. The moon is the measure of the life-creating cycle of the womb and thus of time. Two

35 facets of the same being -- birth and death -- involved the moon’s significance.

Similarly, Medusa was the protector of the secrets of sex, death, , renewal, and of dark moon mysteries.9

Medusa’s influence pervaded earth and sky. It made itself felt, for instance, in the Atlas Mountain, which, Ovid said, touched the skies; the sea, where coral grew, and so on. In makes sense, then, that in their pre- guise the Gorgons and the Graiae were grand-daughters of the Earth Mother, , who had brought forth Heaven and Sea. Thus, one can see that the Gorgon’s character betrays the features of a supreme deity, the Mother Goddess, which had existed since the start of time.10 The latter could and did destroy those she controlled.

In the preceding context Perseus’ sword has additional significance. The

Greek hero’s harpe resembles the lunar sickle, and thereby suggests a symbolic tie to a maternal deity. An awareness of the moon’s significance to Medusa’s myth might have informed Petrus Berchorius’ reference to Perseus’ sword as sickle-like

(Moralized Ovid, 219).11 The harpe would have been, then, a suitable instrument with which to confront the Gorgon’s cosmic force.

In addition to being symbolic of the moon, Medusa’s face was, in a certain sense, like the sun in eclipse, as dark as death (just as the Mother Goddess

36 comprised light and darkness). Because her unmediated power was so great

Medusa overpowered the gaze. In the ancient mind looking at a divinity neces- sitated employing a mirror because a direct stare would cause blindness. It is telling, then, that Perseus needed to use Athena’s mirror-shield to look at

Medusa’s aspect indirectly.12 The mirror disk itself is lunar/solar, even generally cosmic, as the ancients must have believed Athena’s shield to be. As a product of the earth, the mirror stood for the Earth Mother. That Medusa’s face made its mark on Athena’s shield is telling. A description of the Mother Goddess () in Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (second century) brings the preceding motifs together with a resulting image that is rather Medusan:

Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a mirror, or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was. Vipers rising from the left- hand and right hand partings of her hair supported this disc.13

An entity embracing light and heat, the Mother Goddess, like Medusa, embodied both the generative and destructive forces of the sun. Different gems from the ancient world show Medusa at the center of the , occupying the position of the benevolent/destructive sun god /Helios. A well known fact is that Apollo and Medusa were sometimes featured on different sides of the same coin.14 The famous play by poses the question, ‚Does the dwelling of

37

Phoebus‛ (the sun) ‚really cover the central ‛ (navel) ‚of the earth?‛ to which Ion replies, ‚Ay, decorated with garlands and with the Gorgons ‘around it,’ or ‘on both sides.’‛15 However, Medusa was not always so exalted.

Versions of Medusa’s story cutting out the transitional episode of

Metis/Medusa and claiming that Athena was conceived and birthed solely from

Jupiter seem to mark the assimilation of matriarchal divinity to the standards of a new patriarchal order, firmly established around 1100 B.C. with the Dorians’ invasion into Greece, which championed Athena as benevolent and denigrated

Medusa, now the Terrible Mother, as evil. Athena was now part of the new of supreme rulers that included Jupiter and Apollo. She and Medusa then became opponents.16 For instance, Medusa’s erotic nature opposed Athena’s virginal character, which suggests a wish to downplay the latter’s sexuality in an effort to play up Jupiter’s procreative capacity. That capacity is more than a metaphor for political power. Procreation is necessary to dynastic continuity. It may even have been a trope for ability of the mind, for, as a product of Jupiter, Athena had intelligence, certain powers and a relationship with her father that no other god had. Her powers remained integral in themselves and, paradoxically, an instrument of her father. The preceding indicates that a drive to incorporate the feminine in divinity existed during the patriarchal age.

38

The social and political turmoil that gave rise to misogynistic interpreta- tions of the character and tale of Medusa reached a climax well before the canonical version of her story was complete. Then, the historical archetype of the

Mother Goddess informed ancient descriptions of the .17 As Josine Blok has stated, ‚matriarchy was a stock feature of the speculative systems of the development of humanity, and the Amazons were an equally stock feature of matriarchy.‛18 Some authors who claimed that the Amazons were historical suggested that at least as far back as 6000 B.C. Medusa was a high priestess who presided over Amazon women in Libya.19 Diodorus Siculus’ Historical Library

(Book IV) relates that the Libyan Amazons were Gorgons, all women famous for their valor, war-like exploits, and acumen in founding and maintaining cities, governments and nations. At one time, Medusa was their queen. According to

Pausanias as well, Medusa was an Amazon.20 She was an epitome of female power and of matriarchy.

Aeschylus’ Eumenides, written in 458 B.C., states that the Amazons were empire builders, like the Athenians, a fact that Isocrates acknowledged. Even though the Amazons compared to the Athenians in different ways, these women were threatening, though simultaneously fascinating in the patriarchal Greeks’ eyes. Their matriarchic power aside, the androgynous nature of these women, like

39 that of Medusa herself, made up of properties belonging to sexuality, fertility, life and death, was horrific and anomalous to the Athenians.21

The emergence of the new patriarchy coincided with the destruction of the

Amazonian ‚‛ of state. In mythical accounts, which the Renaissance knew, among the first to destroy the Amazons were Achilles, and Hercules.

Then Perseus came to the scene and defeated Medusa, the matriarchic ‚queen,‛ and her Amazon sisters.22 As Siculus claimed, the latter were a great power until the Gorgon met her death. Perseus’ marriage to Andromeda, whose name means

‚ruler of men,‛ stemmed from Medusa’s demise, reflecting the fact that patriarchism’s restrictive system of marriage coincided with the destruction of the matriarchal state.

I propose that in the preceding context – and as matriarchal/matrilineal societies prove -- the mother was the epitome of matriarchy. That is why Perseus’ myth aimed to suppress what Athenians perceived to be the Mother’s negative side (remember, Medusa became the Terrible Mother in the story of Athena’s birth), which partially comprised her physical sexuality.23 Indeed, since ancient times the procreative nature of woman has been understood as an aspect of female power and potency, and has served as a source of fear as well as something to be worshiped, as the cult of the Mother Goddess indicates.

40

In the preceding context, it is telling that Perseus’ entrance into the

Gorgons’ cave at the extreme West, that is, Night, where the sun retires, symbol- izes the sun’s setting, or its death, while his exit stands for the sun’s birth into the world from Mother Earth’s devouring womb.24 Since the sun vanishes in this way every evening, only to return the next morning, its mortality and immortality coincide, thus typifying the sun’s subjection to the Mother’s power over life and death.

Thus, ‚the feminine whole cannot be fragmented and its parts suppressed,‛ which the Athenian myth sought to do.25 The enduring fear of Medusa functioned,

I would stress, as a sign of patriarchy’s fear of woman, and Medusa’s influence is still a tribute to the long lasting impact of female power and potency. The fact that

Perseus was able to slay the Gorgon only with the aid of Athena and Mercury, his fearful escape from the Gorgon’s lair and his inability to counter some of his rivals at his wedding without Medusa’s help point up his weakness as a man and perhaps even patriarchy’s weakness. It is no coincidence that only men could turn to stone when gazing upon Medusa’s face.

Fear of Woman also resulted in the patriarchal practice of portraying

Medusa as an ugly and frightening monster. She appeared this way from the early seventh through the fifth century B.C. After this time, starting in the fifth

41 century B.C., artists depicted the Gorgon with pleasing features. Remember,

Ovid’s Metamorphoses states that she was once beautiful. During the patriarchal age artists began to include Medusa’s decapitated body to underscore the fact that her death was an assault on the female form. Corporeal partitioning seems to have betrayed an insecure need to reassure oneself of matriarchy’s defeat.

The Hellenistic practice of showing Medusa’s beautiful face to the patriarchal Mediterranean world suggests that fascination with her remained ambivalent. One must stress that her beauty and monstrosity could coincide in the same visual image, a fact that testifies to the of her powerful effects and to the anxious nature of new societies.26

A fuller answer to why the myth of Perseus and Medusa developed when it did requires a separate study, and so my consideration will continue to be abbreviated. As suggested, classical literature which was available to Renaissance individuals proves that the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy changed attitudes toward female deities, such as Medusa, in the Greek . The dominant force in the Greek pantheon was now Jupiter, no longer a supreme

Mother Goddess. Not surprising, then, is the fact that a copy of Athena’s shield on the Parthenon, the center of Athenian religious worship and a symbol of the patriarchal state of , shows the Gorgon head surrounded by a battle

42 between Amazons and Greeks. Other reliefs on the same temple also narrate the

Greek-Amazonian war.27

The Amazon’s role as an epitome of female power likewise comes through in Amazonomachiai that are blatant assaults on the female gender. For instance, numerous antique vase paintings show mythological heroes, such as Hercules and

Theseus, targeting the breast of a militantly clad Amazon (fig. 3). The Greek cult of the phallus that emerged during the age of patriarchal state building seems to have informed representations of patriarchal heroes with spears, clubs, , and other phallic attributes which are both literally and symbolically pitted against the female gender.28

The preceding artistic trends complemented males’ reaction to changes in the Greek family structure: fathers and sons needed to prove themselves as warriors, statesmen and even as sexual aggressors.29 Phillies-Howe has proposed that alterations in the familial hierarchy concurring with the rise of the patriarchal polis probably had the greatest impact on the development of Perseus’ myth. While fathers assumed the role of head of household, male offspring faced a new imperative to separate themselves from dominating mothers and to become domineering themselves. Clearly, a fashion of thinking in polar terms led Greeks to conceive of household and state rule as either by men or by women:30

43

No middle, or third course was imaginable; the absence of male rule presupposed, on the domestic level, the breakdown of marriage, the death of husband, and the destruction of his household. On the public level, loss of male rule meant the creation of matriarchy, a situation tantamount to chaos in the state and cosmos.31

Not coincidentally, some ancient Greek texts from the patriarchal age characterize Medusa as a threat to children. Take the example of ’s

Geography (Book I, 2,8), which claims that in order to educate and to discipline their little ones Greek parents pictured the Gorgon as a goblin who devours children. The image of Medusa as a bogey suggests that she embodied fears of the unknown, of the uncertain and of the different which accompanied the rise of the

Mediterranean polis. Similarly, the Gorgon’s head engendered fear even after

Perseus severed it. As Phillies-Howe has discerned, ‚the

Perseus, one of the heroes they invented to mask and to conquer their own vulnerability:

..heroes like Perseus, , ,

44

not. Hence in the myth, at least, victory was insured.32

In this context, the Gorgon stood, I propose, for fear of the feminization of political culture, of a return to matriarchy. In some ways she responded to ancient anxieties about woman, which manifested themselves in art and literature, as dangerously seductive, ferocious, curious and destructive – all traits that were seemingly fabricated to distort and to mask her original power.33

The Topos of Decapitation

As the accounts of the generative powers of Medusa’s decapitated head and of Athena’s birth suggest, the ancient Mediterranean world believed that the head is vitalistic, the seat of the life force. The notion helps to explain why the head has been a time honored emblem of power.34 During the days of Ovid,

Homer and Hesiod the head purportedly had the potential to achieve ‚the greatest miracle, the holiest mystery‛ – to generate new life.35 was one author who asserted that life within the head even survives death and passes into the other- world.36 Permeating the ancient Greek world was the belief that the head contains another animate part of the person – the soul. Ovid, Pindar, and , for example, stated as much, and at the same time embraced the notion that the head is holy, the most divine part of the individual. Aristotle asserted, in keeping, that the head’s intelligence is divine.37

45

The belief in the head’s vitality carried into the , when Celtic and Scythian ideas that the trophy head could confer strength to the victor influenced different forms of epic literature, such as Arthurian. The latter had a wide audience in the Renaissance, whose authors also clung to ancient

Mediterranean beliefs that this most controversial part of the human being houses supernatural powers.38 For instance, Canto XXVIII of Dante’s (c. 1308-1321) includes the specter of a deceased man with his severed head in his hand. Antonio

Dominguez Leiva has stated that the former image is markedly Medusan.39 I would stress that the preceding is a natural result of ancient beliefs in the head’s vitality and even supports the conclusions of those, such as the Church Fathers, who claimed that the soul’s primary seat is the head.

The notion of the head as a life force and therefore a source of power seems to have informed the symbolic significance of crowns, whose spokes were believed to evoke solar rays. The sun’s heat vitalizes. Similarly, the image of the rays of light radiating from the head has since antiquity signified divinity, fire, energy, and power.40 No other part of the person appeared in this way, for only the head contained the life soul.

Since antiquity, beheading was believedly a dignified form of punishment, the preferred mode of execution for rulers and others of rank, whose heads wore

46 the symbols of state in the first place and who could also lose those emblems. The position of the ruler, or the ruling elite as the ‚head‛ of state naturally came into play here, but the association with holy martyrdoms, like that of John the Baptist, dignified decapitation as a form of punishment. The pages that follow will demonstrate how Cellini’s Medusa epitomizes many of the preceding ideas about the head’s dignity, power and potency.

47

Notes

1. Ovid’s, Lucan’s and Hesiod’s versions of Perseus’ tale are the most thorough popular accounts that existed in the Renaissance. Apollodorus’ translation of the canonical version of the tale came into print only in 1555. However, medieval and Renaissance mythographers popularized the latter in . See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, the Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953): 225. Seznec’s book is filled with information about Ovid’s immense popularity in the Renaissance. The first published editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses appeared in Rome and in 1471 and the first Italian version of the text appeared in Florence in 1497.

2. All quotations of the Theogony come from Catherine Schlegel’s translation of 2006 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

3. Hesiod maintained that Pegasus and Chrysoar were born from Medusa’s neck.

4. All quotations of Ovid come from the Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005).

5. References to Asclepius in Medici art prove that the canonical version of Perseus’ tale was known in Italy.

6. M. L. West, ‚The Medieval and Renaissance Monographs of Hesiod’s Theogony,‛ Classical Quarterly 14 (1964): 165-189. The classical texts discussed here were known to early modern Italy. See, for instance, Balas, as well as Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, the Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art; R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (New York: Routledge Press, 1964).

7. F. M. Muller, Die Wissenschaft der Sprache, eds. R. Fick and W. Wischmann (Leipzig, Germany: W. Englemann, 1892). F. G. Welcker, Griechische Götterlehre (Göttingham, Germany: Deterich, 1857-1863). In Sardinia and Cyprus there was contact with the Egyptian goddess Hathor and Bea, whose depictions sometimes took on Gorgonian forms. Cheikh Anta Diop’s The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: the Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (Illinois: Third World Press, 1978) discusses the of matriarchal Africa and their influence on the Greek pantheon of female divinities. According to Herodotus, all 48 the Greek gods and goddesses came from Egypt. See Diop, 76-81.

8. Seznec, 25. Balas, 25 acknowledges that the writing of Clement of Alexandria was popular in intellectual at the Medici court. The link between women and Wisdom and Truth pervades world mythology. For instance, the Egyptian goddess Maat was Truth. The Hebrew name of Emeth, a fertility goddess, means ‚truth.‛

9. Cooper, 106-108, 146-151. The link between the moon, a time honored symbol of woman, and the Mother Goddess was known in the Renaissance. For example, the figure of Terra appears above a lunar crescent in a fresco in ’s Schifanoia Palace. However, the sun has also been a feminine attribute. The representation of Hathor with a sun-disk is one among many religiously symbolic images of women with the sun dating to the early Bronze Age. The sun-disk is sometimes described as placed in Hathor’s womb, an indication that the sun’s generative properties were associated with women. For like images see Lucy Goodison’s Death, Women and the Sun: Symbolism of Regeneration in Early Aegean Religion (England: University of London, 1989).

10. Euripedes’ Ion (1053) states that Medusa was Earth-born, the daughter of Gaia. For the historical cult of the Mother Goddess see M. I. Rostovzeff, Iranians and Greeks in South (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969); J. J. Bachofen, Gesammeltewerk, vols. 2, 3, ed. K. Meuli (Basel, Switzerland: B. Schwabe, 1948); G. Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, vol. 4 (Leipzig, Germany: C. W. Leske, 1810); E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess: an Archaeological and Documentary Study (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959); W. Leonhard, Hettiter und Amazonen (Leipzig, Germany: B. G. Teubner, 1911); Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Penguin Press, 1976); Lynn E. Roller, In Search of God the Mother, the Cult of Anatolian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

11. All references to Berchorius’ Moralized Ovid are taken from the 1509 edition, Ouidiana moraliter a magistro Thoma Walleys (Houghton Library, ). See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1968): 44, note 35 for an indication that Renaissance Italy was aware of Berchorius’ Repertorium morale and the Moralized Ovid.

12. A. L. Frothingham, ‚Medusa, Apollo, and ,‛ American Journal of Archaeology 15 (1911): 349-377. 49

13. Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951): 263. See Jean Gillies, ‚The Central Figure in Botticelli’s Primavera,‛ Woman’s Art Journal 2 (1981): 12-16 for evidence that Apuleius’ text was known to Renaissance Florentine humanists.

14. For information about the solar gems featuring Medusa see Frothingham, 352.

15. Quoted on Frothingham, 353.

16. Scholars have provided strong evidence that a matriarchy – a term critics and I employ to mean a society that revolved around matriarchal authority, not necessarily a society that oppressed men -- once existed in the prehistoric and ancient Mediterranean and that an invasion of patriarchal Indo-Europeans put an end to it. See, for instance, ’ The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (London, England: Thames and Hudson Press, 2001), The Living Goddess (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), The Kurgan Culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: Selected Articles from 1952 to 1993 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man, 1997), The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe (California: Harper SanFrancisco, 1991). Diop, 80-81 and Miriam Robbins Dexter, ‚The Roots of Indo- European Patriarchy: Indo-European Female Figures and the Principles of Energy,‛ in The Rule of : Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of Patriarchy, ed. Cristina Biaggi (Connecticut: KIT, 2005): 146 also mention the Indo- European invasion. As Diop, 81 shows, the ancient author Polybius spoke of the matriarchal Leleges of Minor (modern day Turkey and Greece). Herodotus’ Histories (Book I, 173), which, remember, the Renaissance knew, publicizes the following about Asia Minor’s matriarchal Lycians:

They have one singular custom which distinguishes from every other nation in the world: naming themselves by their mothers, not their fathers. Ask a Lycian who he is and he answers by giving his own name, that of his mother and so on in the female line. Also, if a free woman marries a slave, their children are full citizens; but if a free man marries a foreign woman, or lives with a concubine, even if he is the chief man of the State, the children forfeit all the rights of citizenship.

Heraclides Ponticus said of the Lycians: ‚From of old they have been ruled by the women.‛ This quotation is found on page 46 of Merlin Stone’s When God was a Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). 50

The cult of the Mother Goddess, entrenched in all Mediterranean matriarchies, suggests that power of an earthly nature influenced individuals’ conceptualization of divinity. Further, one reads that were women, some of whom held a divine right to the throne. Indo-European worshipped, tellingly, male gods. The latter clashed with their female counterparts, as the story of Metis shows. In Harald Haarmann’s terms:

The strong women in the Greek pantheon do not fit into the mold of male-dominated hierarchy of the Indo-European divinities. The Greek goddesses are actually a remnant of the ancient cult of the Great Goddess, the One who functionally proliferated into the Many within . It is noteworthy that the Greek goddesses were very powerful, as powerful as the male divinities and all major achievements of Greek civilization were attributed to the ingenuity of goddesses. For example, the gift of agriculture was given to mankind by , the corn mother who is also credited with the inven- tion of the plow. Haarmann, ‚Why did Patriarchy supersede Egalitarianism?‛ in The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of Patriarchy, 170.

Although material in Chapter 1 of my study indicates that the Renaissance would have been aware of the transition within the ancient Mediterranean world from matriarchy to patriarchy (see my discussion of the Amazonomachia, for instance), the field of Renaissance studies as a whole would benefit from more research on the early modern age’s knowledge of this transition.

17. See, for instance, Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries (New York: Balantine Books, 1999).

18. Quotation of Josine Blok, The Early Amazons, Modern and Ancient Perspectives on a Persistent Myth (New York: Brill Press, 1995): 101. The sources cited in note 10 also discuss the historical basis of matriarchy.

19. See Marguerite Rigoglioso, The Cult of Divine Birth in (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009): 72 for a discussion of Medusa as an historical Amazon priestess. The name of Medusa is also associated with the word ‚Amazon.‛

51

20. Stephen R. Wilk, Medusa: Solving the Myth of the Gorgon (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000): 25. W. Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: a Study in Athenian Mythmaking (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Interestingly, Homer’s associates Medusa with matriarchal societies. Siculus also spoke about matriarchal nations of Africa and the Mediterranean in conjunction with the Amazons. For a pertinent discussion of Siculus’ comments, including his observations about matriarchal worship of a Mother Goddess, see Stone, 34-35.

21. Tyrrell, 89. Roger Just’s Women in Athenian Law and Life (New York: Routledge Press, 1991): 174-175 explores the ‚anomalous‛ nature of the Amazons. Just, 177 also notes that the Athenians knew the Amazons’ invasion of to be a matter of historical truth. Mandy Merck’s ‚The City’s Achievements,‛ in Tearing the Veil, Essays on Femininity, ed. Susan Lipshitz (New York: Routledge Press, 1978): 96 documents the Athenians’ fascination with the Amazons.

22. See Mina Zografou, Amazons in Homer and Hesiod: a Historical Reconstruction (Athens, Greece, 1972). Isocrates’ (436-338 B.C.) ‚Panegyricus‛ tells of the Amazons’ encounters with the Greek patriarchs. Fulgentius, Fulgentius the Mythographer, trans. Leslie G. Whitbread (Ohio State University Press, 1971): 61 describes what seems to be Perseus’ political domination of Medusa. Perseus decapitated the Gorgon because he coveted her rich dominion. After he did so he acquired all her territories. Fulgentius may have meant to characterize Perseus as a surrogate for the Greeks who took control of matriarchal lands. See Seznec, 94, 106, 172, 175, 176n, 178, 228, 234ff for Fulgentius’ great influence in the early modern age.

23. It is worth noting, although Cellini would not have known as much, that the myth of Medusa reflects initiation rituals practiced on certain occasions in the lives of young men. M. Jameson has argued so based on evidence in the form of a certain Mycenaean inscription from the Archaic period. The script links Perseus with ‚parents‛ and thus suggests a tie to maturation rites for which boys donned Gorgon masks, and which prepared young males to separate themselves from their mothers. It appears to me that wearing the masks might have stood for the need to conquer one’s fears by becoming like the Other/Mother before separating oneself from her. M. Jameson, ‚Perseus, the Hero of Mykenai,‛ in Celebrations of Death and Divinity in Bronze Age Argolid, eds. R. Hagg and G. Nordquist (Stockholm, Sweden: Svenska Institutet, 1990): 213-223. The fact that Amazons employed Gorgon masks to ward men away from their sacred rituals seems to support Jameson’s argument for the masks’ sociological significance. 52

24. Matilde Battistini, Symbols and Allegories in Art (California: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005): 224 mentions the sun’s setting into Mother Earth as the former’s death.

25. Tyrrell, 109.

26. During the patriarchal age Athena’s character was also fraught with contra- dictions that betray a struggle among men to separate her from her matriarchal past. For example, her attribute, the , an emblem of birth, regeneration, death and wisdom, testifies to Athena’s previous association with Medusa.

27. The Medici would have known the preceding, for they owned a sarcophagus (c. 180) depicting an . Amazonomachiai feature on many ancient Greek vases, temple friezes, sarcophagus reliefs, etc., and so would have been amply available to Renaissance artists and patrons. Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Book I, 15.1) speaks of the Amazons as historical figures who stormed Troy to fight the Athenians. The same text (Book I, 17.1) states that the sanctuary of Theseus houses pictures of Athenians battling Amazons. See Balas, 152 for an indication of Pausanias’ influence in the Renaissance. Herodotus’ Histories (Book IV) also acknowledges that the Amazons battled the Athenians, that their name means ‚man killer,‛ and that no Amazon girl was permitted to marry until she had killed an male enemy in battle. Plutarch’s Life of Theseus (c. 100) is one among many written accounts of the Athenian siege of the Amazons. See Merck, 95-115 for a thorough discussion of how the Athenians used their victory over the Amazons to historicize and legitimate the creation of their state. Page 106 of Merck’s article states that one can interpret the Parthenon, dedicated to Athena ‚Parthenos,‛ or virgin, as a ‚strident expression of patriarchal ideology. Not only is Athena the inveterate ally of Greek heroes against her Olympian sisters, not only does she abjure the ‘feminine’ functions of coupling and childbirth, not only is her physical sexuality swathed in male armour – but her mythic parentage (portrayed on the temple’s east pediment) presents her as born only of the Father.‛

28. The cult of the phallus emerged when a stronger sense of patriarchal Greeks’ national identity came into being in the sixth century, and it continued to flourish as the myth of Perseus developed in the ancient Mediterranean world. See Eva C. Keuls’ The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), especially 33-64, 78-79 for pertinent informa- tion and artistic representations of the gendered battle between Amazons and Greeks. Keuls treats weapons as phallic symbols here. 53

29. -----, 47.

30. Thalia Phillies-Howe, ‚The Origin and Function of the Gorgon-Head,‛ American Journal of Archaeology 58 (1954): 209-221.

31. Tyrrell, 28.

32. Phillies-Howe, An Interpretation of the Perseus-Gorgon Myth in and Monuments through the Classical Period, Ph.D. (Columbia University, 1975): 85- 86.

33. Note, for instance, the story of Helen, whose alluring beauty was responsible for the .

34. The myth of Hercules and the also suggests that the Greeks believed in the head’s vitality. The Hydra was a monster with many heads, all of which, save one, were immortal, and so each time Hercules severed the heads they kept growing back. Only when he cut off the central, mortal head and had it cauterized did the Hydra perish. The Hydra reminds one of Medusa and her Gorgon sisters. For expanded histories of decapitation see Antonio Dominguez Leiva, Décapitations: du Culte des Cranes au Cinéma Gore (Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004) and P. H. Stahl, Histoire de la Décapitation (Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986). At the most basic level, the fact that decapitation and not the loss of an arm or leg causes death should indicate why the head has been synonymous with life.

35. Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1951): 109. See, for instance, Homer’s , Book III, 299ff.

36. Onians, 116.

37. -----, 107-108, 116-119. See, for instance, Plato’s Timaeus, 44ff.

38. Stahl, 160ff.

39. Dominguez Leiva, 26-34, 36. The motif of the still living decapitated body and head has roots in the Western hagiographic tradition. For instance, the Passio Iusti of the seventh century tells of the decapitated roaming the earth, head in 54 hand, in search of a proper burial place. There is a relationship here to the Golden Legend (1260) by Genoese Archbishop de Voragine, which includes a generous number of .

40. Cooper, 47. See also S. Hijmans, ‚Metaphor, Symbol and Reality: the Polysemy of the Imperial Radiate ,‛ in Common Ground. Archaeology, Art, Science, and Humanities. Proceedings of the XVIth International Congress of Classical Archaeology, ed. C. C. Mattusch, Boston, Massachusetts (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press: August 23-26, 2003): 440-443.

55

Chapter 2 Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa: the Paradigm of Control

The story of Perseus and the Gorgon is paradoxical to its core. In one respect Danae’s son destroyed her, but, on the other, severing her head unleashed

Medusa’s powerful interior. What follows is a discussion of Cellini’s bronze for the Loggia dei Lanzi as an essentialization of the paradoxical nature of Ovid’s tale.

In this capacity the statue translated into a remarkable of Duke Cosimo I’s political achievements, but the salient similarity between the bronze Perseus, the duke’s surrogate, and Medusa emphasizes her power and her share in the hero’s triumphs. Further, the iconography of Cellini’s statue points up the fact that the influence of women played a crucial role in Cosimo I’s rise to greatness.

The Commission and Cellini’s Innovation

In 1545 Cosimo I commissioned Cellini to sculpt Perseus holding the head of Medusa. Nothing more is known about the duke’s intentions, so much of one’s judgment must focus on the way the bronze statue appears in its final form.1

Cellini deviated from his patron’s order by including the body of Medusa in his frame of vision. An unprecedented configuration exists in her spiralesque form, which comprises legs and arms that are bent to varying degrees. Her left hand holds onto her ankle and thus defines her circular shape. The Gorgon’s nude figure hangs onto the last shreds of life and lies contorted upon a pillow and 56 beneath Perseus’ feet. Athena’s shield serves as a support for the Gorgon’s body as Medusa’s figure twists around the shield’s rim (fig. 4). Perseus’ right foot is grounded upon the shield that contributed to Medusa’s destruction, while his other foot rests on his victim’s stomach (fig. 5).

Perseus proudly holds Medusa’s head aloft, while thick rivulets of blood fall from the two halves of the Gorgon’s gruesome neck. Her eyes are not entirely closed and her mouth gapes open (fig. 6).

The base of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa contributes to the sculptural ensemble’s great height (eighteen feet tall, figs. 7, 8, 9, 10). Four niches composed of marble house bronzettes of Jupiter, Athena, Mercury, Danae and the child

Perseus. Jupiter’s has the inscription: ‚Te fili qvis/ laeserit vltor/ ero‛ (If anyone harms thee, my son, I will avenge thee). Near Danae one finds that: ‚Tvta Iove ac/ tanto pignore/ laeta fvgor‛ (With Jove’s protection and with such a pledge I go happily into exile). Athena’s niche contains the words: ‚Ovo vincas/ clypeum do tibi/ casta soror‛ (I, thy chaste sister, gave thee the shield with which thee will conquer), while on the niche for Mercury one reads: ‚Fris ut arma/ nvdvs ad/ astra volo‛ (That thou shalt bear thy brother’s arms I tag">fly naked to the heavens).

Caryatids at the corners of the pedestal represent the bisexual Diana of

Ephesus, the multi-breasted figure of procreation who appears in the work of

Benedetto Varchi, iconographer for Cellini and author of the inscriptions. 57

Garlands of fruit appear above the Ephesian women, who are benign versions of the Mother Goddess. Interestingly, Danae looks similar in appearance to the figure of Earth on Cellini’s Saltcellar for King Francis I, which seems to suggest that the sculptor conceptualized Perseus’ mother as a type for the Earth Goddess

(fig. 11).2 The fact that the sculptor called the Saltcellar Earth by the name of

Berecynthia, an esoteric appellation for the Earth Mother, indicates that he was highly knowledgeable about ancient traditions.3

The goat heads signifying Cosimo I’s adopted zodiacal sign of Capricorn flank several grotteschi on the top of the pedestal. Flames consume the sides and bottoms of these open-mouthed, hollow-eyed masks, which all connect to torches that expand behind the ears of the adjacent Capricorns. The goats’ horns, in turn, merge with the masks’ tops.

The pedestal’s relief, Perseus liberating Andromeda shows the airborne hero fighting Cetus without the head of Medusa, as Ovid said (fig. 12). Perseus is about to strike the monster with his sword, which he holds above his head, while a billowing cape conveys the windy heights Perseus occupies. Two men and a woman, all on horseback, appear to be combating in an area in the sky farther behind Perseus. Another figure is the enraged man with the billowing cape who stands between Andromeda and her family. He is nude, as the horsemen are, and his open-mouthed visage is rather menacing. Andromeda 58 stands chained to a rock, gazing up at the enormous Perseus and Medusa under the

Loggia.

An Interpretation of the Statue’s Meaning

Duality is central to Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. Character doubling involves the Greek hero’s headdress, which has a most intriguing aspect: its back features a grotesque, elderly, lionine male visage framed by a mane of curls. It is a

Janus face of the youthful Perseus on its opposite side (fig. 13). Together the two countenances signify destiny and the start and end of a journey, that is, Perseus’ for the Gorgon’s head. In , past and recommencement numbered among the various attributes of the two-faced deity, so he also became a god of the beginning and end of the day and the year.

Representations of heads with two faces usually stood for prudence – a virtue requiring memory of the past, intelligence, which acts upon the present, and foresight, which affects the outcome of future events, as Berchorius’ Repertorium morale stipulates.4 Two-headed figures can refer to past and future, or, like

Cellini’s Janus faces, present and future. Cosimo I would have appreciated

Cellini’s allusion to Prudence, since the duke adopted it as his personal virtue. In fact, as he and Cellini probably would have known, Andrea Alciati’s Book of

Emblems (1531) named Janus a god of prudence and Natale Conti’s Mythologies

59

(1551), which was just as influential as Alciati’s text, states that Perseus stands for prudence.5

The Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola maintained that souls originally had a Janus nature --- eyes on the fronts and backs of their heads. He claimed that:

they at the same time can see the spiritual things and provide for the material. Before they fall into this earthly body, our souls also have two faces

The Neoplatonists of Medicean Florence knew about Pico’s view. The latter’s followers tied this idea to the problem in ’ fable, told in Plato’s

Symposium, that human beings were originally double, with two faces, but lost their perfection when they were cut in half. Plato’s Symposium also states that in the beginning humanity comprised spherical hermaphrodites with two identical faces on circular necks.7 The Janus faces of Cellini’s bronze Perseus recall Pico’s,

Aristophanes’, and Plato’s ideas about the dual aspect of human nature’s original form.

The Janus face at the rear of Perseus’ helmet contributes to the bronze headdress’ overall intricacy, thereby stressing the Renaissance belief in the head’s

60 significance as the site of identity, where a person might make known his or her merit and pretension.8

The likeness between the heads of the bronze Perseus and Medusa denotes shared identity. Victor’s and victim’s identities are practically interchangeable: their faces, eyes downcast, are strikingly similar from the front and in profile, while the thick, curved lines of Perseus’ hair and helmet the intertwined serpents on Medusa’s head and the coils of her blood (fig. 14). Lifted up, Medusa’s head is almost horizontal to that of Perseus. The Greek hero seems, in this way, to purposefully lead the viewer to a comparison between himself and the Gorgon.

The Perseus and Medusa’s faces thus take on an androgynous characteriza- tion that suggests a union of ‚opposites.‛ Historically, the motif of physically juxtaposed male and female heads may signify shared temporal and spiritual power. According to the Orphic tradition, the gods’ duplicity, including that of a gendered nature, was a mark of their power.9 It is easy to see how Perseus shares the potency of Medusa, since it is through the petrifying power of her gaze that he can turn others to stone. The face behind his helmet also seems to mimic Medusa’s monstrosity and to share her (implied) power to scare an imagined third party.

On the Piazza, Medusa’s power never ends, for art immortalizes her potency.

Indeed, Medusa’s ability to turn onlookers to stone survived her decapitation, as noted. 61

The power of Perseus and Medusa is cosmic. One way that Janus faces may stand for power that is cosmic, a namesake of Cosimo I himself, is by signifying the summer solstice in Cancer and the winter solstice (the sun’s season of rebirth and the beginning of the zodiacal calendar) in Capricorn.10 Ovid’s Fasti (Book I,

63-65) states that Janus regulates the passage of the new sun each year. The preceding comes into play in Cellini’s bronze if Perseus is taken as Cosimo I’s surrogate. Perseus’ status as a solar hero is fitting in the preceding astrological context.

The on Perseus’ helmet are appropriate to the Greek hero’s profile as a child of the sun god Jupiter, for wings are attributes of sun deities. Mercury’s helmet, which Perseus wears, was, indeed, known as a sun cap. Helmets with wings are often symbols of the triumph of light, for instance, sunlight, the essence of the life force, over dark.11 It is appropriate, then, that wings should grace

Perseus’ head, for it too houses a life force. The head of Perseus’ Greek hero is, therefore, a suitable emblem of power.

The original gilding on Cellini’s Perseus complemented the statue’s solar significance and the importance of the bronze hero as a demi-god.12 Renaissance

Italy would have known the time honored association between gold and divinity, and that gold’s precious nature owed itself in part to its similarity to the sun.13

Therefore, the head of Perseus, helmet in tow, would have appeared as a mass of 62 golden ‚rays‛ whose gleams signified the life spirit within. The head of Cellini’s

Perseus, the immortal caput mysticum of Cosimo I, becomes all the more of an emblem of lasting life and enduring political power. In this way Cellini’s statue would have spoken to the traditional Medici concerns of renewal and dynastic immortality, as the medium of bronze did.14

Cellini’s Medusa was also gilded when she first arrived on the Piazza della

Signoria. Her golden serpents would have matched the fiery tendrils of her mythological neighbor, which competed with her fertile, solar head.15 (It is no wonder that the Gorgon’s head spawned the solar Chrysoar.) Perhaps Cellini was inspired by Boccaccio’s On Famous Women (Chapter 22), which states that

Medusa’s hair was golden.16 The ancient world believed, as Cellini must have, that the Gorgon’s serpents, already symbols of life, mimicked the sun’s rays.

Remember that one’s ability to look directly at Medusa’s face matches the weaken- ing of the eye in the attempt to confront the sun directly. The myth of Phaedrus explains that an insatiable desire to see the sun is an impetus for the soul’s downfall. Baldassare Castiglione’s popular book, The Courtier (1528) equates the sun with divinity in a way that reminds one of Medusa’s visage: ‚

As a solar force, Medusa’s blood, which compares to her serpents, emblems of solar and lunar rays, contributes to her cosmic power and her fertile nature. 63

Cellini was probably aware that, viewing the human as microcosm, solar theologian Marsilio Ficino described correspondences between the rising of the sun and the renewal of the blood’s strength before the body rises from sleep.

Blood’s rapport with the sun lies behind the association of blood, perhaps blood from the head, with regenerating fire. Since Medusa’s sanguine rivulets are congruent with Perseus’ phallus her blood compares to the hero’s ability to procreate. Interestingly, the phallus was a solar emblem in the Renaissance.18 In the preceding contexts the solar powers of Cellini’s bronze characters come together.

The story of Athena’s mirror shield suggests the same cosmic match, for when Perseus gazed at Medusa’s face in the he saw his alter ego, that is, a transformed reflection of himself. Remember that the shield is a solar/lunar symbol, an apt attribute of deity. The meeting of Perseus’ and Medusa’s likenesses within the mirror-shield is a trope for the solar/lunar power they share. Recall that the harpe with which Perseus slew Medusa was a lunar symbol that linked him with maternal deity. Cellini’s hero actually holds a derivation of the harpe --- the .

Cellini’s conceptualization of Perseus’ and Medusa’s heads has a marked affinity with contemporary characterizations of the sacred head of John the Baptist, whose cult was in the early modern age highly popular in Florence. The 64 association with Saint John will prove that contemporary Florentines knew about the topoi of the fertile head and the fertile head’s connection with the sun. The feast of John the Baptist took place on June 24th, the date of his birth and that of the summer solstice, which since antiquity has been acknowledged as the time of the sun’s greatest intensity. Florentines interpreted John’s nativity as mirroring the sun’s reappearance after the darkness of winter.19 Naturally, Florentines associated the blessing of summer’s heat and light with the Baptist’s nativity. June

24th was also the date of the Roman solstice rite of Fors Fortuna, which the early

Christians developed into celebrations of birth. It comes as no surprise, then, that

Florentines lit an immense candle at the Baptistery as well as bonfires and fireworks during John’s festival. This practice actually goes back to the middle of the first millennium, when the feast came to include ‚Saint John’s fires,‛ reminders of resurrection and of the sun’s return from the depths of hibernal and nocturnal darkness.20

It is no wonder, then, that John’s head has appeared in art as a symbol of the solar disk. For instance, a sixteenth-century panel by a follower of from the Milanese school displays John’s head on a plate, a standard image of the saint, which looks like the ‚disk‛ of the earth and is symbolically the sun (fig. 15). The painting has a twin in Andrea Solario’s 1507 rendition of the same subject (fig. 16). These pictures may recall Indo-European myths about the 65 heavens, the vault of the sky, issuing from the human head.21 Such depictions evoke the divinity of the Baptist’s head.

Similarly, the Baptist’s martyrdom was thought to have occurred on August

29th. Perhaps the sun’s setting was thought to parallel the fall of John’s severed head to the earth. Thus, his death aligned with the harvest, when the act of shearing life-sustaining grain, long a symbol of death, recalled his beheading.

John’s death was in Christ-like fashion a type of spiritual nourishment,

Comparable to the nourishing value of grain.22 Note how his role as such has much to do with the fertile properties of severed heads in mythic contexts.

It appears that Cosimo I was aware of the generative significance of the

Baptist’s image, for the head of John appeared on the gold opposite that of the Medici duke. Each man was the Janus face of the other.23 The reference to

Saint John embodied contemporary hopes that the state would not die, for in

Renaissance political thought the notion that the People, a universitas, never dies compared to the idea that the state’s ‚head,‛ which on the florin took the form of

Cosimo I, in itself is immortal.24 Remember that the sign of Capricorn characterized Duke Cosimo as a type for the sun, which begins to renew itself at the winter solstice and that Janus regulates the sun’s rebirth. The (Jupiter) who appears frequently in Cosimo’s iconography has the same solar significance.

All of these facts align Cosimo I with the Baptist. 66

The florin’s role as such becomes even more compelling when one considers that the festivities in John’s honor became an occasion for Florentine males to share in their ’s capacity of generation. Richard Trexler has noted that:

the participants at the feast of the Baptist were mostly mature males. All feasts reflected male domination of a society and showed the liens and conflicts that defined a male political order< In these festivities, it seemed that the city had been generated by male lineages married to each other and to the commune, and not by sexual copula- tion and daily work. Visitors to the patron’s feast in this period marveled at a commune that could work endlessly at ritual at the expense of the shop, whose political males seemed able to generate life without women and without workers, a commune that with seeming ease produced genius and imagination from a seedbed of grave governors. Over it all stood the image, altar, and spirit of Saint John the Baptist, the virginal male prophet of Christ and Christianity. Saint John’s day provided means for Florentine, politically enfranchised men to represent themselves within a mythical frame, bracketing out the unruly bodies that might disturb the image of an orderly, symbolic hierarchy, a harmonious body politic. A society regenerates itself. The men imagined that they alone gave birth to the commune, and resurrected it.25

I propose that the cultic topos of Saint John’s power of generation matched the Florentine males’ ability to create their commune. The fertile head of John, an emblem of male civic power in the context Trexler has described, had no female counterpart within his cult.26

A similar episode transpired early in Cosimo I’s political career. In 1537, shortly after taking office, an army of republican exiles marched on Florence.

67

During what was known as the Battle of Montemurlo Cosimo’s troops defeated the enemy by taking them captive before the duke had them all decapitated on the

Piazza della Signoria. The young Medici ruler thought of the moment of execution as his personal resurrection, which he punctuated by adopting the zodiacal title of

Capricorn, also that of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Emperor Charles V, the Great, and Caesar Augustus.27 Note that here the motif of resurrection, a type of rebirth or regeneration, ties into the topos of decapitation, thus proving that the previous discussion of the head’s significance as an epitome of life and power was highly meaningful to Cosimo’s conception of his rulership. The Battle of

Montemurlo also seems to have been the scourge responsible for Florence’s rebirth as stipulated in ’s thirteenth-century Chronica de origine civitatis.28

Since Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa commemorated the Battle of Montemurlo, it is plausible that the Gorgon’s generative power would have corresponded in

Cellini’s and Cosimo’s minds to the bloody battle’s ‚redemptive‛ effect.29

The royal star Regulus in Leo was the sign in which the sun was located on the fateful day at Montemurlo and on the day of the Battle of Marciano. Thus, from the start lionine (solar) imagery was important to the duke’s profile as a fated ruler. It even appeared in his nativity chart.30

Once again, the solar aspect of Cosimo’s political iconography leads one to believe that he identified with Cellini’s Perseus as a solar hero. But the statue is 68 paradoxical: the hero/ruler both rivals and compares with the Gorgon, a maternal deity who, though not a surrogate for the influential women at the Medici court, may have reminded viewers of Eleonora di Toledo’s and Maria Salviati’s share in bringing the duke to power. The first filled the duke’s empty coffers with her wealth and the latter convinced the Florentine council to elect Cosimo as the ruler of Florence after Alessandro de’ Medici’s . The Medici women had their own powers of generation, which were important to the propagation of their dynasty. As Chapter 8 will discuss in detail, Eleonora’s fecundity tied into contemporary characterizations of her as a Mother Goddess.

In this context one cannot help but to think of the contentious relationship of Jupiter, one of Cosimo I’s emblems, to Metis, the ‚mother‛ of ‚sovereign wisdom,‛ in the story of Athena’s birth. The rivalry between the heads of Cellini’s

Perseus and Medusa recalls that between Metis’ power to birth/wisdom and

Jupiter’s ability to spawn. As suggested earlier, the power to birth from the head proves to be a trope for intelligence. I propose that the same is true for the

Gorgon’s fertile nature. Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa indicate as much, for the light of the sun and that of Medusa’s other face, the moon, have long been symbols of wisdom and intelligence. For instance, Nicholas Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus

Orbium Coelestium (1543), which was highly influential in Cellini’s day, notes that

‚some rightly call Him‛ (the sun) ‚the Mind of the Universe.‛31 The Hebrew Book 69 of Wisdom (7:26) states that wisdom is a ‚reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working God.‛ Thus, the wider spiritual importance of Cellini’s

Perseus and of the myth of the Gorgon, which no scholar has observed, includes a connection to a fundamental concept of all pagan religions, Eastern and Western, dating from the first millennium B.C. which holds that:

the inward turning of the mind

The meaning of Perseus’ name, ‚cutter,‛ is relevant. Plutarch’s citation of the passage from Genesis, 15:10, ‚Logos divided‛ the first individual, a composite of male and female ‚in the midst,‛ proves that the Greek ‚Logos‛ (Wisdom/God) had a wide audience. I propose that Perseus takes the role of Logos (Wisdom) and that as ‚cutter‛ he is a type for He who ‚creates by dichotomy‛ but who is ‚joiner of the universe‛ as well (Genesis, 15:10). Perseus has severed the Gorgon’s bronze head, but he has also linked it to his own likeness. It is no wonder, then, that the androgyne, a joining of male and female, was in the Renaissance an emblem of princes and emperors: it stood for universal knowledge.33

In Natale Conti’s words, Perseus is the ‚sun as an agent of divine mind,‛ a reference to Athena, whose bronzette features, as mentioned, on the pedestal of

Cellini’s Perseus.34 Cole has suggested that the statuette of the goddess of 70

wisdom epitomizes, indeed, pure mente (mind).35 Remember that the inscription for Athena’s bronzette reads: ‚I, thy chaste sister, gave thee the shield with which thee will conquer.‛ As those familiar with Perseus’ tale would have known, the mirror-like shield was the medium with which Perseus used his cunning and intelligence to outdo Medusa. The shield is thus a metonym for the divine intelligence that Perseus obtained and used to become like his chaste ‚sister‛

(Minerva), a term that may refer to their intellectual affinity, or ‚union.‛

Not surprisingly, Renaissance mythology coming out of the school of

Fulgentius conceived of Athena’s shield as a gift of divine wisdom.36 As Cole has observed, different ideas for inscriptions to grace Cellini’s Perseus which are found in the in Florence indicate the same thing. Take, for instance, Varchi’s line: ‚I give you this shield, as I once gave you mind and spirit‛

(Do clypeum, quae iam mentem animunque dedi). Pietro Angelico da Barga wrote two of the other inscriptions: ‚Having been born from the head of Jupiter, I graciously impart to my brother a mind, so that he might be knowing, and a shield, so that he may be strong‛ (Nata Iovis cerebo tribui gratissima fratri/ qua sapiat mentem, quo valeat clypeum) and ‚I, his sister, gave Perseus counsel and the fell shield, that he might overthrow this monster with his able hand‛

(Consilium, saevamque dedi soror, aegida persei/ ut monstrum hic valida sterneret ille manu).37 In addition, Niccolo degli Agostini fashioned Andromeda as ‚the 71 noble mind which was taken and removed from God,‛ the mind that Perseus married.38 I propose, in light of the preceding, that Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa served as a means to compliment Cosimo I, who purportedly possessed God-given wisdom, but the statue also reminds one that the wisdom that brought the duke to power was a product of female agency.39

The great height of Cellini’s Perseus, who apparently scales the heavens, as written accounts of the Greek hero state, seems to reflect the fact that Danae’s son obtained wisdom from a divine force in the form of Athena. However, the head of

Medusa is nearly parallel to her captor’s head and thus reminds one that Perseus obtained knowledge from the Gorgon as well; that is, he became aware of the limits of his power as a demi-god through his quest for Medusa’s head. In this regard, their physical proximity, like the androgynous nature of Cellini’s Perseus, suggests that without mente the hero may not with the divine. Further,

Boccaccio’s Genealogie Deorum (Book I, 3) states that Perseus’ flight is mind’s elevation to the celestial.

The figures of Mercury and Andromeda on Cellini’s pedestal acknowledge

Perseus’ and Medusa’s great heights by looking up at the enormous bronze pair above them. Perhaps Mercury raises his eyes to emphasize his contribution to

Perseus’ ability to employ cunning strategies to defeat the Gorgon. Mercury appears in the ancient allegorical tradition as Logos, Ratio, for he is the mind of the 72 sun god Apollo, who is, like Mercury himself, Perseus’ alter ego. Alciati also stated that Mercury is wisdom.40 Similarly, Berchorius’ Moralized Ovid (219-220) allegorizes Mercury’s flight, which the bronzette’s active pose suggests, as celestial contemplation.

The enormity of Cellini’s Perseus, reaching to heaven as it were, reminds one of Niccolo Martelli’s statement that Cosimo I’s idea for the statue descended from heaven.41 The duke was like Perseus in this way, having obtained wisdom from a divine source. In addition, the statue’s heroic height reminds one of ’s equation of Fama with the , who try to scale the heavens in the (Book

IV, 177ff) and in Homer’s Iliad (Book VIII, 192) and Odyssey (Book VIII, 20, 7744;

BOOK XIX, 108). The giant figure was, in addition, a distinguished prototype of

Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine emperors and also of Christ, since great size suggested heavenly ascent. Immensity was a feature ingrained in early Christian teaching, especially in gnostic and docetic learning, and may even have drawn from a Rabbinic tradition concerning : ‚the first man extended from the earth‛ (a dam) ‚to the firmament.‛42 Comparable to this line of reasoning is an excerpt from Augustine’s Psalm 91 that reads, ‚Oh Christ, who sittest in heaven on the right side of the Father, but art with thy feet and limbs struggling on earth.‛

Repeated was Augustine’s message that Christ’s ‚head is in heaven, the body on earth.‛43 Such views find a certain reflection in Cellini’s Perseus, whose feet are 73 literally and symbolically grounded on the body of Medusa, the Earth Mother.

The figure beneath the feet of Cellini’s Perseus is in one respect a denigrated form. By adding the Gorgon’s body to Cosimo’s commission Cellini underscored his assault on the female form. In this way the matched the ancients who aimed to assure themselves of matriarchy’s defeat by including Medusa’s body in representations of her demise. Closer to the ground, the body of Cellini’s Medusa is the material aspect of Earth and of the archetype of Mother (‚mater‛ meaning both matter and mother). Remember, once cut, the Gorgon had the ability to spawn, and so her entire being was maternal. Since she was able to turn men, including Atlas, to stone, her character compares to that of the Petra Genetrix, a hostile and benevolent Earth Mother of Roman who created men from a material of the earth --- stone. In the ancient world earth goddesses were also believed to be able to generate life from stone, the reverse of Medusa’s power of petrifaction.

The severed neck of Cellini’s Medusa recalls the opening of a vessel, a traditional symbol of the earth, whose liquid contents spill forth and will come into contact with the Piazza della Signoria. In Erich Neumann’s terms, an element- ary aspect of the Feminine is the image of the ‚Great Round‛ or the ‚Great

Container.‛44 Noteworthy in the preceding respect are Medusa’s breasts, which

Cellini accentuated by rendering them nude and pointing to the space above them. 74

Perhaps the sculptor was thinking of representations of the Mother

Goddess from various centuries as the vessel-bearing woman with full breasts.

Medusa’s bosoms are complementary sources of the life stream and correspond to

Cellini’s Ephesian women. Since the goddesses and Danae are types for the Earth

Mother, they are Medusa’s alter egos.

The garlands of fruit above the Ephesian goddesses refer to Medusa’s earthy nature and mimic the curling rivulets of her bronze blood, whose fecundity matches the fruits’ nourishing properties. A similar image lies in Cellini’s bust of

Cosimo I, where the Gorgon’s blood takes the form of fruit (fig. 17).45 Here, the duke aligns with Medusa by appropriating her apotropaic power to ward off enemies, while associating the fertility of her head as Earth with his own political strength. Cole has pointed out that while at work on the bust Cellini was thinking of Agostini’s view that the drops from Medusa’s head should be interpreted as grains and fruits and the serpents spawned by the same drops as the seeds of the earth.46 The eagles on the breastplate bite the duke’s bronze nipples and thus signify in comparable fashion nourishment and therefore life. Similarly, the garlands on the Perseus’ pedestal probably refer to the Medici palle and thus symbolized dynastic continuity, prosperity and abundance.

Cellini may have been inspired by Ovid’s essentialization of Medusa’s role as the fertile Earth. Medusa’s blood worked its on the turf near Cetus’ 75 dominion; that is, once the blood came into contact with the vegetation the latter

‚soaked up the monster’s force‛ and took on a new life as coral. Furthermore, her drops of blood were able to generate when they mingled with the earth’s fertile soil and the Atlas mountain sprouted trees, as Ovid claimed.

Cellini and Varchi would have known that Fulgentius allegorized Medusa as agriculture, while Giovanni Bonsignore characterized Medusa as Earth.47 In the latter’s words: ‚Regarding the allegories of Perseus, I maintain, first, that to say gorgone is as much as to say earth, that is, gorgin agricos, which in Greek means

‘earth,’ and which is interpreted as the work of the earth.‛48 The serpents’ presence on Medusa’s head also indicate that she is an Earth Mother, for, as shown, snakes are earth emblems.

Only a decade before Cellini began to work on his Perseus Italy saw the posthumous publication of the influential Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’Amore (1490s).

The text, which influenced Florentine Neoplatonism, includes a theological allegory of Perseus’ ascent from earthiness (Medusa) to spiritual purity (the heavens). ‚Perseus killed Gorgo, an earthly tyrant --- (for ‘Gorgo’ means ‘earth’ in Greek) – and was by men exalted to the skies.‛49 In this context it is worthy to note that the harpe was an instrument to till the land, which under the Loggia takes the form of an assault on Earth.

Medusa also emerges as the Earth Mother on the Tazza Farnese, which 76 originally belonged to Lorenzo de’ Medici and which resided in the Medici collection at the time Cellini worked for Cosimo I (figs. 18, 19).50 One side of the cup shows a female personification of Earth holding a rod entwined with snakes.

A Medusa head with swirling locks of hair and serpents surrounding her mane decorates the cup’s bottom. Two snakes emerge from beneath her ears and intertwine just below her chin, clearly mimicking the serpentine configuration on

Earth’s rod. The snakes define the female entities as twins. It is not a coincidence that the Gorgon appears this enormously on such an expensive vessel that glorified its owner’s taste and the supreme deities, including the River Nile, on its interior. Medusa, the Earth Mother, was the face of Medici power.

Medusa’s role as Earth Mother invests the iconographical significance of the bronze Perseus’ hierarchical relationship to the Gorgon’s body. The Greek hero rises from her figure. Applicable here is the ancient notion of the Earth Mother as the earthly seat of power through which the king rises to new heights, but, one senses, does not overcome. In Neumann’s words:

As mother and earth woman, the Great Mother is the ‚throne‛ pure and simple, and, characteristically, the woman’s motherliness resides not only in the womb but also in the seated woman’s broad expanse of thigh, her lap on which the newborn child sits enthroned. To be taken on the lap is, like being taken to the breast, a symbolic expression for adoption of the child, and also of the man, by the Feminine. It is no accident that the greatest Mother Goddess of the early cults was named 77

Isis, the ‚seat,‛ ‚the throne,‛ the symbol of which she bears on her head; and the king who ‚takes possession‛ of the earth, the Mother Goddess, does so by sitting on her in the literal sense of the word. The enthroned Mother Goddess lives in the sacral symbol of the throne. The king comes to power by ‚mounting the throne,‛ and so takes his place on the lap of the Great Goddess, the earth – he becomes her son. In widespread throne cults, the throne, which was originally the godhead itself, was worshipped as the ‚seat of the godhead‛

Neumann also stated that:

The king, the Great Individual, the god among men and the intermediary between above and below – he too remains the child of the great Mother Goddess, the mother of all the gods, who bore him and rebore him and through whom alone he is king.52

In keeping, the oracle of the Libyan proclaims:

Behold the day will come and the Lord will lighten the darkness, and the bonds of the synagogue will be loosened and the lips of men will be silent: and they will see the king of the living. A virgin, queen of nations, will hold him in her lap. And he will reign in mercy, and the womb of his mother will be the model of all.53

Cellini and Cosimo I must have been aware of the potential of Medusa’s body to assume significance as the ‚seat‛ of Perseus’ power, for early modern derivations of the throne as the seat of power include the globe of Earth upon which the Virgin Mary stands (fig. 20). Here, Christ’s mother and Earth are one and the same.54 Cellini’s Perseus ‚takes possession‛ of the Earth (Medusa), the 78 mound of the Gorgon’s body which supports him, as the throne does the ruler. In this way Cosimo I’s bronze affirms the potency of the female principle by simultaneously appropriating it and attempting to supersede the agency that brought Perseus and indirectly Cosimo I to power.

The sun’s/Perseus’ setting ‚into‛ Earth is a similar image of physical reliance upon the Mother, while the sun’s rising from the earth belies its future return to the maternal. In this context it is telling that Cosimo’s sign of Capricorn would have characterized him as the sun to whom the Earth gave birth and to whom the sun is attached.55

It is noteworthy that the word ‚solium,‛ meaning ‚throne,‛ derives from Sol (sun). The spiral, the shape of Medusa’s bronze body, is a solar symbol, and so in this regard her figure epitomizes the throne-as-sun. Ancient individuals called the enthroned ruler, mediated between heaven and earth, the solar prince.56

The image of Cellini’s Perseus as a mediator between heaven and earth comes to mind.

Cellini’s Medusa recalls the Ouroboros, that is, the serpent consuming its tail. The grip of her hand around her ankle recalls the serpent’s ingestion of its own tail. Both creatures assume a circular configuration by taking hold of the lower part of their bodies. The Ouroboros symbolizes the sun’s revolution around the earth, its setting and rising, or ‚self-generation,‛ which in Medusa’s case took 79 the form of births from her blood and severed head. The Gnostics interpreted the

Ouroboros, the ‚Great Round,‛ as an emblem of self-renewal after destruction.57

At other times the biting its tail was an emblem of the Earth Mother, and so the unprecedented, ouroboric shape of Cellini’s Medusa suggests that she is a version of the Earth Goddess.58 It is known that Lorenzo de’ Medici adopted the image of the serpent circling to meet its tail as one of his personal emblems because the Ouroboros was a symbol of a return to the and of the traditional Medici themes of eternity and immortality (the , like the solar cycle, has no beginning and no end, while the snake’s act of shedding its skin is a symbol of eternity, rebirth, and immortality, fig. 21). The emblem even made its way into Giorgio Vasari’s The First Fruits of the Earth offered to Saturn, where Duke

Cosimo I is the titular god (fig. 22). The preceding indicates that esoteric symbolism from the ancient world was known to the Medici court and most probably to Cellini.

I propose that the role of Cellini’s Medusa as Earth relates to the image of the Earth Mother as Womb. Note how Cellini’s Perseus steps on her stomach, whose navel is clearly visible from a side view of the statue (see fig. 5). In this way the Greek hero characterizes her being as uterine, for the navel has been a metonym for the womb.59 Cellini may have been thinking of Euripedes’ famous

Ion, which, as mentioned, speaks of earth’s navel as residing near the Gorgons, an 80 image that conflates the Gorgon with the Earth-as-Womb.

A related source of inspiration for Cellini’s bronze might have been

‚gnostic‛ gems, which were collected in the Renaissance.60 Some of the jewels bearing images of the uterus with winged appendages resemble winged Etruscan

Gorgoneia (Medusa heads). A. A. Barb’s research on whether or not the Metra image on these uterine amulets was meant to portray the ‚Diva Matrix,‛ the cosmic womb, from which all else derived offers a link to Medusa’s profile as a uterine Mother Goddess. The majority of these gems show a serpent devouring its tail surrounding the uterus.61 Chapter 5 will pick up the discussion of Medusa’s head as a symbol of the uterus in a different context, but for now I must turn to what the image of Mother Earth meant to the process of bringing Cellini’s commission for the Loggia dei Lanzi to completion.

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Casting the Perseus and Medusa

The bronze Perseus was not only one of Cosimo I’s faces, but also an heroic surrogate for Cellini himself. The Greek youth’s sash indicates that he was ‚born‛ of an illustrious citizen -- Benvenuto Cellinis civis Florentinus faciebat MDLIII --- and testifies to the sculptor’s profile as a man of honor. The story of the Perseus’ casting, which forms the crux of Cellini’s Autobiography, is most significant to one’s understanding of the sculptor’s conceptualization of his own manhood and of art making as an honorable process. However, Cellini’s rivalry against the forces of

Nature reveals much about the unstable nature of his masculinity.

Contemporary writing lauded Cellini’s Perseus as an allegory of virtù, that is, of manliness, heroism and strength (vir denoting ‚man‛).62 Indeed, in the

Renaissance the mythological figure of Perseus became a model for rulers because he was a paradigm of virtù. Since Cellini and Cosimo I championed the cult of virtù, they would have conceived of Perseus in the same way.63 The cult of virtù grew in part out of ancient Roman political manhood, which Florentines adopted along with Roman political ideology. In Renaissance Italy, virile, that is, violent and aggressive actions, like those of Perseus, were rites of passage into manhood, just as those actions were into different public spheres of men’s lives. This type of behavior is central to Cellini’s virtùous persona as it emerges in the Autobiography.

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The Perseus was Cellini’s rite of passage into the Florentine art world. His success in casting the enormous bronze statue went hand in hand with his honor and integrity as a man. In other words, for Cellini, achieving the status of a great artist was tantamount to proving oneself as a man.

The story of the Perseus’ casting celebrates violence and destruction, two aspects of Cellini’s virtù. Attempting to outdo his rivals, including Michelangelo, who carved his David out of one block of marble, Cellini noted that he opted to cast his enormous bronze Perseus in one piece instead of in separate sections. The

Autobiography details the difficulties involved in this feat, which was deemed an impossible task. One of the trickiest parts of casting bronze for his subject was raising Perseus’ arm without letting it break off. To achieve this end, the metallic liquid had to flow uninterrupted through the whole mold. Cellini wished to introduce his Perseus as his greatest achievement, which would involve a highly complex shaping of metal. This is why he did not mention the fact that he actually cast the blood from Medusa’s head and the wings on Perseus’ feet and head separately.64

Speaking of an episode when his metal began to clot, Cellini illustrated his ability to enliven his work by adding a cake of tin and some pewter to the mixture:

I was shouting now to one person and now to another.. ‚Bring it here! Take it there!,’ so that, when they saw that the cake was beginning to liquefy, the entire troop obeyed 83

me< Then I had a half bar of pewter brought,.. and I threw it onto the cake inside the furnace, which, along with the help caused by both the wood and by stirring it, now with iron pokers and now with iron bars, in a short space of time became liquid. Now when I saw that we had brought a corpse back to life.. I regained so much energy that I no longer realized whether I still had any fever or any fear of death.65

Cellini’s virtù is evident in his writing and actions. He manipulated the harmful effects of fire, which even figuratively touched him in the form of a fever, and endowed them with qualities of life. The Autobiography presents Cellini’s success in casting the Perseus in his desired fashion as a miraculous resurrection; so was his earlier recovery from a mortal fever. Implicitly identifying himself with the

Perseus, proof of Cellini’s physical and mental virtù, the very embodiment of his artistic destiny, the sculptor compared the statue’s and his resurrections to the

Lord’s: ‚O God, who with your immense power raised Yourself from the dead, and ascended gloriously into heaven!‛66

The episode of the Perseus’ casting shows that proving Cellini’s manhood necessitated a battle with Mother Nature. The sculptor was like Perseus, who proved his virility by defeating Medusa, but the maternal force in each man’s story tested his strengths. Just as Greeks believed that destroying the Gorgon was an impossible task, casting the Perseus in one piece was unfeasible, the Autobio- graphy leads one to believe. Cellini’s battle against Natura was just as difficult;

84 hence Cellini’s success in casting was so honorable. Cellini mentioned that fire and rain threatened to ruin his house and all its contents on the fateful day, but he and his troop finally prevented the elements from bringing about such an injustice.

Cellini proved that the bronze caster is like Natura, for he is able to rid impurities from a mixture and to give metallic matter new form. Cellini’s godly ability to revive the materials of sculpture matched Medusa’s power to raise the dead and to generate earthy matter, stone and coral, from other natural materials. However, he also reversed the petrifying effects of Medusa’s gaze by animating his material.

The Florentine sculptor thus became the Gorgon’s (Mother Earth’s) rival.

As he cast his Perseus Cellini assumed the role of progenitor. In doing so he became like the Lord, who created Adam from clay, the human body’s original material, according to those living in Cellini’s day. Indeed, as the Autobiography notes, the sculptor used earth and clay to form his Perseus and Medusa.67 Cole has pointed out that Cellini’s ‚own later refashioning of his art indicates how important it was that his creation took place, so to speak, within the womb of the earth.‛68 Indeed, in Cellini’s day the casting mold, called a matrix, was Earth’s womb. Cellini would have bought into the symbolic mode of Renaissance thought where even bronze founders assumed the role of Mother Earth.69 In Fritz

Scholten’s terms:

Sixteenth-century casting terminology, which was derived 85

from human anatomy, underlined this belief: the flames that heated the crucible, which represented a kind of womb, were fanned with bellows, a symbol of breathing in the force of life, while the ‚living,‛ molten bronze was shaped inside the mould, itself thought of as a matrix. In the mould, which was kept together by a metal skeleton or ossatura, was the model made of clay and wax, called anima or soul. Thus the sculptor built up his image by analogy to God, who created humans from clay and breathed life into them; fusione (casting) and infusione (animating, inspiring) followed on from one another.70

The account of the Perseus’ casting tells that Cellini too had the ability to animate his figures with soul, as his rivals could not. As Cole has asserted, ‚bronze triumphs over its stone predecessors because the blood of the medium implies a state of life that marble cannot, and because a calculated circuit of mythical birth and death provides for it a spirit that marble, in its face, can only lose.‛71

The story of the Perseus’ casting suggests that art making is an act of power.

That is why the creative act, like political might, is comparable to giving life. The decapitation of Medusa was a creative act because it gave rise to new forms of earthy matter.72 On the Piazza della Signoria art immortalizes the Gorgon’s power.

While the Autobiography characterizes Cellini as a match for the creative entity of

Earth/Natura, the Piazza della Signoria presents Perseus as the rival of Medusa, the

Earth Mother. Art making as a rite of proving one’s manhood became for Cellini a paradoxical process, then, for showcasing his artistic virtù entailed becoming like

Natura, a feminine force. In this way the Autobiography, like the Perseus and

86

Medusa, points up the unstable nature of Cellini’s masculinity. The need to prove one’s manhood betrays a certain degree of insecurity about virtù. Under the

Loggia Perseus denigrates and appropriates the Gorgon’s power with the same implication about Renaissance masculinity.

Why, in this context, should Cellini/Perseus have chosen to rival Medusa if she were not a threat to male power? Perseus, a surrogate for Cosimo I’s and

Cellini’s virtù, was part mortal, a man with weaknesses like those of Medusa’s victims – all of whom were male, remember; hence in myth and under the Loggia

Perseus would not be able to withstand a direct glance at her head. That weakness parallels Perseus’ reliance on the Gorgon’s power to defeat his enemies and the insecure foundation of patriarchy.

The need for Cellini’s Perseus to align with the bronze Medusa suggests perpetual dependence on the maternal, despite attempts to break away from the latter by assaulting the Mother Goddess. The myth of Perseus indicates the same.

This is one reason why the face of Cellini’s Medusa is beautiful, even as her head bears traits of the hideous. In other words, there is still much that possesses the hero to embrace her, despite attempts to denigrate her. As the previous chapter mentioned, in antiquity competing impulses gave rise to rendering the Gorgon as ugly and beautiful.

Cosimo I did not refute Cellini’s acknowledgement of Medusa’s strengths. 87

The duke’s acceptance of the Perseus and Medusa’s final form speaks volumes about his awareness of the importance of maternal power to his own political career. The statue’s adversarial nature would have pointed up the fact that Cosimo I was not without his insecurities, as the next chapter will show, and so he must have realized that in this respect too the Perseus evoked the contingency of the duke’s power.

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Notes

1. Cellini’s letter to Cosimo I’s secretary, Bartolommeo Concino discusses the commission for the Perseus: ‚Il mio Illustrissimo ed Eccellentissimo Signor Duca mi commisse, che gli facessi un Statua di un Perseo di grandezza di tre braccia, colla testa di Medusa in mano, e non altro. Io lo feci di piu di cinque braccia con la detta testa in mano, e di piu con il corpo tutto di Medusa sotto i piedi; e gli feci quella gran basa di marmo con il Giove, e Mercurio, e Danae, e il Bambino Perseo, e Minerva, e di piu la Storia di Andromeda, si come si vede.‛ (‚My most illustrious and excellent Lord Duke commissioned me to make a statue of Perseus, three braccia high, with the head of Medusa in hand, and nothing more. I made it more than three braccia high, with the said head in hand and, in addition, with the entire body of Medusa under his feet; I also made him that great marble base, with the Jupiter, Mercury, Danae, the Baby Perseus, and Minerva, and, in addition, the story of Andromeda, as you see.‛) This letter is quoted in Opere di Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Turin, Italy: UTET, 1980): 474-475.

2. Giorgio Vasari’s fresco featuring of Ephesus evinces the known link between the latter and the Earth Mother, as it always hung upon the wall reserved for Earth in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Sala degli Elementi. Detlef Heikamp, ‚Rapporti fra Accademici ed Artisti nella Firenze del’ 500,‛ Il Vasari 15 (1957): 144-145 mentions that Varchi was Cellini’s iconographer. Umberto Pirotti’s Benedetto Varchi e la Cultura del suo Tempo (Florence, Italy: Olschki Press, 1971) and Salvatore Lo Re’s Politica e Cultura nella Firenze Cosimiana: Studi su Benedetto Varchi (Rome, Italy: Vecchiarelli, 2008) are good studies of Varchi’s learning and influence.

3. Rebecca Zorach’s Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2005): 101 mentions the fact that Cellini used the name Berecynthia for his Saltcellar Earth.

4. Wind, 100n., 201n., 231, 260n.

5. Andrea Alciati, A Book of Emblems, the Emblematum liber in Latin and English, trans. J. Moffitt (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2004): 35. Natale Conti, Mythologies, a Select Translation, trans. Anthony DiMatteo (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994): 375. Seznec discusses the sixteenth-century writer Conti and his influence on pages 226, 229, 277-279, 280, 300, 307ff. For Alciati’s influence see Seznec, 100-103.

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6. Pico della Mirandola, Commento, Book III, xi, stanza 9, quoted on Wind, 17. Lorenzo il Magnifico introduced Janus into Medici iconography. Born in January, the month named after Janus, the Medici ruler may have felt that the multi-faced god was a suitable alter ego. Janus also appeared at the wedding of Cosimo I and Eleonora di Toledo. A statue of Janus was made to represent Duke Cosimo’s entry into Siena, while the Terrace of Saturn in the Palazzo Vecchio includes two images of Janus. Cellini’s medal for Clement VII also features the temple of Janus.

7. Wind, 201. Plato’s Symposium, trans. Seth Bernadete (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2001): 105-109.

8. See Cooper, 80 on the head’s symbolism as a seat of honor, identity and the like.

9. On the androgyne see Battistini, 94. See Kathleen P. Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2006): 7, 189-214.

10. See Cooper, 81, 154 for factual information on Janus’ symbolic value.

11. -----, 193.

12. Cellini’s bronze model of his Perseus and Medusa bears traces of gilding on the Gorgon’s hair, Perseus’ helmet, wings and his greaves. Weil Garris, n.178 also acknowledges the completed statue’s original gilding and so do Cristina Luchinat, et al., The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002): 194-195. In Marsilio Ficino, ed. Angela Voss (California: North Atlantic Books, 2006): 146 Ficino is translated as stating, ‚Nobody questions but that gold is the color of the Sun...‛

13. For instance, the Roman Empire’s cult of divine rulership espoused the practice of revering golden statues of Roman leaders. The ancient Mediterranean’s philosophy of metals re-emerged in the Renaissance partly as a result of the practice of collecting and imitating ancient art objects. In Cellini’s vision which inspired his marble Christ the sun/gold and divinity are one:

‚This sun without its rays appeared to me neither more nor less than a bath of the purest molten gold. While I was contemplating this momentous thing, I saw the center of this sun began to swell up and to expand, and in a moment it was transformed into the figure of a , made from the very material that made up

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the sun.‛ Cellini, My Life, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002): 209.

14. The early modern world believed bronze to be a symbol of duration and strength because the most prominent Roman statues that survived into the Middle Ages did so because they were made of this durable material. Further, in the ancient world bronze was reserved for statues of gods, rulers, and heroes. See Fritz Scholten, ‚Bronze: the Mythology of a Metal,‛ in Bronze: the Power of Life and Death (Leeds, England: Henry Moore Institute, 2005): 32.

15. See Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) for information on the sun as a symbol of male power. In different mythological contexts, such as the ancient Mesopotamian, the male solar principle supersedes the female lunar one.

16. The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana houses a text that includes Apollodorus’ description of the Gorgon with gold wings and bronze hands. Apollodorus, MS. 2.4.2. Hesiod’s poem, ‚Shield of Hercules‛ contains a description of the bag into which Perseus stored Medusa’s head that seems to symbolize the solar/lunar implications of her being: ‚..the Gorgon, covered the broad of his back, and a bag of silver

17. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin Press, 1980): 299.

18. See Thorkil Vanggaard, Phallos: a Symbol and its History in the Male World (New York: International Universities Press, 1972): 66, where one reads that the sun god Apollo’s power centered in his phallus. In ancient Egypt the obelisk was a solar symbol. It pointed to the sun and punctuated sites of sun worship. Since the obelisk mimics the phallus, Egyptians conflated the former’s solar strength with the phallus’ power to generate life. See 17:8; 27:9 for the link between the obelisk and the sun. It is no coincidence that an obelisk from the ancient Egyptian center of sun worship known as Bethshemesh resides on Piazza San Pietro, Rome: it testifies to the importance of solar symbolism to Catholic theology. The Piazza’s 91 eight spokes stand for solar rays. The stone phalloi of ancient statues of Hermes derived from the obelisk. The sun and phallus also may come together by virtue of the fact that sun deities were usually male in ancient patriarchal societies. In addition, the bull, a traditional symbol of virility, was associated with the sun in Mithraism. The cockerel is also a symbolic link between the sun and the phallus. The cockerel crows to the sun at before indulging his libido; hence the vulgar word for penis, ‚cock.‛ Spires of Christian churches, which point to the sun, are typically topped off with a weather vane in the form of a cock. Perhaps the latter derives from the idea of semen as a (Christological) symbol of the solar Logos. See Ficino’s Consilio contro la Pestilentia (1478-1479) for the link between the sun and human blood.

19. The Book of John (3:30) includes the Baptist’s statement regarding Christ: ‚He must increase, but I must decrease,‛ which in the context of John’s cult would relate to the setting sun. The sun been a symbol of Christ, who embodies light and whose Resurrection was a return from the darkness of death.

20. For factual information on John the Baptist’s cult see Heidi Chrétien, The Festival of San Giovanni: Imagery and Political Power in Renaissance Florence (New York: Peter Lang, 1994). Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, vol. 1, trans. William Granger Ryan (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993): 336 states that during the Baptist’s festival ‚lighted torches are also carried around this bonfire, because John was a burning and shining torch.‛ The waters of which John employed to purify and to regenerate the soul, the first step toward salvation, compare to the festival fires.

21. Regina Janes, Losing our Heads: Decapitations in Literature and Culture (New York University Press, 2005): 8. Onians, 129-130.

22. Homer (Iliad, Book XIX, 221ff; Book XI, 67ff) wrote about men as cornstalks and their defeat in battle as their mowing. Their heads fall as cut stalks do. In pre- Christian Europe cutting off the top sheaf of a cornstalk was called ‚beheading,‛ or ‚cutting the neck.‛ Alcmaeon of Croton helped to disseminate these ideas throughout pre-Christian Europe. He believed that the seed of humans came from the brain. Daniel Ogden, Perseus (New York: Routledge Press, 2008): 46 states that the Hydra’s multi-serpented head resembled a crop, which Hercules cut down with his harpe.

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23. In the Renaissance, as in the ancient world, coin images of rulers had an allegorical significance relative to the sitter’s character. Images on the reverse of the ruler’s likeness had the same purpose. Thus, the two-faced Janus god, emblem of alter egos, often showed up on ancient Roman coins.

24. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957) is filled with references to the state’s immortality and that of the sovereign. See, for instance, 1-5, 13, 15, 30, 38, 45, 80, 86, 139, 143, 177, 267, 271- 272, 277-278, 280, 282-283, 300, 304, 310, 312-313, 394, 398, 409.

25. Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980): 277-278; my italics. The republic, or commune of Florence was ruled by a council, which, in turn, was chosen by the gonfalonier (the titular ruler of the city). Every two months a guild chose the gonfalonier. Although the Medici gained control of Florence as autocrats (1434), the family associated with republican traditions and ideals in order to assuage citizens that their liberty would not be lost while the Medici were in power.

26. The Chronica de origine civitatis (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, II.II. 67) was the first history of the city of Florence. It maintains that her origins trace back to the days of and that she flowered ex hominnum Romanorum, that is, from Roman manhood. No mother is present here either. Nevertheless, birth from a male agency competed with images of Florence as a woman in childbirth. For a discussion of the female personification of Florence in childbirth see Donald Weinstein, ‚The Myth of Florence,‛ in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968): 15-21.

27. Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001): 13. Caesar Augustus was, like Cosimo I, a mythical founder of Florence. The Battle of Montemurlo occurred on the same date, August 1, as Augustus’ victory at Actium.

28. The rebirth of Florence is discussed throughout Book III, for example, of Villani’s Chronica de origine civitatis. Machiavelli also discussed the founding of Rome as a birth. A corrupt society must be ‚born again‛ with ‚many perils and much blood,‛ an image that should remind one of Cosimo’s ‚resurrection‛ at Montemurlo. Despite the bloody birth of Rome, no mother is present here. Niccolo Machiavelli, Opere, vol. 1 (, Italy: Feltrinelli, 1960-1965): 125. 93

29. Since Cellini’s Perseus was conceived and in progress years before its unveiling, it shrunk the gap between Montemurlo and 1554. Volker Breidecker has discussed Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa as an epitomization of the fate of Montemurlo’s victims in his book, Florenz, oder ‘Die Rede, die zum Spricht’: Kunst, Fest und Macht im Ambiente der Stadt (, Germany: Fink Press, 1990): 25ff and so has van Veen in Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, 11.

30. See Claudia Rousseau, Cosimo I de’ Medici and Astrology: the Symbolism of Prophecy, Ph.D. (Columbia University, 1983) for a discussion of zodiacal signs associated with the sun in the duke’s astrological chart. Kurt Forster, ‚Metaphors of Rule: Political Ideology and History in the Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici,‛ Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 9 (1960): 85 mentions Augustus and Capricorn, the signs of Leo and Capricorn, and Cosimo’s military conquests at the start of his career. See Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, 43 for the symbolic association between and the sun.

31. Valerie Shrimplin-Evangelidis’ translation of Nicholas Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Nuremberg, 1543, ed. J. Dobrzycki (London, England: Macmillan Press, 1978): Book I, Chapter 10.

32. Quotation of Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, 164.

33. Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and every other esoteric tradition known in the Renaissance maintained that the union of male and female comprises the highest form of knowledge. Therefore the merger stood for power. See, for instance, Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, eds. Konrad Eisenbichler and Zorzi Pugliese (Ottowa, Canada: Dovehouse, 1986). See also Battistini, 100.

34. Conti, 375. The fact that Prudence is wise helps to characterize Perseus as intelligent. See Florence Cathedral’s plaque of Prudentia, a woman whose attributes are a book and another symbol of wisdom – the snake (fig. 23).

35. Michael Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 130ff.

36. Cole, 132. Fulgentius, 161-162.

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37. Cole, 132.

38. Niccolo degli Agostini, Di Ovidio le Metamorphosi cioe Trasmutazione, tradotte dal Latino diligentemente in vulgar Verso, con le sue Allegorie, Significationi, & Dichiarationi delle Fauole in Prosa (Milan, Italy: Bernardino di Bindoni, 1548): 47. See Cole, 129- 132, 137, 141 for evidence of Cellini’s knowledge of Agostini’s views. Bernardo Segni conceded that Andromeda embodied mente. Bernardo Segni, L’Ética d’Aristotile tradotta in Lingua volgare fiorentina et comentata (Florence, Italy: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550): 474.

39. Cosimo I identified with King (1 Kings, 3:28) and with King David (1 Kings, 5:9-14), who both possessed God-given wisdom. For example, see van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, 34, 36, 117, 139. Christopher Hibbert, The : its Rise and Fall (New York: William Morrow Press, 1980): 263 notes that Cosimo proclaimed that his wisdom was divinely endowed.

40. Seznec, 102 discusses Mercury’s role as Wisdom.

41. Niccolo Martelli’s statement is part of a letter to Luigi Alamanni dated to August 20, 1546 and is found in Cole, 61.

42. of Peter, ed. Vaganay (Paris, France: Librarie Lecoffre J. Gabalda et Fils, 1930): 298ff. See H. L. Stack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentor zum Neuen Testament aus Tolmud und Midrasch, vol. 4 (Munich, Germany: Verlag G. H. Beck, 1928): 888, where Rabbi El’azar maintains that the first man extended from earth to heaven, but ‚inasmuch as he sinned, the Holy One

43. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalms XCI, II, PLXXXVII, 1178; XC, V, PLXXXVII, 1163. Depictions matching Augustine’s image appear in art of the eleventh century through the later Middle Ages.

44. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, an Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974): 54. For information on the Renaissance’s conception of vessels as symbols of women’s bodies see Elizabeth Cropper, ‚On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style,‛ Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 374-395.

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45. Cellini may have known that many classical Mediterranean monuments bear the head of Medusa surrounded by garlands of fruit.

46. Cole, 190, note 80; Agostini, 45.

47. Fulgentius, 61 states that Gorgo is related to the Greek ‚georgi,‛ the term for farmer.

48. Giovanni Bonsignore, P. Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare novamente stampato, diligentemente correcto & historiato (Milan, Italy: Nicola da Gorgonzola, 1520): 27. Boccaccio’s On Famous Women (Chapter 22) suggests that Medusa’s name signifies her knowledge of agriculture. Similarly, Neoplatonists and Hermeticists at the Medici court asserted that Earth is female.

49. Leone Ebreo, The Philosophy of Love, trans. F. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes (London, England: Soncino Press, 1937), quoted in The Medusa Reader, eds. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge Press, 2003): 58. See Balas, 32-33, 103 for evidence that Ebreo’s text was known at the Medici court.

50. Eugene Dwyer, ‚The Temporal Allegory of the Tazza Farnese,‛ American Journal of Archaeology 96:2 (1992): 255-282.

51. Neumann, 98-99.

52. -----, 130.

53. Quoted in Esther Gordon Dotson, ‚An Augustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, Part II,‛ Art Bulletin 61 (1979): 426.

54. The image of Mary standing upon a globe is similar to ancient depictions of the Mother Goddess standing upon a mound of earth, which she embodies, flanked by two lions. Cellini and Cosimo I may have known Vincenzo Berruerio’s early sixteenth-century Libellus de natura animalium, which states that God descended from heaven to earth, that is, to the Virgin Mary. In 431 the Council of Ephesus announced Mary the ‚Mater Dei, Thronus Dei‛ (the Mother of God, the Throne of God). As soon as the identified Mary as the Mother Goddess or Great Mother, her stone chairs outside of the Chapel of Saint Silvestro, Rome became birthing chairs. At this same moment in history rebirth became an obligatory rite of passage for the pope-elect. Specifically, he was spiritually reborn 96 of this enthroned Great Mother. In Bertelli’s terms, ‚if the Ecclesia was perceived to be a mother, there was only one possibility in the Christian world‛ for the sovereign to proclaim his ‚divine‛ origins: to ‚assimilate‛ his ‚image to another even more important mother – Mary as Mater Dei, definitively, the Great Mother.‛ Bertelli, 186. Cellini and Cosimo I may also have been aware of Cosimo Tura’s decoration for Lionelle d’Este’s Belfiore Studiolo (1447), where the , Thalia, and are enthroned and pregnant.

55. For Capricorn’s value as a symbol of the sun to whom the Earth gave birth see Cooper, 154. The Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano includes a set of panels with the theme of the Cycles of Time. The last picture in the series is Birth of the Day, which a Perseus term introduces. The panel is divided into three sections that suggest the transition from dark to light: Night precedes Dawn and Apollo-Sol’s Day follows Dawn. As a sun figure, Perseus may support the panel’s solar theme.

56. For information on the solar prince see H. P. L’Orange, Studies in the Iconography of Cosmic Kingship in the Ancient World (New York: Caratzas Brothers Publishing, 1982): 87-88, 105-106. For more information on solar spirals see Julius Schwabe, Archetyp und Tierkreis (Basel, Switzerland: Verlag, 1951): 115-558.

57. For a treatment of the Ouroboros’ traditional symbolism see Cooper, 124. The symbol of the snake biting its tail became common in the Renaissance due to Neoplatonism’s influence. The sixteenth century knew ’s hypothesis about the sun’s orbit in space.

58. The image of the Ouroboros with Earth Mother figures is ubiquitous throughout history. See Neumann, 19 for the Ouroboros’ link with the earth.

59. The famous omphalos at , Greece had uterine significance because ‚Delphys‛ is a Greek term for ‚uterus.‛ See A. A. Barb, ‚Diva Matrix: a Faked Gnostic Intaglio in the Possession of P. P. Rubens and the Iconology of a Symbol,‛ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 200 for a discussion of the Delphic site and the navel’s value as a symbol of the uterus. The river Okeanos, where the Gorgons lived, was for Homer (Iliad, Book XIV, 201, 246) the place from which all life originated. In the sixteenth century Peracelsus stated that ‚the Creator has formed heaven and earth to a womb (matrix) in which Adam was conceived, and..just as man lives in this womb of the outer world so the unborn child lives under the firmament of the mother’s womb.‛ (quoted on Barb, 203)

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60. For more information on the gnostic gems discussed here see Campbell Bonner’s Studies in Magical Amulets, chiefly Graeco-Egyptian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Studies, 1950).

61. Medusa was also a uterine symbol in the Middle Ages. See Barb, 235. Barb, n. 214 indicates that terracotta statues of uteri were popular among Italian collectors of the Renaissance. There is, Barb noted, an ancient cult of the ‚divine uterus‛ which may be connected to the amulets in question. The Orphics knew about the cult. Therefore, intellectuals at the Medici court who were steeped in Orphic thought must have been familiar with the cult as well.

62. Cole, 62, 128-133, 138, 148 discusses the figure of Perseus and Cellini’s Perseus as models of virtù, as well as poems for the Perseus that laud it as a work of virtù. See n.1 of my Introduction for poems about Cellini’s Perseus. Pirro Ligorio, Cellini’s contemporary, believed the statue to be an allegory of virtù. See Libro dell’Antichità, MSS vi, fol. 156r, Archivio di Stato Segnatura, Turin, Italy. An anonymous fifteenth-century treatise published in Georg Heinrich Bode’s Scriptores rerum Mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti (Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 1968): 42 refers to the figure of Perseus as a ‚figura virtutis.‛ Fulgentius, 62.

63. Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X and the two Cosimos (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984): 253-254, 275.

64. Cellini, My Life, 324-332. Cellini also channeled his animosity through his Perseus by writing a poem, ‚Perseo che si maraviglia di questa innusata e favorita braveria grifona‛ in which he speaks through the statue. Here, Perseus, himself a mythical avenger, tells the Piazza della Signoria’s Neptune that Bartolomeo Ammanati, Cellini’s inferior, will ‚ruin‛ the god of the sea.

65. -----, My Life, 329.

66. -----, My Life, 330.

67. I am grateful to Edward J. Olszewski for bringing to my attention the early modern belief in clay as matter for the body. See also Scholten, 26, 33. Consult My Life, 325-326 for Cellini’s explanation of his use of clay and earth to prepare his Perseus and Medusa. Cellini’s most detailed description for his Accademia del Disegno seal mentions that God ‚sculpted with earth.‛ See Cole, 124. The artist also once said that ‚God made the first man out of sculpture in earth.‛ See Piero 98

Calamandrei, Scritti e Inediti Celliniani, ed. Carlo Cordié (Florence, Italy: La Nuova Italia, 1971): 167.

68. Cole, 58.

69. In Martina Droth’s words: ‚The story of the Perseus’ casting suggests that the demiurgic powers of bronze recognized by the ancients were still palpable to sixteenth-century artists.

70. Scholten, 26.

71. Cole, 70. Aristotle’s theory of generation, with which Cellini was familiar, purportedly told that ‚there is moisture in the earth, spirit in that moisture, and a life heat in all of those things, such that all, in some way, are charged with soul.‛ Aristotle, De Generatione Animalivm Libri, trans. Theodoro Gaza (, Italy: Heironymus Scotus, 1545): Book V, 276. Similarly, sixteenth-century metallurgist Antonio Allegretti stated that ‚metal is a material holding living spirit which infuses all created things. It cannot show its forces unless its hot and lively virtue is quickly freed from where it lies, unencumbered.‛ Antonio Allegretti, De la Trasmutazione de Metalli, ed. Mino Gabriele (Rome, Italy: Mediterranee, 1981): 52. Cole, 60 notes that Cosimo I was interested in the practical application of alchemy and metallurgy. Therefore, the duke would have known about the preceding premises.

72. Barb (193-238, esp. 208ff) has noted that gnostic accounts state that beheading Medusa was a creative act because it enabled her to spawn.

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Chapter 3 Renaissance Political Theory and Paradoxes of Power

Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa testifies to the fact that coercion and force were central to Cosimo I’s rise to power and to his vision of state formation. The Medici duke’s political bravado was responsible for his entry into Florence as a larger- than-life sovereign. And yet, aspects of early modern theory on gender and the state which problematize virtù inform Cellini’s bronze in ways that could have reminded viewers of problems with the construction of the ruler’s power, specifically, the transformation of Florence from republic to duchy. Florentines, who held the value of republican liberty close to their hearts, would have been keenly aware of the insecure foundation of their past traditions as times changed rapidly while Cosimo consolidated his power. The controversy over the merits of government by the many versus by the elite few was still an unresolved point of tension in sixteenth-century Florence. Some of the legal and cultural constraints imposed on Cellini were signs of the tighter vigilance and control of the public and private spheres besetting the development of the early modern state.1 Those restrictions affected Cellini’s vision of the Perseus and Medusa in a provocative fashion.

Much political writing and visual imagery dating from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance treats the ruler’s head and body as symbols of the state.

Sixteenth-century art epitomizing the body of the male ruler adoring, or 100 overcoming the state personified as a woman’s body include Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine, a later pro-Medici sculpture, on the Piazza della Signoria (fig. 24).2

The preceding ideological configuration takes a more complex turn in Cellini’s

Perseus and Medusa, which does much to suggest tension, struggle and disturbance, thus drawing the viewer into the scene. In part, this effect stems from the fact that

Perseus’ attack on Medusa is an assault on the female gender. Chapter 3 will show that the theories of Machiavelli, which found a wide audience in the Renaissance and even made their way into Florence’s Grand Ducal Library, are enormously helpful to our understanding of the hero’s treatment of the Gorgon.3

In different writings, elaborately so in , Machiavelli shows that contrasts between the sexes is the essence of politics. Politics stems from the nature of man and, in kind, it cultivates manliness. Virtù was Machiavelli’s most important concept. For him it was largely about energy and virtuosity (recall, a hallmark of Cellini’s manly artistry). Machiavelli’s virtù was the main instrument through which one could cross the fine boundaries between autonomy and dependence. For Florentine males, perhaps especially those living during the age of state formation, individual and political glory and security depended on autonomy, which one cannot separate from psychic and personal matters.

Conversely, one of Machiavelli’s loathed was effeminate because passivity and dependence, then linked to the term, were perilous traits in men. However, 101 problems and contradictions invest his separatist view.

Gendered theories in Machiavelli’s texts intertwine with paradoxes about a man’s ability to control the world around him which, in turn, reflect the anxious nature of Renaissance masculinity. Pico della Mirandola’s words are telling in this regard: ‚If man lifts himself to the full height of mind and soul he rises higher than the sky‛: ‚man possesses ... almost the same genius as the Author of the heavens.‛

Indeed, man could even author the heavens if, alas, he only had ‚the instrument and the heavenly material.‛4 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has proposed that the preced- ing statement most likely couches a certain degree of anxiety and doubt about masculine capabilities.5 Pico might have been thinking of a competing divine energy responsible for orchestrating world activity and infringing upon male autonomy --- the goddess Fortuna, whose identity had already undergone various changes before she touched Machiavelli’s imagination.

The ancient Roman world conceived of Fate as the goddess Fortuna. A spindle fastened the eight spheres of heaven, and the goddess of destiny had the the whole world’s revolving in her womb, which controlled everything.6 The early Christian author made Fortuna appear evil, deceiving.7 Already one has an instance where the perceived malevolence of Woman took on mythical form.

Fortuna retained her human character traits in the Renaissance, which 102 perhaps made it easier for people to associate her with Woman. Conflicted feel- ings about Fortuna led to the practice of portraying her with either a beautiful face, or an ugly one, like Medusa. Fortuna’s changeability led to a comparison to the moon, to which her wheel, an emblem of the cosmos with all its contradictions, also compared. The moon governs the tides, while Fortuna controlled the tides of human life. As one can see, the profile of the Mother Goddess, the mistress of all life and cosmic processes, merged with that of Fortuna.

The Renaissance’s interest in the pagan pantheon inspired men’s attempts to deal with Fortuna as a cosmological entity. For instance, Castiglione and Cellini forcefully confronted her thus.8 Now, early modern writers, such as Machiavelli, suggested that men ally with her, sometimes in such a way that they might access divinity. Their free will had the potential to rival her.

Machiavelli’s most influential writing, which criticism has not sufficiently discussed in light of Cosimo I’s patronage, gives one a most compelling reason to associate Fortuna with Cellini’s Medusa.9 In the Florentine statesman’s writing

Fortuna is most provocatively violent, aggressive, malevolent and deceiving.

However, Machiavelli sometimes connected Fortuna with God, or Heaven. Recall the Florentine theorist’s tercets in which Fortuna is, like Medusa, an intelligent divinity and queen. She is the epitome of duality, for she has ‚two faces,‛ one fierce and the other mild.‛10 Men suffer much when she ‚cuts off‛ the ‚horns of 103 their fame,‛ that is, she injures their manly honor.11

Images of the battle between virtù and Fortuna appeared ever since the days of Cicero, but became more frequent during the time Machiavelli sexualized this fight in his best writing.12 In Machiavelli’s imagination the sexual conquest of

Fortuna interrelated with politics, history, and manliness. He eroticized political power and military conquest and treated as a matter of capture and domina- tion. In the last chapter of The Prince, Italy is a woman ‚beaten, despoiled, bruised, trampled, subject to every kind of injury< she prays to God to send her someone who will rescue her from barbarian insolence and cruelty.‛13 Despite the preceding, in Machiavelli’s writings Fortuna is also in charge of the government of a state, of a ruler’s power and victory, and of loss and honor in battle.

The Medici court enjoyed sexualized images of a Machiavellian nature, such as Vasari’s decoration for the Sala di Giove in the Palazzo Vecchio, where each of

Jupiter’s sexual conquests corresponds to a specific military exploit of Duke

Cosimo I. In addition, Vasari’s First Fruits of the Earth Offered to Saturn shows (Capricorns, references to Cosimo) abducting three partially clothed women just above the goddess Fortuna. One discerns an intended association between the latter and the abducted women, the point being that Saturn (Cosimo) could seize the goddess of Fate, as the satyrs do the helpless women.

Another well known work by Cellini likewise glorifies sexual violence and 104 even seems to have inspired his vision for the Perseus and Medusa. Cellini’s medal for King Francis I (1537, fig. 25), which we know only in the form of later bronze copies, has a portrait of the king as a Roman emperor. On the reverse, an armed soldier on horseback, a surrogate for the virtùous Francis I, is ready to strike a nude woman with his large baton. The work testifies to Cellini’s familiarity with

Machiavelli’s theories, for the inscription on its rim reads: VIRTVE DEVICIT

FORTVNAM (He has overcome Fortuna by Virtue). Nevertheless, the statement does stand for generic Renaissance prescriptions for handling Fortuna. The goddess lies sprawled on the ground, beneath the horse’s deadly rearing hoofs.

One may construe the large baton as a substitute for the male member. Further,

Fortuna is nude. Thus, Cellini highlighted the sexualized nature of the horseman’s political and military conquest.

As Philip Atwood has observed, Cellini rendered the female on Francis’ medal as more passive than ancient images of Fortuna. The woman on the king’s medal is a of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Night (fig. 26) on the left side of

Giuliano de’ Medici’s tomb in San Lorenzo, a derivation connoting sleep and death which underscores Fortuna’s passivity.14 I would add that the association of

Fortuna with Night enhances the former’s astrological significance, while evoking the threatening Mother Goddess. Cellini would have thought as much, for

Florentine Neoplatonism, the inspiration for Michelangelo’s Medici tombs, 105 characterized Night as a primordial maternal being.15 At San Lorenzo she is a star- and-moon-bearing version of the Mother Goddess, a personification of earth, heaven, the spent womb ( her sagging abdomen), and even the tomb, or underworld.

Michelangelo once wrote a poem stipulating that night is more important than day because conception takes place during the night.16 As such, the sculpted mother with all her creative powers rivals the male Day on Giuliano de’ Medici’s tomb. In a similar fashion, Fortuna on Francis I’s medal wears a crown which characterizes her as a rival for the horseman, Francis I.

Precedents for Francis’ medal were Roman coins, for instance, a silver denarius of Septimius Severus (193-211, fig. 27), showing horsemen defeating adversaries and the words VIRTVS AVG (‚The virtue of the emperor‛).17 The coin for Severus is almost a mirror image of Francis I’s: it is complete with a male wielding a baton, a rearing horse and a victim below its two front hooves.

However, the earlier work shows the woman fully clothed, which supports the earlier observation that Cellini, like Machiavelli, indulged in the sexual nature of domination and oppression.

Similarly, the hierarchical arrangement of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa translates into a sexualized conquest. The hero’s foot presses against the Gorgon’s nude abdomen. Her nudity, especially her bare breasts, and the pillow beneath 106 her are erotic, while the sword’s proximity to the penis indicates the sexual nature of this violent political deed.18 Indeed, it is telling that Cellini’s bronze model of his

Perseus evinces more distance between the hero’s phallus and his sword than the statue’s final version does (fig. 28). The Perseus indicates that virtù and, indeed, virtùous state building had phallic associations, which under the Loggia would have complemented extant sexualizations of Cosimo’s military campaigns.

However, Cellini, the misogynist, once endearingly called his Gorgon, an epitome of Fortuna, ‚la mia femina.‛19 In the same vein, Machiavelli’s writing denotes a love/hate relationship with Fortuna: the ruler may handle her roughly even though he may adore her.

The sexual content of the Autobiography, like that of Cellini’s bronze for

Cosimo I, is dialectical. Cellini’s treatment of his model Caterina, echoed

Machiavelli’s comments about loving and abusing Fortuna. On one occasion, ‚she asked me if I was still angry with her. I said I was not..the usual carnal pleasures followed; then ...she provoked me so much that I had to give her the same beating‛ that she received the previous day.20 The artist’s of forcefully and masterfully constructing his enormous bronze for Cosimo I matched the physical exertion he employed to make Caterina comply with his professional and personal interests. The accounts with Caterina are boastful and thus underscore the fact fact that in the Renaissance seducing women, which Cellini proudly said he often 107 did, and raping them, which Cellini did at least once, enhanced and legitimized one’s masculinity. Ironically, in contemporary opinion, rape controlled women’s unruly nature, which mirrored Fortuna and Medusa.21

The sculptor’s relationships with females inspired him to write about the

‚nature‛ of women and their dangerous powers. Throughout the Autobiography, women are repeatedly the ones responsible for Cellini’s misfortunes. His written assaults, which made up for his inability to do some women actual harm, include his characterization of Madame d’Étampes of Fontainebleau as a . She was the one who cost him the commission for a colossal statue of Mars and thus became ‚that damned woman‛ who ‚must have been brought into the world only for its ruination.‛22 Eleonora di Toledo was similar to the Furies, for she cost him

Cosimo I’s favor. Cellini even vilified women from the ancient past: the Amazon

Penthesilea was a courtesan from Italy.

Similarly, in one of Cellini’s poems, Fortuna is a bitch, for he believed that she continually battled against him. It is no surprise that he sometimes conflated

Fortuna with the intimidating females in his life. The conclusion to his story of

Eleonora’s disappointment with his appraisal of one of her pearl necklaces is telling: ‚Now here one can recognize the way in which evil Fortune rages against a poor man, and how shameless Fortune favors a wicked man.‛23 Thus, one can see that on the Piazza della Signoria Perseus’ violent assault of Medusa reflects 108

Cellini’s own ideas about powerful females. It seems that contemporary abuse of women, whether real or imagined, betrays a certain degree of insecurity about the merits of virtùous men.

There is, Machiavelli specified, a special reason why Fortuna – and seemingly women – must be held down and/or beaten in order for men to succeed:

Fortuna has her own power, which, without physical force from adversaries, can oppress and dominate men. Women share Fortuna’s deceitful traits, and harm men professionally and personally with their seductive wiles. In this context men are weak and need to restrain their sexual appetites in order to avoid the clutches of women. The autonomy of the state and of man depends on rapacious, virtùous actions, like those of Perseus. Machiavelli asserted that men must avoid being like women in order to preserve their political and personal autonomy and virtù, as previously mentioned. To be under this second mother’s control means being childish, bestial and dependent.24 Machiavelli’s tenets reveal the unstable nature of Renaissance masculinity.

The following passage from Machiavelli’s ‚How a State Falls Because of

Women,‛ a chapter from his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, exemplifies his view: ‚Women have caused much destruction, have done great harm to those who govern cities, and have occasioned many divisions in them...I say, then, that absolute princes and governors of republics are to take no small 109 account of this matter‛ (3:26).25 Women are a threat not only to rulers, but also to the body politic, for they weaken citizens, just as women do princes.

Indeed, a common theme in Machiavelli’s thought is that while young women are dangerously seductive, older women are a greater political threat. For example, mature women can be just as ambitious as men, since they often desire much power for themselves and for their families. Older women’s powers are almost superhuman, that is, almost like Fortuna’s, and undermine those of men.

Machiavelli cited the story of Tarquin the Proud, who came to power because of his wife’s ambition, despite the fact that she was the daughter of the previous legitimate king. As soon as her husband took the throne, the queen persuaded him to execute her father.26

It is no surprise that weak men can protect themselves by keeping a distance from feminine wiles, but one contradiction is Machiavelli’s proposal that men become like Fortuna and Woman in select ways. Machiavelli’s writing simultaneously pits virtù and Fortuna against each other and also compares one with the other: both forces control human lives. In essence, Man and Fortuna face each other and govern the progress of history. Men must battle her by becoming, like Perseus, cunning, illusory, even killers, just as Fortuna and Medusa variously are. The ability to change, to take on protean characteristics, as many of Ovid’s characters do, is one way to overcome an opponent. Although Fortuna is fickle, 110 she yields to those who fight forcefully. Therefore, men must ‚match her passion with their own passion, her actions with their own actions.‛ ‚The male depends on the female and must assimilate himself to her.‛27

The interchangeable identities of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa reflect

Machiavelli’s claims that men must become like their adversary and that virtù needs adversary in order to triumph. Remember, Perseus rose to power through the violent effects of Medusa’s head, which figuratively reflected his self when it appeared in Athena’s mirror-like shield. Recall as well that the adversarial nature of casting the Perseus despite the fickleness of Natura contributed to Cellini’s greatness. The defensive flavor of Cellini’s Autobiography as a whole answers the call to virtùous action and in the process it proves his ability to transcribe

‚masculinity into artistic enterprise.‛28 Machiavelli’s idea and the Machiavellian significance of Cellini’s androgynous Perseus and Medusa might have bolstered, indeed, the contemporary, insecure male desire (like that of Cosimo I) to display violence in a cavalier manner, a way of suggesting that men were superior to

Fortuna, who ended up controlling half the time and leaving the other half to men’s will.

Duke Cosimo I’s ambition to achieve the status of an autonomous absolutist mirrored Machiavelli’s belief that men should not be dependent on women. In

Cosimo’s case, those women were Eleonora di Toledo and Maria Salviati, the 111 sisters of Fortuna, and so it is plausible that the duke, who was steeped in contemporary political theory, would have taken Machiavelli’s prescriptions to heart in his effort to rise above knowledge of his continual dependence on his mother and to validate his own masculine abilities in light of Eleonora’s perpetual influence on the Tuscan state.29 However, Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa suggests that dependence on the maternal survives denigration of her power.

It is interesting that an inspiration for Machiavelli’s ideas about mimicking

Fortuna was his experience with a ‚public woman‛ of ‚overwhelming power‛ who exerted influence on the political world ‚from behind‛ – Caterina Sforza, the grandmother of Cosimo I de’ Medici.30 Machiavelli’s first important mission as

Secretary to the Ten, or Second Chancery enabled him to meet the Countess of

Forli in 1499, the year she taught him how deceptive politics could be. She instructed Machiavelli how to be a ‚fox‛ when one was too feeble to be a ‚lion.‛31

The ruling Medici, to whom Machiavelli dedicated his Prince, must have been aware of the Florentine theorist’s association of Fortuna’s cunning elusiveness with

Caterina, for one of her anonymous portrait medals shows Caterina as a nearly nude personification of Fortuna, who balances her right foot on a globe and holds another globe in her right hand (fig. 29). The medal suggests that Caterina, the

‚mistress of Imola and Forli,‛ brings fortune and virtue to her political dominions, but, as Joyce de Vries has observed, the medal’s salute ‚to virtue‛ may have been 112 meant to advise Caterina to keep her family’s good fortune alive.32 The implication here is that her role as the mistress of Forli and Imola was not entirely secure.

Thus, Fortuna and women like her, such as Caterina Sforza and Cellini’s Medusa, may have personified generic uncertainty, the unknown, as well as adversity within and without the Renaissance court.33 Recall that in the patriarchal culture of ancient Greece Medusa also took on characteristics of the unknown and thus the dangerous.

The fear of Fortuna/Woman may have reinforced men’s sense of their own inadequacies and weaknesses, which in high profile spheres like government would have been particularly troubling. As the Renaissance progressed, that sense may have intensified, for women’s education improved. Other traditional sex roles changed and met with challenge, likewise to men’s fearful concern. For instance, families became smaller and mothers began to exert most of the control over children’s religious lives.34 Cosimo I and Eleonora, similarly, disagreed about what constituted the best way to bring up their children.35 Meanwhile, the ‚battle of the sexes‛ burgeoned in literature fraught with anxious reactions to the improving state of women. It is no coincidence, then, that contemporary literature harped on the theme of the dominating wife. Telling too was the rise of woodcuts, engravings and prints (for instance, the ‚Fatal Power of Woman‛ series) of domineering women from the ancient past, such as Delilah, , and Judith, who, 113 like literary wives, were ‚devouring, pestering, exhausting‛ figures.36 It is no wonder that hero worship and images of extraordinarily strong men, such as

Hercules, became more prominent in Renaissance Europe, for they were attempts to compensate for the ‚rise‛ of women.

As fear of women abounded, contemporary courtesy books, such as

Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galateo, dueling manuals and legal decisions prescribed rules that contributed to the multiple, unstable nature of Renaissance masculinity.

A number of these echo Machiavelli’s contradictory rules to avoid effeminacy and to emulate Fortuna/Woman. Castiglione’s The Courtier, which prizes violence and aggression, specifically tells men not to act like a woman. However, The Courtier indicates, paradoxically, that everything that can be said of the courtier can be said of the women of the palace:37

...male and female always go naturally together, and one cannot exist without the other. So by very defin- ition we cannot call anything male unless it has its female counterpart, or anything female if it has no male counterpart.38

Castiglione’s comment must have led men to think about similarities between themselves and women.

Fear of becoming like women also informed dress codes. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the only times in Western history when men wore the codpiece. This fact seems to suggest a need in men to prove their sexuality to 114 themselves and to others. As Mark Breitenberg has stated, ‚male anatomical superiority must surely have been experienced as tenuous (and potentially reversible), thus encouraging the symbolic importance of the codpiece as an outward sign of something in actuality less secure.‛39 The act of effeminizing vulnerability necessarily entrapped men in their own undesirable code of meaning. In different contexts, then, Fortuna/Woman would have undermined the equation of male gender and sexuality with political and military power in ways which, paradoxically, men manipulated themselves.

Additional expectations about a man’s public and private images proved to be contradictory. Ideas about what constituted appropriate behavior for married or marriageable men, who were responsible for maintaining social and political order, illuminate the ambiguous nature of early modern manhood. Marriage was the culmination of a ritualized process that transformed disorderly youths into trustworthy men. Supposedly, male youths were emotionally unstable, prone to violence (including ) and profligacy.40 Leon Battista Alberti was one who instructed the public about the typical young man’s behavior: ‚He disagrees with others; he creates disorder in the halls of princes; and he corrupts all things with quarrels and divisions.‛41 Lust also fed into the destructive nature of young men; hence marriage would restrain (not extinguish) men’s carnal desires; only then could a man be ready for political life.42 The belief that raping women could flatter 115 male honor was, then, a paradox.

Cellini’s profile in the Autobiography mirrors that of Alberti’s typical youth.

The sculptor proved to be, like Perseus, an adept . He committed the of murder three times and on more than one occasion Italian authorities sentenced him to death. His less serious offenses, including assault, likewise resulted in legal charges. For example, in 1523 Cellini began to be hostile to the goldsmiths Salvatore and Michele Guasconti, with whom he had been involved professionally. The Autobiography states that Cellini hurt Gherardo Guasconti with a blow to the forehead, and because he threatened some of the Guasconti family with a dagger the clan sent authorities after him.43 Cellini became so furious that he attacked Gherardo with a stiletto, thereby avenging his murdered brother:

With great dexterity, I approached him with a large dagger of the type made in Pistoia and spun him around with a back stroke, hoping to cut off his head cleanly, but he turned quickly and my blow hit him on the edge of his left shoulder and broke the entire bone; he got up, leaving his sword behind, and confused by the intense pain, he began to run, but I followed him and caught up with him in four steps. After I raised my dagger above his head, he lowered it as far as he could and took the blow at a point right on the neck bone and halfway down the nape of the neck, and the whole of the dagger went in so deeply that although I applied tremendous force to extricate it, I could not do so. .. Giovan Bandini arrived, and told<‛ ‚This dagger is mine, and I loaned it to Benvenuto who wanted to avenge his brother.‛ The reactions of the soldiers were many, and they all were sorry to have interrupted me, even though my revenge was taken to excess.44

As the previous account from Cellini’s Autobiography suggests, violence was 116 prevalent in the Renaissance. Violence protected one’s honor; hence the soldiers’ reaction to Bandini’s comment about the Pistoian dagger. Virtù related to honor, as shown, for being a man required defending one’s familias and one’s self. Even

Cellini said that he needed to behave violently because he was a man. I have noted that in the sculptor’s day boys and men were obliged to experience trials and rites of passage that would mold their maleness into an ideal, but this was a which they could gain and keep only by fighting.45

Paradoxically, the Renaissance code of honor perpetuated violence, causing more headaches for legal authorities and for the state as a whole. That such actions had widespread politicized ramifications is not surprising, for public authority interfered more often with private life in the era of state formation. This was a time when new magistracies and regulations shaped the identities of men and women. Men often had mixed feelings about hurting or killing others: guilt, shame, and the like stemmed from the tensions and contradictions between

Christian doctrine and the call to honor. Of course, men were aware of the risk of getting into legal trouble as a result of engaging in adversarial relations with their opponents. The murder of Guasconti, for instance, had to be kept a secret, even though the soldiers who arrived at the crime scene condoned Cellini’s revenge, or so the sculptor said. In this context men like Cellini were constantly judged in public and private. It is not surprising, then, that the institution of revenge met 117 with criticism even while it prevailed.46

Cellini’s Perseus upholds the Renaissance cult of manhood with its pronounced muscularity and its violent action. The nude muscle men on the pedestal relief, who are alter egos of Perseus’ fighting self, do so too and in the same way. Perhaps the fact that Perseus attacks Cetus without the aid of Medusa is partly the result of a desire within the artist for virtù to free itself of

Fortuna/Woman/Medusa. However, the androgynous character of the statue indicates that the artist identified with the Gorgon as only one who is hunted by authority can. The sword, the severed head, even the visage at the helmet’s rear may have appealed to the aggression of both supporters and foes of the artist and the Medici family. In this way the statue could have called forth adversity.

However, the Perseus and Medusa suggests that adversary may turn against oneself, as it turned against Cellini.

Just as Perseus has a paradoxical relationship to the bronze Medusa, so

Renaissance virtù realized itself partly through the act of controlling its ‚opposite‛

–-- female virtue. Women’s virtuous behavior depended mostly on chastity and sexual passivity.47 In Breitenberg’s terms, female chastity was ‚invested with the power to preserve or threaten‛ the blood ‚that figures the purity of status distinctions that were simultaneously construed as the necessary bonds between men.‛48 Thus, female chastity could engender anxiety in men.49 Husbands and 118 fathers often sensed that women’s virtue was ultimately beyond their control.50 In this context, Woman, like Fortuna/Medusa, could not only confirm, but also disrupt masculine identity.

The instability of Renaissance manhood, and, for that matter Renaissance womanhood, mirrors an underlying problem with metaphors of the holistic body of the state. The notion of the composite body’s unity, which had been an ideal for

Europeans since antiquity, naturally conjures up the reverse, that is, the fact that at one point this body was divisible, made up of fragmentary parts, which might still break apart. The trope of the state as one body ‚affirms, even as it seeks to exclude, the possibility of fragmentation and disunity.‛51 The state’s divisibility is implied in Machiavelli’s discussion of the elements of difference and aberration which women bring into the masculinized political world, thereby undermining its

‚coherence.‛ One sees a like frame of mind behind the androgynous nature of

Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa: the likeness between the two bronze figures enables the Gorgon to thwart Perseus’ potential to emerge totally victorious over the feminine presence within the idea of the state.

Machiavelli himself had a similar breakthrough. In John Najemy’s words, the Florentine statesman ‚rejected the tamed, bounded, and decorous body of what by his time had become authoritative tradition. He saw its contradictions and unstable tensions, its potential for self-contestation and disruption, its founda- 119 tions of fear and anxiety.‛52 Machiavelli’s (Discorsi, Book I, Chapter 17) ‚image of the healthy, happy, headless body politic,‛ for instance, represents ‚rhetorical violence‛ against the humanist canon of body imagery.53 In other words, the

Florentine political theorist made more of composite bodies than homogeneous ones.

Likewise, though incontestable in many ways, Cosimo’s vision of his absolutist state did meet with challenges of a practical nature and even clashed with contemporary visions of a homogeneous state. Consider, for instance, the republican exiles from the Battle of Montemurlo, who tried to revolt several times and even attempted to spread anti-Medici propaganda. Another problem for

Cosimo I might have been the lingering popularity of ’s controversial History of Italy (1530s), whose author had lost all favor with Pope

Clement VII before beginning his bitter laments of Fortuna’s victory in contemporary politics. He wanted those whom the Medici defeated, aristocratic and bourgeois, to regain their dignity. Guicciardini made sure to include figures of virtù in his History, characters whom he believed were more talented to rule than the single despot, meaning, no doubt, Cosimo I de’ Medici.54

As Lauro Martines has observed, Fortuna’s wheel was a ‚fitting cipher‛ for theoretical attempts, such as those of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, to make sense of the upper classes’ loss of power.55 Martines has also stated that if sixteenth- 120 century writers attempted to:

enlarge the scope within which man-will-virtue, seen as unity, could be successful, the mere fact that the problem was so incessantly put, and so often answered in favor of Fortune, was testimony to the loss of faith in voluntaristic action. Rather, experience seemed to show that the scope of unreason had expanded.56

It is worth stressing that in the preceding instances a female figure is to blame for the political disappointments of men.

Thus, a strongly dialectical image, Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, matched the variously disturbing and promising natures of events in the contemporary Tuscan state and in contemporary political theory. In doing so, the statue problematizes the prince’s relationship to Fortuna, suggesting that Medusa’s/Fortuna’s inimical nature is a mirror image of the ruler’s character, which breeds division in the polity. In this respect the Perseus and Medusa becomes a speculum principis, a

‚mirror of the prince.‛ In Cellini’s day the speculum principis was a popular genre of political writing that instructed the sovereign in leadership. Before examining

Cellini’s bronze as a ‚mirror of the prince‛ it is necessary to travel back to ancient

Rome, where the genre originated.57

121

The Mirror of the Prince

Seneca’s De clementia is the earliest surviving speculum principis. The text’s topos is in certain respects that of the physical mirror, but the reflection of which it speaks takes place within the ruler’s mind. According to Seneca, the prince must examine himself and others in a rational fashion, which, in turn, will inspire others to do the same and therefore be peaceful. The prince does not need to carry weapons, for his virtue wins the love of those he governs.

One of the most controversial characters in the Roman philosopher’s text is the figure of Fortuna, who became a fixture in subsequent ‚mirrors for princes‛ and whom Seneca first described as male. As an instrument of the gods, one who is endowed, like Cellini’s Perseus and Gorgon, with ‚divine reason,‛ the prince determines the fortune of all individuals.58 This is the first instance where the ruler becomes a mirror image of Fortune; hence the latter is, like Medusa, a character who inspires the prince’s self-reflection.

However, Seneca also explained that a man can fight Fortuna with his virtù, for the latter needs antagonism in order to flourish, as it does in Machiavelli’s thought. In this respect Fortuna’s agency is violent and aggressive. She seeks out the brave man so that she may war with him. Note that Fortune now becomes female in the ancient Roman’s text, one who is worthy to fight the prince:

A gladiator counts it a disgrace to be matched with an 122

inferior, and knows that to win without danger is to win without glory. The same is true of Fortuna. ....Those that are most stubborn and unbending she assails, men against whom she may exert all her strength.59

However, a wise man ‚possesses an undiminished and stable liberty, being free and his own master and towering above all others. For what can possibly be above him who is above Fortuna?‛ The ‚magnanimous prince looks down on apparent misfortune and inuria with equanimity.‛60

The war with Fortuna is an externalization of the inner fight for self-mastery, that is, for the triumph of the rational.61 Now that Fortune is a woman, the meeting of wits, of mente, becomes a struggle --- one between like and like.

Peter Stacey has offered an original account of how Machiavelli, unique in this regard, attacked Seneca’s image of the prince and the principate. Critics have noted that The Prince at once adheres to and subverts the genre of the speculum principis, especially one item in De clementia – the prince’s need to be constantly merciful and to abstain from vice.62 The Prince exposes the injury, murder, ruthlessness, greed, oppression and the instability of princely political regimes, reversing the effects of the speculum principis by deconstructing, while ‚sharpening the tropes and figures of the Roman theory of monarchy into weapons which he then deploys against it.‛63 In this way the Florentine statesman employed the ironic strategy of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, an ancient text that was widely

123 read in the Renaissance.64 The latter theorist once stated that ‚the most satisfactory thing is if you are in a position to derive an argument from your opponent.‛ At the same time, it can be ‚unsafe to speak openly.‛65 Machiavelli’s treatise is one of simultaneous ‚dissimulation and self-disclosure,‛ a most Quintilian technique that epitomizes the variously ambiguous, deceitful, ironic, and illusory nature of his era’s speech, comportment and action.66 Thus, the prince governs his court as

Fortuna does the world.67 I might add, Machiavelli himself became like Fortuna as he wrote in Quintilian fashion. The Prince is a ‚mirror‛ into which the ruler may look to find that he is the embodiment of that which the treatise pretends to denounce.

At the heart of Machiavelli’s philosophy is a rejection of many of the ways

Seneca had described relations among princeps, status, Fortuna and virtù. He conceded with the Roman theorist that the prince holds the state ‚in his hand.‛68

However, Machiavelli undermined the prince’s ability to create and to maintain political unity/stability by exposing what occurs to bodies when they fall under princely rule.

In a paradoxical manner, Machiavelli stated that without the occasione from

Fortuna, a prince’s virtue would not be able to achieve anything, although without the same virtue, the occasione would pass in vain. Here, the attack is directly on

Seneca, whose prince is carried aloft by his Fortuna to a pinnacle from which he 124 cannot descend. From these heights the prince can lower his eyes to those he governs. The Roman theorist stressed that even though the prince holds the governed under his control, people are happiest to live in this form of respublica.69

The first chapter of The Prince reverses these claims, maintaining that all states that dominate people are either republics or principalities.70 Machiavelli claimed that principalities are either hereditary or they are the product of new blood, that is, they are contingent, contestable, not innate possessions.71 The concept of the prince’s ‚rape‛ of the state comes into play here. He warns in

Chapter 5 that in the case of republics ‚there is no sure way of possessing them, other than by destroying them,‛ for a prince who desires to dominate republics must ‚undo them, or else expect to be undone by them.‛72 These tenets strike a with Cosimo I’s and Perseus’ rise to power.

Before Machiavelli put his ideas on paper, the Renaissance ideology of the prince held that monarchy is the greatest hope for the preservation of libertas.

Now, in sixteenth-century Florence Machiavelli claimed that to live under a prince is to be unfree, as Stacey has observed.73 It is no wonder, then, that Machiavelli satirically counseled that Medicean rule could improve through .74

The theme of deceit which is so important to the tale of Medusa’s demise with the aid of Athena’s mirror-shield and thus to Cellini’s Perseus assumes a new political dimension in the context of Machiavelli’s discourse on the contingent 125 state. The deceptive prince, such as Cosimo I, assimilates himself to Fortuna by adopting her image as an elusive cosmic force, just as Cellini’s Perseus adopts the image of the Gorgon (Fortuna).75

Was Cosimo I, whom many praised as a ‚mirror of the prince‛ (a model prince), aware that his adversarial Perseus is a Machiavellian prince whose mirror image in bronze is an emblem of destruction?76 The ‚mirror reflection‛ of Cosimo is the face of Perseus, itself a mirror image of Medusa. Like The Prince, Cellini’s sculpture challenges the Senecan notion that virtue alone is responsible for the prince’s rise to power. The themes of duality and deception relating to the mirror of Athena beneath the feet of Perseus (another destructive ruler) suggest that the statue is a crafty, Machiavellian speculum principis. The figure of Perseus looks down toward the mirror-like shield of Athena, for which the distorted circular configuration of Medusa’s body is a . The implied ‚reflection‛ is up above, at a shared height and visualized as both a real image and a product of the mind, for

Perseus does not look directly at the head he holds. In this way Cellini implied that self-reflection and even seeing one’s Gorgonian reflection is intrinsic to fashioning oneself as an artist, or a ruler – even ruthless ones.

Cellini also seems to have borrowed the Senecan and Machiavellian notion that looking down at his subjects (viewers on the Piazza della Signoria) from the heights to which Fortuna (Medusa, Maria Salviati, Eleonora di Toledo) brought 126 him and which he shares with Fortuna, the prince poses a threat to potential dissenters. Enemies of the Medici could be turned to stone, or, like Medusa, tightly held in his punitive hand and trampled beneath his feet, as Fortuna’s broken wheel (the Gorgon’s body) is under the Loggia. However, as noted, since the statue upholds violence, it could have called forth adversity in others. Thus,

Cellini’s statue testifies to the instability of Seneca’s theory of a unified princedom.

Agnolo Bronzino also painted an image of Duke Cosimo as a ‚mirror of the prince.‛ Cosimo I in Armor (1545, fig. 30) represents the ruler in luminous steel, which in this instance is a virtual mirror, as Gabrielle Langdon has stated. The portrait points up the duke’s role as exemplar at a time when the terms ‚ritratto‛

(portrait) and ‚specchio‛ (mirror) connoted excellence.77 A letter from Bronzino’s iconographer refers to the picture as a ‚mirrabile ritratto,‛ while a note from Vasari to Ottaviano de’ Medici states that the armor in Cosimo’s portrait ‚shines, as should the mirror of the prince so that his people and their actions can be reflected in him.‛78 The contemporary belief that armor deflected evil is relevant to

Bronzino’s painting.79 Two large circles on Cosimo’s breastplate further support the mirror metaphor, I propose. Their spikes, like the rest of the armor, shine brilliantly and are tropes for the sovereign’s militarism.

The circles may also be lunar and solar symbols, just as the mirror has long been. Consider Leonardo’s statement: ‚the body of the moon

Cosimo’s rulership and his metaphorical image as a demi-god. Indeed, in the early modern age, when rulers and generals wanted to be depicted in divine form they usually had themselves shown in armor. Note as well that in the Renaissance portraits were considered to be divine mirrors in which the subject and the artist were reflected in a similar way that Perseus and Medusa were in Athena’s mirror- shield; that is, humans take on the likeness of divinity.81 Ficino once stated that:

in paintings and buildings the wisdom and skill of the artist shines forth. Moreover, we can see in them the attitude and the image, as it were, of his mind; for in these works the mind expresses and reflects itself not otherwise than a mirror reflects the face of a man who looks into it.82

The duke’s armor appears inviolable. Its spiked besagues, especially, accentuate Cosimo’s adversarial nature. On the other hand, as Peter Stallybrass has stressed, armor only seems permanent, for in actuality in rusts, decays and transfers from one body to the next.83 ‚If armor is seen as conferring heroic identity, it is also detachable.‛84 Therefore, the armor (the Machiavellian speculum principis) in Bronzino’s portrait becomes by default a reminder of the limitations of

Cosimo’s power.

Robert Simon has noted that the tight frame around the duke offsets any 128 threat from the right or left, but Cosimo is rather accessible from the viewer’s point of view.85 Simon has further suggested that the duke’s uncovered head and his white, ‚epicene‛ hand resting on his helmet contrast with the tough armor, perhaps pointing up his humanity.86

The adversarial character of Machiavelli’s prince warrants close attention.

The Florentine theorist stated that an unarmed prince and one who does not give the highest premium to building and maintaining his military must expect failure as a ruler. He believed that an army was necessary if the people’s virtù and the state were to survive. Recall that one cannot put virtù into action without battle and/or war. The warrior prince must be armed at all times. In addition, those cities without fortifications are effeminate and the first to fall. They fall,

Machiavelli strangely claimed, by the might of Fortuna and of womankind. In other words, the feminine presence within the state is a foil for the prince’s weakness. That weakness is what necessitates the ruler’s arms.87

Interestingly, Machiavelli implied a connection between the prince and the prophet, who also must be ‚armed,‛ that is, endowed with aggressive character traits. , Cyrus, Theseus, and would never have been successful in commanding their peoples to obey their laws if they had been ‚unarmed,‛ as

Savonarola was. His view matched contemporary interests in biblical heroes, such as the Old Testament hero David, as well as the Famous Men series and other 129 extant portrayals of leaders and their military campaigns. The latter populated the

Palazzo Vecchio. At times, Machiavelli even suggested that the prince be a prophet. His view would have appealed to rulers, such as Cosimo I, interested in cultivating a personal association with fiery prophets like John the Baptist, whose

‚armed‛ influence believedly had a share in Florence’s prosperity.88

War was an art for Machiavellians. War involves the mind of the ruler, who must be steeped in military learning. Art bearing militaristic themes, including

Cellini’s Perseus, for Cosimo I would have complimented the Medici duke’s erudition in warfare, even vengefully so since Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories tells that Cosimo the Elder was unable to expand Florentine power because he was a disarmed man.89

Cellini’s Perseus is a ‚real‛ warrior-prince who embodies the military might of Florence under Medicean absolutism. The mythological figure of Perseus was, in fact, a soldier, just as Cosimo I purportedly was. Cellini’s statuette of Minerva, who transformed Medusa into a force of martial strength, also specifies her own status as warrior goddess.90 Note that her right arm is raised, recalling depictions of her holding a spear. In addition, Vasari’s Ragionamenti considers the military leader’s virtù to be associated with Mercury as a model of erudition, like Duke

Cosimo I.91 However, Perseus’ inability to look at Medusa reminds the viewer of the state’s weaknesses, its need to empower itself with arms, in addition to the 130 state’s dependence on the aid of deities.

According to Machiavelli, taking up arms gives rise to one’s inner , that is, an epitome of the ruler’s imperfection. Even though Machiavelli claimed that bestiality is a sign of weakness, the man-beast is the epitome of perfection.

The eighteenth chapter of The Prince ironically stipulates that a prince must act as a beast who is hunted or hunting, that is, without care for rules and conventions -- as

Cellini often did:

You must recognize that there are two ways of fighting: by means of law, and by means of force. The first belongs properly to man, the second to animals; but since the first is often insufficient, it is necessary to resort to the second. Therefore, a prince must know how to use both what is proper to man and what is proper to beasts. The writers of antiquity taught rulers this lesson allegorically when they told how Achilles and many other ancient princes were sent to be nurtured by the , so that he would train them in his discipline. Their having a creature half-man and half-beast as tutor only means that a prince must know how to use both the one and the other nature, and that the one without the other cannot endure.92

Similarly, Alciati’s Book of Emblems contains a selection on Chiron that reads:

Whoever advises kings ought to be a professor who is half-animal, and a centaur who is half-human. The king becomes a beast when he ravages his allies and when he annihilates his enemies; he becomes a man when he repre- sents himself to his people as being devoted to them.93

Cosimo I had reason to identify with many of the diverse traits of the

Machiavellian beast- prince. Apart from being a ruthless military man, he once 131 flew into a rage and murdered his servant Sforza Almeni by running a lance threw him. Cellini’s Autobiography notes that the duke was responsible for the death of his son Giovanni, who died while dueling his own brother. Similarly, Cosimo’s desire to obtain the ducal title sometimes led to vocal outbursts which probably also made him fearsome in others’ eyes. Yet, at times he proved to be (like Fortuna and his wife Eleonora) quite fickle, ranging from sullenness and irritability to friendliness, just as Cellini so wavered.94 To be near the duke must have instilled varying degrees of anxiety and uncertainty about the future of ones career and perhaps even about ones life. After Cosimo obtained the ducal title an observer at festivities for the occasion noted that there was ‚little real joy to be discerned in the faces of the people.‛95 The austerity of Cosimo’s temperament resulted in his profound distrust of many near him, from whom he withheld his feelings and opinions.96 In effect, he thought and behaved like Machiavelli’s hunted beast.

Did artists give Cosimo’s ‚beastly‛ nature a visual form? An image of

Hercules wearing the skin of the Nemean lion featured as an emblem of strength on the reverse of one of Cosimo’s coins (fig. 31). Cellini’s bust of Cosimo I shows the sitter with the intense, wide eyes of Florence’s mascot, Marzocco the lion; a generous, ‚lionine‛ mane of hair; and several hoary male heads with grotesque, open-mouthed visages mimicking those of the more obviously animal-human composites on the ruler’s armor. For example, a small head of a lion, a solar 132 animal on account of its color and fiery mane, rests on the clavicle and a large, frightening head occupies the right shoulder (fig. 32).97 The lionine type further associates the duke with the winged Medusa head on Cosimo’s breastplate, for both beastly creatures have similar aspects, which include wide eyes, gaping mouths, and manes of different sorts. Furthermore, the creatures support the notion that the Gorgon head is solar. It is no wonder, then, that in the ancient world lions could be apotropaic, just as the fierce gaze of the solar hero Cosimo seems to be here.98

The gaping mouth of the large creature on Cosimo’s right shoulder shows off four large fangs which seem incongruous with the ram’s horns on its head. The figure is, I propose, a portrait of a , for its humanized face indicates that this is a composite being. It too has lionine traits, as well as solar power. Therefore, the satyr is in this instance an emblem of sovereignty. Cellini’s bust of Cosimo I characterizes the duke as a Machiavellian ruler with beastly traits.99

Medusa, like the Mediterranean Earth Mother, sometimes appeared with one or more lions, suggesting cosmic power and sovereignty.100 Lionine power informed Medusa’s ancient guises with a round head, large gaping eyes and enormous teeth, or fangs (fig. 33). The association of Medusa and lions with

Cellini’s bust of Cosimo I and with related images of the Medici ruler, such as

Baccio Bandinelli’s marble bust of Cosimo I (1543-1544, fig. 34), represents the 133 duke’s appropriation of the Gorgon’s power as the Earth Mother. Yet, Medusa’s presence on Cosimo’s chestplates reminds one of the beastly ruler’s vulnerability, that is, his need to rely on her apotropaic force.

The Medusa head on Cosimo’s bronze breastplate associates his bust with

Cellini’s Perseus, another Machiavellian beast-ruler and, remember, another speculum principis; so do lionine creatures on Cellini’s bronze bust. Note that the ball tip of Perseus’ sword has a lionine head (fig. 35). Equally significant as a solar emblem is the lion mask near Cellini’s Mercury bronzette. However, on the crest of

Perseus’ bronze helmet one finds an open-mouthed, four-pawed animal whose hump back characterizes him a of nature and perhaps an embodiment of

Perseus’/Cosimo I’s – the beast-rulers’ -- moral imperfection (fig. 36).

The satyr’s fiery character is similar to Cosimo I’s, and he is closely related to the Capricorn. the satyr would have played an intriguing role at the duke’s sumptuous residence at Castello. In designs for the ’s wall Pan symbolized the earth, while Neptune featured in a second sketch for a wall fountain as an emblem of water. Here, the statues of Pan, who would have recalled Capricorn, and Neptune were rulers of land and sea, respectively, and as such they would have stood for Cosimo I.101 However, since Pan is the god of panics, his place at Castello and perhaps also the Capricorns on the Perseus’ pedestal could have recalled contemporary political adversity within the Tuscan 134 state.

It is worth stressing the ability of Pan (a deceitful figure, like Cosimo I) to disrupt the psychological and physiological balance of human beings by instilling panic in them.102 How does panic set into the as a result of Pan’s presence?103 Ancient texts, such as Clearchus of Soli’s On Panic, describe panic as fear, terror, confusion and disturbances. Panic usually involves the lack of a visible cause. In other words, panic is a response to the unknown or the idea thereof. I propose that references in the form of the frightening creatures on

Cosimo I’s bust to Pan’s fear and panic induction characterize the Medici ruler’s presence as a contrived apotropaion which necessitates (as Machiavelli’s virtù does) adversaries, known or unknown, within the landscape of Florence.

The Medusa on Cosimo’s breastplate relates to Pan as one who instills fear.

Indeed, in ancient Greece Pan was a version of (fear). Medusa herself also personified Phobos.104 In light of Cellini’s design for Duke Cosimo I’s bronze bust it is telling that the ancient Greek world presented Pan as the Earth Goddess’ alter ego. Both figures shared the same landscape as well as the power to petrify and to distract humans.

The bronze bust of Cosimo I suggests, thus, that Cellini was aware of

Medusa’s animal origins. An artist of his caliber would have known that during the Orientalizing period of artistic production in Greece Medusa sometimes 135 appeared as a centaur, and in this guise she served as both the adversary and tutor of heroes (fig. 37).105 She thus becomes, like Fortuna, the perfect companion and of the Machiavellian warrior prince (Cosimo I).

136

Notes

1. Nicolai Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1995): 64ff. For a discussion of new government-run restrictions placed on individuals in Cosimo I’s absolutist state see John Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in late Renaissance Florence, 1537-1609 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

2. Paul Archambault, ‚The Analogy of the Body in Renaissance Political Literature,‛ Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 29 (1967): 21-53. David Hale, The Body Politic: a Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (Paris, France: Mouton, 1971). Lynn Hunt, Eroticism and the Body Politic (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. John Najemy, ‚The Republic’s Two Bodies: Body Metaphors in Italian Renaissance Political Thought,‛ in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1995): 237-262. See Randolph, 19-75 for a discussion of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s identity as the lover of Florence and of the contemporary practice of allegorizing the state as a female object of desire.

3. Van Veen, Cosimo I and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, 169- 170 indicates the Medici’s knowledge of Machiavelli’s works.

4. Pico della Mirandola, ‚On the Dignity of Man,‛ in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, eds. Cassirer, Rinsteller, and Randall (Illinois: Books, 1956): 225.

5. Hanna Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 12.

6. Howard Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927): 12-25.

7. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Victor Watts (New York: Penguin Press, 1999): 3, 8-11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22-24, 26-31, 33-35, 39-40, 44-45, 47, 49, 53, 57, 101, 106-109, 111-113, 141.

8. In the Renaissance the image of Fortuna presiding over her court existed alongside depictions of her as the cosmic mother of humankind. Note how the roles of mother and queen come together as potentially threatening political forces. 137

Theodore de Bry’s engraving of Fortuna (1592) has the inscription: ‚Sometimes Fortuna is a mother, sometimes an unjust stepmother‛ and thus exemplifies the timeless nature of malevolence against cosmic/maternal women.

9. See Gwendolyn Trottein, ‚Battling Fortune in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Cellini and the Changing Faces of Fortuna,‛ in Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe, ed. Cuneo (Massachusetts: Brill Press, 2002): 218, 220-221 for the reception of Fortuna’s image in Medici Florence. Trottein mentions Fortuna’s image in Machiavelli’s thought.

10. Quoted on Pitkin, 165. None that the Renaissance authors discussed in the third chapter of my study equated Fortuna with Medusa. The comparison of the two goddesses is mine.

11. Quoted on Pitkin, 145.

12. For instance, at Poggio a Caiano one the battle between virtù and Fortuna takes the form of the Hercules and Fortuna, which bears the inscription VIRTVTEM FORTVNA SEQVETVR. For Duke Francesco de’ Medici’s wedding apparato of 1565 officials sculpted Virtù and Fortuna. See Cox-Rearick 148ff for a fuller discussion of virtù and the goddess of fate in Medici iconography.

13. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Daniel Donno (New York: Bantam Books, 1966): 87. Diane Wolfthal’s Images of Rape, the ‚Heroic‛ Tradition and its Alternatives (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999) also discusses the early modern equation of martial prowess with rape.

14. Philip Atwood, ‚Cellini’s Coins and Medals,‛ in Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor, Goldsmith, Writer, eds. Margaret A. Gallucci and Paolo Rossi (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 109-110.

15. For a discussion of Night as Mother Goddess and of Neoplatonism’s place in Michelangelo’s vision for San Lorenzo see Balas, Michelangelo’s : a New Interpretation (Pennsylvania: American Philosophical Society, 1995).

16. Michelangelo, The Poems, trans. C. Ryan (London, England: J. M. Dent, 1996): #103.

17. Atwood, 109 indicates that Cellini knew the coin of Septimius Severus.

138

18. Patricia Simons’ ‚Alert and Erect: Masculinity in some Italian Renaissance Portraits of Fathers and Sons,‛ 163-186 is a good study of early modern ideas about the phallus. Numerous Renaissance portraits of military leaders and statesmen, such as ’s Francesco Maria della Rovere, juxtapose the sitter’s phallus/codpiece with his sword. In Simons’ words: ‚Sixteenth-century portraits often unabashedly represent a young adult man’s artificially adorned and enlarged penis

19. G. Molini, ed., La Vita di Benvenuto Cellini: Scritta da lui medesimo tratta dal l’Autografo, vol. 1 (Florence, Italy: Tipografia all’insegna di Dante, 1832): 628.

20. Cellini, My Life, 274.

21. For Renaissance ideas about women, rape and violence see Gallucci, 5, 114, 124- 125, 134. Similarly, in Renaissance Florence, husbands who ‚disciplined‛ their wives by inflicting physical pain on them, or who even killed their wives were rarely punished. The preceding certainly accords with Machiavelli’s notion that in order to rise above Fortuna one must physically beat her.

22. -----, My Life, 285.

23. Trottein, 225. Cellini, My Life, 340. Machiavelli painted similar portraits of female politicians. For instance, his Florentine Histories (Book I, Chapter 8) maintains that Queen Rosamond was responsible for the Longobards’ failure to dominate Italy.

139

24. See Pitkin, 231-232 for Machiavelli’s notions about virtù and dependence.

25. Machiavelli, Discourses, trans. Leslie Walker (New York: Penguin Press, 1974): Book III, 26.

26. Machiavelli, Discourses, Book III, Chapter 4. In the second chapter of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories one reads that the first division in Florence resulted from the treachery of two women – a rich widow and her daughter. The story involved the widow’s desire to persuade a young knight to end his betrothal to a wealthy girl so he could marry her more beautiful daughter. The rejected girl’s family murdered the knight as revenge, an event that divided the city between the Uberti, the slighted girl’s kin, and the Buondelmonti, the knight’s family. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988): 55-56.

27. Quotation of Arlene W. Saxonhouse, ‚Niccolo Machiavelli: Women as Men, Men as Women, and the Ambiguity of Sex,‛ in Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo Machiavelli, ed. Maria J. Falco (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004): 98, 99, my italics.

28. Quotation of Gallucci, 113.

29. Langdon (33) has noted broadly that Cosimo I depended ‚on Maria’s image for full credibility in the political arena.‛

30. Pitkin, 109.

31. Maria J. Falco, ed., Introduction, Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo Machiavelli, 5. Machiavelli’s Discourses, Book I, Chapter 9 discusses Caterina Sforza as a strong maternal power.

32. Joyce de Vries, ‚Caterina Sforza’s Portrait Medals: Power, Gender, and Representation in the Italian Renaissance Court,‛ Woman’s Art Journal 24 (2003): 25.

33. For Medusa as Discord, an embodiment, in my view, of uncertainty, chaos, and adversity, see Giorgio Vasari, Le Opere, vol. 8, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, Italy: G. C. Sansoni, 1906): 566. Peter Daly, ‚Alciato’s Emblem ‘Concordiae Symbolum’: a Medusa’s Mirror for Rulers?‛ German Life and Letters 41:4 (1988): 354 acknow- ledges that in the Renaissance Medusa was a frequent representation of discord.

140

34. David Hale, ‚War and Public Opinion in Renaissance Italy,‛ In Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. Fraser (London, England: Faber and Faber Press, 1960): 105-107. For information on Renaissance women’s education see also King, 157-240.

35. Hibbert, 269 includes a discussion of Cosimo and Eleonora’s marital relationship. Here, one also reads that Cosimo did not get along with his mother and neither did Eleonora.

36. Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959): 250.

37. Castiglione, 220ff. Gallucci, 120.

38. -----, 220.

39. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 151.

40. Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997): 24-25.

41. Leon Battista Alberti, Opere Volgari, ed. C. Grayson (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1960): vol. 1, 94.

42. Tinagli, 25.

43. Cellini, My Life, xxxi-xxxii, 25-26.

44. -----, My Life, 89-90. Paolo Rossi’s ‚The Writer and the Man. Real and Mitigating Circumstances: Il Caso Cellini,‛ in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 157-183 is a good study of the Guasconti case and the criminal justice system in Florence.

45. See Gallucci, 109-141 for a discussion about Cellini and the cult of honor and manliness.

141

46. See Edward Muir’s ‚The Double Binds of Manly Revenge,‛ in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History (New York: MRTS, 1994): 68.

47. See Breitenberg, 73 for Renaissance standards of female virtue.

48. -----, 96.

49. See Breitenberg’s study for a discussion of the paradoxical nature of Renaissance masculinity in itself and as it related to the feminine.

50. Breitenberg, 97ff.

51. Najemy, 241.

52. -----, 257.

53. -----, 258.

54. See Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth- Century Florence (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984) for further discussion of contemporary criticism of Florentine politics.

55. Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988): 327.

56. -----, 327.

57. The term ‚speculum principis‛ is medieval.

58. Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 66. Seneca, De Clementia, in Moral Essays, vol. 1, ed. and trans. John W. Basore (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1928- 1932): 378. The link between ‚divine reason‛ and Perseus and Medusa is mine.

59. Seneca, vol. 1, 16.

60. -----, vol. 1, 416.

61. Stacey, 72. 142

62. See Peter Stacey’s Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince as well as Harvey Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 125-126.

63. Stacey, 210.

64. On the popularity of Quintilian in the Renaissance see, Stacey 212-214.

65. -----, 257. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001): 72-74.

66. Stacey, 257.

67. -----, 286-293.

68. -----, 234, 259. Seneca, De Clementia, in Moral Essays, 360-362.

69. -----, 58, 77, 94, 234, 259. Seneca, De Clementia, in Moral Essays, vol. 1, 356.

70. -----, 260ff.

71. -----, 260.

72. -----, 262. Machiavelli, Il Principe e Discorsi, ed. Sergio Bertelli (Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 1960): 29.

73. Machiavelli, Il Principe e Discorsi, 29. Stacey, 265ff.

74. Machiavelli, Il Principe e Discorsi, 15.

75. Cosimo I persuaded the Florentine Senate to ratify his election as duke by stating that his would be a purely symbolic role and that all governmental power would actually rest in the hands of the established magistrates. However, once the Senate granted his wish, the young ruler convinced the senators to issue a decree forbidding anyone from Lorenzo de’ Medici’s side of the family to rule. By the time the Senate realized that granting the decree was a mistake Cosimo I had already took the reins of all power within the Florentine state.

76. Langdon, 82 notes that Cosimo I was revered as a ‚mirror of the prince‛ in his day. For Renaissance artists’ and writers’ propagandization of him as such see 143

Joanna Woods-Marsden, ‚Introduction: Collective Identity/ Individual Identity,‛ in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, ed. Mary Rogers (Vermont: Aldershot, 2000): 1-14. A contemporary example is Lucio Paolo Rosello’s 1552 translation of Il ritratto del vero Governo del Principe, dal essempio vivo del Gran Cosimo .. con due oration d’Isocrate conformi all’istessa material. Alciati’s emblem book represents the face of Medusa as a type of speculum principis. A sarcophagus lies beneath her, implying that death is the fate of the prince who does not keep order within his realm. In this context the Gorgon is a mirror image of the prince’s potential to destroy. Alciati’s concetto was a common one in the Renaissance.

77. Langdon, 82.

78. Robert Simon, Bronzino’s Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Ph.D. (Columbia University, 1982): 387-388. Karl Frey, ed., Der Literarische nachless Giorgio Vasaris, vol. 1 (Munich, Germany: Muller Press, 1923-1930): I, x, 28. For more information on Cosimo’s state portrait see Simon, ‚Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I in Armour,‛ Burlington Magazine 125 (1983): 527-539.

79. Ephesians, 6:11, 13 claims that the armor of God will protect its faithful wearer. Darryl J. Gless, The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Charles Hamilton (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1997): 61-62. See Tinagli, ‚The Identity of the Prince: Cosimo de’ Medici, Giorgio Vasari and the Ragionamenti,‛ in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2000): 193 for a discussion of Vasari’s paintings for the Palazzo Vecchio’s Sala di Ercole as mirrors of the prince. The pictures were meant as allegorizations of Cosimo I’s role as ruler. The same article by Tinagli also treats written celebrations of the Medici duke as an exemplary prince.

80. Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, vol. 2, ed. Jean Paul Richter (New York: Dover Publications, 1970): 159.

81. On the Renaissance’s belief in armor’s divine associations see pages 61 and 62 of Gless, which discuss the chivalric tradition in literature. Consult Fulgentius’ and Prudentius’ treatment of armor and divinity. Pertinent studies are also Carolyn Springer’s Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2010): 37-53 and Matthias Winner’s ‚The Orb as the Symbol of the State in the Pictorial Cycle by Rubens depicting the Life of Marie de’ Medici,‛ in Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation, ed. Allen Ellenius (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1998): 98.

144

82. Marsilio Ficino, Omnia (Basel, Switzerland: Henricus Petri, 1576): 229.

83. Peter Stallybrass, ‚Hauntings: the Materiality of Memory on the Renaissance Stage,‛ in Gender and Representation in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, eds. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001): 297.

84. -----, 297.

85. Simon, Bronzino’s Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici, 140-142.

86. Simon, Bronzino’s Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici, 142. In the Renaissance portraiture started with the profile view of the sitter, then gave way to a more assertive view, that is, the frontal. Bronzino’s Cosimo is not as bold as the frontal. See Simon, ‚Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I in Armour,‛ 535, which states that the duke’s hand gesture is passive and that in this portrait ‚Bronzino seems to portray his subject as fearful as he is fearsome. It is of course expressed subtly ... but ... Bronzino has introduced the same doubts, fears, misgivings, those cracks in the mask that he so profoundly perceives in the rest of humanity.‛ The spiked besagues are defensive in nature, as even Simon has observed. See Bronzino’s Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici, 141.

87. One reads about the armed ruler throughout Machiavelli’s The Prince.

88. Chapter 6, The Prince. Pitkin, 20, 38, 76. For the belief in John the Baptist’s blessing of Florence see Chrétien’s study. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 281ff.

89. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 281ff, 329ff.

90. Medusa was, in fact, a fixture in the warrior ideology of because of her association with the Amazons.

91. Vasari, Le Opere, vol. 8, 199.

92. Machiavelli, The Prince, 62.

93. Alciati, A Book of Emblems, the Emblematum Liber in Latin and English, ed. and trans. John F. Moffitt (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2004): 171.

145

94. For information on Cosimo’s character see Hibbert, 262-263, 266, 268, 272.

95. -----, 266.

96. Cosimo listened to the advice of his secretary, Francesco Campana, and to his mother, who knew much about elite Florentine families. The severity of Cosimo’s suspicious nature showed when he threw real or imagined enemies into ’s dungeons and hired assassins to murder meddlesome dissenters and rivals. Due to suspicion Cosimo always wore a coat of mail under his jerkin, a dagger, sword and many stiletti stuck into the lining of his scabbard. He also had a bodyguard present at all times. Cosimo had good reason to fear assassination, for more than one attempt was made to murder him. Further, the Medici duke would not put up with any dissension: that would have been a threat to his power. Surveillance at the Medici court was tightest while he ruled. For instance, since 1546 he kept a closer eye on governmental officials nearest him by bringing all of Florence’s judicial and administrative offices as well as the city’s major guilds into one building near the Palazzo Vecchio. It seems that Cosimo’s demand for intense control was a symptom of a concern that he would lose power, even though his astrological chart purported that his fortune would always be great. A sense of insecurity also seems to have informed his belief that any hint of disturbances within the polity’s institutions harbored the potential to spoil the state’s ‚stability.‛ Hibbert, 262-263, 265, 269, 270, 271. For Cosimo’s horoscope see Mandel, 168 and Cox-Rearick, 206, 212, 217.

97. In ancient Roman times the placement of the Gorgon’s head on the ruler’s chestplate meant that he shared in her divinity. The presence of lions as complementary emblems of sovereign power was and still is ubiquitous in Florence. For instance, sculptural lions with cosmic spheres reside on the Piazza della Signoria (fig. 38). A large statue of a lion wearing a crown, whose spokes mimic its mane, graces the courtyard of the Bargello Museum (fig. 39). All of these and like instances represent the Medici faction’s emblem – the Gold Lion. Witness the stone rendition of the Medici coat of arms on the Piazza San Lorenzo which features two lion heads at the top of its stone shield (fig. 40). The solar aspect of the animals would have complemented the Medici family’s cosmic palle on the shield, which is perhaps an apotropaic device. In addition, in the 1550s Cellini adopted the Marzocco for his own coat of arms, and thus he too became a solar/beastly figure.

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98. The material of Cosimo’s bust – bronze – would have been apotropaic in a metaphorical sense, in keeping with ancient belief. See Scholten, 32 for a brief discussion of bronze as a classical apotropaion. The Renaissance world knew about the ancient belief in the apotropaic nature of lionine imagery on weaponry. For example, the scholar Guillaume Du Choul cited the fourth-century scholar Vegetius’ statement that lion heads ‚render the standard-bearer more ferocious and terrible to the enemy.‛ See Du Choul’s Discours sur la Castramentation et Discipline Militaire des Romains (Lyon, France: Guillaume Rouille, 1555): 152.

99. See Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Massachusetts: Brill Press, 2008): 247, which states that in the Renaissance ‚the monstrous conjoining of part human and part animal expressed a threatening dualism or hypocrisy.‛

100. Bernardino di Betto, also known as Pinturicchio (1452-1513), painted a picture of the earth goddess Cybele with lions, thus proving that the link between the animals and the Mother Goddess was known in the Renaissance. See Roller, 295 for an illustration of the ancient Mother Goddess in her lion-drawn chariot. The eagles on Cosimo’s breastplate point up Jupiter’s significance to the duke’s mythical image and they also link the bust to Cellini’s Perseus. Interestingly, the inscription beneath the bust indicates that Jupiter will punish Perseus’ enemies.

101. Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden: from the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1990): 179 states that at Castello Pan stood for Cosimo I, an indication that the goat god merged with Capricorn. The ancient world associated Pan with Capricorn in a zodiacal sense, while mythographers, such as Hyginius, told that Jupiter put Pan into the heavens, where the latter took the form of Capricorn. See also Claudia Conforti’s ‚Il Giardino di Castello comme Immagine del Territorio,‛ in La Città effimera e l’Universo artificiale del Giardino: la Firenze dei Medici e Italia del ‘500‛ (Rome, Italy: Officina, 1980): 153, 156, which mentions the Pan for Castello as a surrogate for Cosimo I. Conforti believes that the Neptune-Pan alliance would have symbolized the duke’s successful control of chaos within the state. Alciati’s Emblem 98 states that Pan is the nature of things and Natura associates with him.

102. See Philippe Borgeaud’s The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1988): 125.

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103. The panic landscape, a mountainous terrain, is a place where strange events occur, one reason why Pan is comparable to Fortuna, whose dwelling is situated on a rocky promontory. The panic landscape is the epitome of the unfamiliar, of danger. It is the ‚edge‛ of civilized life. The Gorgons’ landscape comes to mind. For a description of Fortuna’s dwelling see Book I, Chapter 1 of Alanus de Insulis, The Anticlaudian, as well as Romance of the Rose (Book I, 5921-6020) by Guillaume de Lorris.

104. Hesiod’s ‚Shield of Hercules‛ states: ‚And upon the awful heads of the Gorgons great Fear (Phobos) was quaking.‛

105. There is a correspondence between and Amazons as anomalous Others in numerous ancient depictions of the Amazonomachy, for the Greeks’ battle with the centaurs frequently appears alongside Greeks’ battle with the Amazons. Perhaps Medusa’s ancient guise as a centaur relates to the preceding images. See Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982). The Acropolis’ altar to the Mother Goddess includes two statues of Pan. In the Medicean context Pan would have emerged as a version of Machiavelli’s prince, for the goat god was a ‚founder.‛ He contributed his cave on the Acropolis to the establishment of Athens. Likewise, Perseus and Cosimo founded great dominions.

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Chapter 4 The Goddess as Other and Same

The conception of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa as a speculum principis involves the paradoxical relationship between hero and victim, as indicated.

Similarly, the mirror meeting between Perseus and Medusa is a metaphor for the hero’s paradoxical position vis-à-vis the divine. As this chapter will show,

Medusa’s role in that trope echoes fifteenth-century conflicts with Woman as divine Other.

The shield of Athena is a ‚reconciler‛ and a ‚divider.‛ It represents

Perseus’ status as a demi-god. A mirror reflection in multiple ways, the face of

Medusa, as it appears in textual form and on the Piazza della Signoria, can be said to epitomize Perseus’ divine alter ego. However, the mirror-shield reminds one of his weakness as a man, for Perseus must use it to slay the Gorgon. Cellini’s

Perseus is unable to look at Medusa, as stated. He peers down toward the shield at his feet, which, as mentioned, has an implied relationship to the faces above it.

The mirror-shield confuses Self and Other, just as the androgynous appear- ance of Cellini’s bronze heads do. Indeed, in Victoria Rimell’s terms, ‚Medusa thrusts unfamiliarity into our very I, and figures the dialectical relation between same and other.‛1

Jean-Pierre Vernant ‘s words are meaningful to Perseus’ encounter with the

Gorgon: 149

In this face-to-face encounter with frontality, man puts himself in a position of symmetry with respect to the god, always remaining centered on his own axis. This reciprocity implies both duality (man-god face each other) and inseparability, even identification.2

The role of Cellini’s Medusa as Other and Same relates, thus, to her status as a divinity.

Similarly, Cellini’s shield for Duke Cosimo I’s son Francesco I de’ Medici juxtaposes the Other in the form of Medusa’s head with roundels portraying Old

Testament figures: the Jewish leaders Judith and David, whose triumphs stemmed from the Lord’s favor (figs. 41, 42, 43). The latter as Other were once underdogs with whom the Medici, at their lowest, identified. Images of the disadvantaged played up the Medici dynasty’s ability to overcome misfortune, often seemingly against the most terrible odds.3

In one bronze roundel David lifts his shield, ready to strike the fallen

Philistine giant beneath him. Judith places the Assyrian general’s head in her pouch, while the upper half of Holofernes’ body looms from the folds of his bed canopy. The abandoned shield above Bianca Cappello’s portrait roundel has the grimacing face of a soldier emitting battle cries (fig. 44). All of the figures, including the open-mouthed Medusa, are heroic warriors with whom Francesco and the cuirassed, helmeted Bianca can identify. The figure of Medusa at the

150 center seems in supernatural fashion to encapsulate and to disseminate the power of the men and women around her.

Cellini’s shield associates Judith with Medusa’s power as a divinity. Here, the feminine stands for ‚the unearthly, the most pronounced form of Otherness to humankind... Both the terror and the magnificence of Judith as Other signify the terrifying mystery of the invisible deity.‛4 That Judith occupies a shield, a weapon of war, indicates that her power was indeed terrible. Her position in the

Medici imagination proves that female divinity was highly meaningful for the

Medici women as public Others.

Women on Top

The function of Donatello’s Judith as a female leader in the Medici Palace garden is thus worth discussing at some length. In the Renaissance, gardens were

(allegorically) places where concord ruled over social and political discord. One work responsible for the conceptualization of the garden’s role as such was the medieval De Fructibus Carnis et Spiritus. In this text the tree of vices, arbor , is rooted in Superbia (Pride). The arbor mala bears the word Babilonia, which is significant to Donatello’s statue, since Holofernes served Nebuchadnezzar, king of

Babylon. Those coming into the Medici Palace garden would have found it appropriate to conceive of Judith’s defeat of Holofernes as a symbol of the

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‚purgation‛ of evil, or political discord from Florence.5 Since Judith’s victory was also that of God, her place in the Medici garden would have reminded rulers of the dangers of pride and injustice and of the benefits of becoming, like Judith, God’s spokesperson.

Long before the Elder’s day, the walled palace garden emerged as a hortus conclusus, a symbol of Mary’s virginity. ’s and ’s interpreta- tions of the Song of Songs (4:12) conclude as much, and by the fifteenth century the hortus conclusus (an enclosed garden) became a feature in many paintings of the

Annunciation. Since Judith, Israel’s maternal founder, was a type for the Blessed

Mother, her place within the Medici Palace garden enhanced its role as a hortus conclusus, a place where virtue deflected the threat of tyranny from Florence.6

Indeed, Dante’s celestial rose garden involves Judith sitting beneath a celestial rose herself – the Blessed Virgin (Paradiso, Canto XXXII, 10). The Medici would have known about the preceding associations from their immense knowledge of

Italian art and literature. For instance, Cosimo the Elder de’ Medici owned a copy of Saint Antonine’s Summa, which discusses Judith as Mary’s forerunner.7

The Medici probably would have known Saint ’s explanation that the Virgin, like Judith, cut off the head of the devil, whom Holofernes incarnates.8 Judith’s chastity and her fully clothed appearance in the Medici garden enhance her Marian role. By contrast, the pillow beneath Holofernes; his 152 partial nudity; and the bacchanalian reliefs on the statue’s base all typify the

Assyrian general as Luxuria (Lust). Even Prudentius and Saint Jerome interpreted

Judith’s feat as Chastity’s punishment of Lust/Sodomy.9 It would have been appropriate, therefore, to consider Donatello’s statue as an allegory of Christian chastity. Here was a way that the palace garden thematized sexual purity, or marital fidelity, valuable virtues for the Medici men and women.10 In this context the male assimilated himself to the Other in the form of the feminine divine.

The same difference between Judith and Holofernes created an ideational parallel between the Medici Palace garden and the garden of Eden, where the serpent first tempted human beings to satisfy forbidden desires of the flesh.

Indeed, Saint Antonine’s Summa equates the hortus conclusus with Eden.11

A political turn of thought of probable interest to Cosimo the Elder invested the Medici garden’s image as Paradise before the Fall. Paradise had courtly and imperial connotations in the fifteenth century which would have complemented

Cosimo’s role as state ‚creator.‛ The term ‚paradise‛ itself originated from the ancient Persian term for royal parks. The Greek translation of the Bible referred to royal gardens as heaven, or Eden. In the pre-medieval age ‚paradise‛ also became the term for spaces where government affairs took place. In this context the celestial garden of Mary became the royal court of Christ’s Queen of Heaven and

Earth.12 Christ, as the true king of kings, entered garden settings as sole Creator 153 and possessor of the cosmos. For instance, Dante’s Paradiso (Canto XXVI, 64-66) names Christ as gardener, an image that would have appealed to Cosimo the

Elder, a great gardener himself.13

However, Judith’s assault on Holofernes posed a challenge to the patriarchal establishment of Medicean Florence. In Margarita Stocker’s words,

Holofernes’ decollation has:

the effect... to demonize masculine sexuality as the national penetration of invasion, as Holofernes and his.. lust for power, as the rapine which is an intimidating strategy of power politics. In these symbolic patterns the Book of Judith deliberately portrays sexual politics as a vehicle for its religious themes. When Judith decapitates Holofernes — man, lover, ruler, commander --- she beheads patriarchy.14

Judith has appropriated the sword of her foe and, concomitantly, his power as ruler and man. Incidentally, the sword that Donatello’s Judith bears is a , which Renaissance Italians associated with Eastern peoples -- the Other, and so her weapon symbolizes the connection between male, and female as Other.15

Donatello’s Judith is formally implicated in Holofernes’ sexuality, despite the artist’s stylization of her chastity. Note how Holofernes, rumpled in posture, crouches beneath Judith. His limbs, trunk and neck are contorted. In this way

Judith becomes like the sundry women in Greek mythology who injure masculinity by rendering it ‚formless.‛16 However, the bronze heroine’s body literally mingles with that of her Assyrian captive: her foot crushes his groin, 154 emphasizing the assault on male sexuality; the thick folds of her garments pile confusedly near, or onto his head and upper body as she straddles his partially nude form between her knees; her left leg merges with his right arm; his shoulder rests between her legs. The minimal distance between them contradicts her heavily veiled and draped aspect. A cloth from Holofernes’ bed wraps around

Judith’s body, tying her to her foe and implicating them in the same erotically charged space.

Perhaps Judith’s involvement in Holofernes’ sexuality is the result of an attempt to downplay her political success and her godliness and, concomitantly, to draw attention to her physical weakness as a woman.17 Note that Donatello chose to render his heroine with her sword-wielding hand raised above a partially severed neck. It took Judith two strokes to decapitate Holofernes: unlike Perseus, she was not physically strong enough to slice the head with one blow.

One might reformulate Judith’s struggle into an epitomization of the binary of gendered power in Medicean Florence, where women were denigrated as

Others, but had reason to identify with Judith’s political attributes. Opportunities for women to wield political influence existed during the time of Florence’s transition from republic to princely state, as Tomas has shown.18 Republics enabled women to enjoy a certain amount of freedom in the public sphere, since informal, flexible networks were part of republican political machinery. At this 155 time the Medici women gained more and more influence as intercessors for their male family members, and the women even acquired power through their participation in the ‚undergovernment‛ of the Florentine state.19

Since the boundaries between the public and private spaces of the

Renaissance palace were blurred, women were able to affect the outcome of busi- ness and political affairs transpiring in their homes. The political and domestic realms of Florence became more permeable from the later years of Cosimo the

Elder’s rule on, that is, while power was focused more on the Medici living quarters and less on the Piazza della Signoria. The process culminated in the destruction of the republic in 1530 and the subsequent creation of Cosimo I’s state.

One should conceive of the Medici women’s role as intercessors in the context of their deep devotion to and identification with the Virgin Mary, the intercessor for God’s blessing on behalf of humankind. Indeed, in order to legiti- mize their involvement in public affairs as well as political events within their own home, the Medici women consciously and unconsciously portrayed themselves as virtuous mothers and pious matrons. In suit, others represented them in the same fashion. For instance, Clarice Orsini was highly instrumental in establishing new ties with Rome which would later a Medici to hold the papal office. The deed characterized her as a spiritual mother and guide.20 The Medici women found for themselves a royal court in their ‚paradisiacal‛ garden, the hortus 156 conclusus of the family palace. Judith’s/Mary’s role as the Medici garden’s spiritual queen reflected the power of the female family members. However, the Medici women were not always looked upon with favor.

Opponents of the Medici were known to direct their political antipathy against some of the most powerful women of the family. One target was

Alfonsina Orsini, who in effect ruled Florence from the summer of 1515 until after her son Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, died in 1519. Francesco Vettori accused Alfonsina of having too much control over her son and of being extremely pesty and disorderly in the presence of the pope, whom she implored to give

Lorenzo the duchy of Urbino.21 Vettori’s slanderous description of Orsini as a

‚nagging and whining woman‛ contrasts with that of her ‚good son.‛22

Consider the denigration of the Medici women’s image as rulers in light of the republicans’ removal of the Judith from the Medici Palace garden in 1495 and of the statue’s removal from the Loggia dei Lanzi in 1504. As Adrian Randolph has stated, the displacement of Donatello’s sculpture might have stood for something other than women’s ‚erasure‛ from Florentine public life. The Judith’s fate might have been, instead, a reflection of the current fear of the feminization of the

Florentine republic. In the eyes of Renaissance Florentines the rule of a woman posed a particularly poignant threat: that rule was tantamount to the loss of male liberty.23 Evidence supporting this conclusion is Bartolomeo Cerretani’s comment 157 that what he saw in the Signoria during Piero Soderini’s tenure in office was

‚something which until this time was unusual

Filarete’s characterization of Donatello’s Judith as a type for Fortuna with fatal cosmic powers: ‚ has been lost.‛26 Comments like these make the reader wonder if Judith’s implication in

Holofernes’ sinfulness downplays her political success, with the same implication for ‚public women,‛ such as Alfonsina Orsini.

The Medici’s second exile furnished yet another opportunity for their women to handle political affairs. Maria Salviati’s prominent place in the family after 1537 owed itself not to her role as the one who brought Cosimo I to power, but to her status as the duke’s mother. During this time she influenced her family’s relations with the papal court. In addition, Maria participated in domestic affairs that took place just after Duke Alessandro’s assassination on

January 6, 1537. For instance, she helped to ingratiate Cosimo with leading 158 members of the Medici family; and one must not forget the counsel she gave the duke throughout his time in power.

Thus, as this chapter has shown, the image of Woman as divine Other could take different forms in the Renaissance imagination --- as Medusa, for instance, or as Judith. The Gorgon’s role as divine Other comes through in a painting found in the Medici collection, Pinturicchio’s Pala di Santa Maria dei Fossi (1495-1496, fig. 45), where Medusa’s miniscule head occupies the Virgin Mary’s throne. The two women are morally opposed to each other, but the fact that they share the same throne suggests that they have an affinity with one another as Goddesses. Mary and Medusa embody wisdom, which the throne symbolizes.27 Ultimately, Medusa is a denigrated version of the Holy Mother.

One should consider Pinturicchio’s painting in light of the Medici women’s identification with the Virgin Mary and of how that identification filtered through

Donatello’s Judith, but was spoiled by the statue’s rejection.28 A type for the Holy

Mother, Judith nevertheless embodied, as Medusa did, the fearsomeness of the divine Other; hence the biblical heroine became a supernatural force with the power to wreck political havoc. The Judith ultimately served as a reminder of the merits of ‚public women.‛

Like the mirror that facilitated Medusa’s demise, the female/divine Other could be a foil for virtù’s weakness. At the same time, the Other could be virtù’s 159

Same. The next chapter will show how that association assumes a most pronounced sexual form in Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.

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Notes

1. Victoria Rimell, Ovid’s Lovers; Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 19. Perseus’ act of borrowing the eye of the Graiae is the first instance of character doubling in his tale.

2. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, Collected Essays (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991): 137.

3. For discussions of the Medici’s identification with political underdogs see Roger Crum, ‚Donatello’s bronze David and the Question of Foreign versus Domestic Tyranny,‛ Renaissance Studies 10 (1996): 440-450.

4. Margarita Stocker, Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998): 10-11.

5. Matthew G. Looper, ‚Political Messages in the Medici Palace Garden,‛ Journal of Garden History 12:4 (1992): 261-262.

6. -----, 262.

7. -----, 262.

8. Saint Bonaventure, ‚De navitate b. virginis Mariae,‛ sermon 5.3.

9. Book of Judith, Greek text with an English translation, commentary and critical notes by Enslin and Zeitlin (Leiden, Holland: Brill Press, 1972): 48-49. See also Wind, ‚Donatello’s Judith: a Symbol of Sanctimonia,‛ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937-1938): 62-63 and V. Martin von Erffa, ‚Judith-Virtus Virtutum-Maria,‛ Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 14 (1970): 460-465 for discussion of medieval and Renaissance interpretations of Judith’s character.

10. Looper, 262.

11. -----, 262.

12. -----, 262-264. 161

13. -----, 263-264.

14. Stocker, 8.

15. I am grateful to Professor Olszewski for bringing the scimitar’s significance as a product of Eastern or alien cultures to my attention. See Olszewski, ‚Bring on the Clones: Pollaiuolo’s Battle of Ten Nude Men,‛ Artibus et Historiae 30:60 (2009): 23.

16. Remember, for example, , who enveloped in a garment that had no boundaries.

17. Several critics have argued that Donatello’s David (c. 1440-1460, fig. 46), which stood within the Medici Palace complex while the Judith was there, may have spoken to the homoerotic/social subculture of Florence. (Homoeroticism/social- ism, a modern term, refers in this study to the love of boys and men as well as to sexual relations between mature males.) David’s nudity and his sword’s proxim- ity to his penis, for instance, may suggest sodomical sex. See Randolph 173, 191, 254-255, 263 and Laurie Schneider, ‚Donatello and : the Iconography of Decapitation,‛ American Imago 33 (1976): 76-91. In my view, however, the statue’s nudity might have had a spiritual message for Florence’s leading family. The Old Testament states that David threw off his armor so that he might better fight Goliath. David’s nudity denoted his humility before the Lord and his trust that God would lead him to victory. David also danced semi-nude before the Ark of the Covenant. The Medici would have associated with David as a virtuous leader, then.

18. See Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence for information on the political infrastructure of Medicean Florence.

19. -----, 45, 67-68.

20. -----, 45-46, 52, 56, 59.

21. For information on Alfonsina Orsini see Tomas, 167-185. See Sheryl E. Reiss, ‚Widow, Mother, Patron of Art: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici,‛ in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss (Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2001): 125-140 for a discussion of Alfonsina’s political ambitions and how they were perceived to be a threat to Florence’s political establishment.

162

22. Francesco Vettori, ‚Sommario della Istoria d’Italia (1511-1527),‛ in Scritti Storici e Politici, ed. E. Niccolini (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1972): 184-185, 267.

23. Randolph, 265-285.

24. Quoted on Randolph, 281.

25. -----, 281.

26. Quoted on Randolph, 280.

27. Medusa, il Mito, l’Antico, e i Medici (Florence, Italy: Uffizi Museum, 2008): 14-15 likewise states that Medusa and Mary appear on the holy throne together because they are women of wisdom.

28. Mary Kisler, ‚Florence and the Feminine,‛ in Italian Women and the City: Essays, eds. Janet L. Smarr and Daria Valentini (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 2003): 61 suggests that women moved within open spaces built alongside their family dwellings, such as the Loggia dei Lanzi. Therefore, Donatello’s Judith would have been visible to the Medici women while it stood under the Loggia.

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Chapter 5 The Sexual Symbolism of the Perseus and Medusa

The sexually symbolic character of Medusa’s being enhances her role as

Mother. For instance, the coils of blood issuing from the severed neck parts of

Cellini’s Medusa recall the bleeding vagina. Since the neck parts and Medusa’s mouth are open, they may characterize the Gorgon as an engulfing creature. A similar image, that of the vagina dentata (‚toothed vagina‛) touched the imaginations of sundry ancient artists and writers. Witness, for instance, ancient

Gorgon faces variously endowed with devouring tusks and fangs (see fig. 33).1

Such images from antiquity present the Gorgon’s head as a fearsomely engulfing vagina that threatens the male. However, as mentioned in Chapter 2, the Gorgon’s head is also uterine. Medusa is, in conclusion, an epitome of the devouring

Mother, whose fertile potency poses a threat to patriarchy.2

Medusa’s role as a voracious maternal power reminds one of the devouring wives of Renaissance art and literature mentioned in Chapter 3 and of the ancient image of Medusa as a goblin who eats children.3 The preceding indicates that the sexuality of Woman, which Medusa embodies, emerged as a threat to ancient and early modern patriarchy.

The Gorgon’s sexual aspect on the Piazza della Signoria is, one must stress, also androgynous. Her bronze serpents and the ball-tipped coil of blood issuing from Cellini’s Medusa compare in shape to Perseus’ phallus. Cellini’s stylization 164 indicates that he was aware of the traditional role of serpents per se as phallic symbols.4

Evidentially, the sexual symbolism of the Perseus and Medusa was personally meaningful to Cellini. The statue’s androgyny as a whole epitomizes his own conflicted sexuality, for he as Perseus identified with the sexual Other in the form of Medusa.

His Autobiography indicates that Cellini had various relationships with young men. The story of Cellini’s life indicates that life in his bottega involved homosocial bonding.5 For instance, Cellini states that working with Francesco

Lippi ‚generated such a strong sense of friendship between us that neither day nor night we were ever out of each other’s company.‛6 It is also clear that Cellini had at least one sexual relationship with a youth. In February, 1557 (luckily when the

Perseus had already been completed) Florentine authorities convicted the sculptor for keeping one Ferdinand from Montepulciano, ‚an adolescent, in his bed as his wife and using him carnally very many times in the nefarious act of sodomy for about the last five years.‛7 In March of the same year Cellini was imprisoned in the Stinche. However, as a result of the artist’s appeal to Cosimo I to stay within the city’s limits and another appeal for house arrest, the sentence, which comprised four years in prison and the loss of the right to hold public office, the

Medici ruler commuted the penalty to house arrest. The new decision stemmed in 165 part from the duke’s desire to see Cellini’s marble Christ completed.8

One of Cellini’s poems is an interesting revelation of his psychological state during the time that he was discriminated against because of his sexual orientation:

I’ve struggled through two months here in : some say I’m here on ’s account; Others, because I spoke out too audaciously. To love anyone but women is unknown to Perseus; I don’t have the fair winged youth’s respected prize.9

Cellini refers to his sodomical crime as ‚Ganymede’s account,‛ an expression that harks back to a fictive altercation (the Medici duke did not permit quarrels among his artists) between Cellini and Bandinelli in the presence of Cosimo I.10 Cellini’s

Autobiography relates that while he voiced his ideas about restoring an antique marble torso for the ducal court, his rival walked in and began criticizing the fragment. Cellini retorted by deprecating Bandinelli’s own Hercules and Cacus, thereby precipitating the latter’s subsequent insult: ‚Oh, keep quiet, you dirty sodomite!‛11 Cellini denied the accusation with the following remark:

Oh, you madman, you’ve taken leave of your senses; but I wish to God that I knew how to exercise such a noble art, for we read that Jove practiced it on Ganymede in paradise, while here on earth it is practiced by the greatest emperors and the greatest kings in the world. I am but a lowly and humble little man, who neither could nor would ever know how to meddle in such a marvelous manner.12 166

This clever, humorous, self-serving speech dispelled the gloom that Bandinelli cast over those in his presence, while it legitimized the practice of sodomy by linking it to great emperors and kings.

Note how ambiguous the sexuality of Cellini is in his Perseus poem. The artist does not deny that he loves men in a homosexual capacity. Perseus’ sexuality is, likewise, ambiguous. Cellini seems to suggest that the Greek hero loves (perhaps in a platonic and sexual senses) both men and women; that is, he does not love everyone except (‚but‛) women. Further, the ‚respected prize‛ of

Perseus (the ‚winged youth‛) is the head of Medusa. Perhaps in the poem the

Gorgon’s head assumes a sexual nature, just as it does on the Piazza della Signoria, for it seems that in order to indulge his love Cellini/Perseus must have the head.

His poem explains why his bronze Medusa has a certain dignity and it elucidates

Cellini’s term for his bronze Gorgon --- ‚la mia femina.‛ Still, the poem is an implied assertion of Cellini’s bisexuality. The poem’s defensive tone, like that of the Autobiography as a whole, betrays the sculptor’s insecurity.

Gallucci has stressed that Cellini’s reputation as a transgressor helped to bring about his conviction for sodomy. He was keenly aware of contemporary social and legal restrictions on male sexuality, so he:13

violates Petrarchan conventions in his lyric, ridiculing its language of love and celebration of female beauty, in order to align himself with the oppositional voices of his 167

day who sought to critique contemporary family values. Like Bronzino and Pietro Aretino, Cellini chose to sing the praises of a variety of transgressive practices in his poetry, choosing sex over love, whores (or even boys) over wives, sodomy over ‚natural‛ sexual acts.14

Cellini’s Autobiography indicates that his trial for sodomy, his charge and subsequent house arrest provoked the sculptor’s enraged attack on Medici politics, which, along with the crime itself, resulted in Cellini’s loss of Cosimo’s favor. The unfortunate episode effectively ended Cellini’s artistic career and it probably influenced the Autobiography’s general tone of defense, for the sculptor wrote his memoirs while he was imprisoned for sodomy.

Cellini had reason to feel insecure about his sexuality. Paradoxically, police institutions, such as the Ufficiali di notte, fostered a climate of fear in early

Renaissance Florence, but that fear intensified when Duke Cosimo I implemented new means to control male sexuality in its ‚deviant‛ forms. Harsher laws would punish those convicted of sodomy. In addition, the duke cast a keen eye on the appeal process for convicts. It is not surprising that Cosimo did away with previous provisions enabling younger partners to remain exempt from prosecu- tion. He also imposed a regulation for long-term imprisonment in the Stinche, or exile from the city in place of fines, the previous standard punishment for first- time, older offenders. The duke respected the law for some of the most promiscuous sodomites – that calling for punishment in the form of beheading. 168

Another law, the one that incriminated Cellini, entailed more severe penalties for men convicted of sexual relations with the same partner over a long expanse of time.15

As the preceding indicates, by the 1540s Cosimo I was already using the legal system to increase and to consolidate his power as well as to deter active opposition against his wishes. His legal orders were in one capacity a weapon against his enemies, who were feminized in the form of Cellini’s Medusa.

Similarly, contemporary legal convictions against sodomites refer to the latter as bitches and whores.16 Fear and insecurity about the future of his state seem to have inspired Cosimo I to treat sodomites in severe fashions. The following occasion suggests as much. On July 8, 1542 disaster struck northern Florence in the form of an earthquake. After lightning bolts damaged the Palazzo Ducale

Cosimo quickly wrote two new laws – one against blasphemy and one against sodomy. Thus, threats to virtù in the form of sodomy/homosexuality would have had the potential to ruin the Tuscan state. In other words, since male heterosexuality and the state were equable, aberrations in the former could damage the latter, just as women could.

One comes back to the ideal of the homogeneous state and to the futility of that model. Aims to control ‚deviance‛ within the early modern state took the most treacherous forms precisely because that imperative was most difficult. The 169 next chapter will demonstrate how Cellini’s Perseus indicates the same.

170

Notes

1. See Campbell’s The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, 73ff for a discussion of the vagina dentata. Sonja Ross, Die Vagina Dentata in Mythos und Erzählung (Bonn, Germany: Holos, 1994). Pages 168-169 of Neumann and 126, 205 of Keuls also indicate that Medusa is the vagina dentata, which, Keuls notes, Greek men feared.

2. Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon Press, 1954): 87 states that ‚among the symbols of the devouring chasm we must count the womb in its frightening aspect, the numinous heads of the Gorgon and the Medusa, the woman with beard and phallus...The open womb is the devouring symbol of the uroboric mother, especially when connected with phallic symbols. The gnashing mouth of the Medusa with its boar’s tongue is obviously connected with the phallus.‛ For a discussion of the ancient notion (known in the Renaissance) of the earth’s womb as a deathly place see Balas, The Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance Art, 9-10. Onians, 157 relates that the root of MEDUS, ‚Mdhos,‛ derives from the idea of the genital. In Homer’s writing ‚Mdhos‛ means the genitals. Andreas Vesalius’ famous De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) describes the uterus as a mouth hungry for male seed. In the same vein, the character Lucretia in Machiavelli’s La Mandragora appears to consume her mate. In order to save her once she has swallowed a mandrake he must let her suck him dry. In the play the deed takes the form of intercourse. Transferring the deadly food from one to the other takes place in the prison of Lucretia’s bed, itself a trope for the womb that ‚devours‛ the male, holding him captive.

3. Stocker, 52, 53 notes that a heightened ‚phobia‛ of women emerged in Europe around 1500. At this time ‚a customary fear of women’s sexuality‛ merged with ‚complaints about women’s domineering impulses.‛ For a discussion of early modern fears of the womb see David Miller’s The Poem’s Two Bodies: the Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988).

4. See Cooper, 147-151 on the snake’s traditional symbolism.

5. See Gallucci, 34-35 about life in the Renaissance bottega. Her book says much about Cellini’s conflicted sexual profile.

6. Cellini, My Life, 21.

171

7. Gallucci, ‚Cellini’s Trial for Sodomy: Power and Patronage at the Court of Cosimo I,‛ in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2001): quoted on page 37.

8. See note 359 on page 458 of Cellini’s My Life.

9. Cellini’s poem is quoted by James M. Saslow in Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1986): 151.

10. For information on Cosimo I’s injunction against quarreling see Karen-edis Barzman, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: the Discipline of Disegno (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 39, which states that from Cosimo I’s ‚perspective, unrest at any level, within any of the institutional structures of the social polity, carried with it a potential threat to the internal security of the state. For this reason, he would not tolerate any dispute or disturbance, even within the context of professional rivalries and academic discord.‛

11. Cellini, My Life, 321. Jupiter transformed himself into an eagle and, seizing the young Ganymede, flew to the heavens to rape him.

12. Vasari, Le Opere, page 700 of vol. 7.

13. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini, Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy, 45ff.

14. -----, Benvenuto Cellini, Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy, 46.

15. Elena Fasano Guarini, ‚The Prince, the Judges and the Law: Cosimo I and Sexual Violence, 1558,‛ in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 121-141.

16. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini, Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy, 26. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996): 107-109.

172

Chapter 6 The Public Face of Justice

Ducal manipulation of Florence’s judicial system was vital to the formation of Cosimo I’s absolutist state, for through that system the Medici ruler could impose his will on his constituents in the name of political and social cohesion.

In this context the heterogeneity of the Tuscan state required the strictest measures. One of the most severe forms of the ducal legal system’s control of the human body comes to light in the Loggia statues representing decapitation. Like

Donatello’s Judith, Cellini’s Perseus comprises an implied threat of execution. Note that the viewer standing in front of the statue beneath the Gorgon’s body receives the impression that Perseus’ sword is about to alight upon his/her head. The

Greek hero seems to watch for the spectator’s reaction (fig. 47). Cellini’s actualiza- tion of Perseus’ murderous act must have been most menacing in light of the fact that when Cosimo’s sculpture was unveiled the Loggia dei Lanzi was still used for important show executions, just as it had provided a setting for the beheading of victims of the Battle of Montemurlo.1 As noted, Cellini’s sculpture commemorates this glorious event of utmost importance to Cosimo’s rise to power.

The research of Marco Chiari and Frederick Cummings suggests that in the sixteenth century public executions in Florence averaged six per day; but the more interesting statistic is that from 1530 to 1534 the Medici regime carried out in

173 record fashion more than ninety public executions, twenty of which entailed from the Palazzo della Signoria.2 The executions performed during

Cosimo I’s time in office were among the most barbaric recorded, despite the fact that the Medici duke could display his power through grazia; that is, in order to showcase his mastery of the law Cosimo sometimes pardoned criminals awaiting their deaths.3

In Cellini’s time decapitation was an appropriate form of execution for those who committed crimes against the state. The latter were concomitant with crimes against the sovereign; hence the loss of one’s head mimicked the harm intended for the ‚head‛ of state.‛ Since decapitating the Gorgon proved to be an assault on the ‚head‛ of the matriarchal state, the Gorgon’s image on the Piazza della Signoria is both denigrated and dignified. Thus, Cosimo’s Perseus and

Medusa reminds the viewer that decapitation was the honorable way to execute a king, queen, or other political dignitary.

Corporeal symbolism at the scene of punishment tied into messages about the law. Since the law was an instrument of the state and thus a part of the sovereign, it naturally stood for the will of the ruler. The force of the law was the force of the prince. In Michel Foucault’s words:

In punishment, there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince, and, even when it is combined with the redress laid down, it constitutes the most important element in the liquidation of the crime. Now, this portion 174

belonging to the prince is not in itself simple: on the one hand, it requires redress for the injury that has been done to his kingdom (as an element of disorder and as an example given to others, this considerable injury is out of all proportion to that which had been committed upon a private individual).4

The execution of a criminal communicated the absolute power over life and death which was the absolutist ruler’s birthright. It comes as no surprise, then, that the sovereign’s godliness manifested itself through the ritual of public execution: he/she was present in spirit, if not in person, at the scene of punishment.

When Cellini’s Perseus was unveiled and its patron looked down at what transpired, Cosimo I played the part of the all-seeing lord responsible for this new ritualized display of power and revenge. Cosimo’s ‚divine‛ justice infiltrated

Perseus, the demi-god, against the matriarchal goddess Medusa. Raised to a great height on its pedestal, the Perseus provided a bridge between the duke and the political and criminal worlds below him, while the Loggia arches above framed the bronze and thus implied that the spectacle of public execution participated in a

‚whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored.‛5 The latter included the coronation of a king or queen and his or her entry into a conquered city, two events that usually took place beneath triumphal arches. In the preced- ing context the Loggia statues ritualized Cosimo’s rise to power after Montemurlo.

Public executions played an important role in early modern state formation: they were attempts to define a dominion. Armed punishment, the state’s primary 175 form of repression, was a warning to neighboring states because it symbolized the ruler’s monopoly of juridical, legal, political and military authority within the state. The presence of a duke, count, king, or queen would supposedly daunt the masses watching the grisly spectacle of execution into obeying the law, thereby implying the sovereign’s control over all bodies – criminal and noncriminal --- comprising the state.

In my view the chaos of the execution scene mirrored the difficult, often violent process of state formation. In the states developed slowly. The open nature of territorial divides was one factor that contributed to societal discord. Understandably, early modern individuals were constantly concerned about improving highly unstable and geographically limited monopolies of authority. Thus, the effects of violent behavior were two-fold: they disrupted stability where concord existed and were, in response, deemed necessary to maintain stability. As Peter Spierenberg has stressed, public execu- tions were meant to materialize the state’s strength precisely because this power was not yet consolidated. The preindustrial justice system needed publicity because the ruler’s power over wrong doers had to be made visible: execution of the body, the display of the corpse, even the practice of not refraining from conducting execution in the chaos after riots all contributed to the propagandistic display of the sovereign’s power.6 176

Likewise, while Cellini was preparing his Perseus, Cosimo I de’ Medici headed a dominion not without its anxieties about political stability, as seen. The

Medici ruler’s own desire to control the law in the strictest of fashions betrayed his sensitivity to dissent, which was tantamount to rebellion. The lack of control over cities such as Lucca and Siena, which Cosimo did not wholly annex until 1557, besetting his early tenure, he knew, contributed to the vulnerability of Tuscany’s physical boundaries. Indeed, controlling Italian society was extremely difficult due to such factors as the ruggedness and remoteness of land that provided cover for lawbreakers and the increased danger of banditry from the mid-sixteenth century to the early decades of the next, a problem in Florence stemming from the fall of Montalcino and general resistance against the Emperor and the Medici. The structure of authority in Florence did not compare, moreover, to the fractured police organization in the countryside. Tuscan law-breakers outside of Florence found it easier to resist Florentine control. In Medicean Florence, the cult of revenge also generated a great number of criminal acts that contributed to the instability of state formation. The same was the result of poverty, social discontent, and turmoil from political factions.7

In light of the preceding, I conceive of Cellini’s Medusa as a terror- inducing epitomization of the criminal body in disorder, of the partitioning of state

(specifically, republican) territories, and yet also of the threat of disorderly political 177 factions. The body of Medusa lies in a slump-like heap, a chaotic mass of flesh, much as a mutilated and executed body would, and the Gorgon’s face evinces a naturalistic vacuity. The adverse effects of her gaze symbolize ongoing cycles of violence troubling Cosimo’s Tuscan state, and the blood that, tellingly, gave birth to a monster continues to fall on the Piazza. Thus, Cellini’s statue employed violence to intimidate inimical forces into submission, but, as stated earlier, it also could have called forth adversity. Foucault’s statement suits the statue’s dynamics: ‚as a ritual of armed law, in which the prince showed himself, indissociably, both as the head of justice and head of war, the public execution had two aspects: one of victory, the other of struggle‛ to overcome the deviance of adversary in the violent challenge which the ritual of execution posed to the prince.8

Cellini also seems to have visualized the adversarial nature of the ritual of public execution through his Greek hero’s physical similarity to the Gorgon, which suggests that the infamy of his victim stained the Renaissance .9

Reflecting both Cellini’s and the Renaissance executioner’s sinful characters,

Perseus matches the ‚criminal‛ in the Gorgon’s image. The executioner’s profile is similar to that of Cellini as the Autobiography describes the latter. The sculptor both enjoyed the acceptance of patrons and friends and at other times was unfortunate enough to be an outcast. 178

One may liken Perseus’ weapon to the large swords Renaissance used to decapitate condemned criminals. These arms were heavy, and so the executioner had to be a man of considerable strength to wield them. Those most adept at their task were men who could finish their deed by striking only once, just as Perseus so decapitated Medusa and just as Cellini almost took Guasconti’s head with one blow, feebly short, as Judith did, of such a feat. As such, the act of punishment became for the executioner/Perseus a rite of passage into the male world of juridico-penal authority, which oversaw the body sacrificed through the penal ritual.10

The Body Broken and Divine

Although the figure of Cellini’s Medusa has a severed neck, its configura- tion recalls an additional form of sacrificial ritual — breaking with the wheel

(fig. 48). Note how the Gorgon’s arms and legs are folded and contorted in ways suggesting broken bones, even the shape of the body strung between the spokes of a wheel. In the northern and central parts of early modern Europe, after hanging, breaking with the wheel was the most common aggravated way to bring criminals to justice. Although Italy seldom employed the technique, Italians were familiar with the breaking wheel through such media as prints, paintings and written accounts of its horrors.11 The executioner would lay the criminal’s body across a

179 hard surface, such as a ladder, to which he would tie the victim’s hands and feet, then he would knock the wheel against the victim’s limbs and/or chest. The latter was either left to die on his back or lifted up and strung between the spokes of a wheel on a pike. As the pike’s wheel rotated, more bones broke. At times just the revolving wheel on a pike was the condemned individual’s punishment. The breaking wheel epitomized a perpetuation of violence and disorder, as did all forms of public execution. However, breaking with the wheel was an aggravated perpetuation because of the acute pain and physical disfiguration it caused.12

Breaking with the wheel was just one way of sacrificing the criminal for the sake of social order. In Cellini’s day the trope of the scaffold as an altar derived from a willingness to understand the condemned person’s death as a Christ-like sacrifice for humankind.13 On the Piazza della Signoria Medusa’s broken body assumes a sacrificial character when one considers Cellini’s pedestal as an altar.14

It is not a coincidence that Cellini chose to include images of Mercury, Athena, and

Jupiter on his altar-pedestal, for as Ovid stated, Perseus built altars to these three deities after he obtained Medusa’s head.

The bronze Gorgon’s wheel-shaped body also has a related cosmic significance. Edgar Wind indicated in his study on the cross’ pre-Christian symbolism that ‚the very shape of the wheel and the cross

Nemesis (Vortumna) and Fortuna: its whorl symbolizes the revolutions of the universe, which the Goddess controls. The spiral form of Medusa’s bronze body, though it does not move, conjures up the Mother Goddess’ wheel.16

Italians living in Cellini’s day would have known the wheel’s time honored symbolism. It has stood for solar power; the sun, whose rays are its spokes, turning in the sky; the cycle of life and death; rebirth and renewal; change, Fate,

Time; and, as noted, Fortuna, the Gothic rose window having originated in

Romanesque art as a wheel of Fortuna. The ancient ceremony of rolling the wheel signified the sun’s rotation through the heavens. Since the wheel is an attribute of all sun gods, including Zeus and Apollo, it symbolizes domination of the cosmos.17

As a wheel-like spiral, the body of Cellini’s Medusa stands for solar power as well as the increase and decrease of the sun, for generation and death have their part in the symbolic system of the spiral’s expanding and contracting configuration.18 I have already noted the link between the Ouroboros and the sun as well as the resemblance of Medusa’s body to the Ouroboros. The latter compares to the wheel.

A pertinent representation that was available to the Medici was Taddeo

Gaddi’s Holy Francis appearing to his Disciples, which shows the saint in an inflamed 181 chariot whose wheel mimics the halo of light around him (fig. 49). The similarity implies a correspondence between the wheel and solar light.

Karl von Amira and Hans von Hentig have written that the breaking wheel was indeed an archetypical emblem of the sun. Thus, torture with the wheel, which dates back to ancient Greece and Rome, was, in their view, a type of pagan sacrifice to the sun god Zeus. To support their claim, von Amira and von Hentig have cited the famous myth of Ixion, a mortal who incited Zeus’ anger for attempting to seduce , and, as a result, was bound to an enflamed wheel which would roll through the sky for eternity. In the ancient Mediterranean world

Ixion’s wheel did become an emblem of the sun.19 Perhaps Ixion’s eternal punishment corresponded to the slow death one suffered from the breaking wheel.

In the opinion of Erwin Roos the medieval torture wheel had nothing to do with that of Ixion, since his limbs were not laced between spokes. Ixion was, rather, strapped to the face of the wheel and his limbs were unbroken.20 However,

I would like to bring attention to the fact that at least one ancient Roman sarco- phagus represents Ixion’s limbs intertwined between the spokes of a torture wheel

(fig. 50). Here, flames light its rim. Ixion’s right foot is missing, which is, perhaps, an effect of time, or possibly a result of the wheel’s rotation. Ixion’s right arm is also mangled. This and similar artifacts showing Zeus’ victim may have been available to medieval and early modern Italians, who thus may have better 182 understood the link between Ixion’s lit wheel and the breaking wheel.

Pagan saturnalia, that is, feasts of renewal, influenced the medieval and early modern breaking wheel’s sacrificial significance, for during these festivals a criminal would stand in for the Divine King, whose original sacrifice fertilized the earth.21 The ritual of breaking with the wheel offered up the criminal’s death as a sacrifice in the name of earthly and cosmic order.22 In the preceding context the wheel’s association with the earth would have enhanced the profile of Cellini’s

Medusa as a terrestrial symbol.

Indeed, the wheel has long been an emblem of the earth and of the cosmos as a whole. Book XIV of Isidorus of Seville’s (c. 570-636) Etymologiae explains that the earth is like a wheel, meaning, no doubt, in shape, for the author did not conceive of the world in motion.23 In addition, Psalm 76:19 tells of the ‚voice of thy thunder‛ in the wheel. This is the voice of God, whose cosmic throne is the wheel. ’s vision represents the throne of God on wheels (Ezekiel, 1:15ff) which, as Marcell Jankovics has observed, are really the rims of an astrolabe revolving within each other. They are cosmic circles and the wheeled mechanics of heaven.24

As the previous discussion about the wheel indicates, even before

Columbus’ voyage to the New World in 1492 some Europeans knew the earth to be round. Consider that the ancient Greek belief that the earth has nine circles 183 conforming to its shape survived into the fifteenth century.25 Renaissance Europe would have known, in addition, that the emblematic orbs of Pompey, Caesar and

Augustus stood for earthly and even cosmic sovereignty and that ’s official coinage bears the inscription, ‚restorer of of the earth‛ (‚restitutur orbis terrarum‛). Witness the many visual images of early modern leaders holding the symbolic terrestrial orb as their ancient predecessors did (fig. 51).

Comparable images are the chariot wheels of Bartolomeo Ammanati’s

Neptune Fountain, which followed Cellini’s Perseus (fig. 52). The northern wheel bears the zodiacal signs of spring and summer, while the southern has those of autumn and winter. Van Veen has stated that the zodiacal emblems pertain to

Earth, as responsible for seasonal rotation.26 Ammanati’s wheels encapsulate the link among Earth, the cosmos, and the wheel discussed previously, thereby suggesting that Cellini would have known the same. It is not coincidental that medallions with the head of Medusa, the Earth Mother, grace the rim of the fountain’s wheels.

184

Mater Iuri

My consideration of Renaissance executions stresses that in contemporary imaginations earthly justice was a reflection of God’s plan for cosmic order.

Sixteenth-century civic buildings often included elaborate murals representing judicial themes from biblical writing, most frequently the Last Judgment. Criminal procedures commonly took place in the presence of such images. Arches within judicial buildings framed high magistrates and stood for God’s cosmos, just as the

Loggia arches do.

Comparable personifications of cosmic/divine justice were sword-bearing females who derive from the ancient Mother of Justice (Iustitia/Mater Iuri).

Donatello’s Judith is one such example and so is Cellini’s Medusa, who rivals the supreme judge Zeus on the pedestal beneath her. Just as Medusa was responsible for Perseus’ ability to bring enemies to justice at various points in his story, the

Piazza’s della Signoria’s Gorgon is the means through which Perseus punishes his foes. Similarly, a sixteenth-century Florentine poem written in honor of Cellini’s

Perseus and Medusa maintains that Cosimo I would usher in a new Golden Age because the duke descended from the firmament with Iustitia.27 Note how Cellini’s

Perseus-Cosimo holds Medusa’s head aloft, as if in homage to her ties to the heavens.

Cellini must have known that in his time Justice was inseparable from the 185

Almighty and associated with an absolute and deified State. The earthly body and the spiritual body of the prince shared in Iustitia’s eternal nature. Significant in the preceding regard is the fact that Duke Cosimo I personally embraced the paradoxical notion that the prince’s two bodies embodied the law and, perhaps partly in a spiritual sense, stood above it.28 His belief becomes more meaningful in light of the preceding poem on Iustitia: the Medici duke would have assimilated his personae to both the spiritual nature of Iustitia and her manifestation in earthly laws.29 The head of Cellini’s Medusa epitomizes both of Iustitia’s guises.

In order to better understand the bronze Gorgon’s role as Iustitia, which relates to her role as the Mother Goddess, one must travel to the ancient world.

The idea of justice as a living cosmic entity originated in pre-Socratic Greece.

Here, in her first religious-mythical guise, justice appeared as a face of the Mother

Goddess. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey present the Mother Goddess as a judgmental entity, for she punishes those who ignore, or challenge her. In addition, Hesiod’s

Theogony states that (Justice) is the daughter of Zeus and and that she resides at the center of religious and moral affairs, embodying divine will. Themis and Dike descend from the Mother Goddess.30

Evidence indicates that Athenians conceptualized the law as a maternal entity. Shortly before the end of the fifth century B.C. the Mother of the Gods received cult honors in the Council House of Athens, where she resided, 186 enthroned at the center of the building housing all of the official texts of Athenian laws and all other documents belonging to the government. By the end of the fifth century the Athenian state archives became known, therefore, as the Shrine of the

Mother, the Metroon. The edifice was the veritable embodiment of Athenian democracy.31

The Mother Goddess’ role as the protectress of laws stemmed from her status as the source of sovereignty, a fact that should remind one of Medusa’s role as source of Perseus’ political empowerment. The Mother Goddess’ dual role as such dates back to her involvement with King Midas, who was keenly adept at administering justice. The king’s mother, the Phrygian Great Goddess, was responsible for founding, foreseeing and protecting Midas’ just kingship. Even though Midas’ ability to turn all he touched to gold moralizes the evils of greed, his golden touch might also have stood for his ability to impose justice, for in antiquity, as in the Renaissance, gold could symbolize justice – a point which

Cellini must have known.32

187

The Shield Device as a Judicial and Cosmological Emblem

The original gilding on Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa would have enhanced the statue’s judicial power. Further, as Cellini and his contemporaries may have known, in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. Roman statutes, decrees, treatises and edicts were all written on bronze tablets. Bronze’s durability symbolized the validity of Roman legal documents. Therefore, the metal’s strength suited lawmakers’ intention for their decisions to be long-lived and long-remembered. It is no wonder, then, that Romans often placed bronze legal tablets on hilltops for all to see. Further, bronze’s sacred connotations may have informed what Callie

Williamson has argued to be Rome’s conceptualization of bronze legal tablets as sacrosanct.33 One should Cellini’s bronze Perseus as a similar testament, that is, as a resplendently divine, lasting monument to its patron’s judicial will, made visible on the Piazza della Signoria for viewers to admire and to fear. An indication that the preceding was so is the pose of Francesco di Giovanni Ferrucci del Tadda’s sword-bearing Justice, which is nearly identical to that of the Perseus

(fig. 53). Del Tadda’s female personification of Cosimo I’s judicial power is made, tellingly, of , which ducal Florence valued for its hardness and durability and associated with justice.34 Like the bronze legal tablets of Rome, Justice occupies great heights: she stands on top of a Roman column on Florence’s Piazza

Santa Trinità, where she proclaims Cosimo’s judicial strength to those beneath her. 188

The gilded weaponry of Cellini’s Perseus has a particular way of defining the Greek hero as a judicial figure. Cellini may have known the following example from Homer’s Iliad, which endows bronze weaponry with judicial connotations:

He took his two sturdy, sharp spears, headed with bronze. The bronze of the spears sent up to heaven a far-reaching gleam; Athene and Hera shouted in applause, in honor of the king of , rich in gold. (Iliad, Book XI, 43ff.)

Here, the sovereign’s bronze spears are a metonym for political power, including the ability to wage war and to impose justice. Similarly, in his poem, ‚On Nature‛ the Greek philosopher Parmenides associates justice with gold: justice, he believed, is like the sun. The Romans, meanwhile, swore by the sun.35 As the seat of justice in ancient mytho-poetic traditions, the sun was highly appropriate as an apotropaic image on weaponry, such as shields. The reason why Western monarchs placed the image of the sun on their breast-plates was their belief that solar power would protect the wearer’s heart in times of peace and in times of war.36 Perhaps the preceding ideas informed the choice to render the Gorgon’s head on ancient and early modern breastplates, including that of Duke Cosimo I’s bronze bust by Cellini. The position of a lion as a solar emblem on a breastplate or shield compares. Witness, for example, Vasari’s Allegory of the Quartiere of San

Giovanni and Santa Maria Novella, which includes a shield decorated with a lion whose mane mimics the suns’ rays and even Medusa’s snakes (1563-1565, fig. 54). 189

Ancient authors and artists consistently employed the circular form of the shield device as an allusion to the sun. Hence, the , as it appears in the Iliad, features the sun. In the preceding context the solar shield serves as an emblem of a ruler’s ambition for the just outcome of battles and/or the conquest of territories.37

In Euripedes’ description of Achilles’ shield Perseus and Medusa appear, perhaps as cosmic bodies, on the aegis’ outer rim (, 455f). The Iliad proves that the Gorgon face on the cosmic shield of Agamemnon is a sign of cosmic domination.

The early iconography of Eastern and Western kingship indicates that when a ruler is represented in the zodiacal ring, or on the cosmic clipeus -- the circular shield with a border around its middle disk – he is a cosmocrator/divine judge.

Consider a passage from Corippus De laudibus Justini which pays homage to the elevation of the just Emperor Justinus Minor:

Now he is present, the greatest benefactor of the world community, to whom kings bend their necks in submission, before whose name they tremble, and whose numen they worship. There he stands on that disk, the most powerful prince, having the appearance of the Sun. Yet another light shines forth from the city. This day is truly a marvel, for it allows two suns to rise together at the same time.38

The image of the emperor raised on a shield had the same solar significance in the Middle Ages and beyond. Manuel Holobolos of the thirteenth century, for

190 instance, stated that the act of raising a shield from earth to heaven greets the emperor on the aegis as a ‚great Sun.‛39 As the Sun of Justice, Christ also appears lifted up to heaven on a clipeus. Berchorius’ Repertorium morale describes ’ image as such:

Further I say of the Sun (the ‚Sun of righteousness‛) that He shall be enflamed when exercising supreme power, that is to say, when He sits in judgment, when He shall be strict and severe< because He shall be all hot and bloody by dint of justice and strictness. For, as the sun, when in the center of his orbit, that is to say, midday point, is hottest, so shall Christ be when He shall appear in the center of heaven and earth

In the preceding eras, raising a figure on a shield was also a way of proclaiming the individual as ruler.41

The position of Cellini’s Perseus on Athena’s shield contributes to his status as a solar hero, one who looms large between heaven and earth as a cosmocrator.

The sculpture testifies that not only the ruler’s physical person, but also his/her artistic rendition as standing on the shield meant that he/she was the new sun.

The original golden sheen of Cellini’s aegis would have indicated so. Perseus’ mirror-shield is analogous to the body of Cellini’s Gorgon and even brings ancient descriptions of cosmic shields to bear upon Medusa’s configuration. Consider the

Iliad’s (Book XI, 33-36) depiction of Agamemnon’s shield with a central circle 191 portraying a Gorgon face. The spiral shape of the Gorgon’s bronze body is similar to the clipeus’ design. Since the shield of Cellini’s Perseus is an emblem of

Medusa’s and Athena’s power, the fact that the Greek hero steps on the shield suggests that he is the rival of both women. Simultaneously, his powerful form as it rises from the shield and Medusa’s body implies that his sovereignty owes itself to both mythological goddesses.

The ancients believed the clipeus to be an image of the revolving cosmos; hence Aischylos and his contemporaries compared the clipeus to a rotating wheel, which simultaneously symbolized the universe, heaven, and Sol (the sun) in his orbit.42 The similarity between the aegis and the wheel enhances the role of

Medusa’s body as an emblem of the wheel, the cosmos, and the sun. One exemplification of the similarity between the wheel and the clipeus that must have been known to Cosimo I was the shield of the Medici duke’s idol, Alexander the

Great, which bore a picture of the heavens and whose rim featured the wheel of the Zodiac.43 In the shield’s middle were the sun, moon and stars. Alexander’s aegis leads one to believe that the legendary Greek ruler might have thought of himself as the ‚great Sun.‛

Another way of representing the sun of the clipeus was to present the head of the sun god Helios at the disk’s center – Sol in suo clipeo. Several ancient Greek clipei in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston feature the sun god with flaring rays 192 about his head (fig. 55). They are images that are similar to the decapitated head of Medusa sporting ‚fiery‛ tendrils at the center of shields, canon devices, and other military paraphernalia, all of which point up Medusa’s solar significance (fig. 56).

In antiquity Sol, the sun-ruler, even assumed the role of Sol Iustitiae (Just

Sun) with his right hand raised. His gesture entered into Roman imperial ritual as an expression of the ruler’s power to judge. Sol, in the ‚magic sign of his ingens dextra rules and moves the Cosmos, sends the spheres spinning in their eternal orbits, thus affecting everything that happens in our earthly sphere. It is the gesture of the cosmocrator.‛44 The raised hand of Cellini’s Perseus likewise has connotations of the solar cosmocrator, for in the early modern world, as in the ancient, the lifted, or outstretched hand (ubiquitously the right, but in the Perseus’ case the upheld left derives from the same concept) had a divine significance distinct from the gesture of benediction. Supernatural powers would, believedly, emanate from emperors’ outstretched right hands.45 In the case of Cellini’s Perseus the outstretched hand is the vehicle through which the hero imparts the supernatural effects of Medusa’s gaze, while the sword-bearing right hand holds the power to destroy or to execute justice. As the Perseus proves, the raised hand could have the ability to curse, or to destroy.

The motif of the powerful raised hand also recurs throughout the Bible. For 193 instance, Psalm 89 proclaims, ‚You have a mighty arm; your hand is powerful; your right hand is lifted high. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of

Your throne.‛ The Lord says, ‚By My great strength and outstretched arm, I made the earth.‛ (, 27:5). The tradition legis seen in numerous , paintings and sarcophagi since Constantine’s late reign comprises the image of Christ giving the world the new law, His right hand raised in all-powerful command. The judicial power of the raised hand comes into play in Michelangelo’s Sistine Last

Judgment, which shows Christ welcoming souls with an upraised right hand

(fig. 57). The sun behind the Lord Christ characterizes Him as Sol Invictus.

As this chapter has shown, judicial power essentializes Cellini’s Perseus as an embodiment of the Medicean state. While the statuesque hero’s prerogative to judge points up Perseus’ power over foes, Cellini’s iconography once again negates the Greek hero’s independence and elucidates Perseus’ implication in the

Gorgon’s power. The next chapter shall demonstrate how the formal design of

Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa complements that hero’s involvement in the Gorgon’s agency in a fashion that challenges the ideal of the holistic state.

194

Notes

1. As a backdrop for the Loggia, the Palazzo Vecchio’s austere façade would have reminded viewers of the Bargello, formerly the city hall, which since the thirteenth century served as the headquarters of the podestà (the chief police magistrate for the city). At the Bargello, one found criminal and civil law courts, torture chambers, and close cells for those awaiting execution. The ‚Book of the Executed‛ is still housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, and outlines the different types of executions performed in the city from 1420 to 1744. The account shows that the years of greatest turmoil, including those of the Pazzi conspiracy, the fall of the Medici, and the reign of Duke Alessandro, met with an increase in the number of capital punishments.

2. Frederick Cummings and Marco Chiari, eds., The Twilight of the Medici: Late Baroque Art in Florence, 1670-1743 (Centro di Firenze, Italy, 1974): 19.

3. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985): 203. See Nicholas Scott Baker, ‚For Reasons of State: Political Executions, Republicanism, and the Medici in Florence, 1480-1560,‛ Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 444-473 for a discussion of the relationship between the increasing number of political executions in the city and Florence’s transformation from republic to duchy. The records of the Compagnia de’ Neri, the confraternity that cared for the condemned criminals prior to execution, states that from 1480 to 1560, sixty-two Florentine men were executed for political reasons. Baker, 447. Over one third of these executions took place during the reign of Cosimo I. Baker, 465. Such findings show that the law became an increasingly important means to defend the state: due to the state’s centralization, absolutists became more and more suspicious about dissenters. In Baker’s view the increase of executions under the Medici duke suggests a ‚continuation of a significant minority of opposition from within the Florentine elite.‛ Baker, 467.

4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Press, 1977): 48. Information I have given about what public execution meant in historical terms derives from Foucault’s book.

5. -----, 50.

195

6. Peter Spierenberg, The Spectacle of Suffering, Execution and the Evolution of Repression: from a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986): 78-80, 201-202.

7. Hibbert, 265. Julius Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Cosimo I’s police force grew weaker throughout the duke’s time in office, for the Medici ruler allowed the number of policemen to dwindle. Those men who were left worked poorly because they were not adequately, or timely paid.

8. Foucault, 50.

9. Much of the information about the Renaissance executioner included in this study derives from Foucault, 53, 255 and Spierenberg, 13-42. The early modern executioner was, especially in pictorial representations, a swashbuckler, or Don Juan, and he could even be the overseer of a bordello or the seller of talismans. In this way, he matches Cellini’s profile as a young man given to violence, sex, and necromancy rituals. See My Life, 117, 138 for Cellini’s interest in the occult.

10. Foucault, 73-74.

11. The Golden Legend describes saints’, such as Saint Juliana’s, experiences with the breaking wheel.

12. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, England: Reaktion Press, 1999).

13. A good study of the sacrificial and spiritual significance of execution in Italy is The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Missouri: Truman State Press University, 2008).

14. Weil-Garris Brandt, 409-410 states that the Perseus’ pedestal is an altar to the Olympian gods who safeguard Perseus/Cosimo I. Therefore, Cellini’s work might have recalled the fact that the ringhiera of the Palazzo Vecchio had, in Trexler’s terms, ‚the effect of an altar‛ for relics, Mass offerings and sermons. Trexler, 49.

196

15. Wind, ‚’The Criminal-God’ and the ‘ of Haman,’‛ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937-1938): 244.

16. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (New York: Penguin Press, 1955): 126.

17. On the wheel’s traditional symbolism see Cooper, 191-192. The wagon of Demeter, a face of the Earth Goddess, was a symbolic wheel, that is, the circle of the earth rimmed with snakes. 2 Kings 23:11 exemplifies the traditional association of chariot wheels with the sun and fire: ‚And he took away the houses that the Kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entering in of the house of the Lord, by the chamber of Nathanmelech the chamberlain.. and burned the chariots of the sun with fire.‛

18. For a discussion of links between the wheel and the sun see Goodison, 126ff. De Voragine’s Golden Legend, 336 notes that the wheel that is spun on John the Baptist’s feast day symbolizes the sun’s cyclical decline. See Cooper, 156 for the spiral’s symbolic significance as the sun’s increase and decrease.

19. Wheels and fire frequently feature together in ancient Mediterranean mythology. Hans von Hentig, Punishment: its Origins, Purpose and Psychology (London, England: Hodge Press, 1937): 50-51. Karl von Amira, Die Germanische Todestrafen. Untersuchungen zur Rechts und Religionsgeschichte (Munich, Germany: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1922): 240ff.

20. Erwin Roos, ‚Das Rad als Folter und Hinrichtungswerkzeung in Altertum,‛ Opuscula Archaeologica, Proceedings from the Swedish Institute in Rome (Lund, Sweden: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1952): 87-104.

21. Merback, 162. Wind, ‚’The Criminal-God’ and the ‘Crucifixion of Haman,’‛ 243-248.

22. Merback, 162ff.

23. See Seznec, 14-16, 56, 164, 172, 221, 306 for the Etymologiae’s importance to the humanist imagination.

24. Jankovics, 181.

197

25. I am grateful to Dr. Carolyn Corretti for giving me this bit of information.

26. Van Veen, Cosimo I and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, 109, 112.

27. Cox-Rearick, 135-137, 219-220, 265-266, 269, 286 discusses Cosimo’s courtly personification as and with Justitia-. For further information on Justitia- Astraea see Rousseau, 346-347 and Suzanne B. Butters, The Triumph of : Sculptors’ Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence (Florence, Italy: Olschki Press, 1996): 93. Justitia-Astraea was the last deity to leave the earth at the end of the Golden Age and the first to return to the earth to restore that glorious time.

28. Kantorowicz, 92-106, 127-143, 143, 147-148, 473 include treatment of the personification of law and justice as a mother. The notion of the ruler’s two bodies – an earthly one, and one with a divine right to rule – informs Cosimo’s desire to be seen as a divinely assisted lawgiver. See Cox-Rearick, ‚Bronzino’s Crossing of the Red Sea,‛ Art Bulletin 69:1 (1987): 47ff. The joint images of Cosimo’s and his earthly funeral respond to the preceding notion. See Eve Borsook, ‚Art and Politics at the Medici Court I: the Funeral of Cosimo I de’ Medici,‛ Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 12 (1965): 31-54.

29. Cosimo I considered the law as a maternal force even when he said that his mother’s words were his ‚precept and law.‛ This quotation of Cosimo’s letter to Maria Salviati of January 28, 1530 can be found in Cecily Booth’s Cosimo I, Duke of Florence (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1921): 38.

30. In subsequent Orphic traditions Dike was a great goddess who shared Zeus’ throne. She appears on some third and fourth-century B.C. Italian vases with a sword in her right hand, sitting among divine judges. The term ‚dike‛ as employed in the Iliad and the Odyssey refers to customs that accord with human laws, and it also means the order of the universe. Since Neith was the Mother Goddess of war, her derivative, Athena, became a maternal goddess of justice. Renaissance Tarot cards show Athena in this guise, indicating that the early modern world was aware of the Mother Goddess’ ancient significance as an embodiment of judicial power.

31. See Balas, The Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance Art, 9, 15 for the Metroon. Balas’ discussion suggests that the Metroon was known in the Renaissance. 198

32. The scepter, a symbol of justice, is, not coincidentally, made of gold. On Midas see Mark Henderson Munn, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: a Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): 331ff.

33. Callie Williamson, ‚Monuments of Bronze: Roman Legal Documents on Bronze Tablets,‛ Classical Antiquity 6:1 (1987): 160-183.

34. Page 92 of Butters’ study indicates that Cosimo I and his iconographers associated porphyry with justice.

35. For the Roman practice of swearing by the sun see Tim Parkin and Arthur Pomeroy, Roman Social History: a Sourcebook (New York: Routledge Press, 2007): 9.

36. Philip R. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1986).

37. Hardie’s study is important in this regard.

38. Corippus’ De laudibus Justini Aug. Min. 2, 137ff. This is Kantorowicz’s translation, found in his article ‚Oriens Augusti – Lever du Roi,‛ Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): 152. For another discussion of the elevation of the solar ruler on a clipeus see 88-89, 103-109 of L’Orange.

39. Manuel Holobolos, in J. Fr. Boissonade, Aenecdota Graeca, vol. 5 (Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 1962): 163.

40. Petrus Berchorius, Repertorium morale, first published in Nuremberg, Germany, 1489; quoted on page 262 of Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (New York: Doubleday, 1955).

41. Moshe Barasch, The Language of Art, Studies in Interpretation (New York University Press, 1997): 289-294 also discusses elevation on a shield, including the act’s cosmic, military, and political significance. Elevation on a shield was a common symbolic image in the visual arts of the pre-modern . Book IV of Tacitus’ Histories contains the earliest literary reference to the act of proclaiming a new ruler by elevating him on a shield.

199

42. L’Orange, 90.

43. Van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, 33.

44. L’Orange, 148. Diverse poetic texts from the ancient Mediterranean, such as those of Statius and Martial, praise the emperor’s right hand as the magna manus, the ingens manus, and the divina manus. Numerous coins, medallions, statues and triumphal arches depict emperors in the same way. For example, the Arch of Constantine shows both the emperor and Sol with the gesture.

45. -----, 139-140, 143.

200

Ch 7 Classical and Grotesque Polities

As shown, nascent states had serious concerns about geographical boundaries’ becoming and remaining integral under the auspices of political claimants. The fact that political unity remained an ideal is unquestionable.

However, as suggested, diverse factors, such as political factions and violence, contributed to the instability of European polities, which troubled early modern imaginations and therefore inspired reversals of the classical body politic, tamed and sealed at the borders. Chapter 3 demonstrated how Machiavelli made more of composite bodies than integral ones. His image of a headless, content body politic shatters the humanist polity. The head separated from the body has the capacity to wreck havoc in the state and to destroy life.1 The preceding image is markedly Medusan: it matches the potential of Cellini’s Gorgon to threaten enemies of the Medici. Machiavelli’s statement also undermines the idea of the holistic state by implying that the head may turn against itself, just as Cellini’s penchant for violence turned against him. Indeed, this chapter will detail how the Perseus and Medusa responds to and disrupts the humanist model of the state.

The preceding political situation mirrored a broad cultural dilemma. In

Najemy’s words:

Despite its reputation for having discovered (or rediscovered) the canonical image of a body whose order, proportions, and 201

harmony reproduced those of the entire universe and could thus serve as a model, measure, or rule for the right ordering of political communities, the Renaissance actually entertained a bewildering variety of images of the body natural. It is perhaps not so surprising that the humanists responded to this pervasive ignorance and uncertainty about the body with ennobling myths about the body’s perfect proportions and enduring dignity. Uncer- tainty about the body was in all likelihood just as productive of anxiety in the Renaissance as it is for us, and the myth of the body’s harmony, order, and dignity (and of the actual or desired reflection of the same in worlds outside the body) was summoned to deflect the uncomfortable awareness of just how little was in fact known about the body.2

Let me turn to Machiavelli’s example once again:

Bodies human and bodies politic, for Machiavelli, are always involved in processes that subvert efforts at closure, demarcation, and what Bakhtin called the ‚border of a closed individuality.‛3

In short, the age of state formation witnessed a growing awareness of the body’s physical boundaries. Early modern individuals knew that the ‚mixed body of humankind‛ must ‚face dangers from within and without, and it is particularly vulnerable at the boundaries.‛4 The Renaissance obsession with the humoral body fed into this preoccupation. For instance, Ficino stated that the body is ‚perpetually in , changed by growing, shrinking, continuous disintegration, liquefaction, and alternative heat and cold.‛5 The preceding statement indicates that the marriage of matter and form was especially unstable: matter could fluctuate at any given time and thus take on a different form – an all 202 too frequent occurrence in an age beset by a multitude of diseases.

I must turn to Mikhail Bakhtin‘s image of the anti-classical body, that is, the grotesque body, which pervaded the Renaissance imagination. Aspects of the grotesque were ubiquitous in the mythology, art and folklore of the ancient

Mediterranean, but during the classical age the grotesque was relegated to

‚low,‛ that is, nonclassical forms, such as comic masks, symbols of fertility, satyrs, satiric drama, Attic comedy, and the like. The grotesque was not, however, systematically analyzed, defined, or categorized; neither was it given a name. One discovery helped to bring the grotesque into Renaissance conscious- ness. Late fifteenth-century Italians unearthed the first-century baths of the

Roman Emperor Titus, which contained ornaments with fanciful plant, animal, and human features. The decorations became known as grottesche (from the

Italian ‚grotto‛).6 In Bakhtin’s terms, the decorations of Titus seemingly merged and thus gave birth to one another:

The borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldly infringed. Neither was there the usual static presentation of reality. There was no longer the movement of finished forms, vegetable or animal, in a finished and stable world; instead the inner movement of being itself was expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incompleted character of being.7

Vasari was the first Renaissance man to describe the grotesque. 203

Conceding with Vitruvius, he proclaimed that it is marked by monstrosity, barbarism, and proves to be a violation of decorum and natural proportions. Yet this genre is actually a part of all lives, Bakhtin asserted, for the degradation of the grotesque body, its act of coming in death, is the fate of all people.8 The earth is, as shown, able to swallow the person and to give life simultaneously; hence the Earth and Medusa are characteristically grotesque.

Degradation features in much Renaissance literature, such as that of

Fontainebleau author François Rabelais, where grotesque realism involves the juxtaposition of death and life, of old and new.9

Bakhtin cited the famous Kerch terracotta of senile pregnant hags as epitomes of the grotesque.10 Their laughing faces evoke the culture of the masses, particularly the carnivalesque, where there is much laughter in addition to bawdiness, lewdness and other types of low merrymaking and pleasures of the flesh; but, more importantly for my purposes, the hags are similar to Mother

Earth. They are ‚pregnant death, a death that gives birth.‛ The hags comprise

‚decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life.‛11

Bakhtin’s famous discourse on Rabelais as carnivalesque includes a description of the grotesque body as always in the process of becoming, never static, never complete, and merging with different forms. It is even marked by

204 doubling. Furthermore, the grotesque body is transgressive. It exceeds its own limits. Representations of the grotesque body stress those parts that are open to the world and that emit substances into it: the phallus, the womb, the eyes, the mouth, etc; as well as other parts that protrude: the breasts, the tongue, and the like.12 As such, the grotesque body is the personification of the lower strata of life: the grave and the earth.

The antithesis of the grotesque body is that of the classical, which is closed, holistic, static, monumental, completed, and emblematic of the absolutist state. The former comprises an ‚opaque surface‛ that acquires ‚essential mean- ing as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world.‛13 Bakhtin noted that although one may characterize the grotesque and classical bodies as pure and extreme in themselves, historically and paradoxically they were not fixed, but were diacritical, each body formed by retracing the other’s boundaries.14

The grotesque and classical paradigms come into play in Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. The bronze Gorgon is a grotesque image par excellence, as her severed head and body merge death and life and cast blood into the world. Like

Bakhtin’s grotesque body, Cellini’s Medusa emphasizes parts that are disclosed: the breasts, which flare outward, her eyes, the open-mouthed serpents, the

205 severed neck and head, and the open mouth --- all suggest transgression.

Bakhtin’s claim that the carnivalesque hags of Kerch embody a death that gives birth echoes the Gorgon’s ability to generate life after her decapitation. Her power of generation, along with the Gorgon’s open form are vital to one’s understanding of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa as a sculpture that thematizes the challenge of controlling and doing away with evil in the state.15 The figure of

Medusa, like the early modern state, is open to invasion and capable of retaliating, even against those who were not enemies of the Medici.

Cellini’s Gorgon evinces a highly unstable pose in the twists and turns of the legs and arms. One struggles a bit, even at different , to follow just how her limbs are arranged in relation to each other. Medusa’s body is a clumped mass that is opened up by spatial confusion and contortion. She thus embodies a state of continuous becoming, for she is not static. In addition, imagined reactions to the Gorgon’s visage are similar to the terror, shock, and anxiety one may feel while confronting the grotesque. In Medusan fashion, the grotesque may serve as a weapon to stun viewers.16

The multiple breasts of the Ephesian goddesses on Cellini’s pedestal are grotesque in their own right, for they multiply to excess and imply the emergence of substance (milk) into the world. The breasts also merge with the

206 garlands of fruit gracing the pedestal.

On the other hand, the body of Cellini’s Perseus is almost entirely classical. It is in different ways a symbol of closure, as the male body generally was in the Renaissance, and of the holistic absolutist state, but the upraised

Perseus’ left arm and sword break away in transgressive fashion from a closed silhouette.17 The monstrous face on the hero’s helmet and the statue’s beastly aspects likewise deviate from the classical ideal to which the hero’s perfect proportions otherwise adhere.18 In other words, parts of the bronze that mark

Cellini’s hero as a classical male ‚merge‛ with their antitheses. Recall that the classical and the grotesque body canons developed by retracing the other’s boundaries. The orifice of Perseus’ phallus is exposed to the viewer and is able to emit substance into the world. The phallus is truant and protean, much as the snakes on Medusa’s head are. Note that Perseus’ penis is caught between the open forms of the Gorgon’s neck and head, to which it is also akin. Like the grotesque body, the Perseus mingles old (the visage at the back of the bronze helmet) and young – thus and life -- and is marked by doubling (the Janus face at the helmet’s rear and Perseus’ physical similarity to Medusa). I propose that the Perseus’ deviation from the classical ideal stands for the destructive traits of Cellini’s hero, of the statue’s artist and patron, and for political, social, and

207 criminal fissures within Duke Cosimo I’s state. Machiavelli’s refracted, hetero- geneous body politic has a certain reflection in Cellini’s sculpture, which gives one a new sense that the state is mortal after all.

The grotesque, open-mouthed heads on the pedestal of Cellini’s Perseus are similar to the bronze Medusa in appearance. They remind one that Capricorn is similar to the typically grotesque satyr, whose grimaces are Medusan in their own right. The fact that the torches belonging to the grotesque heads merge with the Capricorns’ horns indicates that these beings have a moral affinity with one another. Both the Capricorns and the grotesque heads find moral echoes in the grotesque animal forms on Perseus’ equipment and in the elderly visage at the back of the hero’s helmet.19

Thus, the grotesque aspect of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa is an expression of the Greek hero’s implication in power of the Gorgon -- the Earth Mother, which points up the ruler’s weaknesses, including the difficulties in fabricating his absolutist state.

The grotesque image of Medusa compares to the Renaissance’s ‚scientific‛ notions of female sexuality. The latter, which, early moderners must have known, comprise Gorgonian traits, may have informed the role of Cellini’s

Medusa as an embodiment of the terrifying power of the feminine. In Susanne

208

Scholz’s terms, ‚the grotesque style < envisaged in images of protruding or dislocated members and leaky bodies‛ came in the Renaissance to represent women’s bodies; that is, the humoral, open body ‚gradually emerged as the materialization of femininity on earth.‛20 Early modern theories about female blood and hair exemplify just how noxious women were supposed to be.

Renaissance culture borrowed the idea from Aristotle that hair forms when sooty vapors (waste products) which are exhaled through the body’s pores come into the air. Since female constitutions were, to the Renaissance mind, cold and moist, women’s bodies were believed to have an excess of secretions, and what their bodies did not use to make hair they expended as menstrual blood.21

Serpents were further extensions of the noxious fluids making up hair, suggesting that woman’s serpentine nature derived from her interior. When a menstruating woman places her hair in dung or earth it spawns a snake. As a result of age, elderly women are too cold to synthesize and to emit their harmful fluids, which in the young accrue into deadly poisons. The unexpelled residues collect within the skull and, after having contracted near the brain, permeate through the scalp as snakes.22 It is interesting that dung’s role in the generation of snakes recalls that of dung as fertilizer for the grotesque body. There is also a link between Bakhtin’s terracotta hags and the consistent characterization of

209 snake-headed women as hags.

The early modern scientific community believed that menstrual blood is venomous, having the capacity to wilt vegetation, to poison humans, to destroy trees, to make dogs rabid, to rust metal and to blacken bronze. The gaze of a menstruating woman was also toxic: her polluted blood would corrupt the air of those near her. A menstruating woman could also dull a mirror or stain it with her glance. Even in a solidified state, as marble, or bronze, for instance, female blood, like Medusa’s, harbored the potential for destruction and decay.23

Such theories betray a personal insecurity that results in fear of the female body and serve to deny potency by labeling female physiology deviant. They suggest that woman’s evil nature is deliberate and yet also beyond her control, for she is a fiendish, beastly figure whose interior and exterior are constantly intermingling and changing to result in deviations of character. Moreover, woman’s evil influence, whether unleashed or contained within her, escapes the control of others. No matter how carefully locked up she is, this grotesque creature will always transgress and escape. She is, like the uterus itself, the

‚gaping mouth, the open window, the body that exceeds its own limits and negates all those boundaries without which property could not be constituted.‛24

Woman is, then, a suitable metaphor for and even the cause of disorder

210

(Discordia). I propose that Cellini’s Medusa is an exhibition of such transgressive power, as her effects are difficult to ‚contain.‛

The preceding ‚scientific‛ theories help to explain why a diverse range of

Renaissance texts, such as Alberti’s Della Famiglia, stipulate that women must remain enclosed within the home. Here, the transgressive parts of the grotesque body become a threat to the patriarchal status quo. That is why her mouth must remain closed much of the time, unmarried women must be virginal and the married ‚chaste.‛25

The Renaissance ideal of keeping women enclosed within the home was similar to the metaphorical image of the hortus conclusus. The secured garden was usually a symbol of female virginity and, as suggested earlier, of the Virgin

Mary, which underscores the fact that the closed body meant something different for men and women. Stallybrass has termed the ideal ‚Woman‛ of early modern times a sealed ‚container.‛26 She, as opposed to common woman, was therefore the perfect emblem of the state’s integrity.27 A pertinent model was Sandro

Botticelli’s Primavera (c. 1482), which hung in Cosimo I’s villa at Castello as a legacy of the duke’s forebears (fig. 58). Critics have identified the heavily clad woman bearing a basket of flowers as the spring goddess Flora, whose name plays on Florence, the city she personifies.28 Botticelli’s landscape, which may

211 have suggested the hortus conclusus due to its partial enclosure, would also have stood for the Florentine state, for the petals strewn on the ground refer to the contemporary myth that the city of Florence was born on a bed of flowers.

Logically, Flora’s status as the personification of Florence involves her embodiment of the landscape and its riches.29

Renaissance depictions of the ideal Woman were foils for Cellini’s

Medusa. Although the latter bears the mark of male domination, Cellini’s

Gorgon is an icon of power who is comparable to the idealized Woman, whose long lived image testified to her undeniable potency. The preceding is a point to keep in mind as I turn to the subject of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo’s role in

Renaissance art and thought, the topic of the next chapter.

212

Notes

1. See Chapter 26 of The Prince. For a pertinent discussion of Machiavelli’s headless body see Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics, a Feminist Reading in Political Theory (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988): 181.

2. Najemy, 260.

3. -----, 259.

4. -----, 248.

5. Ficino, Three Books on Life, eds. and trans. Carol Kaske and John Clark (New York: MRTS, 1989): 75.

6. See Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1968): 30-31.

7. -----, 32.

8. -----, 19-21, on Vasari see Bakhtin, 33. Vasari described the grotesque throughout his monumental Le Vite di piu Eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, e Scultori Italiani (1550).

9. Since Cellini worked at Francis I’s Fontainebleau for several years (the late 1530s and early 1540s) he would have been familiar with the literary culture of the French court.

10. Bakhtin, 25.

11. -----, 25-26.

12. -----, 1-58, 303-367.

13. -----, 320.

14. See Stallybrass, ‚Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,‛ in Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. 213

Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 123-144. Bakhtin, 30.

15. One of Medusa’s evil effects was the generation of the monster Chrysoar.

16. For the grotesque’s generic nature in the arts, including its ability to stun see Michael Steig, ‚Defining the Grotesque: an Attempt at Synthesis,‛ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39/40 (1970): 252-260.

17. Stallybrass, ‚Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,‛ 124. Although men’s and women’s knowledge of the male body included an understanding of its genital orifices, men’s generic physicality was commensurate with harmony, order, stability. As Springer, 36 states, the male body, politicized in armor, ‚embodied an ideal of masculinity inherited from the ancient Roman world --- that of corporeal inviolability

18. Androgynes are not classical because they are not individualistic.

19. The bodies making up the Perseus liberating Andromeda and the bronze statuette of Hermes represent a third canon --- the high Mannerist. Their svelte, curving forms embody a mixture of masculine and feminine, just as the Perseus and Medusa do. Note that Andromeda’s body is rather muscular.

20. Quotation of Susanne Scholz, Body Narratives, Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000): 67-68. See also Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (New York: Routledge Press, 1989). Susan Koslow, ‚’How Looked the Gorgon then<’: the Science and Poetics of The Head of Medusa by Rubens and Snyders,‛ in Shop Talk, Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995): 147-149, 349-350. See Ian

214

MacLean’s The Renaissance Notion of Woman: a Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and Mary Russ’ ‚Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,‛ in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Indiana University Press, 1986): 215-230. The Renaissance artist Cennino Cennini wrote in his Il Libro dell’arte that there is no need for the artist to study the anatomy of woman because the female has no fixed proportions. See Cennini’s The Craftsman’s Handbook: ‚Il Libro dell’Arte,‛ trans. Daniel V. Thompson (New York: Dover Publications, 1960): 48.

21. Vieda Skultans, ‚The Symbolic Signification of Menstruation and the Menopause,‛ Man 5 (1970): 639-651. In antiquity the combination of blood, serpents and women’s secret rituals could be fearsome to men.

22. -----, 639-651.

23. Koslow, 148.

24. Stallybrass, ‚Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,‛ 128.

25. See Kisler, 61: ‚The house was the mechanism by which women’s fluid sexuality, more dangerous when mobile, might be controlled.‛ A story known in the Renaissance, that of Pandora, epitomizes contemporary notions of women. Diverse versions of the tale exist, but its crux maintains that Pandora was the first female, who opened a forbidden box, thereby unleashing all the evils known to the world. Pandora is a type for Eve and also a Medusan character, since the box (sometimes a vase), which symbolizes her person, imparts evil effects. Pandora might have originated from an earth goddess. For a detailed discussion of the preceding see Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box, the Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962).

26. Stallybrass, ‚Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,‛ 129.

27. -----, 129.

28. On Botticelli’s Flora see Randolph, 220; Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992): 9, 13, 30-33, 37ff, 41,

215

44, 49, 54, 60-62, 65, 67, 70ff, 76, 118, 120, 123, 130ff, 135ff, 145, 159, 163ff.; Lilian Zirpolo, ‚Botticelli’s Primavera, a Lesson for the Bride,‛ in The Expanding Discourse, Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper Collins Press, 1992): 101-109.

29. For the myth that Florence was born on a bed of flowers see Randolph, 220. Another interesting exemplification of the ideal woman, albeit one that may not have been known in Renaissance Italy, is the Ditchley portrait of Queen Elizabeth I of England by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. The picture shows the queen standing upon a map of England as an imperial virgin who symbolizes and is symbolized by the hortus conclusus of the state (fig. 59). Her white gown, the color of purity, with its many roses, symbols of the Virgin Mary, epitomizes Elizabeth’s virginity and thus the state’s integrity.

216

Chapter 8 Eleonora di Toledo and the Image of the Mother Goddess

Duchess Eleonora’s iconography characterized her as a type for the

Earth Mother Goddess and an embodiment of the Tuscan state and its power.

The pages that follow will examine her role as a ‚divine‛ and earthly Mother who had the ability to handle stately affairs on her own and to act as intercessor for Duke Cosimo I. Ultimately, Eleonora’s iconographical image served as a counterpart to Cellini’s Medusa.

In 1541 Eleonora became Regent of State. That August, while administer- ing governmental affairs in the absence of Cosimo I, she told Majordomo

Pierfrancesco, ‚I feel like a Pope.‛1 However, even when the duke resided in

Florence, there was, in Konrad Eisenbichler’s words, ‚little in town that did not, somehow, feel the power of‛ Eleonora di Toledo ‚and the effect of her insist- ence.‛2 Despite the paucity of information about precisely how the duchess exerted her power and influence, it is known that she owned much land in

Tuscany and even made sure that a portion of Florence’s agricultural output reached Spain and other foreign markets. When her husband was away military affairs were also the duchess’ order of business. Eleonora, an exemplar of

Christian piety and devotion, was even responsible for introducing the Jesuits into Florence.

217

Time and again artists depicted Eleonora as a divine matriarch, and they did so through pagan allegory and Christian figuration. She was, in the words of

Anton Francesco Cirni Corso, ‚a more than earthly queen‛ having a ‚super- human majesty.‛3 However, despite the high praise Eleonora received, she was also the object of disdain. At the beginning of her life Eleonora’s foreignness enhanced her image as a divinity. But with time her character alienated many of her subjects, for she was imperious, haughty, mysterious, and she never smiled to subjects who were not Spanish. Florentines were also fearful that Eleonora would enable Charles V to wield perpetual authority over their state; hence they were unable to accept Cosimo’s statement that Tuscany was independent from the Spanish emperor.4 As Pamela J. Benson has observed, the preceding seems to have incited many Florentines to see the duchess as ‚an enemy and to have increased anti-Medicean sentiment generally, or at least to have aggravated it among those still devoted to the republic.‛5 Benson has also pointed out that the contemporary diarist Signor Marucelli paraphrased the situation when he wrote that ‚the Florentine Republicans hated Cosimo’s wife‛ throughout the 1540s and

1550s. She was, in Marucelli’s words, ‚a proud woman and an absolute enemy of the Florentines.‛6 During the 1540s and 1550s republicans believed that the duchess had a negative effect on Cosimo I’s policies and feared that she would

218 come to control all of Tuscany on her own. One must consider Cellini’s adverse opinions about Eleonora within this context.

The preceding suggests that because the duchess’ influence was great

Eleonora’s contemporaries perceived her as a threat. Further, it appears that her gender made the duchess the target of republican antipathy. Perhaps such disdain would have led Cellini and his viewers to perceive mixed reactions to

Eleonora’s role as duchess as akin to the simultaneous denigration and dignification of Cosimo I’s Medusa as Mother Goddess. Indeed, Cellini would have been keenly aware of contemporary characterizations of Cosimo I’s wife as divine Mother.

Contemporary stylizations of Eleonora as a maternal goddess resulted, in part, from her great fertility. Niccolo Tribolo’s large Fecundità for Eleonora’s nuptial entrata into Florence seems to have been a prognostication for the eleven births the duchess would give during the time she was married to Cosimo I.

Officials placed the statue, which embodied hopes that Eleonora would perpetuate the Medici dynasty, at the city’s entrance. Here, Fecundità resided alongside three other statues – those of Security; Eternity, around whose neck hung the Moon and Sun; and the old man Time. Security held the sprouting , a time honored Medici emblem of perpetuity and redemption. The

219 branch proved that the ability to procreate was closely related to political power.

Once again, redemption tied into the topos of generation. The Sun and Moon as deities that looked over the Medici corresponded to the duke’s and duchess’ status as ‚divine‛ rulers with cosmic powers. Interestingly, artists linked the cosmic bodies to husband and wife as thematizations of their shared rulership, just as Cellini described a nexus of cosmic power in the form of his Perseus and

Medusa. Fecundità, now surrounded by numerous small children, returned at the wedding festivities to proclaim Eleonora the mother of the Tuscan state, an image that would become ingrained in the Florentine imagination.7

For Eleonora’s triumphal entry into Siena Ammanati created a statue of

Cybele which referred to the duchess as the Earth Mother. Cybele’s headpiece was the turreted crown she wore in antiquity. Its shapes mimicked civic buildings and, compositely, an entire city (here, Florence). Cybele stood for the wealth of Tuscany, including the monetary treasure Eleonora brought to the

Medici court. In fact, Cybele held her attribute of Abundance – the fruit-bearing branch, which, like her being, epitomized Eleonora’s contribution to the city’s and the Medici estates’ agricultural production and, therefore, wealth.8 The duchess’ influence on her city’s agricultural supply reinforced her characteriza- tion as a politically powerful matriarch.

220

Cybele also represented the duchess’ fertility, to which the earth’s riches compared. Similarly, in the words of Paolo Giovio, which were written in homage to the duchess’ pregnancy with her second son, Eleonora was ‚another spouting Gaia.‛9

Shortly after Eleonora joined the Medici family, artists began decorations for the Palazzo Vecchio’s living quarters and chapel. Here, the themes of fertility and abundance invested Ammanati’s Juno, the goddess of childbearing, marriage, and the queen of divinities whose head housed a genius that was also a procreative spirit. In this instance generation was a trope for intelligence.

Vasari said that since Juno was the wife of Jupiter (Cosimo’s surrogate), the two mythological characters were of one mind.10 Vasari’s statement reminds one of the intellectual nexus between Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa and suggests that the Medici court was aware of the significance of mente, outlined above, to

Cellini’s statue. It is telling, then, that Juno’s peahen, a symbol of divine wisdom, was Eleonora’s emblem.11

The identification of Juno, who owned a monopoly of earthly power and wealth, with Eleonora informed the decision to place Ammanati’s statue directly across from Cosimo’s throne in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo Vecchio. The sculptures’ situation would have thematized Cosimo’s and Eleonora’s political

221 partnership. However, the plan to pair statue and throne was never realized.

Ammanati also made a large statue of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture/earth and probably Eleonora’s surrogate (1555-1563, fig. 60), to accompany the Sala Grande’s Juno.12 The Ceres’ intended installation in the Sala

Grande would have made it a match for Bandinelli’s Ceres in the .

Designed as a fountain, Ammanati’s Ceres was supposed to supply water to the

Palazzo Vecchio and the Pitti estate. In the preceding context water became an emblem of the earth’s fertility and of the state’s wealth. Thus, the sculpture would have complemented Castello’s Hercules and Antaeus fountain, to which I shall return shortly.

Vasari’s decorative program for the Palazzo Vecchio’s Quartiere degli

Elementi also includes Juno, Ceres and Ops as references to Eleonora. His First

Fruits of the Earth offered to Saturn features the figure whom Vasari called Mother

Earth.13 Edelstein has stressed that the woman stands for Eleonora, the consort of

Saturn (Cosimo I).14 Here, the Earth Mother is responsible for Saturn’s riches, a fact that may have referred to Eleonora’s contribution to Cosimo’s power.

Significant to the duchess’ image as a woman of influence was Bronzino’s state portrait of Eleonora di Toledo (1545, fig. 61), the pendant to Bronzino’s

Cosimo I in Armor. The pictures each have a dark background and luminosity.

222

Emblems of fertility, the laurel branch behind Cosimo and his codpiece (perhaps a needed reminder of his power to father) compare to the product of Eleonora’s fecundity – her son Giovanni.15 The pomegranate, here at the center of

Eleonora’s bodice, was a Renaissance symbol of fertility and an attribute of the

Earth Mother. In addition, throughout the Hapsburg the fruit was valued as a symbol of unity, that is, its seeds stood for subjects united under one ruler. Langdon has observed that the pomegranate’s place on the duchess’ bodice therefore signified the Spanish emperor’s connection via

Eleonora to the Medici and also the imperial crown’s ultimate control of the

Tuscan state.16 Therefore, the portrait of the duchess, the daughter of Emperor

Charles V’s lieutenant-governor Don Pedro of Toledo, would have been a reminder of the limits of Cosimo’s power.

Langdon has noted that the duchess recalls the iconic depiction of the

Virgin Mary enthroned on a long red cushion as if seated on the medieval

Throne of Wisdom, the Sedes sapientiae.17 I propose that, in addition, the Earth

Mother’s role as the throne responsible for kingly power comes into play in

Bronzino’s state portrait of Eleonora. Little Giovanni has neared his mother’s lap, a move that may symbolize his future role as Bishop of Pisa and cardinal.

The mother-and-son format reminds one of pictures of Mary and the Christ

223

Child and therefore complements the other portrayals of the duchess as divine and even brings Eleonora close to the Medici women who identified with the

Blessed Virgin.

The backdrop of Bronzino’s portrait contributes to Eleonora’s portrayal as a divinity. Behind the duchess is a landscape with a river beneath a night sky.

The heavens appear in regal ultramarine, which lightens around her head, forming a type of nimbus, or halo, but from the front both sitters are evenly and sharply illuminated. Eleonora had been reared in the Spanish pedagogy of

Woman as a shining mirror of prudence, valor, wisdom and chastity. Langdon has observed that in Bronzino’s portrait the nimbus of moonlight behind her head represents this Spanish ideology, which also corresponds to the ray of light that hits the water and landscape in back.18 This light in turn ‚mirrors‛ the sky.

I propose that the conventional trope of the Virgin Mary as a spotless mirror compares to Eleonora’s image as a virtuous mirror.19 The duchess is a ‚paradigm of the beloved, chaste consort, regent of Cosimo’s earthly dominions, the ideal, unattainable Petrachan women, and virtuous mirror of heaven on earth.‛20 The duchess is thus an embodiment of the divine whose face, like Medusa’s, is

‚reflected‛ in a ‚mirror.‛

The mirror’s solar and lunar significance comes into play in Eleonora’s

224 portrait as a match to the mirror metaphor in the story of Perseus and in

Bronzino’s Cosimo I in Armor. One may construe the light around Eleonora’s head as a reminder of Mary’s attributes – the sun and moon. The duchess’ state portrait quotes the image of the Virgin Mary of the clothed with the sun and moon, for Eleonora is ambiguously illuminated: frontally lit by daylight, but placed against a night sky.21 Eleonora herself is a luminous emanation of solar and lunar light. The preceding concetto is also found in Petrarch’s poetry.22

For instance, ‚Vergine bella‛ evokes night even as it speaks of the sun:

Beautiful Virgin who, clothed with the sun and crowned with the stars, so pleased the Highest Sun that in you he hid his light.23

Bronzino’s own poetry mentions ‚sweet darkness‛ as a reminder of the sun’s return from night: ‚Alla dolce ombra dell’amata pianta

Che quanto stette a ritornar l’Aurora.‛24

The fertile landscape and river behind her present the duchess as a type for the Earth Mother and a counterpart to Cellini’s Medusa.25 As noted, water has been an emblem of woman, of which Eleonora is the ideal paradigm. Water is also an attribute of the Virgin Mary, and so its presence in Bronzino’s painting brings Eleonora closer to Christ’s mother. The duchess is an image of wholeness amidst a cosmos that is unified around and through her person; that is, the

225 duchess embodies and controls the natural cosmos.

Langdon has stated that Eleonora’s depiction as a deity presiding over

Nature came to echo Francesco Cattani di Diacetto’s description of Natura, which treats the persona of the ideal woman:26

Just as the divine Plato described the body, it exists still, and the soul is very different from it. The soul has intellect, the body does not have this. The soul, like a woman, has command over the body; this, as a servant, is subject and ruled. The spirit is the fountain of unity and of feeling, and of all the other affections that we perceive in the body; this by its nature is fitting to accept, and to bear, and we may conclude that the soul, by far more perfect, has superior rank in the universe.27

Here, the body is not the equivalent of the spiritualized Earth of Bronzino’s portrait, but is a composite of humanity. The notion of the Tuscan state as the progeny of Eleonora probably would have come into play in this frame of vision.

The Medici and probably Cellini were exposed to Cattani’s writing through

Varchi. Cellini also may have known that Bartolomeo Goggio dedicated his De laudibus mulierium, which maintains that women are superior to men, to Eleonora di Toledo.28 One wonders if Cattani’s and Goggio’s premises were, in fact,

‚fitting to accept, and to bear‛ by the Medici court. Just as Duke Cosimo I realized the need to counter rumors about being overly dependent on his mother, he might have felt a need to compete with his wife as a result of written

226 statements about women’s/Eleonora’s ‚supremacy.‛ Indeed, Cosimo I had good reason to feel this way, given that Eleonora was superior in rank to him, enjoyed financial independence and Charles V’s confidence, and had power and influence of her own. In this context it is worth stressing that the duke did not protest Cellini’s denigration of the Gorgon as an epitome of matriarchal power, for the duke was aware of the contemporary need to rise above that power.

As Langdon has noted, the landscape in Bronzino’s portrait provided a

‚concrete context‛ for Eleonora’s power, since under magnification it proves to be the estuary around Pisa, which the duchess governed in Cosimo’s absence.29

Bronzino’s painting thus compares to Cosimo and Eleonora with Maps, which shows the couple perusing greater Pisa and its water supply (1546, fig. 62).

During Eleonora’s time as Regent of State she bought much marshland and had it drained, thereby significantly contributing to Tuscany’s health and wealth. At the time the double portrait was created Cosimo and Eleonora were joint owners of the merchant navy, whose base lay in Pisa.30 One must consider Bronzino’s state portrait of Eleonora and the Erlanger painting as part of a greater effort to employ nature as an expression of Medici power. The same effort fed into designs and decorations for Duchess Eleonora’s most illustrious estate.

227

The Pitti Estate

In 1549 Eleonora di Toledo bought the late medieval building known as the , located on the south side of the Arno River, near the Oltrarno district (fig. 63). In 1569, when Cosimo became duke, it served as the ducal couple’s primary dwelling outside of the urban space of Florence. After the purchase Vasari stepped in and more than doubled the palace’s size. He also built what is now known as the , a walkway that runs from the

Palazzo Vecchio through the Uffizi, above the and to the Pitti. The

Corridorio was, as Franco Cesati has noted, one of the many signs of the privatization of power in ducal Florence: it loomed above domestic dwellings, towers and churches, thus symbolizing the duke’s power over his subjects.31

Because of the corridor Cosimo and Eleonora could now cross the Arno and part of the city in total privacy.

The Medici hired Tribolo as landscape architect. The results of his brilliance include the Boboli Gardens, which are located behind the palace’s corps de logis. Ammanati later created a large courtyard behind the principle façade.

This would link the Pitti to its new gardens. Between the years 1558 and 1570

Ammanati extended the wings on the garden front that embraced a courtyard excavated into a hillside at the same level as the piazza’s façade. The palace’s

228 two ‚arms,‛ whose open ‚gesture‛ embrace the natural world of the Boboli

Gardens on the distant hill, might have stood for Eleonora’s influence, which

‚exuded‛ throughout the whole estate (fig. 64).

The Boboli Garden thematizes maternal influence through an additional spatial concetto. A grotto housing Giambologna’s statue of Florence, or perhaps the Earth Mother Ops at the top of a basin epitomizes, I propose, Eleonora’s role as Mother, for the grotto is an emblem of the womb. The basin, which would have contained water, corresponds to the body of woman (fig. 65). One enters and exits the grotto as if into and out of the womb of Mother Earth. The grotto serves as a place of initiations, while water, as life and a feminine motif, adds to the grotto’s symbolic significance. Nearby, an oval room, whose egg shape represents life, repeats this concetto.

The at the right and left of the Pitti’s Viottolone is, likewise, an emblem of birth, rebirth, and the womb. Ancient representations of the spiral, or the labyrinth on the Mother Goddess’ womb must have been known throughout the early modern age, for a spiralesque ornament is found on the lower abdomen of Issi, the ancient Egyptian goddess of motherhood and fertility, as she appears in Athanasius Kirchner’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652, fig. 66). Ancient myths prove that the labyrinth is the earth’s womb from which the hero who has

229 traveled its path emerges, as if reborn. The hero’s entrance into its center could signify his regression from the active life on earth into the womb.32

Thus, the garden complex of the Palazzo Pitti essentializes the symbolic association between the Earth Mother’s riches and Eleonora’s wealth and power.

A similar configuration exists at the Medici estate of Castello, which Cosimo I associated with his mother, the residence’s original owner.33

The Castello Estate

The garden of Castello is the site of Niccolo Tribolo’s monumental Hercules and Antaeus Fountain (fig. 67). The statue’s subject also appears on the reverse of one of Cosimo I’s coins, which indicates that the fountain was personally meaningful to the Medici ruler. Tribolo’s work celebrated the duke as the solar hero Hercules, for Cosimo’s repertoire of virtues included Fortitude, which

Hercules embodied, and water spouted from decorative goat heads on the fountain. In addition, Hercules was the mythical founder of Florence. The statue may have touted Cosimo’s victory over enemies (personified by Antaeus), but there is something more complicated at work here.34 Before examining the sculpture, it is imperative to consider the tale of Hercules’ triumph over the monster Antaeus.

According to Greek mythology, Antaeus was a monster who lived in a 230 cave in Libya.35 He challenged passersby to wrestling matches and then killed them, for Antaeus’ strength would always be superior to his victims as long as he stayed in contact with his mother Gaia. Earth renewed her son’s strength each time Hercules threw the Libyan monster to the ground. However, Hercules triumphed when he finally realized what Earth was up to and, raising Antaeus up high, crushed him to death.

Tribolo’s statue indicates that Cosimo I would have known Philostratus’

Imagines (third century). The text relates that Gaia helps her son counteract

Hercules’ embrace by surging up and thereby countering Antaeus’ downward thrust against the head of Hercules. Tribolo depicted the solar hero’s back and right leg slightly bent in reference to Gaia’s intensification of the compression of Antaeus’ body onto his foe and thus the interrelatedness of all three antagonists. Edward J. Olszewski has discerned that ‚bend the knee‛ was an Homeric topos for resting, which the Imagines says Hercules did not do after taking the apples of the . The hero’s bent knee denotes his uneasy footing while Gaia surged beneath him, as Philostratus explained.36 I propose that Hercules’ physical position is thus a metonym for his weakness or instability as a man. The struggle that Tribolo portrayed acknowledges that same weakness in Antaeus: the water -- here, a symbol of strength -- issuing from Antaeus’

231 mouth comes from the earth. Just as Hercules squeezes water out of Antaeus’ mouth, so Duke Cosimo I was able to bring water out of the earth through ingenious means --- his aqueduct system. But even though Hercules robs water/strength from Antaeus, Cosimo’s fountain still depends on Earth for its flow.37 At Castello, Hercules’ competition, like that between Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, epitomizes the ruler’s dependence on the Earth Mother.

Had Ammanati completed his Ceres, his statue would have matched

Tribolo’s fountain as a ‚spouting Gaia.‛ Tellingly, a grassy labyrinth, like that for the Pitti, lies beneath Castello’s Hercules and Antaeus. Taken together, the two fountains would have reinforced the political ties between Cosimo I and Maria

Salviati and Cosimo I and Eleonora di Toledo.

Castello’s theme of maternal dependence echoed a story found in Book II of Machiavelli’s Discorsi. Here, , the father of Roman liberty, dons traits that remind one of Duke Cosimo I. The oracle of Apollo as Livy recorded it relates that the first among a group of young men to kiss his mother would rise to the highest office in Rome. The clever Brutus, one among the group, states that his mother is the earth, then pretends to fall so that he can kiss her. Brutus’ behavior in this passage recalls Antaeus’ attachment to Gaia as well as the role of the Medici matriarchs in bringing about and strengthening their menfolk’s

232 power. Clearly, the preceding story and Brutus’ worthiness in Machiavelli’s eyes prove that the ancient idea of the Earth Mother’s ability to breed power was meaningful in the Renaissance.

As shown, the estates of Eleonora di Toledo and Cosimo I de’ Medici, like the Loggia dei Lanzi and the Palazzo Vecchio, were spaces where matters of business and politics took place in the presence of visual representations of female empowerment. As those within and from without the Medici court moved within and among these spaces they must have realized that within the

Medici state versions of the Earth Mother Goddess, such as Cellini’s Medusa, served diversely as substitutes, or surrogates for the most powerful women in ducal Florence. Compositely, contemporary visions of the Earth Mother

Goddess within Florence rivaled Duke Cosimo’s image as ruler, even while some of those images were necessary to his political iconography and persona.

233

Notes

1. Quoted on Langdon, 59. Our knowledge of Eleonora di Toledo is significantly limited. The earliest monograph on her, Anna Baia’s Leonora di Toledo, Duchessa di Firenze e di Siena (Perugia, Italy: Z. Foglietti, 1907), characterizes the duchess as an intelligent, capable woman, but, overall, the text is not illuminating. Konrad Eisenbichler’s dissertation for Harvard University, The Early Patronage of Eleonora di Toledo: the Camera Verde and its Dependence in the Palazzo Vecchio, 2 vols., 1995 remains an important study of Eleonora’s iconography. The same may be said of Cox-Rearick’s Bronzino’s Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). The essays in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2004) discuss the varied faces of Eleonora as divine and earthly ruler and mother, as well as her political and economic contributions to the fabrication of Tuscan absolutism.

2. Eisenbichler, ed., The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2004): 1.

3. Anton Francesco Cirni Corso, La reale Entrata dell’Ecc.mo Signor Duca e Duchessa di Firenze in Siena con la Significazione delle Latine Inscrittioni, e con alcuni Sonetti (Rome, Italy: Antonio Blado, 1560): 4.

4. Pamela J. Benson, ‚Eleonora di Toledo among the Famous Women: Iconographic Innovation after the Conquest of Siena,‛ in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, 153.

5. -----, 153.

6. -----, 153. Marucelli, Cronaca fiorentina: 1537-1555, ed. Enrico Coppi (Florence, Italy: Olschki Press, 2000): 25, 128.

7. For Eleonora’s image as mother of the Tuscan state see, for instance, Bruce Edelstein, ‚La fecundissima Signora Duchessa: the Courtly Persona of Eleonora di Toledo and the Iconography of Abundance,‛ in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, 71-97. Cox-Rearick, ‚La Ill. Sig.ra Duchessa felice memoria: the Posthumous Eleonora di Toledo,‛ in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, 259. The Medici family

234 were dwindling in numbers before Eleonora produced heirs and daughters who strengthened the family through marriage with other elite families.

8. Edelstein, 72.

9. Paolo Giovio, Lettere, in Opere, vol. 1, ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Rome, Italy: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1956-1958): 306-307 (March 10, 1543).

10. Vasari, Le Opere, vol. 8, 73.

11. On the peahen see Langdon, 86-87.

12. On the Juno and Ceres for Eleonora di Toledo and their significance as Earth Mothers see Lazzaro’s ‚The Visual Language of Gender in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture,‛ in Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, eds. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991): 71-113. M. Campbell’s ‚Observations on the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Time of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, 1540-1571,‛ in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’ del ‘500 1 (1983): 819-830 also associates the fountain statues with Eleonora di Toledo.

13. Vasari, Le Vite di piu Eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, e Scultori Italiani, vol. 8, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, Italy: Sansoni, 1878-1885): 31.

14. Edelstein, 89.

15. Cosimo’s friend Paolo Giovio indicated that the Medici ruler employed the laurel branch at the start of his rule, that is, when Cosimo was most in need of showcasing his power and ability to perpetuate the Medici name. See Giovio, Dialogo dell’Imprese Militari e Amorose, ed. M. L. Doglio (Rome, Italy: Bulzoni, 1978): 72ff.

16. For the pomegranate’s attribution and symbolism see Balas, The Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance Art, 59-61, 97, 101. The pomegranate’s symbolic significance is also discussed in Langdon, 69, 70.

17. -----, 74. Langdon, 73 notes that G. Domenico Fiesole’s altarpiece of 1425 would have furnished a precedent for Bronzino’s state portrait of Eleonora, as it

235 shows the Virgin Mary before a lapis cloth of honor.

18. -----, 82. Benson, 136 quotes a letter from Eleonora’s mother, found in the Archivio di Stato, Florence, Mediceo del Principato, 487, f. 514r, that says the duchess will be a mirror and light for all women. Andrea M. Gáldy, ‚Tuscan Concerns and Spanish Heritage in the Decoration of Duchess Eleonora’s Apartment in the Palazzo Vecchio,‛ Renaissance Studies 20:3 (2006): 293-319 discusses the influence of treatises on female education and devotion on Eleonora. Here, one reads that famous women from the Bible, classical antiquity and contemporary legends served as models of virtuous behavior and strength of character for women of the Spanish Renaissance court. The previous practice was also popular in early modern Florence, as shown. See Gáldy, 304. Robert W. Gaston, ‚Eleonora di Toledo’s Chapel: Lineage, Salvation and the War against the Turks, in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, 157-180 believes that Spanish devotional treatises inspired the decoration of Eleonora’s chapel.

19. The Hebrew Bible describes Wisdom as an unspotted mirror of God (Wisdom of Solomon, 7:26), which seems to explain why Mary sometimes appears in art looking at herself in a mirror. The preceding trope signifies the fact that Jesus was immaculately (spotlessly) conceived within Mary, who mirrored Him through her person.

20. -----, 82.

21. Eleonora’s horoscope also included a joining of the sun and moon, as Cox- Rearick has noted. See Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X and the two Cosimos, 290.

22. Langdon, 74-76.

23. Petrarch, canzone 366, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert Durling (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976): 574-575.

24. Quoted on Langdon, 75-76.

25. Langdon (77) believes that in her state portrait Eleonora represents Earthly Venus. 236

26. Langdon, 83.

27. Francesco Cattani di Diacceto, I tre Libri d’Amore di M. Francesco Cattani di Diacceto. Con un Panegirico all’Amore; e con la Vita del ditto Autore, fatta da M. Benedetto Varchi (Venice, Italy: Vinegia, 1561): 15-17.

28. For Goggio’s text see Tinagli, ‚Eleonora and her ‘Famous Sisters.’ The Tradition of ‘Illustrious Women’ in Paintings for the Domestic Interior,‛ in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, 126. Langdon, 82 mentions Varchi’s interest in Diacceto’s work.

29. Langdon, 78.

30. -----, 78, 80.

31. Franco Cesati, The Medici, Story of a European Dynasty (Florence, Italy: Mandragora, 1999): 77-78.

32. For information on the spiral’s association with the Mother Goddess see Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (New York: Penguin Press, 1993): 40, 50-51, 57, 108, 135-137, 620. Although Renaissance Florence would not have known the following, it is interesting to note that in the Upper Paleolithic parts of Old Europe images of a Medusa figure appeared on labyrinth designs, suggesting that she emerged as a version of the Mother Goddess even before her persona developed a few thousand years later in Greece. It is no coincidence that women usually preside over in art and in literature, such as the tale of . The story of Theseus, who killed the at the labyrinth’s center, is an allegory of rebirth. For a similar interpretation of Theseus’ legend see Baring, 137-144. On the labyrinth’s symbolism see Neumann, The Great Mother, an Analysis of the Archetype, 175, 177; Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), Helmut Jaskolski, The Labyrinth: Symbol of Fear, Rebirth, and Liberation (Massachusetts: Shambhala Press, 1997): 53-66. In the medieval imagination the labyrinth’s entrance signified rebirth. According to Christian belief, the labyrinth stood for spiritual rebirths; hence labyrinthine octagons in Christian churches epitomize resurrection and rebirth through baptism. See Jaskolski, 65. The Christianization of the labyrinth came into being in early Christian times and survived into the Renaissance, but during the early modern age it was not as

237 popular as secular treatments of the motif.

33. After the Battle of Montemurlo, as if in homage to Maria Salviati’s role in his success, Cosimo ordered Jacopo Pontormo to paint Villa Castello and a few portraits of himself and his mother.

34. Vasari stated that the neatly landscaped estate of Castello represented the order that Cosimo I imposed on Florence after Montemurlo. See Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden: from the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy, 167 for pertinent references to Vasari.

35. See, for instance, Book IV of Lucan’s Pharsalia.

36. Olszewski, ‚Framing the Moral Lesson in Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus,‛ in Wege zum Mythos, ed. Luba Freedman (Berlin, Germany: Verlag, 2001): 77-78 discusses the bent backs of Antonio Pollaiuolo’s bronze and painted portrayals of Hercules as well as the Homeric topos in relation to this anatomical detail. Philostratus, Book II of Imagines relates the story of Hercules and Antaeus.

37. In light of Castello one must recall a lesson of King Midas’ legend (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XI; Herodotus, Histories, Book VIII) which becomes paradoxical at Castello: water and birth from the earth sanctify rulership. Midas’ legendary power stemmed from his mother, the Earth Goddess, and ultimately because of her he personified ideal kingship. His legend holds that his mother was in the process of carrying water when he became king. Similarly, Jupiter’s riches, like Midas’, included gold, a product of the earth. Jupiter’s ties to Gaia suggest that the earth sanctified his rule. Clearly, Cosimo I would have known as much, since Jupiter was one of his personal emblems.

238

Conclusion

This study has shown that Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa for Cosimo I de’

Medici pits virtù against the Gorgon, an embodiment of female power. The sculpture’s androgyny proclaims, however, that the Greek hero, a surrogate for

Cosimo I de’ Medici, derives power from Medusa, whom Cellini conceptualized as a version of the Mother Goddess. I have shown that the Medici duke’s repertoire of personal imagery includes instances where he aligns with and appropriates the power of Mother figures. A case in point is Cellini’s bust of

Cosimo I. The preceding examples support my argument that the bronze Perseus depends on the power of a Mother figure. In turn, Cellini’s statue reminds one of the fact that Cosimo I rose to power through the aid of two powerful women --- his mother Maria Salviati and his wife Duchess Eleonora di Toledo.

I have considered the theme of maternal dependence at the heart of the tale of Perseus and Medusa in relation to Cellini’s statue. I also have examined the iconography of the Perseus and Medusa as a thematization of shared power.

The Greek hero, a sun figure, matches the cosmic strength of his Gorgon. The solar significance of Cellini’s bronze figures encompasses the head’s fertility, which is a symbol of political power. I have argued that in the preceding respect the head of Cellini’s Perseus symbolizes the enduring caput mysticum of the state,

239 which Cosimo I himself embodied. Thus, the Greek hero rivals the fertile power of Medusa’s head.

The likeness between the facial appearances of Cellini’s Perseus and

Medusa as epitomizes not only their shared power, but also Machiavelli’s tenets that virtù must assimilate itself to its adversary in order to triumph. The male depends on the female and must become like her in order to flourish.

Machiavelli’s thought proves that the subject of maternal dependence was a political concern in Renaissance Florence. Cosimo I, who found rumors of his continual dependence on his mother to be distasteful, would have been keenly aware of the relevance of Machiavelli’s tenets to his own political career. Thus, the Gorgon’s relationship to Cellini’s Perseus points up the weakness of

Medicean patriarchism and of Renaissance masculinity as a whole.

The fifth chapter supports my premise that Medusa’s role as the Mother

Goddess was a threat to male power. Cellini fashioned his Gorgon as sexually symbolic and thus demonstrated that Medusa’s significance as womb and the vagina dentata informs her frightful aspect. The Perseus and Medusa’s sexual symbolism provides a context for a discussion of Cellini’s bisexuality, which led him into trouble with the law.

I have shown that Cellini’s role as a figure hunted by legal authority led

240 the sculptor to identify with his Gorgon, for the bronze Perseus is also a surrogate for Cellini himself. Cellini’s experience with his illustrious Medici patron stifled the sculptor and in paradoxical manner proved that if he were to lose his patron then Cellini would lose his freedom as an artist. Thus, the Perseus and Medusa is in different ways a testament to the enslaving ramifications of living in Duke

Cosimo I’s Florence.

I have argued that Cosimo’s Perseus suggests that the violence of a virtùous man, such as Cellini considered himself to be, may turn against himself.

Similarly, violence contributed to the Medici state’s social instability. The

Perseus’ androgynous nature once again comes into play as a reminder of the

Medici state’s flaws. In this context it is telling that the Greek hero deviates from the canon of the classical body, with which the absolutist state was commensurate.

A foil for Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa was, then, the image of Duchess

Eleonora di Toledo as ideal Woman. As shown, the iconography of the Earth

Mother Goddess was important to Eleonora’s political image, to her achieve- ments and to her capacity to propagate the Medici dynasty through childbearing.

Contemporaries recognized the Earth Mother Goddess, an ideal Woman, as a personification of the Tuscan state, which Eleonora herself embodied.

241

Gaia’s implied presence at Castello suggests that the Earth Mother was also important for the political image of Cosimo I’s mother. The presence of the

Labyrinth at Castello reinforces the maternal theme at the heart of Antaeus’ tale, with the same implication for Maria Salviati.

I would like to stress that the denigrated and dignified image of Cellini’s

Medusa echoes the contemporary notion of female power as both remarkable and threatening. Cellini’s Gorgon is, as the sculptor and his contemporaries, including Cosimo I, may have realized, a foil for all benign representations of the

Earth Mother Goddess and a type for the latter. Medusa’s significance as such comes through in a painting I have discussed earlier --- Pinturicchio’s Pala di

Santa Maria dei Fossi. Taken together, the two faces of female power – benign and fearsome – are ultimately irreconcilable under the patriarchal model of separatism.

242

Illustrations

Fig. 1 Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus and Medusa, 1545-1555, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy.

243

Fig. 2 Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, c. 1446-1460s, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

244

Fig. 3 Hercules killing an Amazon, red figure vase.

245

Fig. 4 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.

246

Fig. 5 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.

247

Fig. 6 Detail of Cellini’s Medusa.

248

Fig. 7 Cellini, Danae and baby Perseus from the Perseus and Medusa’s pedestal.

249

Fig. 8 Cellini, pedestal niche of the Perseus and Medusa featuring Jupiter.

250

Fig. 9 Cellini, pedestal niche of the Perseus and Medusa featuring Athena.

251

Fig. 10 Cellini, Mercury from the Perseus and Medusa’s pedestal.

252

Fig. 11 Cellini, Saltcellar, 1543, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

253

Fig. 12 Cellini, Perseus liberating Andromeda from the Perseus and Medusa’s pedestal.

254

Fig. 13 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus.

255

Fig. 14 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.

256

Fig. 15 Follower of Leonardo da Vinci, Milanese school, Head of John the Baptist, 1511, National Gallery of Art, London, England.

257

Fig. 16 Andrea Solario, Head of John the Baptist, 1507, Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

258

Fig. 17 Cellini, Cosimo I, 1545, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.

259

Fig. 18 Tazza Farnese, interior, second century B.C., National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy.

260

Fig. 19 Tazza Farnese, exterior.

261

Fig. 20 Raphael, The Sistine Madonna, 1513-1514, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, Germany.

262

Fig. 21 Ouroboros, device for Lorenzo de’ Medici.

263

Fig. 22 Giorgio Vasari, The First Fruits of the Earth offered to Saturn, 1555-1557, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

264

Fig. 23 Prudentia, Florence Cathedral, Italy.

265

Fig. 24 Giambologna, Rape of the Sabine, c. 1574-1580, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy.

266

Fig. 25 Cellini, King Francis I on Horseback, medal, reverse, 1537, British Museum, London, England.

267

Fig. 26 Michelangelo, Night, tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy.

268

Fig. 27 Denarius of Septimius Severus, reverse, 193-211, British Museum, London, England.

269

Fig. 28 Cellini, bronze model of the Perseus, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.

270

Fig. 29 Caterina Sforza as Fortuna, medal, reverse, 1480-1484, British Museum, London, England.

271

Fig. 30 Agnolo Bronzino, Cosimo I in Armor, 1545, Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy.

272

Fig. 31 Domenico di Polo, coin of Cosimo I, reverse featuring Hercules with the Nemean Lion Skin, Museo degli Argenti, Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy.

273

Fig. 32 Detail of Cellini’s bronze bust of Cosimo I.

274

Fig. 33 Seventh-century cosmetic Gorgo-shaped vase.

275

Fig. 34 Baccio Bandinelli, Cosimo I, 1543-1544, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 35 Cellini, detail of the Perseus.

276

Fig. 36 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus.

277

Fig. 37 Perseus slaying Medusa, Boeotian amphora, c. 670 B.C., Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

278

Fig. 38 Marzocco, Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy.

279

Fig. 39 Crowned lion, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 40 Medici coat of arms, Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy.

280

Fig. 41 Cellini, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici, c. 1570.

281

Fig. 42 Cellini, David and Goliath, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici.

282

Fig. 43 Cellini, Judith and Holofernes, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici.

283

Fig. 44 Cellini, Bianca Cappello, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici.

284

Fig. 45 Pinturicchio, Pala di Santa Maria dei Fossi, 1495-1496, National Gallery of Umbria, Perugia, Italy.

285

Fig. 46 Donatello, David, c. 1440-1460, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.

286

Fig. 47 Bottom view of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.

287

Fig. 48 Breaking with the Wheel, from the Book of Numquam, 13th or 14th century, Cathedral Library, Soest, Germany.

288

Fig. 49 Taddeo Gaddi, Holy Francis appearing to his Disciples, 1330-1335, Santa Croce, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 50 Ixion and the Torture Wheel, Roman sarcophagus.

289

Fig. 51 Francesco Bartoli’s drawing of Cellini’s cope pin for Clement VII, 1530, British Museum, London, England.

Fig. 52 Bartolomeo Ammanati, detail of Neptune Fountain, c. 1565, Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy.

290

Fig. 53 Francesco di Giovanni Ferrucci del Tadda, Justice, 1581, Piazza Santa Trinità, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 54 Vasari, Allegory of the Quartiere of San Giovanni and Santa Maria Novella, 1563-1565, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

291

Fig. 55 Terracotta clipei featuring Helios, 310-240 B.C., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

292

Fig. 56 Alberghetti family, ‚Furies‛ gun featuring Medusa, 1773, Royal Armouries Museum of Artillery, Fort Nelson, Fareham, England.

293

Fig. 57 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Last Judgment, 1537-1541, Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace, Rome, Italy.

294

Fig. 58 Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, c. 1482, Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy.

295

Fig. 59 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, The Ditchley Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I of England, 1592, National Portrait Gallery, London, England.

296

Fig. 60 Ammanati, Ceres, 1555-1563, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.

297

Fig. 61 Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo and son Giovanni, 1545, Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy.

298

Fig. 62 Anonymous, Cosimo and Eleonora with Maps, 1546, Collection of Mrs. A. Erlanger, Connecticut.

299

Fig. 63 Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 64 Detail of Pitti Palace.

300

Fig. 65 Giambologna, Ops (Florence?), 1565, Boboli Garden, Florence, Italy.

301

Fig. 66 Athanasius Kirchner, Isis, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652.

302

Fig. 67 Niccolo Tribolo, Hercules and Antaeus Fountain, after 1536, Castello, Italy.

303

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