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

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http://www.jstor.org 's Blood Michael Cole

The blood of 's and group new order allowed.7 The ideal place for such a work, finally, all (Figs. 1-3) was a marvel of sixteenth-century . 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 '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 's , 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 (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 '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. At issue, rather, is the statue's 218 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2

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antithesis between containment and privation, between a poem, like those of his contemporaries, looks beyond the hero great with his possessing soul and a victim from which point of Ovid's story; the key topic is rather the depletion of spirto is being tapped. Francesco Bocchi's terms are even corporeal vitality. With its second body, the sculpture explores closer to Vasari's: "Medusa's body is ... dead and cascading the relationship of exhaustion and beauty; with its blood, it [cascante]; it makes wholly manifest how flesh and bones reveals what life drains from the face and from the limbs (Figs. deprived of spirit are disposed."19 And Cellini himself offered 6, 7). this description: There are, then, at least two available historical explana- tions for the incorporation of the blood into the program of Qualche saggio di me Perseo pur mostra the Perseus, one involving the narrative that blood entailed, in alto ha '1 testio e '1 crudel ferro tinto, the other involving the sculptural inheritance it claimed. In sotto ha '1 cadavro e non di spirto privo.20 both cases, the advent of the blood not only served Cosimo's it also facilitated the individuation of Cellini's own (Perseus shows my essay: above, he holds the head and the purposes, role as Florence's new star bronze maker. The aim of what cruel, colored sword; beneath he has the cadaver, its spirits follows is to show how, even its not gone.) beyond strictly programmatic rationale, the blood brought Cellini's own artistic identity Medusa is a cadaver, as good as dead, even if her life, like into focus. Considering how the artist's horizons of thought Holofernes', has not quite vanished. As her muscles contract could color the blood's significance, and how his interpreters' and her heart gives its final beat, she comes to her end. The conceits could form around the blood's issue, I want to linger body's distortion updates Donatello's cascading loss, while on the means both Cellini's and his viewers' writings offer for the blood presents the spirit's own desperate motion. Cellini's addressing the blood directly. Employing contemporary texts CELLINI'SBLOOD 219 about the Perseus and its making, I will pursue a two-stage argument. First, I will consider the work's adoption of Donatello's emptying body, proposing why Cellini's given task made this antithesis of the full and the vacant all the more material. Following that, I will reconsider Cellini's use of his literary sources, examining more closelyjust what it is that the artist was trying to render. Throughout, I will attempt to remain faithful to his viewers' belief that Medusa's blood was fundamental to Cellini's artifice-my proposal, in fact, will be that blood is here the medium of a sculptural execution.

Casting Blood

Oh, would that by my father's arts I might restore the nations, and, like my father, infuse breath into the molded clay!-Ovid, Metamorphoses1.363-64

In the climactic scene of his autobiography, Cellini rises from his deathbed, cuffs his traitorous assistants, quenches the fire that is consuming the roof of his house, and battles even the lightning that the heavens direct at his studio, all to cast the Perseus. It is an incomparable episode in sixteenth-century literature, not only for Cellini's skill as a raconteur but also for the momentousness of the historical event it ostensibly records: Cellini, having appropriated the pouring of his statue from the artillery makers who threatened to ruin it, has succeeded in casting the biggest single-piece bronze the world had known. By the time he came to writing, years after the Perseus's success, Cellini knew that it was as a caster that his fame would live. He recognized that his small-scale metalwork had pre- pared him for his Florentine patron's monumental commis- sion, and he believed that it was through metallurgy that he had addressed the challenge of colossal figure sculpture. Within the context of early modern sculpture theory, accord- ingly, Cellini's claim involves a remarkable statement of vocation. In his Vita and elsewhere, his narratives resist the belief, articulated forcefully by Pomponius Gauricus half a century earlier and still alive in the new Florentine Accademia di Disegno, that casting was at best a mechanical process subordinate to modeling, at worst a disreputable task better handed off to a different person.21 Cellini's writings, which begin with the controversial premise that goldsmithing is the basis of sculptural training, comprise a series of claims that defend his established field as an honorable one.22 Rather than isolating his works as a clay shaper, he exaggerates his importance as a caster, even to the point of fiction. The pour itself, Cellini insists, is his. He makes the complete execution 4 wax for Perseusand Medusa. Museo of the cast the feature activity of his studio, and he declares his Cellini, Florence, Nazionale del (photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut) personal responsibility for it through the final moments.23 Unlike Gauricus, Cellini was prepared to claim that found- ing, no less than modeling, must be ingenious. Fully aware that his schemes placed new demands on the skills of experienced only Cellini's own last-minute resourcefulness allowed its founders, his comments exploit the tensions between idea completion.25 In the spirit of Leonardo and Guglielmo and execution that his initiatives implied. When he writes that della Porta, Cellini proved the design and operation of "my workers understood my method, which was very different furnaces and channeling apparatuses to be a scene for artistic from that of other masters in the profession," he acknowl- originality.26 edges, backhandedly, that casting is collaborative, but he also Cellini moreover relied on founding, and notjust forming, underscores the novelty of his task.24 Left in the hands of the when articulating his most ambitious imitative claims. For the "foundry masters," the Perseuscast would have been wrecked; Michelangelesque marble sculptor, the prime exercise of 220 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2

Ilk,

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5 Donatello, Judith and Holofernes. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut) design was the extraction of a composition from a single hunk Judith had done), intentionally making the operation more of stone. Cellini appreciated this challenge. Commissioned difficult.29 And when he came subsequently to describe his for the Loggia, his Perseushad to stand before 's feat, he conveniently suppressed the fact that not only the , the century's most enviable posting of the feat; in his blood from Medusa's head but also the wings on Perseus's Treatiseon Sculpture, he attacks sculptors who, having planned feet and head had been made separately. Cellini presented badly, are forced to piece together their figures.27 While the achievement of his cast as one that happened in a single planning the Perseus, Cellini undertook his own first two gesture, and thereby both likened his achievement to that of marble , both as complicated arrangements discov- the greatest stonecutters and set the standards for a new kind ered in single blocks. Because bronze is not carved, Cellini of work. The design of both figure and apparatus were to push could not think of the Perseus as a matter of recognizing the the limits of the large, freestanding, unpieced sculpture. form in the stone. The act of metallic fusion, however, offered Corollary to this, casting allowed Cellini to confront the Cellini a way to emulate the accomplishment of a monumen- most visible technical difficulty of marble sculpture, that of tal piece without joins. Transposing the demand for material raising an arm holding something in its hand without having unity into the technical problem of managing the single it break. In stone, the effort was that of competing with the pour,28 Cellini rejected the safer and more practical option of block's strength, extending a cantilevered piece from the core casting the Perseus in sections (as the caster of Donatello's as dramatically as possible.30 With a one-piece cast, this could CELLINI'S BLOOD 221

be converted into the difficulty of leading the metallic flow through the entire mold without interruption. In his Vita, Cellini gives us the following conversation with his patron:

The Duke said, "Now, tell me, Benvenuto, how is it possible that this beautiful head of Medusa, which is way up there in Perseus's hand, can ever come out [in your cast]? I responded without hesitation, "Now look here, my Lord, if your most illustrious excellency had the knowledge of art which he claims to have, he would not be afraid, as he says he is, that the beautiful head would not come out. Rather, he would be afraid for the right foot, which is way down there, and a bit displaced.31

The exchange, written after the fact, is almost certainly a fiction, but it pursues an important point. The duke's igno- rance (as Cellini would have it) lies in the fact that he has been trained only to appreciate marble: by habit, he looks at what is raised in the hand. Cellini's lesson is on how to see the difficulties of his art. The lifted marble arm is trumped by the stepping bronze foot, and the legible signs of his predeces- sors' greatness are translated from results of cutting to results of casting. 7 detail: head of Holofernes In promoting his Perseus as his most important sculptural Donatello,Judith, (photo: Alinari/Art Resource) legacy, then, Cellini was convinced that its significance de- pended on its ultimate accomplishment in metal. Dramatiz-

ing his use of the furnace, Cellini domesticated the defining challenges of the fields of his competitors into the terms of his own profession. What needs to occupy us most, however, is the vantage of casting that Cellini took to be the paramount evidence of its virtuousness, the function that let it trump even the greatest marbles. This he found not in a problem of design per se, but in a mythical notion that focused more directly on the cast itself. Presenting himself as a pourer of metals, Cellini discovered, he could do something no stonecut- ter could: he could explain just how he spirited his figures. At the deciding moment in the Vita scene, as Cellini recounts the outcome of the almost disastrous clotting of the metal, he narrates as follows:

I had [my assistants] get a half cake of tin, one which weighed about 60 pounds, and I cast it [lo gittai] into the clot in the furnace. This, with help from the fire and from stirring with iron bars and pokers, became liquid in a few minutes. Once I saw that I had resuscitated the dead, against the belief of all of those idiots, so much vigor returned to me that I no longer felt any fever or fear of death.32

Much has been written on Cellini's account of this revivifica- tion, but what has not been emphasized is that when Cellini says he has raised the dead, he is not speaking of his sculpture at all, but only of the bronze itself. His assistants' betrayal was to let the metal clot, his salvation is to make it remelt. Cellini rejoices even before the metal enters the channels. Later, once it has moved, he repeats the idea:

as everyone saw that my bronze had so perfectly been made liquid, and that my form was filled, they all helped 6 Cellini, Perseus,detail: head of Medusa (photo: Dimitri Zikos) and obeyed me with spirit and joy, and I ran about 222 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2

commanding and helping, calling out: "O Christ, how with If one could witness the spirit of metals, Allegretti thought, your immense virtu'you resuscitated from the dead, and then one should be able to isolate it. And if one indeed could climbed gloriously to Heaven!"33 isolate it, then one should be able to capture it and harness its virtue. Only the second time he brings up revival, with the invocation Allegretti's conjoining of movement, liquidity, heat, and to Christ, does Cellini refer more generally to the enlivening life in metals is representative of the kind of naturalist of the sculpture itself. And even here, he preserves the understanding and language Cellini had available when original resuscitation: the assistants are cheered, first, because contemplating his own challenges and accomplishments.39 Of they see that the bronze has liquefied. interest to us here, however, is less Cellini's and more The idea that bronze could be brought to life is not alchemy his For this reason, the of the theme something Cellini made up. It draws on conceptions about pyrotechnics. handling metals that he would have understood as both ancient and in another book Cellini probably knew, Vannoccio Biringuc- cio's De la is still more contemporary, scientific assumptions about their nature, pirotechnia, revealing: their origins, and their potential. Fundamental here is the want from bodies ancient Greek belief, questioned but never fully rejected in [Alchemists to] separate spirits [of the , that the primary ingredient in metals was metals], and would return them there at will, as if they watery, and that metals formed when waters (or waters-to-be) were daggers taken from their sheaths. I would believe that became trapped in the earth and congealed.34 One implica- it is possible, with the will of fire, to extract those sub- tion of this, for sixteenth-century readers, was that the stances in things that are called spirits and to reduce them "natural" state of metals was not quite solid, but rather into vapors. But I will not believe that, once extracted, they "unctuous." Acknowledging this hydrous basis of metals, can be returned there, for such an effect would be nothing sixteenth-century metallurgists could not overlook what Aris- other than a knowledge of how to resuscitate the dead.40 totle said about water itself: "in water pneuma is present, and in all pneuma soul-heat is present, so that in a way all things Biringuccio neatly describes the venture of metallic respirit- of [made water] are charged with soul." 5 While neo- ing, but also emphasizes its unrealizability. Here he makes Aristotelians over the details of the argued generative process light of alchemists, just as elsewhere he mocks those who the none the idea that philosopher described, disputed "believe that even outside a woman's body one can generate metals, with water, were animated. As the sixteenth- originating and form a man or any other animal with flesh, bones, and summed "Aristotle century metallurgist Giorgius Agricola up: sinews, and can animate him with a spirit."41 That his remarks that the material of metals is not mere water, but rather a says should appear in a book on casting, however, is telling, and water found in some sentiment and passion."'6 Aristotle's their place invites us to think further about the way Cellini association of metal, liquidity, and pneuma suggested that the brings similar language into his own story. hard metals of the world were found at the edge of a spirited, Had Cellini viewed the vain exercises Biringuccio was liquid state. he, would have denounced them. As We know that Cellini was familiar with the basics of imagining, perhaps too, a sculptor, however, Cellini's perspective on the business was Aristotelian theories of generation well before he began work different. Occupied, like every other artist of his time, with as a bronze caster. His saltcellar, devised in in early the of how to his life and motion, Cellini 1540, shows the combination of earth and water responsible question give figures could not have overlooked the in what we have for salinity and rehearses a similar principle of origination. By suggestiveness seen call the "infusion" of one's "created the time Cellini came to write about his casting of the Perseus, Allegretti things." From sense that the vain alchemical dream of decades later, he would have been able to think through (and Biringuccio's express) such ideas in even more refined ways. He might, for restoring spirits lay dangerously close to his very practical instance, have considered the writings he knew by his friend business of casting, it will seem a small step to change the Antonio Allegretti. With "art," Allegretti explains, one can emphasis while maintaining the analogy. When the bronze "dissolve the perfected metals, disposing them, or rather clot melts, Cellini describes what results as an elixir of life. forcing them, to turn back into water; for water is their first And his larger enterprise presented a schema in which such material, that from which they were created and made."' life could be made, then imported into the body.42 Poured Allegretti's lines, like Cellini's own, not only remember the into the statue, the metal animates it; simultaneously, it cures Aristotelian etiology but also reverse it, finding in metals' Cellini of his own mortal illness and invigorates everyone watery constitution a prime challenge: if the origins of metals around him. Cellini's vocation, unlike Biringuccio's, could let require that there be a spirit within, experience showed that him treat the founding of statues as a fulfillment of the that spirit could be witnessed. A dilettante alchemist like impossible alchemical assignment. this would have a few Allegretti, getting far, gone steps Both in the Vita and elsewhere, Cellini plays out this plot further: against a background of God's own acts: [Metal is] a hard and dense material holding within it that living spirit which infuses all created things [che a le create Quel immortal divin Creator degno cose infonde] and which alone gives them life, motion and dia l'alme a noi, simil al suo valore; sense. It cannot show its forces unless its hot and lively poi le vesti di questo bel furore, virtue is quickly freed where it lies encumbered.38 qual fe' di terra, e non d'ombra o disegno. CELLINI'S BLOOD 223

(That worthy immortal divine Creator gave us souls, in obvious reference as well, for there was but one sculpture of likeness to his virtue, then clothed them with this beautiful Jove by Cellini in Florence, and it was on public display (Fig. furor, which he made of earth, and not of shadow or 2). This was, of course, the mythological father of Perseus; design.) Cellini had advertised this geniture on the front of his statue in the piazza, and the comparison was not missed. God the Note the sequence of creation here. started with soul, Cellini's friend Agnolo Bronzino, in fact, underscored the in To who been then he clothed it ("le vesti") clay. those have importance of Perseus's parentage to Cellini's own creation of what the bronze following Cellini's repeated descriptions myth. In one of the poems about the statue he sent to Cellini, familiar: after the anima maker does, this will sound making Bronzino begins by addressing not the Perseus/Medusa pair, for Cellini he (the "soul," or core form) his Perseus, writes, but rather the statuettes of baby Perseus and his mother, with those earths" that he had "clothed this prepared ("io Danae, which, like the , appear in the socle of Cellini's il mio Perseo di terre che io avevo vestivo quelle acconce").43 monument (Fig. 8): Knowing that God made his first man of terra, we might now wonder whether God, so, was the model- doing exemplifying Ardea Venere bella; e lui ch'in pioggia er's or the founder's art. D'oro cangiasti, Amor, che tanto puoi, Elsewhere, Cellini that God's suggests sculpting paradigm Chiedeva; ond'egli a' dolci preghi tuoi includes not the work of but also that of only clothing Le scese in grembo, ov ogni grazia poggia.47 infusing: (Beautiful Venus burned, and he whom you, Love, who can Dio fe' il prim'uom di terra, e poi l'accese do so much, changed into a shower of gold, beseeched. coll'immortal suo spirto, vivo e santo; Then he, answering your sweet prayers, climbed down into e gli die '1 mondo in guardia tutto quanto; her breast, where every grace is posed.) poi 'n virgin vaso a rivederlo scese.44 In Bronzino's tale, Danae burns forJupiter until Love makes made the first man of then lit him with his (God earth, the god himself turn into a shower of gold that fills Danae's immortal and He him the whole spirit, living holy. gave breast. The wordplay is dense, for Bronzino apostrophizes to to see him world watch over, then, again, redescended Cellini's figures not as Danae and Perseino but as Venus and into the virgin vessel.) Cupid. The child is thus both the desire that causes Jupiter's transformation and the warm result of Danae's fulfillment, God's here, as is of terra, earth or the figure previously, clay, the actual burning within her breast and the child from it, same material with which Cellini works, both when forming now at her side. Looking to the other face of Cellini's models and when molds. The itself on to forming poem goes pedestal, Bronzino then addresses Minerva (Fig. 9): make this analogy, repeating its story of God's career by summarizing Cellini's: "Fe' Perseo Benvenuto, e Cristo in Starete, disse, omai, Minerva in terra; croce" (Benvenuto made Perseus, and Christ on the cross). E fe' d'entrambi un sol giovin, chall'ali The truncated verb fe' is identical with that of the poem's E al tronco Gorgon, Perseo dimostri. opening, as is the sequence: Cellini, like God, made his first E quinci appar divina agli occhi nostri man, then he made his savior. The argument here is a L'opra, che il bene e la bellezza serra, variation on a familiar paragone theme: sculpture defeats Suprema gloria de' tuoi dolci mali. painting because God sculpted.45 Cellini's novelty is to insist that the ultimate sculpting gesture is the addition of, as the (He said, "You will remain, Minerva, on earth," and he poem says, a "spirto vivo." This makes his argument suitable made of both a single young man. Thus winged, Perseus not only as a case for the superiority of work in terra, but also appears at the trunk of the Gorgon. And so the work, as an apology for casting. Cellini's resuscitation, first of his which encloses the good and the beautiful, appears divine bronze, then of his statue, schematically repeats the bringing to our eyes, the supreme glory of your sweet pains.) of the first man to life. At points, Cellini makes the autobiographical element in At the moment Minerva, the protectress of art and of these arguments explicit: alchemy, enters the poem, the agency of Perseus's creation is shifted from the conjunction Love-Jupiter-Danae to Cellini Poi che dal gran Fattore alone. The bellezzaof the boy is no longer just Danae's gift to s'accese '1 lume mio, Perseus but is an aspect of the opra. The "sweet pains" of Sia '1 Benvenuto, disse '1 mio buon Giove.46 Danae's desire for Jupiter are now Cellini's own, becoming the labor of love that is his work. Especially interesting for our God, the great Maker, gave spark to Cellini, then named him, purposes is how these final lines allow a rereading of the just as he had done once before with Adam. But crucial this unmistakably Petrarchan stanza that precedes them. Describ- time is the last phrase, where Cellini refers to God as Jove. In ing Danae's heat asJupiter's gold enters her, Bronzino writes: Cellini's time, Giove could be used generally as a classicizing designation for the singular generator of humanity, and Ma come avvien s'a fuoco esca s'appoggia Cellini uses the name elsewhere in specifically Christian O qual di neve al Sol, quaggiii fra noi contexts. In this case, however, mio buon Giove has a second S'accese e strusse al caldo seno; e poi 224 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2

8 Cellini, Perseus,detail: Danae and baby Perseus (photo: 9 Cellini, Perseus,detail: Minerva (photo: Kunsthistorisches Kunsthistorisches Institut) Institut)

Seco s'unio viepiui che pietra in loggia. Poetic inventions like Bronzino's illustrate the kinds of (But as it happens if tinder rests in fire, or snow in the sun, creation myths the Perseus allowed, and Cellini's own later so down here among us [the gold] is lit and melts in the refashioning of his art indicates how important it was that this hot breast, and then unites with it [to make something] creation took place, so to speak, within the breast of the much more than stone in the loggia.) earth.49 Making man will have to go beyond giving him a form in clay; it must also involve ignition. If the making of the first How literally is Bronzino imagining Cellini's repetition of man is to be emulated, one cannot just shape bodies, one Jupiter and Danae's act? When the fire burns, Minerva must also, Prometheus-like, animate them.50 Cellini's stories arrives, and a statue "viepifi che pietra" appears. Are we, of casting are consistent with his poetry insofar as the marvel then, directed to think specifically about Cellini's heated of Cellini's fusione (casting) is its capacity for infusione (infu- filling of the body with his own golden metal?48 sion). Once liquefied metals are understood as living, the CELLINI'SBLOOD 225 pouring of them into the armed mold could reproduce the nevertheless, Cellini's clarification that the return to Lethe is archetypal act of life-giving. This lets Cellini hold his casting glorious, as well as his implication that the return was allowed up to painting,just as he would hold it up to marble sculpture. through the champion's worldly deeds, distances us from the Conversely, the poetry inflects Cellini's technical vocabulary. passive suffering that a pointedly Purgatorial scene would The earthen mold has an anima, an inner form that deter- require. Cellini's specification that one returns to Lethe mines its shape, and an ossatura, a steel "skeleton" that holds sooner evokes Virgil's and Plato's stories of how, after death, it The infusion into its its together. goes bocca, mouth.51 the river purges the spirit so that it can reenter the body This us back to brings very nearly our primary topic of reborn. The protagonist who casts blood and metals into the blood and it is Minerbetti it seemsto spirits: although metal, says, world arrives at the beginning of immortality. This affects how be blood.Are we the blood's we will now want seeing effusion, we understand the deeds at the center of the poem. We might to ask, or do we see that the that emitted it was proof body take "casting blood" to mean spewing blood, and thus to be a infused? metallically labor that is ultimately redemptive, or redeemable; elsewhere Minerbetti's innocent remark could have been probably Cellini insists that work on his marble Christ was the contrary in Cellini's time various lines. amplified along Mining experts of "casting away his hours" on vain activities.58 Situating would have observed that metal formed in "veins" in the sangue between roba and pregiati metalli, the pun in this case earth, "almost like the veins of blood in the bodies of invites a comparison between the suffering of bloodletting animals." The alchemist whom Cellini asked for an explana- and the sculptor's work.59 As Michelangelo allegedly re- tion of mining must have commented on this.52 Aristotelian marked to Ammanati, "In my works, I shit blood."'60 Alterna- pneumatology, furthermore, offered accounts homophonic tively, we might read "casting blood," as Torquato Mabellini of the origins of human blood (hence spirit and life) and of has, to mean the spilling of others' blood; to gettar sangue is to metals; both were infusions of water into earth. One could, as do violence. It is, of course, easy to imagine the unrepentant Agricola did, make the point by quoting Timocles: "silver is double murderer Cellini intending such a sense, and the the soul and the blood of mortals.""53Alchemists, on the other virtue rewarded in this respect, too, brings Cellini close to hand, might have pointed to the theories of metallic etiology Plato's or Virgil's spirits.61 Perseus, we should observe, is according to which metals were generated of "seeds" and surely meant to be "glorious" as he spills Medusa's blood. blood, just as people are. "Whoever claims that vapor is the For whatever opacity remains, the poem binds blood and material of metals, says nothing other than he who calls the metals, and does so in ways that implicate both the imagery of material of birth the blood of the male and the female, the Perseus and the sculptural act behind it. If we allow the whence seeds are generated."54 "Menstruum" (mestruo), a third line, "per tornar gloriosi al flume Lete," to set the solvent in which metals dissolved, was a standard ingredient in parameters for the gloss on what precedes it, these conjunc- sixteenth-century attempts at metallic transmutation.55 And tions will contribute to one conception of sculptural We Biringuccio, citing proof of antimony's proximity to metals, virtuf. might, however, also question this noted that a "bloody liquor" could be extracted from it.56 conception by looking more critically at the form in which the sonnet has appeared Most interesting, though, is Cellini's own poetry. In 1559, ever since its first publication in the nineteenth century.62 on learning ofVincenzo Danti's triple failure in attempting to The poem exists in one draft. It was never intended for cast the statue of and Antaeus for the garden fountain print, and was never even rewritten so of the Medici villa at Castello, Cellini wrote a series of sonnets as to make it presentable to others. In the it we find that the at Danti's expense. Most of these pun on the word gettare manuscript, happens, third line of the stanza was not tornar al (cast), comparing Danti's miscasting to Hercules's own toss- original "per gloriosi flume Lete," but rather "non vi mettete a far se non ing away of Antaeus. But one sonnet in particular ends with sapete.'63 to make his conceit sound more interesting lines: Cellini, perhaps attempting more erudite, changed his mind about how to conclude the stanza. It is tempting to think that the first two lines were written with Voi che nel mondo pur gittar volete the draft's deleted conclusion, rather than the one known o roba o sangue o pregiati metalli, today, in mind. Left intact, the of the stanza per tornar gloriosi al flume Lete; original nugget would have been and more who gittai nel fier 'lion, pria infra i Galli; simpler grammatical: "you want to cast substance or blood or materials into the se ben feci, '1 mio premio voi sapete: prized world, don't begin if don't know how." Such a remark brutto a '1 creder saper poi far tre falli.57 you highlights the second face of the central pun, the reference to ([O] you who want to cast substance or blood or prized the enterprise of metal casting at which Danti failed. Blood metals into the world, to return glorious to the river and precious metals, in this case, could betoken each other Lethe-I cast in proud Florence [in 'Lion: Ilium/home of interchangeably: one can found with the blood of the earth, the Marzocco] and earlier among the Gauls [i galli: Gauls, and one can throw one's mettle into the task. cocks]; although I did it, you know my reward. It is The related threads of the discourses we have been follow- condemnable to believe you know how, then make three ing can now be drawn together. Cellini, assigned to undertake failures.) a monumental bronze response to Donatello's Judith and Holofernes,studied in particular his predecessor's depiction of The first stanza is intentionally difficult. In Cellini's Florence, lost spirits; with his Medusa, Cellini imitated Donatello's own the river Lethe could not have been mentioned without drained figure, but portrayed those spirits directly. Cellini awareness that Dante placed it at the top of Purgatory; gave the spirits a medium in metal, and as such attempted to 226 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2

10 Giovanni Battista d'Angeli, after Giulio Romano, PerseusSacrificing to His Creators(photo: Graphische Sammlung Albertina)

meet the poetic expectation that his bodies, like Donatello's, after all, play a prominent role in the story of Perseus. Having be infused. Exposing blood, he demonstrated just what rescued , Ovid writes, infused the body, and he illustrated how that essence could move across the container's threshold. The metal of this Perseus builds to three gods three altars of turf, the left to blood, moreover, could seem, to one with Cellini's science, Mercury, the right to thee, O warlike maid, and the central specially resonant as the carrier of the infusing spirits. one to Jove. To Minerva he slays a cow, a young bullock to Rendering liquidity in metal effectively recalled spirits already the winged god, and a bull to thee, thou greatest of gods.65 there. By the same token, the status of his bodies as infused was naturalized by descriptions of the act that generated It is suggestive that Cellini's altar includes all three of the them, the act of pouring that Cellini insisted was at the center figures on Ovid's. The artist could thus well be alluding to a of his profession. Ultimately, domesticating the terms of specific detail from the Perseus narrative, one he could have metallurgy allowed the artist to corroborate his fulfillment of known not just from texts but also from other images, for the assigned aesthetic of infusion. The fictive blood, as liquid instance, the etching designed by his friend Giulio Romano metal, could, in retrospect, record the spirits that Cellini had (Fig. 10). If, as Brandt implies, Cellini intends his base to literally poured into the sculpture. Retold, the act of turning function as an altar (and not merely to incorporate classiciz- real bronze into the fictive insides of Medusa illustrates the ing, but contentless, shapes), then the object's role as a base process of turning real bronze into the real insides of the becomes more consequential. We might think, for example, statue's ossatura, or corpo.Cellini cast blood. about what should be on an altar: as Cellini certainly knew, This reading is enriched when we take into account some of Medusa occupies the space of immolation, the space of fire.66 the other ways the statue has, in the recent literature, been Viewed against contemporary representations of pagan rites, framed. Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, for example, encour- we could infer that Medusa's blood pours in the midst of a ages us to look again at the base on which the Perseus stands: notional heat. Along similar lines, we might question the developing a suggestion from Christof Thoenes, she proposes effect, vis-ai-vis the base, of Perseus's own gesture. It is that this socle be read as an altar. The idea is a powerful one; intriguing to consider whether Cellini looked carefully at, for comparison with Renaissance renderings of Roman altars instance, the Pygmalion and Galatea by his friend Bronzino leaves little doubt that Cellini had such a form in mind. On (Fig. 11), whether he thought about the relation of sacrifice this basis, Brandt enjoins us to read the pedestal as "an altar to the sculptor's own act of transformation, about how life to the Olympian gods who protect the Medicean 'son ofJove,' comes to be given through fire and death.67 An argument in now Duke Cosimo I."64 Although the poems of Bronzino and this direction could draw on Mircea Eliade's classic studies of others treat the statuettes Cellini includes on the base as the role of blood sacrifice in metal casting, and specifically on Perseus's creators as much as his protectors, and caution us his thesis that "life can only be engendered from another life from limiting the figures to a statement of Medicean geneal- that has been immolated." The transfer of life, its shift from ogy, much speaks for the kernel of Brandt's proposal: the base one being to another can be viewed as an almost primordial is dedicated to the gods it contains. Such dedicated altars, strategy in metal forging; Eliade's discussion of the impor- CELLINI'SBLOOD 227 tance of animal and human oblations in various cultures' founding rituals is one way to normalize Cellini's own act of creation.68 To expand our scope in a different way, we might also consider John Shearman's observation that Michelangelo's David and Baccio Bandinelli's Herculescan be (and were) read as having been enfolded into the Perseus's fiction. Cellini's group realized a subject that thematized the petrifaction of the beholder in a material that was perspicuously not stone, and it occupied an architectural plot on which two gigantic marble works seemed to gaze (Fig. 3). The opportunity was extraordinary: Perseus could seem to transform his two stone predecessors into the first and lasting evidence of his own petrifying weapon. Shearman does not discuss just how Cellini hoped to make this gorgonization operate, how the artist could make plain that his sculpture was, as Bronzino put it, "viepiui che pietra." But if we can now say that it is through infusion that bronze exceeds marble, then we can infer that it is precisely the blood that guarantees the whole effect. It is its warmth, its red life, that differentiates Cellini's bronze from its petrified companions:69 Ovid himself narrates that when Perseus held up the Medusa's head, he made his opponents into "stone without blood [silicem sine sanguine].",,70 Cellini's 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 11 Agnolo Bronzino, Pygmalionand Galatea.Florence, Galleria degli (photo: Scala/Art Resource) Rendering Blood

But after he felt the chilled bronze in his hand, he cried, were extra Cellini once intended for the could the Gods themselves be deceived by my pour?- gorgoni Gorgons statue.74 in the Cellini to Pagano Pagani to Cellini, 155472 Eugene Plon, fact, only specialist comment on the phrase, was certain that the gorgoni were Between the comments of poets, the forms with which Cellini independently cast Medusa heads.75 frames his work, and the setting the statue had to enter, Unknown to Plon, however, was a second, more specific, perspectives accumulate that allow us to read Cellini's sculp- document of the weighing. From this we learn that Cellini ture in much the way that he himself read Vincenzo Danti's: made not just any Gorgons but the "gorgoni del collo e della his picture of virtui might be taken as an allegory of casting. testa della medusa" (gorgoni of the neck and of the head of And it is by now tempting to see Perseus's gesture as the Medusa).76 The document leaves no doubt: the gorgoni are heroic (as Hercules' was the pathetic) pouring of metallic- exactly the two blood formations that hang from Medusa's blood/spirited-metal into the place where the monument two parts. We are faced, consequently, with new consider- should or does stand. One further piece of evidence, however, ations. How, to begin, should we now reconstruct Cellini's remains to be addressed. There is, it turns out, another actual making of the blood? The Medusa was cast in June document that bears directly on the blood, one that requires 1548, the Perseus in the winter of 1549, but the pieces us to view its role in more complicated terms: surprisingly, mentioned here were cast only in the summer of 1552.77 Cellini gives his blood a name. Cellini thus seems to have rendered the blood independently, In the accounts preserved of the weighing of pieces of the designing it as a piece on its own, turning to it only after he monument cast subsequently to the Perseus, we learn of a had seen how the figures themselves would look in cleaned Merchurio,a Danae, a Perseino,four alie (wings), and two gorgoni condition. Such a scenario, perhaps, helps make sense of di Medusa.73All but the last of these items present no problem; another small work from Cellini's hand, the mysterious they can be readily identified with components in Cellini's bronze study of Medusa's head, today preserved in the assemblage. The due gorgoni, however, have long remained Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 12). The function of this something of a mystery. Since the Perseus figures were not the piece, datable on the basis of chemical tests to Cellini's only metalworks Cellini had under way at the time of the lifetime,78 and presumably identical with the "testa di Medusa record, one could guess that the document records more di bronzo" listed in the inventory of Cellini's studio on his miscellaneous pieces. As there is also evidence that Cellini death in 1571,79 has never been established. The wrist executed components for his monument that were ultimately grasping the hair is curiously truncated, with no indication omitted, it might seem possible, alternatively, that these that the hand was ever intended to be attached to an arm. At 228 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2

13 Detail of Fig. 12

documents in question were written, spotlights and explains Pliny's word:

[Coral] has also been called gorgonian, because the poets imagine that the gorgons were converted into stone. Thus Pliny, writing about gems, says these words: "gorgonian is, in effect, nothing other than coral, and the reason for this name is that is converted into the 12 Cellini, Head of Medusa. London, Victoria and Albert gorgonian transformed, Museum (photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Art hardness of stone."83 Resource) Surprisingly, Agricola glosses Pliny's definition not with refer- ence to the petrifying power of Medusa's face, but rather with the assertion that Gorgons themselves, like gorgonian corals, rigidify.84 Cellini's term gorgoni accordingly requires us to the however, the metal has been filed down to a neck, fairly consider the that Medusa's metal not flows but even Did Cellini exclude the blood possibility only plane (Fig. 13). simply also hardens.85 from the or did he rather design the head for the blood study, For this, we return to Ovid's of the Perseus as a model onto which the artist could fit different might telling specifically, Now, we need to read not about the versions of blood he had made in a less story. though, beheading separately, perhaps of Medusa but about the rescue of Andromeda: durable material, in order to visualize them?80 The date of the reference to orients about gorgoni questions Having killed the dragon, Perseus came down from the the sequence of Cellini's work on the Perseus and may help us rock and sat on the bank of the sea to wash himself, for he how he about his different To discuss imagine thought pieces. was soaked with the dragon's blood. As he did this, the Cellini's actual treatment of the we must also blood, however, head of Medusa got in his way, so he set it on the ground. tackle the issues raised the documents' word- philological by So that the head did not crack, Perseus gathered some From modern we to find that Cellini's ing. Italian, expect seaborne sticks of wood to set it on, and put them on the term is the of In his gorgoni plural gorgone, Gorgon. time, too, ground. Immediately those sticks hardened as stone does, the word was familiar a gorgone enough; mentioning Gorgon, and from the blood of the head they became vermilion. It one could be speaking of a member of Medusa's family, the is thus that coral is made, and this was the first coral. of Medusa or even Plon her head in person herself, (as knew) Seeing this, and the death of the dragon, the sea nymphs isolation.81 no of the Medusa nor However, example story, any marveled greatly. And as Perseus entered the water, the or seems to allow the word dictionary entry, early recent, nymphs came to the bank, took those corals and dissemi- to blood. are Cellini's items? gorgone designate What, then, nated them through the sea, where they immediately One is raised Tommaseo and Bernardo possibility by Niccol6 began to grow. Because of this, there is now an abundance Bellini's 1869 Dizionario della lingua italiana, which remarks of coral in the world.86 that the plural gorgonii names not Gorgons as such, but rather a particular family of polyps-gorgonii are corals.82Tommaseo The quotation comes from the earliest published Italian and Bellini give no source or example for this usage, but their translation of the Metamorphoses,written by Giovanni Bon- word is very close to a term that Cellini could have found in signore in the fourteenth century, but first printed in 1497. Pliny's Natural History, namely gorgonia (English gorgonian), Bonsignore's version of the story, like those that follow his, the term for a red coral "so named because it is converted modifies several significant details of Ovid's Latin.87 Ovid, as it into the hardness of stone." The Italian version of Agricola's happens, did not even mention blood, specifying that sea- scientific writings, published two years before the Cellini weed was petrified at Medusa's touch, transformed through CELLINI'S BLOOD 229 the vim monstri.88The early Italian versions, in contrast, do not finial on the helmet, and the extraordinary fineness of the name the cause of the petrifaction, but do explain that once Medusa head itself. It is as if Cellini has turned the whole coral hardened, Medusa's blood made it red. statue into a colossal setting for the marvelous coral, calculat- That Cellini has blood itself become coral may indicate that ing how best to show its qualities to the piazza. he knew Ovid in translation; that he omits seaweed as an But Cellini and Cosimo would both also have been fasci- ingredient, however, makes his own metamorphosis one of a nated by the transformative properties Ovid and Pliny at- new sort. In part, his variation depends on his having located tribute to the substance. As Philippe Morel has demonstrated, the generation of coral in the scene of Perseus's confronta- coral is a meaningful participant in Renaissance grottoes, tion with Medusa, rather than Andromeda. What is striking, where its behavior likens it to spugna, the dripping ooze that is in from though, how, departing Ovid's Andromeda tale, the covers the walls and ceilings. Coral was a "juice apt to become sum of Cellini's details not the earlier approaches only stone [sugo atto a diventar pietra]"; it, like spugna, seemed to moment in Ovid's narrative but also some ideas from In Pliny. harden before the viewer's eyes. Morel compares the genera- the Natural it is not the that but the History, Gorgon petrifies tion of coral to that of rocks, stressing that the fundamental removal of the coral-to-be from its native wet conditions: soft process in its generation is one of glutination.96 Such a view in the coral becomes hard when it meets air. water, only Pliny works well with Cellini's gorgoni: he renders a material with also has this to about it: say traces of its past as a moving current of liquid and a present in the coagulated stillness of metallic stone. In coral is like a shrub and its color is Its shape, green. Beyond Morel's account, it should be stressed that in the berries are white under the water and soft; when taken out sixteenth century, many thought that coral began as a plant. they immediately harden and grow red, being like, in Its nativity thus involves not only a process of solidification, appearance and size, to those of cultivated cornel. It is said but also one of preservation; coral's vegetative virtues remain that at a touch it immediately petrifies; and that therefore within, and consequently allow the gem to function as an it is quickly severed and pulled away in nets or cut off by a apotropaion, as a medicine, and even, ideally, as a philoso- sharp iron instrument. In this way, the name "coral" is pher's stone.97 This adds a Plinian dimension to the collecting explained.89 of coral, and we need to see Medusa's blood not merely as the product of Cellini's inspired fantasy but also as an ornament The passage is suggestive, inasmuch as Cellini, like Pliny, has central to his patron's interests. Recognizing coral-and coral become coral only when it is cut. If Cellini knew his Ovid knowing its potency-the viewer must take even the Perseus's not from translations but rather (or also) from Raphael propagandistic intentions to involve more than menacing Regius's popular Latin edition, he would have found the would-be rebels with beheading, or recording the violent commentary referring him directly to Pliny's discussion.90 appropriation of the The naturalist view of And if Cellini read one of the many available editions of the piazza's space. coral lets the statue illustrate transformation as much as Storia Naturale, then he knew Pliny's etymological hypothesis- Perseus's more curalius (probably because of the Greek KELpELV,to cut, butchery.98 smiling gesture, allowably benign than it is now said to be, involves the conversion of the shear) is so named for the way it is collected.91 Cinquecento usually into the fine, the into the valuable. The Italian editions render Pliny's "acer ferramentus" as "un rough dangerous outstretched arm offers coral to the ducal to which its tagliente ferro." Coincidentally enough, Cellini himself re- city, bearer has It constitutes both a claim for fers to his Perseus's sword exclusively as a ferro. And in the guaranteed safety. the richness of the arts that the of sculpture, this is rendered in the most literal sense, for the accompany keeping peace sword, unlike the rest of the statue, is made of iron.92 and a reassuring amulet of protection from the hero that has it.99 It is the as much as the We might expect that Cellini, who remembers that he once guaranteed Gorgon, beholder, that is transformed: from the that threatens to passed every day of an entire month on a beach, collecting pride upset civic Medusa becomes the that both arises from "the most beautiful and rare pebbles, snails and seashells,"9g3 calm, object and that would have been interested in coral for its visual properties guarantees pride's removal, the petrified prize of alone. This he would have had in common with his patron, Perseus's blade. who, like other European princes, avidly sought coral as a All of this assumes, of course, that Cellini's accounting note marvelous objet.94In his profession, Cellini must have known is sufficient to demonstrate that coral is what we see. We might goldsmiths who had mounted coral in brilliant settings; find his actual rendering more equivocal. The main stalk of perhaps he had done the same himself. Coral, in sum, was blood reaching from Medusa's head, perhaps, will appear to precious-a point emphasized, among others, by Vasari, have grown rather than fallen, stretching a knobby trunk into whose Perseus and Andromedafor Francesco I's studiolo puts the space, twisting like a vine (Figs. 6, 14). And perhaps Miner- coral (like Cellini's, more decisively blood-shaped than Ovid's betti should not have been worried about being soaked with text requires) in the good company of pearl-bedecked nymphs, the blood from Medusa's body: it has stopped the outward Minerva's sparkling shield, and the hero's own ermine- trajectory of its spray and has turned downward, dangling for fringed boots. Originally, this painting designated and com- perpetuity in bobble-tipped strands (Figs. 3, 15). Maybe these mented on objects hidden behind it, objects that very likely ends, like the small globules that hide within, are to be taken included gorgonian.95 Looking from Vasari's coral to Celli- as the berries Pliny mentions, white when under water, red ni's, we might decide that the latter's participates in what is and hard when brought into the air. We should note that all of sometimes described as his goldsmith's aesthetic; it agrees the blood that emerges from both head and body moves in with the monstrous heads on the hilt of the sword, the dragon individualized serpentine stems. And the surprising volume 230 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2

15 Cellini, Perseus,detail of Fig. 1: blood from the cadaver of Medusa

we have seen, later refers to the blood in terms consonant with his viewers' descriptions. If the artist wants us to see coral, he wants us to see it at the threshold of its existence, at the moment when it stops being blood. Ovid and Pliny will cue us to read this backward, from the coral toward its source.101 But we could just as well approach the transformation from the other side, starting with blood. Blood itself, after all, is nothing less than a "nutrient in potential," a substance ready to change into other substances as soon as it enters the right conditions. As Varchi asserted while lecturing on blood just two years before the Perseus was begun, blood even contains an ingredient called cambio, so-named because blood is changed and transformed as it moves from one environment to the next.102 Is what we see, then, better described as coral that was blood or, rather, coral-to-be, the aptness of blood to become coral? 14 Cellini, Perseus,detail: blood from the head of Medusa Either way, taking coral to be the end of Cellini's blood leads (photo: Eike D. Schmidt) us to understand it as something more than infusion revealed. To say that blood can become coral is to say that it can itself be rendered; as a medium, it not only bears spirit, it also accepts of the blood may, as well, suggest its vegetative state: compare form. Blood, writes Galen, "is like the statuary's wax, a single especially the amount of blood we see coming from the head uniform matter, subjected to the artificer."103 Molding blood with the size of its container. in wax, Cellini proved the simile. And casting metal after this At the same time, incontrovertible features of coral are wax, Cellini found not just shape but also value. His medium absent. Its forms are not branched, and, having probably becomes vivid: in its featured preciousness, and in its aptness been gilded, it lacks the telltale blood red color. Its hang fairly to form, the blood-cum-coral is as functional a token of bronze reproduces what we would expect of liquids drawn by gravity; as any Cellini could have offered. The coral emphasizes that from the head the substance moves straight to the ground, Cellini's blood is dear,and comments on the marvelous object from the body it curves downward as well. There is, further- into which it is made. We come back to Cellini's punning more, the difference, already remarked, between Cellini's phrase on the pouring of "sangue o pregiati metalli" and to scene and the narratives of coral generation that are its the anonymous viewer's description of the spirit and body of presumed sources. More suspiciously, we are faced with the Medusa, "prezioso e caro." If the rendering of metal into ineluctable fact that not one of Cellini's contemporaries, a blood could, through poetic and alchemical discourses, number of whom we have already heard commenting on the typologically fulfill the quest of bringing metal into spirit, blood, mention recognizing it as gorgonian. For Minerbetti, then rendering that blood as coral, making it simultaneously the blood "seems ... to be real"; for the poet Pagano Pagani, congealed and precious, brings the achievement full circle. "a true wave of blood flows from the neck."100 Even Cellini, Cast, the metal hardens into immortal life. CELLINI'S BLOOD 231

Michael Cole is a Whiting Fellow and a Centerfor Human Values restored despotism over democracy"; McCarthy, The Stones of Florence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 22. More has associated GraduatePrize Fellow at Princeton wherehe is recently, Pope-Hennessy University, completing the Perseus subject with "the dogma of the divinely inspired wisdom and a doctoral dissertation on Benvenuto Cellini. He has previously ruthless heroism of ... the Duke" (168). And Philippe Morel, citing has written that "the head to the could serve contributed articles to Word and Image and to the Burlington Pope-Hennessy, presented public as a threat to [Cosimo's] enemies, the rescue of Andromeda as a metaphor for Magazine [Department of Art and Archaeology,Princeton Univer- the liberation of Florence from the republican monster"; "La chair sity, Princeton, N.J. 08544]. d'Andrombde et le sang de MWduse:Mythologie et rh6torique dans le Pers&eet Andromede de Vasari," in Andromide, ou le hiros d l'ipreuve de la beauti, ed. Francoise Jiguret and Alain Laframbroise (Paris: , 1996), 70 n. 6. The most forceful exponent of this view, however, is Volker Breidecker, who Cited Sources compares the scene Cellini shows to actual executions Cosimo staged and Frequently oversaw on the piazza, including the beheading of republican rebels in 1537; see Breidecker, Florenz, oder 'DieRede, die zum Auge spricht':Kunst, Fest und Macht im Ambiente der Stadt (Munich: Fink, 1990), 25ff. I am to Rainer Niccolo trans., Di Ovidio le Methamorphosi cioe trasmutationi, grateful Agostini, degli, Donandt for this reference. tradottedal latino diligentementein volgar verso, con le sue Allegorie, significationi, 3. Cellini, letter to Bartolommeo Concino, in Tassi, vol. 3, 334-42. For a & dichiarationi delle Fauole in prosa (1521; Milan: Bernardino di Bindoni, more extensive citation, see n. 9 below; see also Pope-Hennessy, 169. 1548). 4. For the medal and its connection to the statue, see Karla Langedijk, The Allegretti, Antonio, De la trasmutatione de metalli, ed. Mino Gabriele (Rome: Portraits of the Medici, 15th-18th Centuries, vol. 1 (Florence: SPES, 1981), 76. Mediterranee, 1981). Also frequently cited as a visual source for Cellini is a statuette now in Barocchi, Paula, Scritti d'arte del 3 vols. (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, cinquecento, Hamburg; see Braunfels (as in n. 2); also Brandt, 411 n. 181; and Pope- 1973). Hennessy, 168. De facs. edited Adriano Biringuccio, Vannoccio, la pirotechnia (1540; ed., by 5. Cellini writes that when Cosimo first proposed the sculpture, he offered Carugo, Milan: II Polifilo, 1977). to make it either in bronze or in marble. See Ferrero, 474-75. Bonsignore, Giovanni, trans., P Ovidio metamorphoseosvulgare novamente stam- 6. See Varchi, Questionesull'alchimia (Florence: Stamperia Magheri, 1827), 4; pato: Diligentementecorrecto & historiato (Milan, 1520). also cited in Suzanne B. Butters, The Triumphof :Sculptors' Tools, Porphyry, [Brandt], Kathleen Weil-Garris, "On Pedestals: Michelangelo's David, Bandinel- and thePrince in DucalRorence(Florence: Olschki, 1996), vol. 1, 242, and vol. 2, 460. li's , and the Sculpture of the Piazza della Signoria," 7. W. Chandler Kirwin's recent book on Bernini suggests that the monumen- RomischesJahrbuchfiirKunstgeschichte 20 (1983): 377-415. tal bronze baldachin the sculptor designed for Urban VIII could have brought Ferrero, Giuseppe Guido, ed., Operedi Benvenuto Cellini (Turin: UTET, 1980). to mind cannons, which were forged from the same materials and produced Milanese, Carlo, ed., I trattati dell'oreficeriae della scultura di Benvenuto Cellini with the same technology. Although the context of Cosimo's commission and (Florence, 1857). the circumstances of Cellini's studio leadership were in important ways different from those of Urban and the of Kirwin's is Pope-Hennessy,John, Cellini (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985). Bernini, gist argument with to the earlier work as well. The Perseus, unlike the Somigli, Guglielmo, Notizie storiche sulla fusione del Perseo (Milan: Associazione suggestive regard baldachin, was an of violence; Cellini tells us that masters Italiana di Metallurgia, 1958). image artillery helped him cast it (Ferrero, 769) and describes the fiery scene of its casting in Tassi, F., ed, Vita di Benvenuto Cellini orefice e scultore fiorentino scritta di lui language that evokes a battle. See Kirwin, Powers Matchless: The Pontificate of medesimoresituita alla lezione originale sul manoscrittoPoirot ora Laurenziano ed Urban VIII, the Baldachin, and (New York: Peter Lang, arricchita d'illustrazioni e documenti inediti, 3 vols. (Florence: Guglielmo Piatti, 1997), esp. chap. 2; also Kirwin with Peter G. Rush, "Bubble Reputation: In 1829). the Cannon's and the Horse's Mouth (or, The Tale of Three Horses)," in 's Sforza Monument Horse: TheArt ofEngineering, ed. Diane Cole Ahl (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1995), 87-110. 8. Niccolo Martelli, letter to Luigi Alamanni, Aug. 20, 1546, in Detlef Notes Heikamp, "Rapporti fra accademici ed artisti nel Firenze del '500," II Vasari15 (1957): 139-63: "egli si vedra con stupor delle genti nel rialto della Piazza di I undertook the research for this article while a fellow at the Kunsthistoriches sua Eccza Illma nell'altro arco della Loggia di 1A dalla Giudetta di Donato, Institut in Florence. I am deeply grateful to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation quasi luogo vacuo e privio riserbato fino a questo tempo, con l'invenzione for sponsoring my tenure there and to Professor Max Seidel for the Institute's nella idea del famoso Duca nostro, dalle fatali stelle per adornar la patria di hospitality. quanto bello in metallo, natura, arte, ingegno, norma e stil pu6 fare." Professor Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann read an early version of this paper in 9. See esp. the letter Cellini sent to the duke's secretary, Bartolommeo the summer of 1997; in approach and in detail my discussion is indebted to his Concino (as in n. 3): "... il mio Illustrissimo ed Eccellentissimo Signor Duca remarks. Professor Elizabeth Cropper kindly invited me to deliver the paper at mi commisse, che io gli facessi un Statua di un Perseo di grandezza di tre the Charles Singleton Center for Italian Studies in March 1998, and I owe her braccia, colla testa di Medusa in mano, e non altro. Io lo feci di pifi di cinque thanks both for reading my work and for the opportunity to present it in braccia con la detta testa in mano, e di pifi con il corpo tutto di Medusa sotto i Cellini's city. On the invitation of Professor Berthold Hinz, I was able to piedi; e gli feci quella gran basa di marmo con il Giove, e Mercurio, e Danae, e present related material in a talk entitled "Leben und Tod in Benvenuto il Bambino, e Minerva, e di pifi la Storia di Andromeda, si come si vede" (My Cellinis Perseus und Medusa" at the University of Kassel, and I benefited from most illustrious and excellent Lord Duke commissioned me to make a statue the comments I received there as well. Dott. Giovanni Morigi, who is currently of Perseus, three braccia high, with the head of Medusa in hand, and nothing restoring the Perseus, allowed me to follow his progress and generously shared more. I made it more than five bracciahigh, with the said head in hand and, in his findings with me. I am grateful to Dr. Ulrich Pfisterer, Professor John addition, with the entire body of Medusa under his feet; I also made him that Paoletti, Madeleine Viljoen, and the two anonymous readers from the Art great marble base, with the Jupiter, Mercury, Danae, the Baby [Perseus], and Bulletin for commenting on drafts of the article. Francesca Toffolo checked my Minerva, and, in addition, the storia of Andromeda, as you see"). In his Italian translations, Larry Kim my Latin. Eike D. Schmidt and Dimitri Zikos autobiography, Cellini narrates that the duke asked him to make "solo un discussed several technical problems with me and allowed me to use their Perseo," and that he returned several weeks later with a wax model; the duke photographs. accepted the design and it became the basis for the large statue (see Ferrero, Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. 475). If this wax modellettois identical with the wax group in the Bargello (Fig. 1. Bernardetto Minerbetti, in a letter to Giorgio Vasari, Aug. 20, 1552, in 4)-Cellini mentions only one, and this is the only one that survives-we Barocchi, vol. 2, 1198-1200: "Dico che questa figura si vede nel volto una might infer that the two-figure group had been accepted practically from the fierezza mirabile in una faccia dolcissima; el moto del braccio manco, che outset, and that the base (and blood), however implicitly now needed, were sostiene per e' crini la testa di Medusa, e cosa incredibile, che vedendola par actually designed some time later. My inferences here follow those of che vivamente la mostri al mondo; et in quella testa si vede la morte negli ochi Pope-Hennessy, 169. e nella bocca fare el suo crudele offizio. E quel che non posso saziarmi di 10. For the inscriptions, see Tassi, vol. 3, 491-92, and Heikamp (as in n. 8), guardare con stupore e el sangue, che impetuosamente esce del tronco, che, 145 n. Varchi's move to the duke's employ in Florence preceded Cellini's by ancorch6 di metallo sia, par niente di meno tanto da dovero, che scaccia altrui two years, but the two had been friends from at least the 1520s. Who initiated per paura di essere insanguinato." Brandt comments on the letter, 411. Varchi's participation in the Perseus, and how extensive that participation was, 2. This interpretation of the Perseus has been the standard one at least since are matters for speculation; it may be that Varchi simply offered suggestions the influential monograph on the statue by Wolfgang Braunfels. Braunfels appropriate to an already established program, or he may have played a role in takes the statue to represent the "power and cleverness" of the sovereign, and formulating the iconography. Varchi's personal interest in the sculpture is he contends that it demonstrates how "the people are wont to do homage to suggested by his academic lectures. When discussing the nature of sculpture in no one more than the one who oppresses them"; Braunfels, Benvenuto Cellini: his now-famous Sulla la pittura e scultura, he took as his example "un Perseo"; Perseus und Medusa (1948; Stuttgart: Reclam, 1961), 7. In a similar spirit, Mary see Operedi Benedetto Varchi,vol. 2, ed. G. B. Busini (Trieste: Lloyd Austriaco, McCarthy writes, "When Cosimo I installed himself as dictator, he ordered 1859), 620. When he conducted his survey on the relative nobility of sculpture from Cellini the 'Perseus and Medusa,' to commemorate the triumph of a and painting, Cellini was one of the eight artists he invited to submit opinions. 232 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2

When the Perseus was unveiled in 1554, Varchi led the charge in writing 20. Ferrero, 859. encomiastic poems, composing at least two himself and having the longer 21. Leon Battista Alberti's De statua distinguishes the fictor (modeler) from versions of the Latin inscriptions translated into Italian. A poem by Bernardo the faber (founder). Gauricus makes the distinction both more rigid and more Vecchietti, moreover, associates Varchi and Cellini explicitly in the mutual morally loaded. He celebrates what he calls ductoria (modeling) inasmuch as it honor they do to Cosimo: "As now only Cellini's chisel may boast of carving is here that the artist exercises invention and imitation, proportion and him, so it will be heard without contest how noble Varchi alone wrote about perspective. Fusoria (casting), on the other hand, has much less to speak for it: him [E come hor d'intagliarlo hd sol lo stile/Del Cellin grido, allor senza contesa/ it enables one to melt valuables and pay armies, becoming indirectly S'udird; solo il VARCHIalto ne scrisse]"; in I sonetti di M. BenedettoVarchi (: responsible for the suffering and destruction brought by war. See Gauricus, De Pietrasanta, 1555), 117. Later, Cellini sent both his poetry and his autobiogra- sculptura, ed. Robert Klein and Andre Chastel (Geneva: Droz, 1969), esp. 225. phy to Varchi "to feel the polish of [his] marvelous file"; see the letter of May On the topic in Alberti, see Marco Collareta, "Considerazioni in Margine al De 2, 1559, in Ferrero, 985-86. Statua ed alla sua fortuna," Annali della Scuola Normale Superioredi 3, no. 12 11. Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.785-86, trans. Frank Justus Miller (London: (1982): 171-87. William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 233: 22. The importance of goldsmithing to Cellini's sense of his profession will "[E]ripuisse caput collo pennisque fugacem/Pegason et fratrem matris de need to be discussed elsewhere. Suffice it to note here that in his Trattati, sanguine natos." chapters on topics like "Cardinals' Seals" and "How to Fashion Vessels of Gold 12. "De sanguine autem Gorgonis natus est Pegasus, quifama interpretatur; and Silver" collapse modeling and casting into a single sequence of activities. et pede suo fontem Castaliae sive Pegaseum produxit; quia virtus, omnia 23. Here and in what follows, I argue for a perspective different from the superans, bonam sibi acquirit famam": this is the interpretation given in one one recently offered by Elisabeth Dalucas, who writes of Cellini: "The creative of the anonymous treatises published in Georg Heinrich Bode, Scriptoresrerum act has been shifted entirely into the invention [of the figure], even if the mythicarumlatini tresromae nuper reperti(Cellis: Schultz, 1834), 42. Compare the execution of the cast, as that act's extended arm, must still be supervised by commentary on the beheading of Medusa in the most recent vernacular the creator in order to ensure the quality of the product. The creation of the translation of the MetamorphosesCellini could have seen: "Ovid says that from figure, not the cast, represents the true sculptural activity." See Dalucas, "'Ars the blood of Medusa was born a horse with wings; this is to be interpreted as erit archetypus naturae': Zur Ikonologie der Bronze in der Renaissance," in 'fame' which flies through the world.... Perseus killed Medusa, and the fame VonAllen SeitenSchon: Bronzen der Renaissance und des Barock:Wilhelm Bode zum 150. that flew from his victory was such that every person he encountered was Geburtstag,ed. Volker Krahn, exh. cat., Staatliche Museen, Berlin, 1995, 70-81. petrified" (dice Ouidio che del sangue della detta Medusa nacque vno cauallo 24. Ferrero, 517. con le ali, questo sintende per la fama, la qual vola per lo mondo ... la uccise 25. Cellini writes that when he fell sick in the process of casting the Perseus, et fu tanta la fama che volo di questa sua uittoria che ogni persona che he left the task in the hands of his "master founders and manual laborers and incontraua diuentaua immobile); Agostini, 45v. The locus classicus of this idea farm workers and shop employees."; ibid., 518. is Fulgentius, Mythologies1.21. 26. For della Porta's claims about invention in casting, see his 1569 letter to 13. G. C. Capaccio wrote that the device of Pegasus, made for , Ammanati, published by Werner Gramberg in Die DiisseldorferSkizzenbiicher des meant "che l'attion virtuosa fa scaturir i fonti della gloria, e della lode," Guglielmo della Porta, vol. 1 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1964), 122-28. On Leonardo quoted in Anthony Hobson, and Pegasus: An Enquiry into the Formation and casting, see the documents in Luca Beltrami, Documenti e memorie and Dispersal of a Renaissance Library (Amsterdam: Gfrard Th. van Heusden, rituardanti la vita e le opere di Leonardo da Vinci (Milan: Allegretti, 1919), and 1975), 32. On the medal, see also the entry by Rudolf-Alexander Schfilte in fols. 141-57 of Codex II, included by Ladislao Reti in The Madrid Pegasus und die Kiinste, ed. Claudia Brink and Wilhelm Hornbostel, exh. cat., Codices (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979). The large secondary literature on the Museum fiir Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, topic includes, most recently, the collection of essays edited by Diane Cole Ahl 1993), 198, with further bibliography. (as in n. 7); the articles by Ahl, Kirwin and Rush, Carlo Pedretti, and Virginia 14. Ferrero, 821. For the connection between Pegasus and the origin of the Bush have useful bibliographies. In addition to the works they cite, see visual arts, see esp. Claudia Brink, "Pegasus und die Kfinste: Eine Ein- Guglielmo Somigli, "Leonardo da Vinci e la fonderia," La Fonderia Italiana 7 fiihrung," in Brink and Hornbostel (as in n. 13), 10-25; and Thomas Ketelsen, (1952); Pedretti, "Un disegno per la fusione del cavallo per il monumento "Das Lob der Malerei: Pegasus und die Musen in der italienischen Kunst," in Sforza," Raccolta Vinciana 20 (1964): 271-75; Renzo Cianchi, "Figure nuove ibid., 46-60; both with further bibliography. Perseus is connected explicitly del mondo vinciano: Paolo e Vannoccio Biringuccio da ," Raccolta with the origin of the arts, for example, in a fresco cycle on the second floor of Vinciana 20 (1964): 277-97; Marcia Hall, "Reconsiderations of Sculpture by the Casa Zuccari in Florence; here a central image of Apollo and the Muses is Leonardo da Vinci," J B. Speed Art Museum Bulletin 29 (1973): 11-7; and surrounded by scenes from the story of Perseus. See also Agostini's interpreta- Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, tion of what Medusa's blood generated: "one should interpret the drops that (London:J. M. Dent and Sons, 1981), 203-7. fell from the head of Medusa as grains and other fruits; but one should 27. Ferrero, 790. On the relationship between the difficulty of the one-piece understand the serpents generated by those drops as the seeds of the earth, marble and the task of the giant-conquerer David it depicts, see esp. Charles which, multiplying through human cultivation, pour forth the wealth of the SeymourJr., Michelangelo'sDavid: A SearchforlIdentity(NewYork: Norton, 1974); world [per le goccie che caderanno del capo di Medusa sintendino le biade & gli altri and Irving Lavin, "David's Sling and Michelangelo's Bow: A Sign of Free- frutti, ma per gli serpentigenerati di quelle si comprendonole sementedi essa terra, che dom," in Past-Present: Essays in Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso per il coltiuar delle genti moltiplicando abondano nelle diuitie del mondo]"; Agostini, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 29-61, with further references. 45r. This is a slightly modified plagiarism of Giovanni Bonsignore's 14th- 28. Cellini was by no means the first to pursue the one-piece cast. The century translation of the Metamorphoses,27r (on the two texts, see also n. 87 contract for Ghiberti's Saint Matthew required that the sculptor attempt to cast below). Its relevance to Cellini's interests at the time he was making the Perseus it as a single piece. Leonardo, when planning the horse for his Sforza is evidenced by the depiction of the head of Medusa on the breastplate of Monument, considered ways it might be made in one pour. For bell casters, Cellini's portrait of Cosimo: there, Medusa's blood is rendered as fruit, again furthermore, it was routine knowledge that, however monumental the work implicitly praising Cosimo as the founder and protector of the arts. might be, it could have no joins. My argument here is merely that, in the 15. " [The Duke said,] 'If you, Benvenuto, would carry out this little model emulative context of Cellini's Perseus assignment, he would as likely have as a large work, it would be the most beautiful work in the piazza.' I answered, thought about the specific dificultd his contemporaries admired in marble 'My most excellent Lord, in the piazza there are the works of the great sculpture as about the history of bronze casts. For the Ghiberti documents, see Donatello and of the marvelous Michelangelo, who were two of the greatest A. Doren, Das Akenbuchfiir Ghiberti'sMatthiiusstatue an Or S. Michele zu Florenz, men who have ever lived. Considering that, your most illustrious Excellency Italienische Forschungen, vol. 1 (Berlin: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, gives great spirit to my model .... [Per tanto VostraEccellenzia illustrissima dd un 1906), 26ff; also the summary in Richard Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti grand'animo al mio modello .. .] "; Ferrero, 475. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 406, doc. 71. On one-piece bell 16. "[L]a semplicith del di fuori nello abito et nello aspetto di Giudit, casting, see Biringuccio, bk. 6, chap. 12. Virginia Bush traces the interest in the manifestamente scuopre nel di dentro, I'animo grande di quella Donna, et lo one-piece cast back to Leonardo; see Virginia Bush, "Leonardo's Sforza aiuto di Dio: si come nella aria di esso Oloferne, il vino et il sonno, et la morte Monument and Cinquecento Sculpture," Arte Lombarda50 (1978): 47-68, esp. nelle sue membra, che per avere perduti gli spiriti si dimostrano fredde et 59-61; as well as the discussions in Martin Kemp (as in n. 26); idem, cascanti .. "; Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de'Pidi EccelentiArchitetti, Pittori, et Scultori "Leonardo's Drawings for 'I1 Cavallo del Duca Francesco di Bronzo': The Italiani, da Cimabue insino a' Tempi Nostri (1550), ed. Luciani Bellosi and Program of Research," in Ahl (as in n. 7), 64-78; Kirwin (as in n. 7); and Lorenzo Torrentino (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 317. Dalucas (as in n. 23). 17. My understanding ofVasari's comments depends on Charles Dempsey's 29. For technical aspects of the Judith, see B. Bearzi, "La tecnica fusoria di important analysis of this passage, and I am grateful to him for discussing it Donatello," in Donatello e il suo tempo: Atti dell'VIII Convegno Internazionale di with me further. See Dempsey, "Donatello's Spiritelli," in Ars naturam adiuvans: Studi sul Rinascimento (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Festschriftfiir Matthias ed. Victoria V. Flemming and Sebastian Schiitze 1968), 102-4. (Mainz: Von Zabern, 1996),Winne, 50-61, esp. 54-56. 30. The most pointed written description of this difficulty comes, surpris- 18. Milanese, 411. ingly enough, from the painter Jacopo da Pontormo: "a sculptural figure, 19. "I1 corpo di Medusa e fatto con bella considerazione; & morto, & made in the round and finished on all sides and in every place with chisels and cascante fa palese a pieno, come la carne, & l'ossa spogliate di spirito sono other taxing instruments, so demonstrated in certain places that it is disposte, & fatte quasi dalle mani di natura"; Bocchi, Le bellezzedella cittd di impossible to imagine how one could have entered there and finished the Firenze (1591; facs. ed., with introduction by John Shearman, Amsterdam: details, it being of stone or of another hard material-such a figure would, for Demand Reprints, 1984), 35. the labor which brittle stone requires, be difficult: even beyond the difficulty of CELLINI'S BLOOD 233

raising an arm with something held in its hand into the air, it would be difficult Renaissancefiirst in Europa, ed. Heiner Borggrefe, Vera Lfipkes, and Hans and subtle to carry out the work in such a way that it does not break"; in Ottomeyer (Erausberg: Minerva, 1997), 371-77; and Paolo L. Rossi, "Sprez- Barocchi, vol. 1, 504. zatura, Patronage, and Fate: Benvenuto Cellini and the World of Words," in 31. Ferrero, 515. Vasari's Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court, ed. Philip Jacks 32. Ibid., 521: "io feci pigliare un mezzo pane di stagno, il quale pesava in (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55-69, esp. 63-64. circa a 60 libbre, e lo gittai in sul migliaccio dentro alla fornace, il quale cone 40. Biringuccio, 6r: "[Alchemisti] separano gli spiriti da corpi & a lor gli altri aiuti e di legne e di stuzzicare or co' ferri e or cone stanghe, in poco volonta vegli ritornano come se fussero il coltel dela lor guaina; creduto bene spazio di tempo e' divenne liquido. Or veduto di avere risuscitato un morto, che quelle sustantie che nele cose si chiamano spiriti sia possibile con la contro al credere di tutti quegli ignoranti, e' mi torn6 tanto vigore, che io non violentia del fuocho cavarli e ridurli in vapori, ma cavati non creder6 gia che mi avvedevo se io avevo pifi febbre o piui paura di morte." mai ve li ritornino che un tale effetto altro non sarebbe si non un saper far 33. Ibid., 522: "][V]eduto ogniuno che '1 mio bronzo s'era benissimo fatto resuscitare i morti." All translations from Biringuccio are my own, but depart liquido, e che la mia forma si empieva, tutti animosamente e liet mi aiutavano from the edition by Cyril Smith and Martha Gnudi (NewYork: Dover, 1990). e ubbidivano; e io or qua e or l1 comandavo, aiutavo e dicevo: -O Dio, che 41. Ibid., 8r: 'Et con questa & con molte altre ragioni vogliano che si creda con le tue immense virtui risuscitasti da e' morti, e glorioso te ne salisti al che fuor del ventre feminile generar & formar si possa uno homo & ogni altro cielo!" On the casting, see esp. Somigli, 9ff., who examines the technical issues animale con carne & ossa & nervi & ancho animarlo di spirito." implied by Cellini's addition of pewter (stagno) to his broth; also Bruno Maier, 42. Relevant in this regard is the story of Daedalus, who allegedly gave Umanitd e stile di Benvenuto Cellini scrittore (Milan: Luigi Trevisini, 1952), esp. mobility and speech to his sculpture by filling it with liquid mercury. See Ernst 84-94; Victoria C. Gardner, "Homines-non-nascuntur-sed-figuntur: Ben- Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist, trans. venuto Cellini's 'Vita' and the Self-Presentation of the Renaissance Artist," Alastair Laing and Lottie M. Newman (New Haven: Yale University Press, Sixteenth CenturyJournal 28 (1997): 447-65; and Margherita Orsino, "I1 fuoco 1979), esp. 66-69; and Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the nella Vita di Benvenuto Cellini: Aspetti di un mito dell'artista-fabbro," Italian Machine: The Kunstkammerand the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology,trans. Studies 52 (1997): 94-110. Regarding Cellini's claims that he caught a fever in Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1995), esp. 47-51. Cellini's the process of executing the cast, see Mircea Eliade's comments on forgers' animation is the inverse of Michelangelo's marble project, which was to transcendence of the human state through their own heat, The Forge and the enliven the figure by withdrawing it: "[I] t is by removing, lady, that one places Crucible,trans. Stephen Corrin (Chicago: Univesity of Chicago Press, 1956), 80. in hard, alpine stone a living figure, which grows greater precisely where the 34. Plato, Timaeus 58d-59b: "The kinds of water are primarily two, the one stone grows less [. .. per levar, donna, si pone/in pietra alpestra e dura una viva the the other the being liquid, fusible kind. ... Of all the kinds of water which figura,/che ld piip cresceu' pis la pietra scema. .. .] "; Michelangelo: The Poems, ed. we have termed 'fusible,' the densest is produced from the finest and most and trans. Christopher Ryan (London: Dent, 1996), 140. uniform particles: this is a kind of unique form, tinged with a glittering and 43. Ferrero, 971, 516. Cellini calls this earthen clothing a tonaca (tunic) and yellow hue, even that most precious of possessions, 'gold,' which has been a vesta (husk, coat); Ferrero, 516, 755, 761. Vasari terms it a cappa, or cloak; strained through stones and solidified. And the off-shoot of gold, which is very Vasari (as in n. 16), 51. hard because of its density and black in colour, is called 'adamant.' And the 44. Ibid., 854. kind which closely resembles gold in its particles but has more forms than one, 45. For this theme in Cellini, see Adolfo Mabellini, Delle rime di Benvenuto and in density is more dense than gold, and partakes of small and fine portions Cellini (Rome: Paravia, 1885), 42ff. On divinity as a paragone topic, see Leatrice of earth so that it is harder, which it is also lighter owing to its having large Mendelsohn, Paragone: Benedetto Varchi's "Due Lezzioni" and Cinquecento Art interstices within it-this particular kind of the bright and solid waters, being Theory (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 112ff.; and Claire J. compounded thus, is termed 'bronze' "; trans. R. G. Bury (London: William Farago, Leonardo da Vinci's "Paragone":A CriticalInterpretation with a New Edition Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 145-47. of the Text in the "CodexUrbinas" (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 73ff. On God as a smith, writes: "The Aristotle (Meteorologica 389a), similarly, following are therefore see Norberto Gramaccini, "Zur Ikonologie der Bronze im Mittelalter," Stddel composed of water: gold, silver, bronze, tin, lead, glass and many kinds of stone Jahrbuch 2 (1987): 147-70, esp. 163. which have no name"; trans. H.D.P. Lee (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, 46. Ferrero, 961. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 365. Elsewhere, Aristotle gives a more 47. Milanese, 405. complicated account of the formation of metals, which is not quite consistent 48. The conceit, with its procreative overtones, resembles one used by with this; see Meteor 378a. Andrea Anguli: "Lysippum doctumque volens superare Myronem/Sculptor, 35. Aristotle, Generation of Animals 762a; trans. A. L. Pack (London: Heine- non duxit Persea, sed genuit./Ipsum iterum genuit, viditque, Deoque replevit/ mann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 357. Compare, for Flatu iterum credens Juppiter esse suum" (The sculptor, wanting to outdo example, , "Comme toutes especes de plantes, voire toutes Lysippus and skilled Myron, did not model Perseus, but begot him. He then choses animees sont en leur premiere essence de matieres liquides, semblable- begot him a second time: he watched, and Ceres filled [Perseus] with breath, ment toutes especes de pierres, metaux & mineraux sont formees de matieres Jupiter believing him to be his own [son]); Tassi, vol. 3, 486. It is also close to liquides, en leur premiere essence" (See that all animate things, like all one used by Michelangelo in a madrigal to Vittoria Colonna a few years earlier: species of plants, are in their first essence liquid matter; similarly, all species of "It is not unique, the mould which, empty of the work of art, finally stands stones, metals and minerals are formed of liquid matter, in their first essence); ready to be filled by silver or gold melted by fire, and then brings forth the Oeuvres completes,vol. 2, ed. Keith Cameron et al. (Mont-de-Marsan: SPEC, work only by being sundered; I, also, through the fire of love, replenish the 1996), 376; and Giovanni Vittorio Soderini, who writes that water is "the soul desire within me, empty of infinite beauty, with her whom I adore, soul and of cities and gardens [ anima delle ville e degli orti]," Trattatodegli arbori (: heart of my fragile life. This noble and dear lady descends into me through Bacchi dalla Lega, 1904), 261, quoted in Alessandro Rinaldi, "La ricerca della such narrow spaces that, for her to be brought forth, I too must be broken and 'terza natura': artificialia e naturalia nel giardino toscano del '500," in Natura e shattered [Non pur d'argento o d'oro/vinto dal foco esser po' piena aspetta,/vota artificio: L'ordine rustico, lefontane, gli automi nella cultura del manierismo europeo, d'opra prefetta,/la forma, che sol fratta il traggefora;/tal io, col foco ancora/d'amor ed. Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Officina, 1971), 165. dentro ristoro/il desir voto di belta infinita,/di coste' ch i' adoro, anima e cor della mie 36. Giorgio Agricola, De la generatione de le cose, che sotto la terra sono, e de le fragil vita./Alta donna e gradita/in me discende per si brevi spazi,/c'a trarla fuor cause de' loro effetti e nature. Libri V; De la Natura di quelle cose, che da la terra convien mi rompa e strazi]"; Ryan (as in n. 42), 140-41. Note especially scorrono. Libr IIII.; De la Natura de le coseFossili, e che sotto la terra si cavano. Libri Michelangelo's treatment of the casting mold as a body, and his puns onforma X.; De le Minere antiche e moderne. Libri II.; Il BERMANNO, o de le cose Metallice, and anima. Dialogo; Recato tutto hora dal Latino in buona lingua Volgare (Venice: Michele 49. On Medusa as Earth, see Bonsignore, 27r: "Vediamo le allegorie di facti Tramezzino, 1549), 66: "Aristotele ... bene dice che non sia l'acqua pura la di Perseo dico prima tanto vien a dir gorgon quanto che terra cioe gorgin materia de' metalli, ma quella, che in qualche affetto e passione si truovi." agicos che vien a dire in greco terra & vene interpretato opera di la terra" 37. Allegretti, 85-86: "Quella parte mezzana riserbata/Riduce in acqua, con (Regarding the allegory of the adventures of Perseus, I maintain that to say la qual poi solve/Gli metalli perfetti, e gli dispone/Anzi gli sforza a ritornare gorgone is as much as to say earth, that is gorgin agricos, which in Greek means in acqua/Che la materia prima, sendo d'acqua/Creati e fatti." On Allegretti's 'earth,' and which is interpreted as the work of the earth). Bonsignore's relationship with Cellini, see Gabriele's introduction, esp. 11ff. interpretation is recycled by Agostini, 45r. Also suggestive for the interpreta- 38. Ibid., 52: "... materia dura e densa,/Che tiene in s6 rinchiuso il vivo tion of Cellini's Perseus pursued here is an extraordinary 1953 article by A. A. spirito,/Ch'a le create cose infonde, e dona/Egli solo la vita, il moto e '1 Barb, who underscores the fact that Perseus's victim is, in the classical stories, senso/Dove mostrar le forze sue non puote/Se da pronta virti vivace e pregnant, and who, from gnostic sources, argues that "the beheading is clearly calda/Fuor non e tratto ond'impedito giace." a creative act"; see Barb, "Diva Matrix," Journal of the Warburgand Courtauld 39. As several scholars have suggested, there may even be an alchemical Institutes 16 (1953): 193-238, esp. 208ff. dimension to Cellini's writings. A poem in his hand refers to the pursuit of oro 50. One viewer of the Perseuswrote: "Quod stupeant homines, viso uccisore potabile, drinkable gold, the elixir that could make the sick well and the old Medusae,/Non est vipereum, quod great ille caput, Sed manus Artificis, quae young; he seems to have been perfectly familiar with the hypothetical process tot iam saecula nobis,/Mortua, quae fuerant corpora, viva facit./Igne lutum by which one arrives at such gold. In the Trattati, Cellini also observes that a potuit sublato animare Prometheus:/Saxaque cum cara coniuge Deucalion:/ smalt he uses was invented by alchemists. See Ferrero, 882, 617. Allegretti Persea CELLINUS;sed siquis comparet unus/Hic vivit Perseus, mortua sunt asked the goldsmith to deliver his alchemical writings to Varchi, who also wrote reliqua" (What astonishes men when the killer of Medusa is viewed is not the on alchemy; see Gabriele, introduction to Allegretti, 11-14. See also Ivan serpent-bearing head that he presents, but the hand of the Artificer, which, Arnaldi, La vita violenta di Benvenuto Cellini (Rome: Laterza, 1986), 19ff.; [for the first time] after so many centuries, makes us, the dead, who were but Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, "Kunst und Alchemie," in Moritz der Gelehrte:Ein cadavers, come alive. Prometheus could animate clay with stolen fire, 234 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 2

Deucalion, with his beloved spouse, could animate rocks; Cellini could credited to Titian in painting: "with a smear of his finger he would place a animate Perseus; if anyone appears here, [he will find that] Perseus alone stroke of darkness in some of the corners, to strengthen them, elsewhere some lives, the others are dead); Tassi, vol. 3, 482. Reinhard Steiner cites this poem smears of red, like drops of blood, to invigorate the feeling of the surface; for different purposes; see Steiner, Prometheus:Ikonologische und anthropologische proceeding thus, he reduced his animated figures to perfection" (con un Aspekteder bildenden Kunst vom 14. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert (Munich: Klaus Boer, striscio delle dita pure poneva un colpo d'oscuro in qualche angolo, per 1991), 69-71. rinforzarlo, oltre qualche striscio di rossetto, quasi gocciola di sangue, che 51. For the term bocca,see Ferrero, 764, 766. Describing his preparations for invigoriva alcun sentimento superficiale; e cosi andava a riducendo a perfezi- casting the Medusa, Cellini writes: "I had made the iron skeleton [for the one le sue animate figure); Marco Boschini, La carta del navegar pitoresco, ed. Medusa], and had then made her form of earth, as in anatomy [avevofatto la Anna Pallucchini (Rome: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1966), 712; sua ossatura di ferro: di poi fattala di terra, come di notomia] "; ibid., 490. The discussed by David Rosand, "Titian and the Critical Tradition," in Titian: His hollow, "negative" form of this body, it might be noted, genders it female; this Worldand His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 24 and n. makes the overtly sexual perspective on the casting process that Bronzino's 27; and by Patricia L. Reilly, "The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Color in language allows even more apposite. Two perceptive analyses of the role Italian Renaissance Theory," in Broude and Garrard (as in n. 51), 91-92. sexual violence plays in Cellini's art can be found in NancyJ. Vickers, "The More generally, Cellini's portrayal of blood can be compared with other Mistress in the Masterpiece," in The Poetics of Gende, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New means contemporary sculptors found to extract and display spirits-for York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 19-41, and Margaret D. Carroll, "The example, as breath. Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence," 69. John Shearman, Only Connect ... Art and the Spectator in the Italian reprinted in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 44-58. Tests of Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 139-59; see Cellini's metal composition reveal that his alloy had an unusually high also Yael Even, "The : A Showcase of Female Subjugation," in proportion of copper (approximately 95 percent). We can imagine, then, that ibid., 126-37, and Geraldine A. Johnson, "Idol or Ideal? The Power and its original color would have been far redder than it appears today. See Potency of Female Public Sculpture," in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Somigli, 12ff. More exact analyses will soon be available from Giovanni Morigi. Baroque Italy, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (Cam- 70. Ovid, Met. 5.249. bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 222-45. 71. Since Shearman's ingenious observations, it is impossible to view the 52. Biringuccio, bk. 1 (n.p.): "Et queste si dimostrano quasi con quel modo statues in the piazza without considering medium. The basic lines of his che stan le vene del sangue ne li corpi de gli animali ." For Cellini's reading of the piazza are irresistible, and I am cautious in following only a few conversation, Ferrero, 552. ... of his inferences. The evidence suggests that it was not Cellini himself but 53. Agricola, L'arte de' metalli, trans. M. Florio (Basil, 1563), 6. rather his patron, Duke Cosimo I, who determined the site, the medium, and 54. Agricola (as in n. 36), 67. the subject of Medusa. This raises the question whether, for such petrification 55. See, for example, the anonymous recipe "Aqua, et Menstruo per conceits, any bronze Perseus in the Loggia would have sufficed and, accord- preparar il solfo dal avere de li pianeti," Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, ingly, what we should make of the actual thing Cellini spent the culminating Fondo Palatina, 863, fols. 89ff. decade of his career making. Shearman leaves no doubt about the cleverness 56. On this "licor sanguigno," see Biringuccio, 28r. with which the setting for Cellini's work was exploited. And even if we 57. Ferrero, 945. conclude that the decisions that allowed this were not Cellini's, the situation 58. On Dec. 26, 1557, Cellini appealed to Duke Cosimo for release from nevertheless invites us to view the artist's task as one that was specially prison "per non gittar via queste poche ore che Iddio mi presta..... Sendo bronze-specific and one that, confronting the David, had to face the tradition chiamato dal mio bel Cristo"; Tassi, vol. 3, 77. of Michelangelo. I follow Shearman's instinct that Cellini's use of bronze was 59. The word roba is equally curious. I have rendered it as "substance," the basis of his response to his predecessors, and that the subject of Medusa intending to connote its economic senses of money or personal goods, as well offered the means through which that response could be thought. In contrast as its sustentative possibilities as food, drink, or narcotic. In this regard, "stuff" to Shearman, however, I am attempting to take into account Medusa's might serve better, although to my ear that word is now too vague. Depending function within the monument, and not just her conversion of the beholder. on how we interpret the rest of the line, we might, less neutrally, render it See Shearman (as in n. 69). Earlier discussions of art and the "Medusa effect" "works," or even "artworks"-the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana lists includeJohn Freccero, "Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit," YearbookofItalian numerous examples of usages with this meaning. Studies 2 (1972): 1-18; Louis Marin, Ditruire la peinture (Paris: Galil6e, 1977); 60. Michelangelo, quoted in Paul Fr4art de Chantelou, Journal de voyage du Neil Hertz, "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure," Represen- Cavalier Bernin en France, ed. Jean Paul Guibbert (Paris: Pandora, 1981), 206: tations 4 (1983): 27-54; Catherine Gallagher, Joel Fineman, and Neil Hertz, "nelle mie opere, caco sangue." Leonardo Bruno also compares blood and "More about 'Medusa's Head,' " ibid., 55-72; and Elizabeth Cropper, "The artworks: "Nam velut sanguis per universum , sic ornamenta deliti- Petrifying Art: Marino's Poetry and ," Metropolitan Museum Journal aeque per universum urbem diffuse sunt" (Just as there is blood through the 26 (1991): 193-212. whole body, so are there ornaments and delights diffused through the whole 72. Pagano Pagini, in Tassi, vol. 3, 489: "Sed postquam aera manu frigentia city); Bruno, Oratio de laudibus Florentine urbis, ed. Giuseppe de Toffol sentit, an ipsas/Exclamat, possunt fallere fusa Deas?" (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974), 22. I am grateful to Ulrich Pfisterer for this 73. See the document published by Milanese, 251. reference. 74. Minerbetti notes that he saw two bronze reliefs, intended for the base of 61. On Cellini's violence, see esp. Arnaldi (as in n. 39), 120-29; and Paolo the sculpture, not yet poured (Barocchi, vol. 2, 1200). Only one of these, that Rossi, "The Writer and the Man: Real Crimes and Mitigating Circumstances: II depicting the plight of Andromeda, was finished and added to the work. caso Cellini," in Crime, Societyand the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean Brandt hypothesizes that "the entire pedestal of the Perseus was to be and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 157-83. freestanding" (411). 62. The poem was first published by Milanese in 1857 (384); it has been 75. "With these words, Gorgoni di Medusa, Benvenuto no doubt means heads reprinted many times, but Cellini's corrections have never been pointed out. of Medusa. We know that the Gorgons were three sisters, Stheno, Euryale, and 63. Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana ms 2353, fol. 85r. The page is illus- Medusa, the daughters of Phorcys and Ceto; they had the power to change all trated in Michael Cole, "Benvenuto Cellini's Designs for His Tomb," Burling- who dared to look at them to stone. Thus, the head of Medusa, cut off by ton Magazine 140 (Dec. 1998): 799, fig. 18. Perseus and placed on Minerva's aegis, was commonly called the Gorgon. 64. Brandt, 409-10. Regarding the entry whence the weight of the Perseus comes, we can conclude 65. Ovid, Met. 4.753-57, in Miller (as in n. 11). that the sculptor had the head of Medusa, which the hero holds, cast 66. Ovid's own story describes how, as Perseus's opponent Chromis be- separately; this is all the more probable seeing that the inventory taken at his headed Perseus's ally Emathion, the head fell onto an altar, and "he breathed death includes a Head of Medusa in bronze"; Eugene Plon, Benvenuto Cellini, out his life in the midst of the flames [medios animam exspiravit in ignes] "; Met. orfrvre, sculpteur (Paris: Plon, 1883), 219 n. 6. midailleur 5.106. 76. The document was published by Somigli, 45. 67. In an epigram on Myron (an ancient sculptor who also made a bronze 77. The chronology of Cellini's castings is most accurately summarized by Perseus, and to whom Cellini was frequently compared), Ausonius adopts the Dario Trento, Benvenuto Cellini, Operenon espostee documenti notarili, exh. cat., voice of the famous cow the sculptor cast: "I had stood here a brazen heifer; a Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, 1984, 56-64; other important cow was slaughtered to Minerva; but the goddess transferred to me the life observations are made by Somigli, 9ff. breathed forth [Aerea bos steteram;mactata est vacca Minervae;/sed dea proflatam 78. See Charles Avery and Susanna Barbaglia, L'opera completa di Cellini transtulit huc animam] "; Ausonius, Epigrams 72, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn White (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981), 95. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), vol. 2, 197. Also of 79. See Tassi, vol. 3, 256-58, no. 324. interest here is Hendrik Goltzius's Venus, and Ceresin the Hermitage, 80. The piece is carelessly modeled and poorly cast, and probably not St. Petersburg, which shows the artist tempering his burins at the altar/forge intended for presentation. of Venus. On this, see Walter S. Melion, "Love and Artisanship in Hendrick 81. For this last possibility, see Vincenzo Cartari, Le immagini degli di, ed. Goltzius's Venus, Bacchus and Ceresof 1606," Art History 16 (Mar. 1993): 60-94, Caterina Volpi (Rome: De Luca, 1996), 427. with further references; and Kaufmann (as in n. 39). 82. Niccol6 Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini, Dizionario della lingua italiana 68. See Eliade (as in n. 33), 31, 62ff. One might consider, in this context, the (Turin: Unione Tipografico Editrice, 1861-79), vol. 2, pt. 2, 1156: "Ram- alchemical process standardly referred to as mortification, the killing of the mentando che Medusa dicevasi amata da Nettuno; e che quarta delle Gorgoni body that contained the life one sought to employ. Alternatively, one might facevasi Scilla co' suoi cani mostruosi; e le Gorgoni abitatrici delle isole view Cellini's animating gesture as the sculptural analogue of a technique Gorgone nell'Atlantico, dicontro agli orti delle Esperidi, alecito arguirne non CELLINI'S BLOOD 235

tanto che questo sia nome d'isole serpentifere, quanto che questo fosse nome in coral so that they harden when exposed to air, and what was a pliant twig com. di varie singolaritA, quasi mostri marini. Onde non a caso fu detto beneath the sea is turned to stone above" [nunc quoque curaliis eadem natura Gorgonii un genere di polipi...." (Remembering that Medusa was said to remansit,/duritiam tacto capiant ut ab aere quodque/vimen in aequoreerat, fiat super have been loved by Neptune, that the fourth of the Gorgons was made into aequora saxum]; trans. Miller (as in n. 11), 231. Scilla with her monstrous dogs, and that the Gorgons were the inhabitants of 89. Pliny, Nat. Hist. 32.22, trans. W.H.S. Jones (London: Heinemann; the Gorgon islands in the Atlantic, opposite the place of the Hesperides, it is Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 477-79: "forma est ei less legitimate to conclude that this [ Gorgoni] was the name of the serpentine fruticis, colos viridis. bacae eius candidae sub aqua ac molles, exemptae islands, and more that it was the common name of various peculiar things that confestim durantur et rubescunt qua corna saativa specie atque magnitudine. were virtually sea monsters. It is thus no chance thing that a family of polyps aiunt tactu protinus lapidescere, si vivat; itaque occupar, evellique retibus aut was called gorgonii). acri ferramento praecidi, qua de causa curalium vocitatum." The cinquecento 83. Agricola (as in n. 36), 246v: "... Astato ancho chiamato Gorgonia; Italian text reads: "Ha forma d'arbuscello. Il colore e verde le coccole sue perche i poeti fingono, chele Gorgone fossero convertite in pietre: Scrivendo sotto l'acqua sono bianche, & morbide, ma spiccate diventano dure, & rosse di dunque Plinio de le gemme dice queste parole; la Gorgonia non ? altro in forma, & di grandezza di Corniole dimestiche. Et dicono che toccandogli effetto, che il Corallo: e la cagione del nome si e, perche si muta e converte in mentre che sono vivi di subito diventano pietra. Et per questo anticipano in una durezza di pietra." tirargli fuori colle reti, o mozzaargli con tagliente ferro. Per questa cagione 84. the Contrast entry for gorgonia in Jacobi Facciolati's Totius Latinitatis interpretano che e sia chiamato Corallo"; Historia naturale di C. Plinio Secondo, Lexicon (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1828), 494: "Gorgonia, ae, feminine di Latino in volgare tradottaper ChristophoroLandino, et nuovamente in molti luoghi, gorgonia, 'coral,' from the genitive gorgonos, because it was born from the blood dove quella mancava, supplito. ... (Venice, 1543), 787-88. of the Gorgon Medusa, or because, when removed from water, it was 90. P Ovidii Metamorphosis cum luculentissimis Raphaelis Regii enarrationibus immediately converted into the hardness of stone, just like those who look (Venice: Leonardo Laredano, 1517), 50r: "narratur quemadmodum virgae in upon the Gorgons. See Pliny, Nat. Hist. 37.10.59." mari nascentes in coralia fuerunt coversae: inquit eas a Perseo Medusae capiti 85. The lexical issues here are convoluted. Tommaseo and Bellini (as in n. subiectas induruisse lapidisque figuram contraxisse: q(uan)d(o)q(ui)dem 82) list no singular for gorgonii, but we might infer that the singular should be nereides admiratae multa & ipsae virgulta capiti Medusae subiecerunt: atque gorgonio. If this noun exists, then it is plausible that Cellini's own word, gorgoni, in mare disiecerunt. q(uae) q(uam)diu aqua teguntur mollia sunt. extracta ad is an alternative plural; many Italian words ending in -io take both -i and -ii as aerem statirigescunt. Quare quidam coralium Gorgoniam vocant Plinius ait acceptable plurals (principi/principii, omicidi/omicidii). The noun gorgonio, quod extractum e mari in duriciam lapidis mutetur tanq(uam) viso Gorgonis however, appears in no dictionary. It is possible that gorgonii is an irregular capite" ([Ovid] tells how branches born in the sea were converted into coral. plural for gorgonia, perhaps because, coming from Greek, the -a goes to -i (cf. He says that these [branches], having been placed by Perseus under the head poeta/poeti). This does not preclude Cellini's gorgoni as another irregular of Medusa, hardened, and that a figure of stone came together. The plural. It is also possible that gorgoni (and gorgonii) are nominals formed from sea-nymphs marveled much at this, and they themselves placed twigs under adjectives: gorgonio, as an adjective, means gorgonlike, and gorgoni(i) could Medusa's head, then strew them through the sea. These things are soft as long thus be gorgonlike things. On this score, it should be added that gorgonia itself as they are covered by water. Extracted, they harden in the air. Pliny says that functions the same way; like the English cognate gorgonian, the word means the reason why certain people call coral Gorgonia is because it is transformed both "coral" and "gorgonlike." Furthermore, the word, taken as an adjective, into the hardness of stone when extracted from the sea, just as if the head of a can involve the noun: gorgonian can mean gorgonianlike (coral-like) as well as Gorgon had been seen). gorgonlike. To all of this, finally, should be added Agricola's implication that 91. Pliny, 1963 (as in n. 89), 478 n. a. gorgons are gorgonian inasmuch as they themselves harden like coral. For the 92. Pope-Hennessy, 185. moment, I am considering the possibility that, through one of these circum- 93. Ferrero, 122. navigations, Cellini's word gorgoni might suggest, a priori, that his blood is also 94. On the collecting of coral in 16th-century Europe, see esp. Erich coral. However, a nice alternative suggestion offered to me by Conte Niccolo Schneider, "Korallen in ffirstlichen Kunstkammern des 16. Jahrhunderts," Capponi will prove relevant in a later stage of the discussion: conceivably, Weltkunst52 (1982): 3447-50. The Medici were interested not only in carved gorgone could be an augmentation of gorgo, which (in addition to being corals but also in fabricated ones: see, for example, the formulas in the 1561 synonymous with gorgon) can mean a whirlpool, eddy, or gurgle. This would Recettario,Florence, Bibl. Naz., Fondo Palat., 1001, fols. 14r ff. place the emphasis, again, on the liquid movement of Cellini's blood, about 95. Morel (as in n. 2), 60. which, see below. 96. Morel, "La thCdtralisation de l'alchimie de la nature: Les grottes 86. Bonsignore, 26v: "Come Perseo hebbe ucciso la belva dicese dal scoglio artificielles et la culture scientifique a Florence a la fin du XVIe siacle," & posese a sedere sopra el lito del mare per lavarse: che era tutto insanguinato Symbolesde la Renaissance 3 (1990):154-83, esp. 167-68. dil sangue di la belva. Ma percio chel capo di Medusa gli dava impedimento: si 97. At the beginning of the 17th century, Michael Maier would write that in lo pose terra: & perche quello capo non fesse alchuna lebone ala terra. coral's vegetative origins provided coral with "as much curative power as all Tolse alquante verge di legno lequal erano nati in mare: & subito quelle verge herbs together." He cautioned, however, that coral "has to be cut very se induraro in modo de pietra: & del sangue di quello capo ne fecero carefully under water, so that the juice and blood is not lost"; Maier, Atalanta vermiglie: & cosi sono facti li corali & questi fu li primi corali. Vedendo questo Fugiens: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems, ed. H.M.E. de Jong (Leiden: le nymphe del mare se maravegliaro molto: & si anchora per la morte dela Brill, 1969), 227-28. De Jong cites as the source for Maier's passage the Artis belva. & intrando Perseo ne lacqua vennaro le nymphe ala riva del mare & Auriferae, a 1572 compilation of earlier alchemical texts. Maier evidently had tolsero quelli corali & si li seminaron per mare & subito cominciaron a also read Pliny. in crescere: questo modo e abundantia di corali per lo mondo." 98. Compare the comments by Braunfels, McCarthy, Pope-Hennessy, Morel, 87. Bonsignore's translation went through numerous editions until 1521, at and Breidecker in n. 2 above, as well as Thomas Hirthe, "Die Perseus-und- which point it was superseded by Agostini's. It is evident that Agostini worked Medusa-Gruppe des Benvenuto Cellini in Florenz," Jahrbuch der Berliner closely with both Bonsignore's earlier translation (which is extensively re- Museen 29-30 (1987-88): 197-216. Brandt interprets the killing of Medusa as cycled and paraphrased) and with a Latin version. For the story of the Cosimo's elimination of Discord, but also observes, suggestively, that: "the generation of coral in particular, Agostini seems not to have controlled sculptor transforms [the pedestal] into art, much as the duke tames and Bonsignore against Ovid, but rather to have converted the vernacular prose cultivates nature's abundance for the good of his people and glorifies his rule into ottava nima: "Comhebbe morta il giouine p(re)giato/l'iniqua Belua, by patronizing the arts" (410). uenne su la riua/del mar, doue perch'era insanguinato/lauar si uolse, e la 99. On the protective value of coral as an amulet, see Pliny, Nat. Hist. 32.24; testa copriua/di Medusa c'hauea con seco alato/d'un bel cespo di uerge che and Agostino Del Riccio, Istoria dellepietre, ed. Raniero Gnoli and Attila Sironi n'usciua/fora de l'acqua, le qual s'induraro/e per il sangue rosse diuentaro" (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1996), 163-71; in the secondary literature, see (When the man had killed the he came to prized young frightful monster, the Elfriede Grabner, "Die Koralle in Volksmedizin und Aberglaube," Zeitschrift water's bank. There, because he was covered with blood, he wanted to wash fiir Volkskunde65 (1969): 183-95; and Corinne Mandel, "Mythe, mariage et himself. He covered the Medusa's head, which he had at his side, with a metamorphose: Piazza della Signoria," in Jiguret and Laframbroise (as in n. beautiful tuft of branches that had been sticking out of the water: this 2), esp. 369, with further references. On the coral worn by the Christ Child in hardened, and, because of the blood, became red); Agostini, 44v. Lodovico Piero della Francesca's Montefeltro Altarpiece, see Marilyn Aronberg Lavin Dolce's philologically more ambitious translations of bks. 4 and 5 of the and Miriam I. Redleaf, "Heart and Soul and the Pulmonary Tree in Two Metamorphosesfirst appeared in 1553, too late for Cellini to have consulted them. Paintings by Piero della Francesca," Artibus et Histoniae 31 (1995): 9-17. On 88. Ovid, Met. 4.740-52: "He washes his victorious hands in water drawn for bronze as an apotropaion, see Gramaccini (as in n. 45). him; and, that the Gorgon's snaky head may not be bruised on the hard sand, 100. Pagano Pagini, in Tassi, vol. 3, 488: "... collo veri sanguinis unda fluit." he softens the ground with leaves, strews seaweed over these, and lays on this 101. Compare Morel (as in n. 2), 66, on Vasari's coral: "It would not be born the head of Medusa, daughter of Phorcys. The fresh weed twigs, but now alive from the transformation of seaweed on contact with the head of Medusa, as and porous to the core, absorb the power of the monster and harden at its Ovid recounts, but from the petrification of her blood on contact with water." touch and take a strange stiffness in their stems and leaves [virga recens 102. Varchi, 1859 (as in n. 10), vol. 2, 286-87. bibulaque etiamnum viva medulla/vim rapuit monstri tactuque induruit huis/ 103. Galen, On the Natural Faculties 2.3, trans. ArthurJohn Brock (London: percepitquenovum ramis etfronde nigorem].And the sea-nymphs test the wonder Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 131. Galen's on more twigs and are delighted to find the same thing happening to them all; comparison is extended, and he goes as far as to say that semen is a great and, by scattering these twigs as seeds, propagate the wondrous thing artificer, "analogous with Phidias, whilst the blood corresponds to the throughout their waters. And even till this day the same nature has remained statuary's wax."