Cellini's Blood Author(s): Michael Cole Reviewed work(s): Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 215-235 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3050690 . Accessed: 12/01/2012 12:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. http://www.jstor.org Cellini's Blood Michael Cole The blood of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa group new order allowed.7 The ideal place for such a work, finally, all (Figs. 1-3) was a marvel of sixteenth-century sculpture. With but awaited its arrival. As Niccolo Martelli, writing in 1546, its implausible volume, Cellini breached everything he knew put it, "The people will look at [the Perseus] with amazement of human physiology and voided his tireless insistence on [when it is] on the platform of his Excellency's piazza, in the anatomical accuracy. With its vivid rush, he contravened the other archway of the Loggia, beside the one with Donatello's determined self-containment of his hero's pose and focused Judith. This space has been empty, and virtually reserved until his figures into two points of convulsive animation. The now for the invention, [come] from the fateful stars, into the statue's first viewers were overwhelmed: "I cannot get mind of our famous Duke; it will adorn the realm with all that enough," wrote Bernardetto Minerbetti in 1552, "of watching metal, nature, art, ingeniousness, knowledge, and style can the blood that pours impetuously from [Medusa's] trunk. make."8 This, although it is metal, seems nonetheless to be real, and it Cosimo, it would seem, had calculated the combination of drives others away out of fear that they will be soaked with it."' Perseus subject, bronze medium, and site. Neither what the Knowing about the harsh rule of the statue's patron, Duke sources reveal about these calculations, nor other evidence, Cosimo I, and remembering the violent history of its site, however, contradicts a further claim Cellini himself twice Florence's Piazza della Signoria, many have found Cellini's makes: the ultimate additions of the body of Medusa, the "impetuous pour" to be simply gruesome. The submission of marble base on which the figures stand, and that base's Medusa to Perseus's blade can remind us of real bodies that ornaments could all be distinguished from Cosimo's first met similar or worse fates in Cellini's Florence, and the hero's idea; all exceeded Cosimo's original desires (Fig. 4).9 Inas- triumphant act may accordingly seem the very identity of much as at least one of these assertions appears in a letter political tyranny.2 As this essay will argue, however, such a meant to be read by the duke, it may well be that the visceral reaction is but one of the responses the blood might amplification of the Perseuswas indeed urged by the artist- provoke, and it is a historically narrow one at that. The first presumably with the support and advice of Varchi, then admirers of the blood were not all admirers of Duke Cosimo, director of Florence's academy and Cellini's close friend; we and they did not couch their praise as praise of Cosimo's know, at the very least, that Varchi eventually authored the rigor. They did not assume that Perseus's violence manifests four inscriptions on the statue's base.10 An expanded project, Cosimo's, nor that it was addressed exclusively to the duke's Cellini and Varchi would both have recognized, could meet enemies. They allowed it, as we shall see, a more complicated Cosimo's desire for a display of metallo, arte, and ingegno in role. even more concrete ways; it could also, however, fulfill that The possibilities for this role are bound up with the story of desire in terms of newly specific interest to the artist. And this, how and why blood entered the program of the Perseus in the it can be argued, had everything to do with the new place first place. Cellini tells us that the duke initially required "just made for blood. a Perseus," "a statue of Perseus, three braccia high, with the By changing the composition to include not only Perseus's head of Medusa in hand, and nothing more."3 This basic petrifying display of Medusa's head but also the beheading motif, as Karla Langedijk first recognized, was already current itself, the point in the story of Perseus that the composition in the imagery of Cosimo's predecessor, Alessandro I, and the would de facto illustrate shifted. Set neither over the sea (as similarity of Cosimo's limited request to the (bloodless) del Prato's medal was) nor in the realm of Atlas (where Ovid's picture of Perseus on a medal coined by Francesco del Prato a Perseus "held out from his left hand the ghastly Medusa few years earlier may indicate that, even before speaking with head"), the notional setting became the land of the Gorgons, his new artist, Cosimo was imagining what might be done with and the time the moment when "[Perseus] smote [Medusa's] a monumental display of Medusa's head.4 The decision-also, head clean from her neck, and from the blood of the mother we should presume, Cosimo's-to commission this as a work swift-winged Pegasus and his brother sprang."" In the new of bronze rather than marble must have had its own attrac- scene, that is, blood was not gratuitous; it multiplied the tions.5 Culturally, Cosimo's bronze would revive a classic myths to which the new sculpture was keyed. Initiating the Florentine material that had lapsed for nearly half a century; birth of the winged Pegasus, the blood could synecdochally technologically, it would demonstrate his regime's premier invoke Pegasus's own eventual role in originating poetry: pyrotechnic capacities. In 1544, the year before the work was "From the blood of the Gorgon was born Pegasus, who is begun, the poet-philosopher Benedetto Varchi was already interpreted as fame; he produced with his foot the Castalian writing that Cosimo's "knowledge and study of metals re- fount or the Pegaseum, [and he is interpreted as fame splend[ed] among his virtues."'6 A new metal Perseus in the because] virtue, overcoming all, wins itself noble renown."'12 Ducal Square could state much the same thing, making The blood, anticipating the flow of the Hippocrene waters, science an implicit factor in the rebirth of art that Cosimo's linked the act of virtue to its glorification. Through mytho- 216 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2 1 Benvenuto Cellini, Perseusand Medusa. Formerly Loggia de' Lanzi, Piazza della Signoria, Florence (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, New York) CELLINI'S BLOOD 217 2 Cellini, Perseus(photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence) graphic logics, its flow could become the origin of art itself, The exterior simplicity in Judith's habit and countenance the principle that glorious deeds mandate their artistic manifestly reveal what is inside, the great mind of that celebration, and thus the very justification of both Cosimo's Woman, and the aid of God; in the same way, the air of commission and Cellini's work. As one later sixteenth-century Holofernes reveals wine, sleep, and the death in his writer explained, referring to the imagery on Cellini's own members, which, having lost their spirits, show themselves earlier medal of Pegasus, "virtuous action makes the foun- to be cold and cascading.16 tains of glory and praise spring forth."'3 And when Cellini himself points out that "valorous and wise poets," recogniz- Holofernes's limbs are "cascanti," Vasari writes, because they ing the virtu'of his sculpture, "covered its base with Latin and have lost their spirits. Having been struck once already with Italian verses," he reminds us that the spilling of Medusa's Judith's sword, the giant's life has retreated from his extremi- bronze blood did indeed result in poetry and fame.14 ties; on the verge of death, warmth lasts only in his heart.'7 As Beyond its symbolic promotion of Cosimo and his executor nearly every writer on Cellini's Medusa, in turn, insists, the Cellini as new founders of the arts, moreover, the blood sequel to Holofernes would make dying even more vivid, reinforced what Martelli, like Cellini himself, specified as the realizing the loss of spirits as the pour of blood. "Perseo primary challenge of the artist's assignment--to make a miro," an anonymous sonateer thus celebrated, "e sotto a lui match for Donatello's Judith and Holofernes (Fig. 5), the work caduto/I1 spirto e '1corpo prezioso e caro/di Medusa" (I gaze that then stood in the Loggia's westernmost archway, and had upon Perseus, and upon what is fallen beneath him, the spirit %long been the Piazza Ducale's unique work of bronze.15 and body, precious and dear, of Medusa).18 In syntax and Consider Giorgio Vasari's description of the Judith, written in conceit, the lines steer away from both the impetuousness of the very years the blood was being designed: the pour and its equine destiny.