Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BODY OF STATE
by
CHRISTINE CORRETTI
January, 2011
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
Christine Corretti
*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary
material contained therein.
1
Copyright © 2011 by Christine Corretti
All rights reserved
2
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations 4
Abstract 9
Introduction 11
Conclusion 239
Illustrations 243
Bibliography 304
3
List of Illustrations
Fig. 7 Cellini, Danae and baby Perseus from the Perseus and 249
Medusa’s pedestal.
Fig. 10 Cellini, Mercury from the Perseus and Medusa’s pedestal. 252
4
Fig. 15 Follower of Leonardo da Vinci, Milanese school, Head of 257
John the Baptist, 1511, National Gallery of Art, London, England.
Fig. 16 Andrea Solario, Head of John the Baptist, 1507, Louvre 258
Museum, Paris, France.
Fig. 22 Giorgio Vasari, The First Fruits of the Earth offered to 264
Saturn, 1555-1557, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.
5
Fig. 29 Caterina Sforza as Fortuna, medal, reverse, 1480-1484, 271
British Museum, London, England.
Fig. 40 Medici coat of arms, Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy. 280
Fig. 42 Cellini, David and Goliath, shield for Francesco I de’ 282
Medici.
Fig. 43 Cellini, Judith and Holofernes, shield for Francesco I de’ 283
Medici.
6
Fig. 44 Cellini, Bianca Cappello, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici. 284
Fig. 48 Breaking with the Wheel, from the Book of Numquam, 288
13th or 14th century, Cathedral Library, Soest, Germany.
7
Fig. 57 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Last Judgment, 1537-1541, 294
Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace, Rome, Italy.
8
Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa: Configurations of the Body of State
Abstract
by
CHRISTINE CORRETTI
In one respect Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa (Loggia dei Lanzi,
Florence, Italy) legitimized the patriarchal power of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s
Tuscany. The bronze statue symbolizes the body of the male ruler as the state
emphasizes the fact that Perseus, Cosimo’s surrogate, rose to power through a
female agency – the Gorgon. Though not a surrogate for the powerful women of
the Medici family, Cellini’s Medusa may have reminded viewers of the fact
that Cosimo’s power stemmed in various ways from maternal influence. The
statue suggests that female power was palpable in the Medicean state. Under
the Loggia dei Lanzi maternal power assumes, specifically, the form of Medusa
of art celebrating the duke’s political greatness align Cosimo’s image with
9
maternal agency.
as an epitome of virtù (virility). Thus, the statue points up the contingent nature
suggests that Cellini (as Perseus) identified with the Gorgon as a hunted figure.
Thus, the statue reminds one of social, cultural, and legal restrictions imposed
upon men who lived in Cosimo’s Florence. Here, the cult of honor and virtù
Cellini’s statue implies that violence may turn against itself by appealing to the
image in art as Mother Goddess, a force who rivals the power of Cosimo I. Thus,
10
Introduction
much of the art he commissioned while he was in power. Among these works,
Benvenuto Cellini’s statue, Perseus and Medusa (1545-1554, fig. 1) under the
Loggia dei Lanzi, Piazza della Signoria, is the most complicated, as well as highly
Cosimo’s final expulsion of the republicans from Florence. T. Hirthe has written
that the statue of Perseus (the duke’s surrogate, as Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt
had also acknowledged) stepping on Medusa’s body while retaining her severed
head allegorizes the peace that Cosimo brought into the city after he took office,
while John Pope-Hennessy has proffered his opinion that Cellini’s sculpture
touts the stability of Cosimo’s regime.1 In Yael Even’s view the statue
symbolized Duke Cosimo I’s absolutist power. The Perseus ‚downplayed‛ the
effect of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes under the east arch of the Loggia,
dominates a man by trampling his body and severing his head (fig. 2).2 The
11
However, she has stated that the statue ‚reinforces‛ the defeat of matriarchy in
the ancient world, with obvious implications for the societal order of sixteenth-
entices sadistic men with an attractive visage and a nude female body that holds
onto the last shred of life.4 Even believes that Medusa’s severed head is sexual.5
treats the Perseus as a celebration of sexual violence and male power, and just
briefly touches upon how these concerns relate to Niccolo Machiavelli’s notion of
virtù.6 Geraldine A. Johnson and Sarah Blake McHam share Even’s view on the
described the Perseus as a ‚thinly veiled allegory of the triumphant Cosimo I.‛7
Corinne Mandel has noted that the ‚defensive‛ nature of Cosimo’s bronze
Henk Th. van Veen has presented a new study of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s
image as a ruler which argues that previous assessments of the duke’s patron-
age, such as P. W. Richelson’s Studies in the Personal Imagery of Cosimo I de’ Medici,
Duke of Florence (1977), Janet Cox-Rearick’s Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art:
Pontormo, Leo X and the two Cosimos (1984), Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge’s
12
Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600 (1992), and Patronage in
princely power.9 In van Veen’s view many of the major works of art and
architecture that the duke commissioned during his time in office do not reflect
‚decisiveness‛ which Cosimo ‚in the face of formidable opposition, had brought
to the city, just as he now offered her protection and prosperity.‛12 The Perseus is
a testament, van Veen has asserted, to Cosimo’s ‚invincibility,‛ and he cited the
Capricorns, Cosimo’s chosen zodiacal sign, on the statue’s base as proof that
13
Ovid’s hero referenced the Medici ruler.13
Undeniably, Cellini’s Perseus epitomizes the body of the male ruler over-
and style remind one that most of the Greek hero’s power derived from the
Gorgon. That message would have been problematic in the patriarchal society in
which Cellini lived. My study proposes that the Perseus and Medusa speaks to the
The sculptural ensemble may have reminded viewers of the fact that
matriarchal forces were the root of the political success of Cosimo I, whose visual
this way the bronze Medusa would have been a counterpart to the figures of
Maria Salviati, the duke’s mother, whose machinations resulted in his election,
and Eleonora di Toledo, Cosimo’s wife, who helped to build the granducal
‚empire‛ of Tuscany.
survived into the Renaissance, as surrogates for Eleonora di Toledo, while Cellini
surprising, for ‚Woman’s <role as mother projected on a cosmic scale, gave her
14
special prominence‛ in the Renaissance.15 Both the fiery spirit and the solemn
the contemporary ‚power of women‛ topos was present.16 In doing so, Cellini’s
statue for the Loggia dei Lanzi accentuates that which it aims to overcome. The
Greek characters.
political and cultural worlds of the Medici state. The Perseus and Medusa’s
Florentines, like most Renaissance Italians, believed that male rule was
orderly, legitimate, and correct. Conversely, female authority was, they claimed,
woman who wielded political power and influence, from Natalie R. Tomas’ The
Despite the belief in male and female as opposites, literary and visual
15
evidence suggests that in the early modern age gender and sexuality were often
cultural and even political instability and uncertainties.19 Cellini’s Perseus and
Medusa proves as much. I reinforce Melissa Bullard’s assertion that ‚anxiety can
culture.20 Indeed, the characters of Perseus and Medusa merit these descriptive
Chapter Summaries
including the legend’s significance for ancient Greek matriarchy and for
assumed in ancient through early modern times. Here, I locate the head’s
historical role as a seat of the life force and therefore of power. The generative
16
Cellini’s bronze for the Loggia dei Lanzi. In sum, it is a story of solar forces
mythological figures and of how they compare and compete as solar powers.
beaten even though she may be loved. Contemporaries, such as Cosimo I, who
sexual activity with political and military power. Within this context I discuss
Cellini’s Perseus as a Machiavellian hero whose attack of the Gorgon is not only
Chapter 4 focuses on the role of Donatello’s Judith as a type for the Virgin
painting for the Medici, and what that role meant for the influential women in
central to the fifth chapter, where I show that the Gorgon’s appearance translates
into Woman’s and the Mother’s fearsome sexuality. The sixth chapter treats
17
Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa as a public execution and concomitantly an
epitomization of Cosimo I’s aims and means to control the Tuscan judicial
system and the legal rights of those within his state. Medusa, as a face of the
a symbol of the absolutist state. However, the exceptions to this binary stand for
Mother Goddess are the main focus of Chapter 8. I treat the duchess’ characteri-
Perhaps Cattani’s premise served to remind those at the Medici court of the
duke’s political limitations and of the source of his authority. I propose that at
least one image of the duchess did just that: Agnolo Bronzino’s state portrait of
Eleonora. Even though Cosimo I aligned his own image as a demi-god with that
18
influence within the Tuscan state. Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa likewise indicates
A Note on Methodology
Although Cellini’s Perseus is the center of this study, this text is not merely
a monograph. I consider various works of art that contrast with the Perseus in
theme and style, as well as images that complement Cosimo’s bronze in the latter
highly significant for the culture in which Cellini lived. In the Renaissance
symbols -- like myth, images and allegories -- had psychological force, for
19
might otherwise be either obscured by the limitations
of language or too complex for adequate expression.
<.Although the symbol captures and integrates
abstractions and places them in their effective context,
it can also be effective on more than one level at the
same time.23
that the statue was meaningful in different ways. As van Veen has noted, in the
Renaissance it was common for patrons to have different reasons for commis-
sioning works of art.24 The duke must have known that the myth of Perseus
tion of Cosimo’s statue indicates, Cellini himself knew as much. The sculptor
and the duke must have realized that the androgynous aspect of the statue partly
in this regard and that erudite viewers who would study it up close would have
different, even conflicting analyses, of what they saw. Van Veen has also
stressed the provocative nature of Cellini’s bronze. His article on the Perseus
holds that the statue would have elicited diverse, even troubled reactions from
Florentine citizens themselves, at least those who had resisted the new Medici
and Florentine rebels points up the personal significance the statue also had for
the life of Cellini, who subverted political authority and came back to Florence in
The Perseus posed a trap for the viewer. As van Veen has stated, the
‚knowing viewers‛ (and there were many, apart from Cellini, with sophisticated
knowledge about sculpture) deliberately concealed their feelings for the troub-
ling political messages the statue held for them. Showing aversion to the Perseus
would have cast Cellini’s viewers as enemies of the state. Therefore, it was safer
to remain silent about the political recollection the Perseus provoked and to limit
responses, which might have convinced him that the exhilarated community in
the city found his despotism intimidating and would keep silent. The event of
the Perseus’ unveiling, in van Veen’s mind, is telling. The ruler, looking out a
window from the Palazzo Vecchio and down at the Loggia dei Lanzi, first let a
few people look at the statue to see if they liked it, but he may have wanted to
find if they would give him negative commentaries of a political nature. If they
did not, then the statue’s present state would be acceptable to him. However, it
21
is not that Cosimo I wanted the aesthetic appeal of the Perseus to mask its
John Shearman had previously noted that Cellini’s Perseus ‚reflected the
needs of the closely watched returned exiles‛ and that contemporaries would
interpret neither it, nor other works of art on the Piazza della Signoria in a
the preceding situation. Cellini was in Rome in 1539, when the Pasquino, the
ancient statue of Menelaus that had long served as the target of lampooning, was
at this time dressed up as Perseus. Surely, Cellini knew about the occurrence.
The Roman poets who donned the statue thus allegorized Medusa’s head as
inimical individuals within their city, such as the cardinals’ women, and the
Council.29 It is telling that these men chose the figures of Perseus and Medusa to
make their point, for Ovid’s story, the Pasquino episode suggests, spoke in
complex ways to the political and cultural fabric of Renaissance Italy. Cellini’s
Perseus and Medusa speaks to that same fabric in a much more complicated
manner. The Pasquino episode highlights the potential of public works of art to
22
come to stand for contemporary concerns that may not have been in the minds of
Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa embodies ideas that are linked concretely, for
instance, via iconography, to the power structure of Medicean Florence. The end
result of the sculptor’s brilliance shows that the assertion of a main message or
ideology, requiring the repression of certain truths and ideas, cannot but bring
23
Notes
3. -----, 11.
4. -----, 11.
5. -----, 11.
7. Geraldine A. Johnson, ‚Idol or Ideal: the Power and Potency of Female Public
Sculpture,‛ in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, eds. Geraldine A.
Johnson and Sarah Matthews Grieco (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1997): 238. Sarah Blake McHam, ‚Public Sculpture in
Renaissance Florence,‛ in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sarah Blake
McHam (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 169.
8. Corinne Mandel, ‚Perseus and the Medici,‛ Storia dell’Arte 87 (1996): 168ff.
Margaret A. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini, Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity
in Renaissance Italy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003): 9.
9. Henk Th. van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine
Art and Culture (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
24
10. -----, 5.
11. -----, 5.
16. Adrian Randolph, Engaging Symbols; Gender, Politics, and Public Art in
Fifteenth-Century Florence (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002): 242-285 for a
discussion of the ‚power of women‛ topos in the fifteenth century.
18. Natalie R. Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence
(Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2003): 164. Tomas’ book is filled with pertinent
discussions of early modern ideas about male and female rulership. See also C.
Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 4, 17-18. In Patricia
Simons’ terms, patriarchal power, though established in Renaissance Italy, was a
construction, not ‚natural and unfettered.‛ See Simons’ ‚Alert and Erect:
Masculinity in some Italian Renaissance Portraits of Fathers and Sons,‛ in Gender
Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History (New York: MRTS,
1994): 167.
19. See, for instance, Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern
France: Eight Essays (California: Stanford University Press, 1975) and Sarah
Matthews Grieco, ‚Pedagogical Prints: Moralizing Broadsheets and Wayward
Women in Counter Reformation Italy,‛ in Picturing Women in Renaissance and
Baroque Italy, eds. Geraldine A. Johnson and Sarah Matthews Grieco (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 61-87. In making the observation
that Renaissance masculinity was unstable I am not suggesting that it was secure
in any other era; neither has femininity been.
20. Melissa Bullard, ‚Lorenzo de’ Medici, Anxiety, Image Making and Political
Reality in the Renaissance,‛ in Lorenzo de’ Medici: Studi, ed. G. C. Garfagnini
(Florence, Italy: Olschki Press, 1992): 40.
21. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1962): 8. Some of Ernst Cassirer’s
salient works on symbolic values include Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen: die
Sprach (Berlin, Germany: Bruno Cassirer, 1923) and Essay on Man (Connecticut:
Yale University Press, 1944).
22. See Gabrielle Langdon, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal from
the Court of Cosimo I (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2006): 14, where one
reads that Renaissance viewers read in visual details ‚a world of meaning and
significance: the burnished sphere on the chair that mirrors papal environment
26
and greater world view is simultaneously the abiding Medici symbol, the golden
palla or sphere.‛
24. Van Veen, ‚Wat een Opdrachtgever wil: Cosimo I de’ Medici en Cellini’s
Perseus en Medusa,‛ in Kunstenaars en Opdrachtgevers, ed. Harald Hendrix
(Holland: Amsterdam University Press, 1996): 49-58.
25. -----, ‚Wat een Opdrachtgever wil: Cosimo I de’ Medici en Cellini’s Perseus en
Medusa,‛ 55.
26. -----, ‚Wat een Opdrachtgever wil: Cosimo I de’ Medici en Cellini’s Perseus en
Medusa,‛ 49-58. Van Veen believes that when Cosimo looked down from a
window in the Palazzo Vecchio at the Perseus’ unveiling he was listening for
viewers’ responses. Cellini, La Vita, I Trattati (Rome, Italy: G. Casini, 1967): 376
states that Cosimo I listened to the populace’s reaction to the Perseus from a
window above the door of the Palazzo Vecchio (‚una finestra bassa del Palazzo,
la quale si è sopra la porta..‛). It may have been, however, that the duke watched
for viewers’ facial expressions and body language, for voices are mostly
inaudible from the duke’s post. Cosimo was also available to receive responses
from viewers after the Perseus’ introduction. Mandel (168) believes that the duke
watched for ‚violent outbursts,‛ like those that viewers let out when Baccio
Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus was unveiled on the Piazza della Signoria.
27. John Shearman, ‚Art or Politics in the Piazza?‛ in Benvenuto Cellini: Kunst und
Kunsttheorie im 16. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Germany: Bohlau Verlag, 2003): 20.
28. -----, 26. Shearman, Only Connect<Art and the Spectator in the Italian
Renaissance (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992): 44.
29. V. Marucci et al., eds., Pasquinate Romane del Cinquecento, vol. 1 (Rome, Italy:
Salerno Press, 1983): 433-454.
27
Chapter 1 The Story of Perseus and Medusa, an Interpretation of its
Meaning, and the Topos of Decapitation
This chapter’s summary of the tale of Perseus and the Gorgon will precede a
and what that image meant to ancient Greece. A subsequent section on the
symbolism of the head as a life force will be important to this study’s discussion of
tale that had the greatest impact upon Cellini. However, Hesiod’s Theogony and
Lucan’s Pharsalia contain additional information that would have been important
to the sculptor. Mention of other Greek authors is also due. What follows is
Danae was the daughter of King Acrisius of Argos who feared an oracle
that his future grandson would kill him and thus become ruler of the land. So one
day Acrisius imprisoned Danae to prevent her from meeting suitors. However,
Jupiter (Zeus) came to the girl as a shower of gold (he was a sun god) and impreg-
nated Danae with the baby Perseus. For years the princess hid her baby, but it
was not long before her father found him out and, according to the canonical
28
version of 700-650 B.C., ordered them both to be locked in a chest and thrown into
the sea. Luckily, a fisherman called Dictys, whose brother, Polydectes, ruled the
island of Seriphos, saved Danae and Perseus and brought them to the island,
where Perseus lived until he reached manhood. Polydectes fell in love with
(Neptune), the supreme god of the sea, and incited the jealously of the goddess
Athena (Minerva). As a result, the latter turned Medusa’s head into a mass of
hissing snakes and her face into a sight so frightful that anyone who would look
the world. However, with the aid of the gods, Perseus was able to overtake the
lay beyond River Okeanos, at the ‚edge of night,‛ where stars and planets
vanished for rebirth.2 Cohabiting with Medusa were her two Gorgon sisters,
offspring, like their dreadful sister, of Ceto and Phorcys, themselves children of
Earth and Sea. The Graiae, who shared one eye and one tooth among them, lived
with the Gorgons. Perseus snatched the eye at the instant they were passing it
29
from one to another, so the sisters became blind to his presence. He then coaxed
Again employing deceit, Perseus made Medusa gaze upon her own face in
Athena’s bronze mirror-like shield, whereupon she turned herself into stone.
Perseus then decapitated her with the harpe, the saw-toothed sickle. The blood
from Medusa’s head spawned the winged horse Pegasus and Chrysoar, the solar
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lucan’s Pharsalia (Book IX) emphasize the heights
which Perseus traveled on his way home from the Gorgon’s den. ‚Driven this way
more substance than the dewy mist, he looked down from a great height onto
earth as he flew over it.‛4 (Metamorphoses, Book IV, 851-855) Ovid and Lucan tell
that during Perseus’ flight blood from Medusa’s head met the earth, where it gave
Air borne in Mercury’s (Hermes’) winged sandals, Perseus saw Atlas’ tree,
‚whose leaves of shining gold concealed gold fruit and branches underneath.‛
‚shining,‛ implies a connection between the gold and himself when he asks: ‚Mine
host, if the renown of noble birth is what impresses you, why, I’m the son of Jove!‛
30
(Metamorphoses, Book IV, 873-875) (Hesiod’s ‚Shield of Achilles,‛ similarly says
that Perseus was made of gold.) The Metamorphoses states that Atlas immediately
recalled an oracle that a son of Jupiter would spoil his tree of gold, so he enclosed
his orchard within a wall and set a dragon there to protect it. Countering Atlas’
impertinence toward him, Perseus held up the head of Medusa, thereby turning
Perseus then spied King Cepheus and his family on the African shore.
Andromeda, the king’s daughter, stood chained to a rock as prey for the sea
monster Cetus. Her sacrifice was made to appease the Nereids, angered as they
were by Cassiopeia’s boasting that her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful
than the Nereids. Perseus flew through the air and the monster attacked his
exists here, for the watery reflection mimics that of the Gorgon on Athena’s
shield. The youth saved the girl by stabbing the monster with his sword multiple
times. After killing Cetus Perseus placed Medusa’s head on the shore, where
vegetation ‚soaked up the monster’s force,‛ that is, her blood, and turned to coral.
Perseus gave thanks to the gods for his success by building three sacrificial
altars: one for Mercury, one for Athena, and one for Jupiter. Grateful for his
31
daughter’s life, King Cepheus gave Perseus permission to marry Andromeda.
Gorgophone (‚Gorgon killer‛), which testifies to the fact that Medusa’s power
Another test of Perseus’ abilities was his encounter with Phineas, a rival for
Perseus was aghast at the number of men on Phineas’ side. Since the former was
not able to slay all of them, he obtained Medusa’s head, held it aloft and turned the
enemies he himself had not killed to stone. After returning to Seriphos, Perseus
did the same to King Polydectes. Thus, Perseus, as Medusa’s alter ego, shared the
When Perseus was finished with the head of Medusa he gave it to Athena,
who appropriated its powers by placing it on her shield for protection. The
canonical version of the tale states that Asclepius discovered Medusa’s lasting
power when blood from her left side destroyed whoever drank it and that from
The oracle is fulfilled late in the story when Perseus kills Acrisius with a
states that Perseus killed Acrisius with a symbol of the sun – the discus. Thus,
32
Perseus was able to become king of Argos. However, since he was Acrisius’
versions of her story from the ancient Mediterranean world, some of whose
authors have been lost to scholarship. Many of these folk traditions dating to as
early as the second millennium B.C. formed the basis for the canonical version of
the Gorgon’s story, which, as mentioned, developed between the years 700-650
Medusa as a goddess with cosmic power, from such classical sources as Hesiod’s
ation of Perseus and the Gorgon derived from many of the ideas outlined here.
Timaeus (21) and Histories (Book II, 170-175) note that the historical origins of
Athena take one back to the Egyptian goddess Neith, who represented Mother
Death. Medusa’s historical origins come into play here, for to see Neith’s face
behind the veil, which signifies the distance between human and divine, was to
have died. Here is a clear link to the Gorgon’s destructive visage. In Libya (North
Africa) Neith was known as Athena. Pausanias’ Description of Greece states that
33
Athena’s place of origin was, indeed, Triton in Libya. Herodotus’ History (Book I)
acknowledges the same. With the passage of time Libyan refugees emigrated to
Crete and brought with them their Serpent Goddess Anatha. By 4000 B.C. she
became known as Athena. Her worship passed onto mainland Greece in the
Minoan and Mycenaean periods, when Greeks came into contact with the myths
By 700 B.C. the Greeks told the tale that Athena was conceived in a union
between the god Jupiter and an infinitely intelligent mother goddess named Metis,
‚sovereign wisdom‛). Hesiod’s Theogony (Book II, 453-491) states that Metis was
wiser than any of the gods and of mortal men. In order to put a stop to the
fulfillment of a prophecy that the child of their union would be stronger than the
father, Jupiter deliberately destroyed Metis by swallowing her while she was
pregnant with Athena. The result was a child solely of the father. Hesiod’s
Theogony (924) and the Homeric ‚Hymn to Athena‛ relate that the child was born
from the head of Jupiter. It appears that Metis’ wisdom was so great that it
resulted in Athena’s birth. Alternatively, another myth holds that the golden-
armored Athena sprung out of Jupiter’s head when it was cleft with a the double-
edged sword. Note here that the rise of a powerful female agency is concomitant
34
with a wound to the patriarch’s head. This episode is almost a mirror image of the
births of Pegasus and Chrysoar. The generative power of Jupiter’s head indicates
Athena also displayed her triple nature as Athena, Metis, and Medusa,
who corresponded to the new, full, and dark phases of the moon, respectively.
Medusa, the Serpent Goddess of female wisdom, embodied the third aspect as
destroyer. Indeed, her role as such fed into the ancient perception that the female
visage surrounded by serpent hair was an emblem of divine wisdom. The Orphic
tradition, which was known at the Medici court, called the moon’s face the
Gorgon’s head, while Clement of Alexandria would later say that Orpheus
cunning and feminine wiles, but also of healing, and they had an affinity with the
shown with the Mother Goddess, one of whose guises was the Earth Mother,
because of their association with water, earth, and the mystery of rebirth and
immortality, of which the moon, sloughing its shadow and again waxing, was the
celestial sign. Serpents slough and regrow their skin in cycles, as if eternally. The
moon is the measure of the life-creating cycle of the womb and thus of time. Two
35
facets of the same being -- birth and death -- involved the moon’s significance.
Similarly, Medusa was the protector of the secrets of sex, death, divination,
Medusa’s influence pervaded earth and sky. It made itself felt, for
instance, in the Atlas Mountain, which, Ovid said, touched the skies; the sea,
where coral grew, and so on. In makes sense, then, that in their pre-Olympian
guise the Gorgons and the Graiae were grand-daughters of the Earth Mother, Gaia,
who had brought forth Heaven and Sea. Thus, one can see that the Gorgon’s
character betrays the features of a supreme deity, the Mother Goddess, which had
existed since the start of time.10 The latter could and did destroy those she
controlled.
Greek hero’s harpe resembles the lunar sickle, and thereby suggests a symbolic tie
(Moralized Ovid, 219).11 The harpe would have been, then, a suitable instrument
sense, like the sun in eclipse, as dark as death (just as the Mother Goddess
36
comprised light and darkness). Because her unmediated power was so great
Medusa overpowered the gaze. In the ancient mind looking at a divinity neces-
Medusa’s aspect indirectly.12 The mirror disk itself is lunar/solar, even generally
cosmic, as the ancients must have believed Athena’s shield to be. As a product of
the earth, the mirror stood for the Earth Mother. That Medusa’s face made its
in Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (second century) brings the preceding motifs
An entity embracing light and heat, the Mother Goddess, like Medusa,
embodied both the generative and destructive forces of the sun. Different gems
from the ancient world show Medusa at the center of the zodiac, occupying the
is that Apollo and Medusa were sometimes featured on different sides of the same
coin.14 The famous play Ion by Euripides poses the question, ‚Does the dwelling of
37
Phoebus‛ (the sun) ‚really cover the central omphalos‛ (navel) ‚of the earth?‛ to
which Ion replies, ‚Ay, decorated with garlands and with the Gorgons ‘around it,’
Metis/Medusa and claiming that Athena was conceived and birthed solely from
new patriarchal order, firmly established around 1100 B.C. with the Dorians’
Medusa, now the Terrible Mother, as evil. Athena was now part of the new trinity
of supreme rulers that included Jupiter and Apollo. She and Medusa then became
play up Jupiter’s procreative capacity. That capacity is more than a metaphor for
been a trope for ability of the mind, for, as a product of Jupiter, Athena had
intelligence, certain powers and a relationship with her father that no other god
instrument of her father. The preceding indicates that a drive to incorporate the
38
The social and political turmoil that gave rise to misogynistic interpreta-
tions of the character and tale of Medusa reached a climax well before the
canonical version of her story was complete. Then, the historical archetype of the
has stated, ‚matriarchy was a stock feature of the speculative systems of the
matriarchy.‛18 Some authors who claimed that the Amazons were historical
suggested that at least as far back as 6000 B.C. Medusa was a high priestess who
(Book IV) relates that the Libyan Amazons were Gorgons, all women famous for
their valor, war-like exploits, and acumen in founding and maintaining cities,
governments and nations. At one time, Medusa was their queen. According to
Aeschylus’ Eumenides, written in 458 B.C., states that the Amazons were
empire builders, like the Athenians, a fact that Isocrates acknowledged. Even
though the Amazons compared to the Athenians in different ways, these women
eyes. Their matriarchic power aside, the androgynous nature of these women, like
39
that of Medusa herself, made up of properties belonging to sexuality, fertility, life
The emergence of the new patriarchy coincided with the destruction of the
among the first to destroy the Amazons were Achilles, Bellerophon and Hercules.
Then Perseus came to the scene and defeated Medusa, the matriarchic ‚queen,‛
and her Amazon sisters.22 As Siculus claimed, the latter were a great power until
the Gorgon met her death. Perseus’ marriage to Andromeda, whose name means
‚ruler of men,‛ stemmed from Medusa’s demise, reflecting the fact that
matriarchal state.
societies prove -- the mother was the epitome of matriarchy. That is why Perseus’
side (remember, Medusa became the Terrible Mother in the story of Athena’s
birth), which partially comprised her physical sexuality.23 Indeed, since ancient
times the procreative nature of woman has been understood as an aspect of female
power and potency, and has served as a source of fear as well as something to be
40
In the preceding context, it is telling that Perseus’ entrance into the
Gorgons’ cave at the extreme West, that is, Night, where the sun retires, symbol-
izes the sun’s setting, or its death, while his exit stands for the sun’s birth into the
world from Mother Earth’s devouring womb.24 Since the sun vanishes in this way
every evening, only to return the next morning, its mortality and immortality
coincide, thus typifying the sun’s subjection to the Mother’s power over life and
death.
Thus, ‚the feminine whole cannot be fragmented and its parts suppressed,‛
which the Athenian myth sought to do.25 The enduring fear of Medusa functioned,
still a tribute to the long lasting impact of female power and potency. The fact that
Perseus was able to slay the Gorgon only with the aid of Athena and Mercury, his
fearful escape from the Gorgon’s lair and his inability to counter some of his rivals
at his wedding without Medusa’s help point up his weakness as a man and
perhaps even patriarchy’s weakness. It is no coincidence that only men could turn
Medusa as an ugly and frightening monster. She appeared this way from the
early seventh through the fifth century B.C. After this time, starting in the fifth
41
century B.C., artists depicted the Gorgon with pleasing features. Remember,
Ovid’s Metamorphoses states that she was once beautiful. During the patriarchal
age artists began to include Medusa’s decapitated body to underscore the fact that
her death was an assault on the female form. Corporeal partitioning seems to have
ambivalent. One must stress that her beauty and monstrosity could coincide in the
same visual image, a fact that testifies to the ambiguity of her powerful effects and
A fuller answer to why the myth of Perseus and Medusa developed when it
attitudes toward female deities, such as Medusa, in the Greek pantheon. The
dominant force in the Greek pantheon was now Jupiter, no longer a supreme
Mother Goddess. Not surprising, then, is the fact that a copy of Athena’s shield on
the Parthenon, the center of Athenian religious worship and a symbol of the
42
between Amazons and Greeks. Other reliefs on the same temple also narrate the
Greek-Amazonian war.27
in Amazonomachiai that are blatant assaults on the female gender. For instance,
numerous antique vase paintings show mythological heroes, such as Hercules and
Theseus, targeting the breast of a militantly clad Amazon (fig. 3). The Greek cult
of the phallus that emerged during the age of patriarchal state building seems to
and other phallic attributes which are both literally and symbolically pitted against
the Greek family structure: fathers and sons needed to prove themselves as
proposed that alterations in the familial hierarchy concurring with the rise of the
patriarchal polis probably had the greatest impact on the development of Perseus’
myth. While fathers assumed the role of head of household, male offspring faced a
43
No middle, or third course was imaginable; the absence
of male rule presupposed, on the domestic level, the
breakdown of marriage, the death of husband, and the
destruction of his household. On the public level, loss
of male rule meant the creation of matriarchy, a situation
tantamount to chaos in the state and cosmos.31
Not coincidentally, some ancient Greek texts from the patriarchal age
Geography (Book I, 2,8), which claims that in order to educate and to discipline
their little ones Greek parents pictured the Gorgon as a goblin who devours
children. The image of Medusa as a bogey suggests that she embodied fears of the
unknown, of the uncertain and of the different which accompanied the rise of the
Mediterranean polis. Similarly, the Gorgon’s head engendered fear even after
Perseus severed it. As Phillies-Howe has discerned, ‚the <struggle was constant,
and where men failed in deeds they kept dreaming of victory,‛ like that of
Perseus, one of the heroes they invented to mask and to conquer their own
vulnerability:
44
not. Hence in the myth, at least, victory was insured.32
In this context, the Gorgon stood, I propose, for fear of the feminization of
ancient anxieties about woman, which manifested themselves in art and literature,
as dangerously seductive, ferocious, curious and destructive – all traits that were
and of Athena’s birth suggest, the ancient Mediterranean world believed that the
head is vitalistic, the seat of the life force. The notion helps to explain why the
head has been a time honored emblem of power.34 During the days of Ovid,
Homer and Hesiod the head purportedly had the potential to achieve ‚the greatest
miracle, the holiest mystery‛ – to generate new life.35 Pindar was one author who
asserted that life within the head even survives death and passes into the other-
world.36 Permeating the ancient Greek world was the belief that the head contains
another animate part of the person – the soul. Ovid, Pindar, Plato and Homer, for
example, stated as much, and at the same time embraced the notion that the head
is holy, the most divine part of the individual. Aristotle asserted, in keeping, that
45
The belief in the head’s vitality carried into the Middle Ages, when Celtic
and Scythian ideas that the trophy head could confer strength to the victor
influenced different forms of epic literature, such as Arthurian. The latter had a
Mediterranean beliefs that this most controversial part of the human being houses
supernatural powers.38 For instance, Canto XXVIII of Dante’s Inferno (c. 1308-1321)
includes the specter of a deceased man with his severed head in his hand. Antonio
Dominguez Leiva has stated that the former image is markedly Medusan.39 I
would stress that the preceding is a natural result of ancient beliefs in the head’s
vitality and even supports the conclusions of those, such as the Church Fathers,
The notion of the head as a life force and therefore a source of power seems
believed to evoke solar rays. The sun’s heat vitalizes. Similarly, the image of the
rays of light radiating from the head has since antiquity signified divinity, fire,
energy, and power.40 No other part of the person appeared in this way, for only
the preferred mode of execution for rulers and others of rank, whose heads wore
46
the symbols of state in the first place and who could also lose those emblems. The
position of the ruler, or the ruling elite as the ‚head‛ of state naturally came into
play here, but the association with holy martyrdoms, like that of John the Baptist,
demonstrate how Cellini’s Medusa epitomizes many of the preceding ideas about
47
Notes
1. Ovid’s, Lucan’s and Hesiod’s versions of Perseus’ tale are the most thorough
popular accounts that existed in the Renaissance. Apollodorus’ translation of the
canonical version of the tale came into print only in 1555. However, medieval and
Renaissance mythographers popularized the latter in Europe. See Jean Seznec, The
Survival of the Pagan Gods, the Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance
Humanism and Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953): 225. Seznec’s
book is filled with information about Ovid’s immense popularity in the
Renaissance. The first published editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses appeared in
Rome and Bologna in 1471 and the first Italian version of the text appeared in
Florence in 1497.
3. Hesiod maintained that Pegasus and Chrysoar were born from Medusa’s neck.
4. All quotations of Ovid come from the Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005).
9. Cooper, 106-108, 146-151. The link between the moon, a time honored symbol of
woman, and the Mother Goddess was known in the Renaissance. For example, the
figure of Terra appears above a lunar crescent in a fresco in Ferrara’s Schifanoia
Palace. However, the sun has also been a feminine attribute. The representation of
Hathor with a sun-disk is one among many religiously symbolic images of women
with the sun dating to the early Bronze Age. The sun-disk is sometimes described
as placed in Hathor’s womb, an indication that the sun’s generative properties
were associated with women. For like images see Lucy Goodison’s Death, Women
and the Sun: Symbolism of Regeneration in Early Aegean Religion (England: University
of London, 1989).
10. Euripedes’ Ion (1053) states that Medusa was Earth-born, the daughter of Gaia.
For the historical cult of the Mother Goddess see M. I. Rostovzeff, Iranians and
Greeks in South Russia (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969); J. J. Bachofen,
Gesammeltewerk, vols. 2, 3, ed. K. Meuli (Basel, Switzerland: B. Schwabe, 1948); G.
Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, vol. 4
(Leipzig, Germany: C. W. Leske, 1810); E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess:
an Archaeological and Documentary Study (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959);
W. Leonhard, Hettiter und Amazonen (Leipzig, Germany: B. G. Teubner, 1911);
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Penguin
Press, 1976); Lynn E. Roller, In Search of God the Mother, the Cult of Anatolian Cybele
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
11. All references to Berchorius’ Moralized Ovid are taken from the 1509 edition,
Ouidiana moraliter a magistro Thoma Walleys (Houghton Library, Harvard
University). See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W. W.
Norton and Company, 1968): 44, note 35 for an indication that RenaissanceItaly
was aware of Berchorius’ Repertorium morale and the Moralized Ovid.
12. A. L. Frothingham, ‚Medusa, Apollo, and the Great Mother,‛ American Journal
of Archaeology 15 (1911): 349-377.
49
13. Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. Robert Graves (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Young, 1951): 263. See Jean Gillies, ‚The Central Figure in Botticelli’s
Primavera,‛ Woman’s Art Journal 2 (1981): 12-16 for evidence that Apuleius’ text
was known to Renaissance Florentine humanists.
14. For information about the solar gems featuring Medusa see Frothingham, 352.
16. Scholars have provided strong evidence that a matriarchy – a term critics and I
employ to mean a society that revolved around matriarchal authority, not
necessarily a society that oppressed men -- once existed in the prehistoric and
ancient Mediterranean and that an invasion of patriarchal Indo-Europeans put an
end to it. See, for instance, Marija Gimbutas’ The Language of the Goddess:
Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (London, England: Thames
and Hudson Press, 2001), The Living Goddess (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999), The Kurgan Culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: Selected
Articles from 1952 to 1993 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man, 1997),
The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe (California: Harper
SanFrancisco, 1991). Diop, 80-81 and Miriam Robbins Dexter, ‚The Roots of Indo-
European Patriarchy: Indo-European Female Figures and the Principles of
Energy,‛ in The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of
Patriarchy, ed. Cristina Biaggi (Connecticut: KIT, 2005): 146 also mention the Indo-
European invasion. As Diop, 81 shows, the ancient author Polybius spoke of the
matriarchal Leleges of Asia Minor (modern day Turkey and Greece). Herodotus’
Histories (Book I, 173), which, remember, the Renaissance knew, publicizes the
following about Asia Minor’s matriarchal Lycians:
They have one singular custom which distinguishes from every other
nation in the world: naming themselves by their mothers, not their fathers.
Ask a Lycian who he is and he answers by giving his own name, that of
his mother and so on in the female line. Also, if a free woman marries a
slave, their children are full citizens; but if a free man marries a foreign
woman, or lives with a concubine, even if he is the chief man of the State,
the children forfeit all the rights of citizenship.
Heraclides Ponticus said of the Lycians: ‚From of old they have been ruled by the
women.‛ This quotation is found on page 46 of Merlin Stone’s When God was a
Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
50
The cult of the Mother Goddess, entrenched in all Mediterranean matriarchies,
suggests that power of an earthly nature influenced individuals’ conceptualization
of divinity. Further, one reads that priests were women, some of whom held a
divine right to the throne. Indo-European patriarchs worshipped, tellingly, male
gods. The latter clashed with their female counterparts, as the story of Metis
shows. In Harald Haarmann’s terms:
The strong women in the Greek pantheon do not fit into the
mold of male-dominated hierarchy of the Indo-European
divinities. The Greek goddesses are actually a remnant of the
ancient cult of the Great Goddess, the One who functionally
proliferated into the Many within Greek mythology. It is
noteworthy that the Greek goddesses were very powerful, as
powerful as the male divinities and all major achievements of
Greek civilization were attributed to the ingenuity of goddesses.
For example, the gift of agriculture was given to mankind by
Demeter, the corn mother who is also credited with the inven-
tion of the plow. Haarmann, ‚Why did Patriarchy supersede
Egalitarianism?‛ in The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins,
History and Impact of Patriarchy, 170.
17. See, for instance, Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries (New York:
Balantine Books, 1999).
18. Quotation of Josine Blok, The Early Amazons, Modern and Ancient Perspectives on
a Persistent Myth (New York: Brill Press, 1995): 101. The sources cited in note 10
also discuss the historical basis of matriarchy.
19. See Marguerite Rigoglioso, The Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2009): 72 for a discussion of Medusa as an historical Amazon
priestess. The name of Medusa is also associated with the word ‚Amazon.‛
51
20. Stephen R. Wilk, Medusa: Solving the Myth of the Gorgon (Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press, 2000): 25. W. Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: a Study in Athenian
Mythmaking (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Interestingly,
Homer’s Odyssey associates Medusa with matriarchal societies. Siculus also spoke
about matriarchal nations of Africa and the Mediterranean in conjunction with the
Amazons. For a pertinent discussion of Siculus’ comments, including his
observations about matriarchal worship of a Mother Goddess, see Stone, 34-35.
21. Tyrrell, 89. Roger Just’s Women in Athenian Law and Life (New York: Routledge
Press, 1991): 174-175 explores the ‚anomalous‛ nature of the Amazons. Just, 177
also notes that the Athenians knew the Amazons’ invasion of Attica to be a matter
of historical truth. Mandy Merck’s ‚The City’s Achievements,‛ in Tearing the Veil,
Essays on Femininity, ed. Susan Lipshitz (New York: Routledge Press, 1978): 96
documents the Athenians’ fascination with the Amazons.
22. See Mina Zografou, Amazons in Homer and Hesiod: a Historical Reconstruction
(Athens, Greece, 1972). Isocrates’ (436-338 B.C.) ‚Panegyricus‛ tells of the
Amazons’ encounters with the Greek patriarchs. Fulgentius, Fulgentius the
Mythographer, trans. Leslie G. Whitbread (Ohio State University Press, 1971): 61
describes what seems to be Perseus’ political domination of Medusa. Perseus
decapitated the Gorgon because he coveted her rich dominion. After he did so he
acquired all her territories. Fulgentius may have meant to characterize Perseus as
a surrogate for the Greeks who took control of matriarchal lands. See Seznec, 94,
106, 172, 175, 176n, 178, 228, 234ff for Fulgentius’ great influence in the early
modern age.
23. It is worth noting, although Cellini would not have known as much, that the
myth of Medusa reflects initiation rituals practiced on certain occasions in the lives
of young men. M. Jameson has argued so based on evidence in the form of a
certain Mycenaean inscription from the Archaic period. The script links Perseus
with ‚parents‛ and thus suggests a tie to maturation rites for which boys donned
Gorgon masks, and which prepared young males to separate themselves from
their mothers. It appears to me that wearing the masks might have stood for the
need to conquer one’s fears by becoming like the Other/Mother before separating
oneself from her. M. Jameson, ‚Perseus, the Hero of Mykenai,‛ in Celebrations of
Death and Divinity in Bronze Age Argolid, eds. R. Hagg and G. Nordquist
(Stockholm, Sweden: Svenska Institutet, 1990): 213-223. The fact that Amazons
employed Gorgon masks to ward men away from their sacred rituals seems to
support Jameson’s argument for the masks’ sociological significance.
52
24. Matilde Battistini, Symbols and Allegories in Art (California: J. Paul Getty
Museum, 2005): 224 mentions the sun’s setting into Mother Earth as the former’s
death.
26. During the patriarchal age Athena’s character was also fraught with contra-
dictions that betray a struggle among men to separate her from her matriarchal
past. For example, her attribute, the owl, an emblem of birth, regeneration, death
and wisdom, testifies to Athena’s previous association with Medusa.
27. The Medici would have known the preceding, for they owned a sarcophagus
(c. 180) depicting an Amazonomachy. Amazonomachiai feature on many ancient
Greek vases, temple friezes, sarcophagus reliefs, etc., and so would have been
amply available to Renaissance artists and patrons. Pausanias’ Description of Greece
(Book I, 15.1) speaks of the Amazons as historical figures who stormed Troy to
fight the Athenians. The same text (Book I, 17.1) states that the sanctuary of
Theseus houses pictures of Athenians battling Amazons. See Balas, 152 for an
indication of Pausanias’ influence in the Renaissance. Herodotus’ Histories (Book
IV) also acknowledges that the Amazons battled the Athenians, that their name
means ‚man killer,‛ and that no Amazon girl was permitted to marry until she
had killed an male enemy in battle. Plutarch’s Life of Theseus (c. 100) is one among
many written accounts of the Athenian siege of the Amazons. See Merck, 95-115
for a thorough discussion of how the Athenians used their victory over the
Amazons to historicize and legitimate the creation of their state. Page 106 of
Merck’s article states that one can interpret the Parthenon, dedicated to Athena
‚Parthenos,‛ or virgin, as a ‚strident expression of patriarchal ideology. Not only
is Athena the inveterate ally of Greek heroes against her Olympian sisters, not
only does she abjure the ‘feminine’ functions of coupling and childbirth, not only
is her physical sexuality swathed in male armour – but her mythic parentage
(portrayed on the temple’s east pediment) presents her as born only of the Father.‛
28. The cult of the phallus emerged when a stronger sense of patriarchal Greeks’
national identity came into being in the sixth century, and it continued to flourish
as the myth of Perseus developed in the ancient Mediterranean world. See Eva C.
Keuls’ The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), especially 33-64, 78-79 for pertinent informa-
tion and artistic representations of the gendered battle between Amazons and
Greeks. Keuls treats weapons as phallic symbols here.
53
29. -----, 47.
33. Note, for instance, the story of Helen, whose alluring beauty was responsible
for the Trojan War.
34. The myth of Hercules and the Hydra also suggests that the Greeks believed in
the head’s vitality. The Hydra was a monster with many heads, all of which, save
one, were immortal, and so each time Hercules severed the heads they kept
growing back. Only when he cut off the central, mortal head and had it cauterized
did the Hydra perish. The Hydra reminds one of Medusa and her Gorgon sisters.
For expanded histories of decapitation see Antonio Dominguez Leiva,
Décapitations: du Culte des Cranes au Cinéma Gore (Paris, France: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2004) and P. H. Stahl, Histoire de la Décapitation (Paris,
France: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986). At the most basic level, the fact
that decapitation and not the loss of an arm or leg causes death should indicate
why the head has been synonymous with life.
35. Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the
Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1951): 109. See, for instance, Homer’s Iliad, Book III, 299ff.
37. -----, 107-108, 116-119. See, for instance, Plato’s Timaeus, 44ff.
39. Dominguez Leiva, 26-34, 36. The motif of the still living decapitated body and
head has roots in the Western hagiographic tradition. For instance, the Passio Iusti
of the seventh century tells of the decapitated saint roaming the earth, head in
54
hand, in search of a proper burial place. There is a relationship here to the Golden
Legend (1260) by Genoese Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine, which includes a
generous number of decapitations.
40. Cooper, 47. See also S. Hijmans, ‚Metaphor, Symbol and Reality: the Polysemy
of the Imperial Radiate Crown,‛ in Common Ground. Archaeology, Art, Science, and
Humanities. Proceedings of the XVIth International Congress of Classical Archaeology,
ed. C. C. Mattusch, Boston, Massachusetts (Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press: August 23-26, 2003): 440-443.
55
Chapter 2 Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa: the Paradigm of Control
The story of Perseus and the Gorgon is paradoxical to its core. In one
respect Danae’s son destroyed her, but, on the other, severing her head unleashed
the Loggia dei Lanzi as an essentialization of the paradoxical nature of Ovid’s tale.
In this capacity the statue translated into a remarkable echo of Duke Cosimo I’s
political achievements, but the salient similarity between the bronze Perseus, the
duke’s surrogate, and Medusa emphasizes her power and her share in the hero’s
triumphs. Further, the iconography of Cellini’s statue points up the fact that the
of Medusa. Nothing more is known about the duke’s intentions, so much of one’s
judgment must focus on the way the bronze statue appears in its final form.1
Cellini deviated from his patron’s order by including the body of Medusa in his
which comprises legs and arms that are bent to varying degrees. Her left hand
holds onto her ankle and thus defines her circular shape. The Gorgon’s nude
figure hangs onto the last shreds of life and lies contorted upon a pillow and
56
beneath Perseus’ feet. Athena’s shield serves as a support for the Gorgon’s body
as Medusa’s figure twists around the shield’s rim (fig. 4). Perseus’ right foot is
grounded upon the shield that contributed to Medusa’s destruction, while his
Perseus proudly holds Medusa’s head aloft, while thick rivulets of blood
fall from the two halves of the Gorgon’s gruesome neck. Her eyes are not entirely
ensemble’s great height (eighteen feet tall, figs. 7, 8, 9, 10). Four niches composed
of marble house bronzettes of Jupiter, Athena, Mercury, Danae and the child
Perseus. Jupiter’s has the inscription: ‚Te fili qvis/ laeserit vltor/ ero‛ (If anyone
harms thee, my son, I will avenge thee). Near Danae one finds that: ‚Tvta Iove ac/
tanto pignore/ laeta fvgor‛ (With Jove’s protection and with such a pledge I go
happily into exile). Athena’s niche contains the words: ‚Ovo vincas/ clypeum do
tibi/ casta soror‛ (I, thy chaste sister, gave thee the shield with which thee will
conquer), while on the niche for Mercury one reads: ‚Fris ut arma/ geras nvdvs ad/
astra volo‛ (That thou shalt bear thy brother’s arms I fly naked to the heavens).
figure of Earth on Cellini’s Saltcellar for King Francis I, which seems to suggest that
the sculptor conceptualized Perseus’ mother as a type for the Earth Goddess
(fig. 11).2 The fact that the sculptor called the Saltcellar Earth by the name of
Berecynthia, an esoteric appellation for the Earth Mother, indicates that he was
The goat heads signifying Cosimo I’s adopted zodiacal sign of Capricorn
flank several grotteschi on the top of the pedestal. Flames consume the sides and
that expand behind the ears of the adjacent Capricorns. The goats’ horns, in turn,
The pedestal’s relief, Perseus liberating Andromeda shows the airborne hero
fighting Cetus without the head of Medusa, as Ovid said (fig. 12). Perseus is about
to strike the monster with his sword, which he holds above his head, while a
billowing cape conveys the windy heights Perseus occupies. Two men and a
behind Perseus. Another mysterious figure is the enraged man with the billowing
cape who stands between Andromeda and her family. He is nude, as the
Loggia.
involves the Greek hero’s headdress, which has a most intriguing aspect: its back
Janus face of the youthful Perseus on its opposite side (fig. 13). Together the two
countenances signify destiny and the start and end of a journey, that is, Perseus’
quest for the Gorgon’s head. In ancient Rome, past and recommencement
numbered among the various attributes of Janus the two-faced deity, so he also
became a god of the beginning and end of the day and the year.
virtue requiring memory of the past, intelligence, which acts upon the present, and
morale stipulates.4 Two-headed figures can refer to past and future, or, like
Cellini’s Janus faces, present and future. Cosimo I would have appreciated
Cellini’s allusion to Prudence, since the duke adopted it as his personal virtue. In
fact, as he and Cellini probably would have known, Andrea Alciati’s Book of
Emblems (1531) named Janus a god of prudence and Natale Conti’s Mythologies
59
(1551), which was just as influential as Alciati’s text, states that Perseus stands for
prudence.5
originally had a Janus nature --- eyes on the fronts and backs of their heads. He
claimed that:
they at the same time can see the spiritual things and
provide for the material. Before they fall into this
earthly body, our souls also have two faces<but when
they descend into the body, it is for them as if they were
cut in half, and of the two faces there remains only one,
whence every time that they turn to face one that is left
to them toward sensible beauty, they remain deprived of
the vision of the other.6
The Neoplatonists of Medicean Florence knew about Pico’s view. The latter’s
followers tied this idea to the problem in Aristophanes’ fable, told in Plato’s
Symposium, that human beings were originally double, with two faces, but lost
their perfection when they were cut in half. Plato’s Symposium also states that in
faces on circular necks.7 The Janus faces of Cellini’s bronze Perseus recall Pico’s,
Aristophanes’, and Plato’s ideas about the dual aspect of human nature’s original
form.
The Janus face at the rear of Perseus’ helmet contributes to the bronze
headdress’ overall intricacy, thereby stressing the Renaissance belief in the head’s
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significance as the site of identity, where a person might make known his or her
The likeness between the heads of the bronze Perseus and Medusa denotes
their faces, eyes downcast, are strikingly similar from the front and in profile,
while the thick, curved lines of Perseus’ hair and helmet mimic the intertwined
serpents on Medusa’s head and the coils of her blood (fig. 14). Lifted up, Medusa’s
head is almost horizontal to that of Perseus. The Greek hero seems, in this way, to
purposefully lead the viewer to a comparison between himself and the Gorgon.
juxtaposed male and female heads may signify shared temporal and spiritual
power. According to the Orphic tradition, the gods’ duplicity, including that of a
gendered nature, was a mark of their power.9 It is easy to see how Perseus shares
the potency of Medusa, since it is through the petrifying power of her gaze that he
can turn others to stone. The face behind his helmet also seems to mimic Medusa’s
monstrosity and to share her (implied) power to scare an imagined third party.
On the Piazza, Medusa’s power never ends, for art immortalizes her potency.
noted.
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The power of Perseus and Medusa is cosmic. One way that Janus faces may
the summer solstice in Cancer and the winter solstice (the sun’s season of rebirth
and the beginning of the zodiacal calendar) in Capricorn.10 Ovid’s Fasti (Book I,
63-65) states that Janus regulates the passage of the new sun each year. The
preceding comes into play in Cellini’s bronze if Perseus is taken as Cosimo I’s
context.
The wings on Perseus’ helmet are appropriate to the Greek hero’s profile as
a child of the sun god Jupiter, for wings are attributes of sun deities. Mercury’s
helmet, which Perseus wears, was, indeed, known as a sun cap. Helmets with
wings are often symbols of the triumph of light, for instance, sunlight, the essence
of the life force, over dark.11 It is appropriate, then, that wings should grace
Perseus’ head, for it too houses a life force. The head of Perseus’ Greek hero is,
Italy would have known the time honored association between gold and divinity,
and that gold’s precious nature owed itself in part to its similarity to the sun.13
Therefore, the head of Perseus, helmet in tow, would have appeared as a mass of
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golden ‚rays‛ whose gleams signified the life spirit within. The head of Cellini’s
Perseus, the immortal caput mysticum of Cosimo I, becomes all the more of an
emblem of lasting life and enduring political power. In this way Cellini’s statue
would have spoken to the traditional Medici concerns of renewal and dynastic
Cellini’s Medusa was also gilded when she first arrived on the Piazza della
Signoria. Her golden serpents would have matched the fiery tendrils of her
mythological neighbor, which competed with her fertile, solar head.15 (It is no
wonder that the Gorgon’s head spawned the solar Chrysoar.) Perhaps Cellini was
Medusa’s hair was golden.16 The ancient world believed, as Cellini must have, that
the Gorgon’s serpents, already symbols of life, mimicked the sun’s rays.
Remember that one’s ability to look directly at Medusa’s face matches the weaken-
ing of the eye in the attempt to confront the sun directly. The myth of Phaedrus
explains that an insatiable desire to see the sun is an impetus for the soul’s
downfall. Baldassare Castiglione’s popular book, The Courtier (1528) equates the
sun with divinity in a way that reminds one of Medusa’s visage: ‚<in the heavens
of solar and lunar rays, contributes to her cosmic power and her fertile nature.
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Cellini was probably aware that, viewing the human as microcosm, solar
sun and the renewal of the blood’s strength before the body rises from sleep.
Blood’s rapport with the sun lies behind the association of blood, perhaps blood
from the head, with regenerating fire. Since Medusa’s sanguine rivulets are
congruent with Perseus’ phallus her blood compares to the hero’s ability to
the preceding contexts the solar powers of Cellini’s bronze characters come
together.
The story of Athena’s mirror shield suggests the same cosmic match, for
when Perseus gazed at Medusa’s face in the aegis he saw his alter ego, that is, a
symbol, an apt attribute of deity. The meeting of Perseus’ and Medusa’s likenesses
within the mirror-shield is a trope for the solar/lunar power they share. Recall that
the harpe with which Perseus slew Medusa was a lunar symbol that linked him
with maternal deity. Cellini’s hero actually holds a derivation of the harpe --- the
falchion.
affinity with contemporary characterizations of the sacred head of John the Baptist,
whose cult was in the early modern age highly popular in Florence. The
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association with Saint John will prove that contemporary Florentines knew about
the topoi of the fertile head and the fertile head’s connection with the sun. The
feast of John the Baptist took place on June 24th, the date of his birth and that of the
summer solstice, which since antiquity has been acknowledged as the time of the
associated the blessing of summer’s heat and light with the Baptist’s nativity. June
24th was also the date of the Roman solstice rite of Fors Fortuna, which the early
fireworks during John’s festival. This practice actually goes back to the middle of
the first millennium, when the feast came to include ‚Saint John’s fires,‛ reminders
of resurrection and of the sun’s return from the depths of hibernal and nocturnal
darkness.20
da Vinci from the Milanese school displays John’s head on a plate, a standard
image of the saint, which looks like the ‚disk‛ of the earth and is symbolically the
sun (fig. 15). The painting has a twin in Andrea Solario’s 1507 rendition of the
same subject (fig. 16). These pictures may recall Indo-European myths about the
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heavens, the vault of the sky, issuing from the human head.21 Such depictions
29th. Perhaps the sun’s setting was thought to parallel the fall of John’s severed
head to the earth. Thus, his death aligned with the harvest, when the act of
Comparable to the nourishing value of grain.22 Note how his role as such has
Baptist’s image, for the head of John appeared on the gold florin opposite that of
the Medici duke. Each man was the Janus face of the other.23 The reference to
Saint John embodied contemporary hopes that the state would not die, for in
Renaissance political thought the notion that the People, a universitas, never dies
compared to the idea that the state’s ‚head,‛ which on the florin took the form of
characterized Duke Cosimo as a type for the sun, which begins to renew itself at
the winter solstice and that Janus regulates the sun’s rebirth. The eagle (Jupiter)
who appears frequently in Cosimo’s iconography has the same solar significance.
that the festivities in John’s honor became an occasion for Florentine males to
share in their patron saint’s capacity of generation. Richard Trexler has noted that:
I propose that the cultic topos of Saint John’s power of generation matched
the Florentine males’ ability to create their commune. The fertile head of John, an
emblem of male civic power in the context Trexler has described, had no female
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During what was known as the Battle of Montemurlo Cosimo’s troops defeated
the enemy by taking them captive before the duke had them all decapitated on the
Piazza della Signoria. The young Medici ruler thought of the moment of execution
the Great, and Caesar Augustus.27 Note that here the motif of resurrection, a type
of rebirth or regeneration, ties into the topos of decapitation, thus proving that the
previous discussion of the head’s significance as an epitome of life and power was
Montemurlo also seems to have been the scourge responsible for Florence’s rebirth
The royal star Regulus in Leo was the sign in which the sun was located on
the fateful day at Montemurlo and on the day of the Battle of Marciano. Thus,
from the start lionine (solar) imagery was important to the duke’s profile as a fated
Once again, the solar aspect of Cosimo’s political iconography leads one to
believe that he identified with Cellini’s Perseus as a solar hero. But the statue is
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paradoxical: the hero/ruler both rivals and compares with the Gorgon, a maternal
deity who, though not a surrogate for the influential women at the Medici court,
may have reminded viewers of Eleonora di Toledo’s and Maria Salviati’s share in
bringing the duke to power. The first filled the duke’s empty coffers with her
wealth and the latter convinced the Florentine council to elect Cosimo as the ruler
of Florence after Alessandro de’ Medici’s assassination. The Medici women had
their own powers of generation, which were important to the propagation of their
In this context one cannot help but to think of the contentious relationship
wisdom,‛ in the story of Athena’s birth. The rivalry between the heads of Cellini’s
Perseus and Medusa recalls that between Metis’ power to birth/wisdom and
Jupiter’s ability to spawn. As suggested earlier, the power to birth from the head
proves to be a trope for intelligence. I propose that the same is true for the
Gorgon’s fertile nature. Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa indicate as much, for the
light of the sun and that of Medusa’s other face, the moon, have long been symbols
Orbium Coelestium (1543), which was highly influential in Cellini’s day, notes that
‚some rightly call Him‛ (the sun) ‚the Mind of the Universe.‛31 The Hebrew Book
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of Wisdom (7:26) states that wisdom is a ‚reflection of eternal light, a spotless
mirror of the working God.‛ Thus, the wider spiritual importance of Cellini’s
Perseus and of the myth of the Gorgon, which no scholar has observed, includes a
the passage from Genesis, 15:10, ‚Logos divided‛ the first individual, a composite
of male and female ‚in the midst,‛ proves that the Greek ‚Logos‛ (Wisdom/God)
had a wide audience. I propose that Perseus takes the role of Logos (Wisdom) and
that as ‚cutter‛ he is a type for He who ‚creates by dichotomy‛ but who is ‚joiner
of the universe‛ as well (Genesis, 15:10). Perseus has severed the Gorgon’s bronze
head, but he has also linked it to his own likeness. It is no wonder, then, that the
Cellini’s Perseus.34 Michael Cole has suggested that the statuette of the goddess of
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wisdom epitomizes, indeed, pure mente (mind).35 Remember that the inscription
for Athena’s bronzette reads: ‚I, thy chaste sister, gave thee the shield with which
thee will conquer.‛ As those familiar with Perseus’ tale would have known, the
mirror-like shield was the medium with which Perseus used his cunning and
intelligence to outdo Medusa. The shield is thus a metonym for the divine
intelligence that Perseus obtained and used to become like his chaste ‚sister‛
observed, different ideas for inscriptions to grace Cellini’s Perseus which are found
in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence indicate the same thing. Take, for
instance, Varchi’s line: ‚I give you this shield, as I once gave you mind and spirit‛
(Do clypeum, quae iam mentem animunque dedi). Pietro Angelico da Barga wrote
two of the other inscriptions: ‚Having been born from the head of Jupiter, I
shield, so that he may be strong‛ (Nata Iovis cerebo tribui gratissima fratri/ qua
sapiat mentem, quo valeat clypeum) and ‚I, his sister, gave Perseus counsel and
the fell shield, that he might overthrow this monster with his able hand‛
(Consilium, saevamque dedi soror, aegida persei/ ut monstrum hic valida sterneret
married.38 I propose, in light of the preceding, that Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa
wisdom, but the statue also reminds one that the wisdom that brought the duke to
The great height of Cellini’s Perseus, who apparently scales the heavens, as
written accounts of the Greek hero state, seems to reflect the fact that Danae’s son
obtained wisdom from a divine force in the form of Athena. However, the head of
Medusa is nearly parallel to her captor’s head and thus reminds one that Perseus
obtained knowledge from the Gorgon as well; that is, he became aware of the
limits of his power as a demi-god through his quest for Medusa’s head. In this
regard, their physical proximity, like the androgynous nature of Cellini’s Perseus,
suggests that without mente the hero may not unite with the divine. Further,
Perseus’ and Medusa’s great heights by looking up at the enormous bronze pair
above them. Perhaps Mercury raises his eyes to emphasize his contribution to
appears in the ancient allegorical tradition as Logos, Ratio, for he is the mind of the
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sun god Apollo, who is, like Mercury himself, Perseus’ alter ego. Alciati also
allegorizes Mercury’s flight, which the bronzette’s active pose suggests, as celestial
contemplation.
of Niccolo Martelli’s statement that Cosimo I’s idea for the statue descended from
heaven.41 The duke was like Perseus in this way, having obtained wisdom from a
divine source. In addition, the statue’s heroic height reminds one of Virgil’s
equation of Fama with the Giants, who try to scale the heavens in the Aeneid (Book
IV, 177ff) and in Homer’s Iliad (Book VIII, 192) and Odyssey (Book VIII, 20, 7744;
BOOK XIX, 108). The giant figure was, in addition, a distinguished prototype of
Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine emperors and also of Christ, since great size
teaching, especially in gnostic and docetic learning, and may even have drawn
from a Rabbinic tradition concerning Adam: ‚the first man extended from the
excerpt from Augustine’s Psalm 91 that reads, ‚Oh Christ, who sittest in heaven on
the right side of the Father, but art with thy feet and limbs struggling on earth.‛
Repeated was Augustine’s message that Christ’s ‚head is in heaven, the body on
earth.‛43 Such views find a certain reflection in Cellini’s Perseus, whose feet are
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literally and symbolically grounded on the body of Medusa, the Earth Mother.
The figure beneath the feet of Cellini’s Perseus is in one respect a denigrated
his assault on the female form. In this way the artist matched the ancients who
representations of her demise. Closer to the ground, the body of Cellini’s Medusa
is the material aspect of Earth and of the archetype of Mother (‚mater‛ meaning
both matter and mother). Remember, once cut, the Gorgon had the ability to
spawn, and so her entire being was maternal. Since she was able to turn men,
including Atlas, to stone, her character compares to that of the Petra Genetrix, a
hostile and benevolent Earth Mother of Roman Mithraism who created men from a
material of the earth --- stone. In the ancient world earth goddesses were also
believed to be able to generate life from stone, the reverse of Medusa’s power of
petrifaction.
traditional symbol of the earth, whose liquid contents spill forth and will come
into contact with the Piazza della Signoria. In Erich Neumann’s terms, an element-
ary aspect of the Feminine is the image of the ‚Great Round‛ or the ‚Great
Cellini accentuated by rendering them nude and pointing to the space above them.
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Perhaps the sculptor was thinking of Cyprian representations of the Mother
Goddess from various centuries as the vessel-bearing woman with full breasts.
Medusa’s bosoms are complementary sources of the life stream and correspond to
Cellini’s Ephesian women. Since the goddesses and Danae are types for the Earth
earthy nature and mimic the curling rivulets of her bronze blood, whose fecundity
matches the fruits’ nourishing properties. A similar image lies in Cellini’s bust of
Cosimo I, where the Gorgon’s blood takes the form of fruit (fig. 17).45 Here, the
duke aligns with Medusa by appropriating her apotropaic power to ward off
enemies, while associating the fertility of her head as Earth with his own political
strength. Cole has pointed out that while at work on the bust Cellini was thinking
of Agostini’s view that the drops from Medusa’s head should be interpreted as
grains and fruits and the serpents spawned by the same drops as the seeds of the
earth.46 The eagles on the breastplate bite the duke’s bronze nipples and thus
garlands on the Perseus’ pedestal probably refer to the Medici palle and thus
as the fertile Earth. Medusa’s blood worked its magic on the turf near Cetus’
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dominion; that is, once the blood came into contact with the vegetation the latter
‚soaked up the monster’s force‛ and took on a new life as coral. Furthermore, her
drops of blood were able to generate when they mingled with the earth’s fertile
Cellini and Varchi would have known that Fulgentius allegorized Medusa
latter’s words: ‚Regarding the allegories of Perseus, I maintain, first, that to say
gorgone is as much as to say earth, that is, gorgin agricos, which in Greek means
‘earth,’ and which is interpreted as the work of the earth.‛48 The serpents’
presence on Medusa’s head also indicate that she is an Earth Mother, for, as
Only a decade before Cellini began to work on his Perseus Italy saw the
heavens). ‚Perseus killed Gorgo, an earthly tyrant --- (for ‘Gorgo’ means ‘earth’
in Greek) – and was by men exalted to the skies.‛49 In this context it is worthy to
note that the harpe was an instrument to till the land, which under the Loggia
Medusa also emerges as the Earth Mother on the Tazza Farnese, which
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originally belonged to Lorenzo de’ Medici and which resided in the Medici
collection at the time Cellini worked for Cosimo I (figs. 18, 19).50 One side of the
cup shows a female personification of Earth holding a rod entwined with snakes.
A Medusa head with swirling locks of hair and serpents surrounding her mane
decorates the cup’s bottom. Two snakes emerge from beneath her ears and
intertwine just below her chin, clearly mimicking the serpentine configuration on
Earth’s rod. The snakes define the female entities as twins. It is not a coincidence
that the Gorgon appears this enormously on such an expensive vessel that
glorified its owner’s taste and the supreme deities, including the River Nile, on its
interior. Medusa, the Earth Mother, was the face of Medici power.
bronze Perseus’ hierarchical relationship to the Gorgon’s body. The Greek hero
rises from her figure. Applicable here is the ancient notion of the Earth Mother as
the earthly seat of power through which the king rises to new heights, but, one
Behold the day will come and the Lord will lighten
the darkness, and the bonds of the synagogue will
be loosened and the lips of men will be silent: and
they will see the king of the living. A virgin, queen
of nations, will hold him in her lap. And he will
reign in mercy, and the womb of his mother will be
the model of all.53
Cellini and Cosimo I must have been aware of the potential of Medusa’s
body to assume significance as the ‚seat‛ of Perseus’ power, for early modern
derivations of the throne as the seat of power include the globe of Earth upon
which the Virgin Mary stands (fig. 20). Here, Christ’s mother and Earth are one
and the same.54 Cellini’s Perseus ‚takes possession‛ of the Earth (Medusa), the
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mound of the Gorgon’s body which supports him, as the throne does the ruler. In
this way Cosimo I’s bronze affirms the potency of the female principle by
reliance upon the Mother, while the sun’s rising from the earth belies its future
return to the maternal. In this context it is telling that Cosimo’s sign of Capricorn
would have characterized him as the sun to whom the Earth gave birth and to
from Sol (sun). The spiral, the shape of Medusa’s bronze body, is a solar symbol,
and so in this regard her figure epitomizes the throne-as-sun. Ancient individuals
called the enthroned ruler, mediated between heaven and earth, the solar prince.56
The image of Cellini’s Perseus as a mediator between heaven and earth comes to
mind.
Cellini’s Medusa recalls the Ouroboros, that is, the serpent consuming its
tail. The grip of her hand around her ankle recalls the serpent’s ingestion of its
own tail. Both creatures assume a circular configuration by taking hold of the
lower part of their bodies. The Ouroboros symbolizes the sun’s revolution around
the earth, its setting and rising, or ‚self-generation,‛ which in Medusa’s case took
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the form of births from her blood and severed head. The Gnostics interpreted the
At other times the snake biting its tail was an emblem of the Earth Mother, and so
version of the Earth Goddess.58 It is known that Lorenzo de’ Medici adopted the
image of the serpent circling to meet its tail as one of his personal emblems
because the Ouroboros was a symbol of a return to the Golden Age and of the
traditional Medici themes of eternity and immortality (the circle, like the solar
cycle, has no beginning and no end, while the snake’s act of shedding its skin is a
symbol of eternity, rebirth, and immortality, fig. 21). The emblem even made its
way into Giorgio Vasari’s The First Fruits of the Earth offered to Saturn, where Duke
Cosimo I is the titular god (fig. 22). The preceding indicates that esoteric
symbolism from the ancient world was known to the Medici court and most
probably to Cellini.
I propose that the role of Cellini’s Medusa as Earth relates to the image of
the Earth Mother as Womb. Note how Cellini’s Perseus steps on her stomach,
whose navel is clearly visible from a side view of the statue (see fig. 5). In this way
the Greek hero characterizes her being as uterine, for the navel has been a
metonym for the womb.59 Cellini may have been thinking of Euripedes’ famous
Ion, which, as mentioned, speaks of earth’s navel as residing near the Gorgons, an
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image that conflates the Gorgon with the Earth-as-Womb.
‚gnostic‛ gems, which were collected in the Renaissance.60 Some of the jewels
bearing images of the uterus with winged appendages resemble winged Etruscan
image on these uterine amulets was meant to portray the ‚Diva Matrix,‛ the
cosmic womb, from which all else derived offers a link to Medusa’s profile as a
uterine Mother Goddess. The majority of these gems show a serpent devouring its
tail surrounding the uterus.61 Chapter 5 will pick up the discussion of Medusa’s
head as a symbol of the uterus in a different context, but for now I must turn to
what the image of Mother Earth meant to the process of bringing Cellini’s
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Casting the Perseus and Medusa
The bronze Perseus was not only one of Cosimo I’s faces, but also an heroic
surrogate for Cellini himself. The Greek youth’s sash indicates that he was ‚born‛
of an illustrious citizen -- Benvenuto Cellinis civis Florentinus faciebat MDLIII --- and
testifies to the sculptor’s profile as a man of honor. The story of the Perseus’
casting, which forms the crux of Cellini’s Autobiography, is most significant to one’s
is, of manliness, heroism and strength (vir denoting ‚man‛).62 Indeed, in the
Renaissance the mythological figure of Perseus became a model for rulers because
he was a paradigm of virtù. Since Cellini and Cosimo I championed the cult of
virtù, they would have conceived of Perseus in the same way.63 The cult of virtù
grew in part out of ancient Roman political manhood, which Florentines adopted
along with Roman political ideology. In Renaissance Italy, virile, that is, violent
and aggressive actions, like those of Perseus, were rites of passage into manhood,
just as those actions were into different public spheres of men’s lives. This type of
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The Perseus was Cellini’s rite of passage into the Florentine art world. His
success in casting the enormous bronze statue went hand in hand with his honor
and integrity as a man. In other words, for Cellini, achieving the status of a great
The story of the Perseus’ casting celebrates violence and destruction, two
who carved his David out of one block of marble, Cellini noted that he opted to cast
his enormous bronze Perseus in one piece instead of in separate sections. The
Autobiography details the difficulties involved in this feat, which was deemed an
impossible task. One of the trickiest parts of casting bronze for his subject was
raising Perseus’ arm without letting it break off. To achieve this end, the metallic
liquid had to flow uninterrupted through the whole mold. Cellini wished to
introduce his Perseus as his greatest achievement, which would involve a highly
complex shaping of metal. This is why he did not mention the fact that he actually
cast the blood from Medusa’s head and the wings on Perseus’ feet and head
separately.64
Speaking of an episode when his metal began to clot, Cellini illustrated his
ability to enliven his work by adding a cake of tin and some pewter to the mixture:
Cellini’s virtù is evident in his writing and actions. He manipulated the harmful
effects of fire, which even figuratively touched him in the form of a fever, and
endowed them with qualities of life. The Autobiography presents Cellini’s success
in casting the Perseus in his desired fashion as a miraculous resurrection; so was his
earlier recovery from a mortal fever. Implicitly identifying himself with the
Perseus, proof of Cellini’s physical and mental virtù, the very embodiment of his
artistic destiny, the sculptor compared the statue’s and his resurrections to the
Lord’s: ‚O God, who with your immense power raised Yourself from the dead,
The episode of the Perseus’ casting shows that proving Cellini’s manhood
necessitated a battle with Mother Nature. The sculptor was like Perseus, who
proved his virility by defeating Medusa, but the maternal force in each man’s
story tested his strengths. Just as Greeks believed that destroying the Gorgon was
an impossible task, casting the Perseus in one piece was unfeasible, the Autobio-
graphy leads one to believe. Cellini’s battle against Natura was just as difficult;
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hence Cellini’s success in casting was so honorable. Cellini mentioned that fire
and rain threatened to ruin his house and all its contents on the fateful day, but he
and his troop finally prevented the elements from bringing about such an injustice.
Cellini proved that the bronze caster is like Natura, for he is able to rid impurities
from a mixture and to give metallic matter new form. Cellini’s godly ability to
revive the materials of sculpture matched Medusa’s power to raise the dead and to
generate earthy matter, stone and coral, from other natural materials. However, he
also reversed the petrifying effects of Medusa’s gaze by animating his material.
The Florentine sculptor thus became the Gorgon’s (Mother Earth’s) rival.
became like the Lord, who created Adam from clay, the human body’s original
notes, the sculptor used earth and clay to form his Perseus and Medusa.67 Cole has
pointed out that Cellini’s ‚own later refashioning of his art indicates how
important it was that his creation took place, so to speak, within the womb of the
earth.‛68 Indeed, in Cellini’s day the casting mold, called a matrix, was Earth’s
womb. Cellini would have bought into the symbolic mode of Renaissance thought
where even bronze founders assumed the role of Mother Earth.69 In Fritz
Scholten’s terms:
The account of the Perseus’ casting tells that Cellini too had the ability to animate
his figures with soul, as his rivals could not. As Cole has asserted, ‚bronze
triumphs over its stone predecessors because the blood of the medium implies a
state of life that marble cannot, and because a calculated circuit of mythical birth
and death provides for it a spirit that marble, in its face, can only lose.‛71
The story of the Perseus’ casting suggests that art making is an act of power.
That is why the creative act, like political might, is comparable to giving life. The
decapitation of Medusa was a creative act because it gave rise to new forms of
earthy matter.72 On the Piazza della Signoria art immortalizes the Gorgon’s power.
While the Autobiography characterizes Cellini as a match for the creative entity of
Earth/Natura, the Piazza della Signoria presents Perseus as the rival of Medusa, the
Earth Mother. Art making as a rite of proving one’s manhood became for Cellini a
paradoxical process, then, for showcasing his artistic virtù entailed becoming like
Natura, a feminine force. In this way the Autobiography, like the Perseus and
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Medusa, points up the unstable nature of Cellini’s masculinity. The need to prove
one’s manhood betrays a certain degree of insecurity about virtù. Under the
Loggia Perseus denigrates and appropriates the Gorgon’s power with the same
she were not a threat to male power? Perseus, a surrogate for Cosimo I’s and
Cellini’s virtù, was part mortal, a man with weaknesses like those of Medusa’s
victims – all of whom were male, remember; hence in myth and under the Loggia
Perseus would not be able to withstand a direct glance at her head. That weakness
parallels Perseus’ reliance on the Gorgon’s power to defeat his enemies and the
The need for Cellini’s Perseus to align with the bronze Medusa suggests
perpetual dependence on the maternal, despite attempts to break away from the
latter by assaulting the Mother Goddess. The myth of Perseus indicates the same.
This is one reason why the face of Cellini’s Medusa is beautiful, even as her head
bears traits of the hideous. In other words, there is still much that possesses the
hero to embrace her, despite attempts to denigrate her. As the previous chapter
his awareness of the importance of maternal power to his own political career. The
statue’s adversarial nature would have pointed up the fact that Cosimo I was not
without his insecurities, as the next chapter will show, and so he must have
realized that in this respect too the Perseus evoked the contingency of the duke’s
power.
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Notes
2. Giorgio Vasari’s fresco featuring Artemis of Ephesus evinces the known link
between the latter and the Earth Mother, as it always hung upon the wall reserved
for Earth in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Sala degli Elementi. Detlef Heikamp, ‚Rapporti
fra Accademici ed Artisti nella Firenze del’ 500,‛ Il Vasari 15 (1957): 144-145
mentions that Varchi was Cellini’s iconographer. Umberto Pirotti’s Benedetto
Varchi e la Cultura del suo Tempo (Florence, Italy: Olschki Press, 1971) and Salvatore
Lo Re’s Politica e Cultura nella Firenze Cosimiana: Studi su Benedetto Varchi (Rome,
Italy: Vecchiarelli, 2008) are good studies of Varchi’s learning and influence.
3. Rebecca Zorach’s Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French
Renaissance (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2005): 101 mentions the fact that
Cellini used the name Berecynthia for his Saltcellar Earth.
5. Andrea Alciati, A Book of Emblems, the Emblematum liber in Latin and English,
trans. J. Moffitt (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2004): 35. Natale
Conti, Mythologies, a Select Translation, trans. Anthony DiMatteo (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1994): 375. Seznec discusses the sixteenth-century writer
Conti and his influence on pages 226, 229, 277-279, 280, 300, 307ff. For Alciati’s
influence see Seznec, 100-103.
89
6. Pico della Mirandola, Commento, Book III, xi, stanza 9, quoted on Wind, 17.
Lorenzo il Magnifico introduced Janus into Medici iconography. Born in January,
the month named after Janus, the Medici ruler may have felt that the multi-faced
god was a suitable alter ego. Janus also appeared at the wedding of Cosimo I and
Eleonora di Toledo. A statue of Janus was made to represent Duke Cosimo’s entry
into Siena, while the Terrace of Saturn in the Palazzo Vecchio includes two images
of Janus. Cellini’s medal for Clement VII also features the temple of Janus.
8. See Cooper, 80 on the head’s symbolism as a seat of honor, identity and the like.
10. See Cooper, 81, 154 for factual information on Janus’ symbolic value.
12. Cellini’s bronze model of his Perseus and Medusa bears traces of gilding on the
Gorgon’s hair, Perseus’ helmet, wings and his greaves. Weil Garris, n.178 also
acknowledges the completed statue’s original gilding and so do Cristina Luchinat,
et al., The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (Connecticut:
Yale University Press, 2002): 194-195. In Marsilio Ficino, ed. Angela Voss
(California: North Atlantic Books, 2006): 146 Ficino is translated as stating,
‚Nobody questions but that gold is the color of the Sun...‛
13. For instance, the Roman Empire’s cult of divine rulership espoused the practice
of revering golden statues of Roman leaders. The ancient Mediterranean’s
philosophy of metals re-emerged in the Renaissance partly as a result of the
practice of collecting and imitating ancient art objects. In Cellini’s vision which
inspired his marble Christ the sun/gold and divinity are one:
‚This sun without its rays appeared to me neither more nor less
than a bath of the purest molten gold. While I was contemplating
this momentous thing, I saw the center of this sun began to swell up
and to expand, and in a moment it was transformed into the figure
of a Christ on the cross, made from the very material that made up
90
the sun.‛ Cellini, My Life, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter
Bondanella (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002): 209.
14. The early modern world believed bronze to be a symbol of duration and
strength because the most prominent Roman statues that survived into the Middle
Ages did so because they were made of this durable material. Further, in the
ancient world bronze was reserved for statues of gods, rulers, and heroes. See
Fritz Scholten, ‚Bronze: the Mythology of a Metal,‛ in Bronze: the Power of Life and
Death (Leeds, England: Henry Moore Institute, 2005): 32.
15. See Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) for information on the sun as a
symbol of male power. In different mythological contexts, such as the ancient
Mesopotamian, the male solar principle supersedes the female lunar one.
16. The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana houses a text that includes Apollodorus’
description of the Gorgon with gold wings and bronze hands. Apollodorus, MS.
2.4.2. Hesiod’s poem, ‚Shield of Hercules‛ contains a description of the bag into
which Perseus stored Medusa’s head that seems to symbolize the solar/lunar
implications of her being: ‚..the Gorgon, covered the broad of his back, and a bag
of silver<contained it: and from the bag bright tassels of gold hung down.‛
Various representations from the ancient world actually show Perseus with a halo
of golden rays, indicating his status as a solar demi-god. Here, the head,
specifically, is the seat of solar power. Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Book I,
1.21.1) also notes that on the south wall of the Acropolis one finds a gilded head of
Medusa.
17. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (New York:
Penguin Press, 1980): 299.
18. See Thorkil Vanggaard, Phallos: a Symbol and its History in the Male World (New
York: International Universities Press, 1972): 66, where one reads that the sun god
Apollo’s power centered in his phallus. In ancient Egypt the obelisk was a solar
symbol. It pointed to the sun and punctuated sites of sun worship. Since the
obelisk mimics the phallus, Egyptians conflated the former’s solar strength with
the phallus’ power to generate life. See Isaiah 17:8; 27:9 for the link between the
obelisk and the sun. It is no coincidence that an obelisk from the ancient Egyptian
center of sun worship known as Bethshemesh resides on Piazza San Pietro, Rome:
it testifies to the importance of solar symbolism to Catholic theology. The Piazza’s
91
eight spokes stand for solar rays. The stone phalloi of ancient statues of Hermes
derived from the obelisk. The sun and phallus also may come together by virtue
of the fact that sun deities were usually male in ancient patriarchal societies. In
addition, the bull, a traditional symbol of virility, was associated with the sun in
Mithraism. The cockerel is also a symbolic link between the sun and the phallus.
The cockerel crows to the sun at dawn before indulging his libido; hence the
vulgar word for penis, ‚cock.‛ Spires of Christian churches, which point to the
sun, are typically topped off with a weather vane in the form of a cock. Perhaps
the latter derives from the idea of semen as a (Christological) symbol of the solar
Logos. See Ficino’s Consilio contro la Pestilentia (1478-1479) for the link between the
sun and human blood.
19. The Book of John (3:30) includes the Baptist’s statement regarding Christ: ‚He
must increase, but I must decrease,‛ which in the context of John’s cult would
relate to the setting sun. The sun been a symbol of Christ, who embodies light and
whose Resurrection was a return from the darkness of death.
20. For factual information on John the Baptist’s cult see Heidi Chrétien, The
Festival of San Giovanni: Imagery and Political Power in Renaissance Florence (New
York: Peter Lang, 1994). Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, vol. 1, trans.
William Granger Ryan (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993): 336 states
that during the Baptist’s festival ‚lighted torches are also carried around this
bonfire, because John was a burning and shining torch.‛ The waters of baptism
which John employed to purify and to regenerate the soul, the first step toward
salvation, compare to the festival fires.
21. Regina Janes, Losing our Heads: Decapitations in Literature and Culture (New York
University Press, 2005): 8. Onians, 129-130.
22. Homer (Iliad, Book XIX, 221ff; Book XI, 67ff) wrote about men as cornstalks and
their defeat in battle as their mowing. Their heads fall as cut stalks do. In pre-
Christian Europe cutting off the top sheaf of a cornstalk was called ‚beheading,‛ or
‚cutting the neck.‛ Alcmaeon of Croton helped to disseminate these ideas
throughout pre-Christian Europe. He believed that the seed of humans came from
the brain. Daniel Ogden, Perseus (New York: Routledge Press, 2008): 46 states that
the Hydra’s multi-serpented head resembled a crop, which Hercules cut down
with his harpe.
92
23. In the Renaissance, as in the ancient world, coin images of rulers had an
allegorical significance relative to the sitter’s character. Images on the reverse of
the ruler’s likeness had the same purpose. Thus, the two-faced Janus god, emblem
of alter egos, often showed up on ancient Roman coins.
24. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1957) is filled with references to the state’s immortality and that of the
sovereign. See, for instance, 1-5, 13, 15, 30, 38, 45, 80, 86, 139, 143, 177, 267, 271-
272, 277-278, 280, 282-283, 300, 304, 310, 312-313, 394, 398, 409.
25. Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press,
1980): 277-278; my italics. The republic, or commune of Florence was ruled by a
council, which, in turn, was chosen by the gonfalonier (the titular ruler of the city).
Every two months a guild chose the gonfalonier. Although the Medici gained
control of Florence as autocrats (1434), the family associated with republican
traditions and ideals in order to assuage citizens that their liberty would not be lost
while the Medici were in power.
26. The Chronica de origine civitatis (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, II.II. 67) was the
first history of the city of Florence. It maintains that her origins trace back to the
days of Julius Caesar and that she flowered ex hominnum Romanorum, that is, from
Roman manhood. No mother is present here either. Nevertheless, birth from a
male agency competed with images of Florence as a woman in childbirth. For a
discussion of the female personification of Florence in childbirth see Donald
Weinstein, ‚The Myth of Florence,‛ in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in
Renaissance Florence (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968): 15-21.
27. Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2001): 13. Caesar Augustus was, like Cosimo I, a mythical
founder of Florence. The Battle of Montemurlo occurred on the same date, August
1, as Augustus’ victory at Actium.
28. The rebirth of Florence is discussed throughout Book III, for example, of
Villani’s Chronica de origine civitatis. Machiavelli also discussed the founding of
Rome as a birth. A corrupt society must be ‚born again‛ with ‚many perils and
much blood,‛ an image that should remind one of Cosimo’s ‚resurrection‛ at
Montemurlo. Despite the bloody birth of Rome, no mother is present here.
Niccolo Machiavelli, Opere, vol. 1 (Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 1960-1965): 125.
93
29. Since Cellini’s Perseus was conceived and in progress years before its unveiling,
it shrunk the gap between Montemurlo and 1554. Volker Breidecker has discussed
Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa as an epitomization of the fate of Montemurlo’s
victims in his book, Florenz, oder ‘Die Rede, die zum Auge Spricht’: Kunst, Fest und
Macht im Ambiente der Stadt (Munich, Germany: Fink Press, 1990): 25ff and so has
van Veen in Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and
Culture, 11.
30. See Claudia Rousseau, Cosimo I de’ Medici and Astrology: the Symbolism of
Prophecy, Ph.D. (Columbia University, 1983) for a discussion of zodiacal signs
associated with the sun in the duke’s astrological chart. Kurt Forster, ‚Metaphors
of Rule: Political Ideology and History in the Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici,‛
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 9 (1960): 85 mentions
Augustus and Capricorn, the signs of Leo and Capricorn, and Cosimo’s military
conquests at the start of his career. See Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right:
Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, 43 for the symbolic association between lions and
the sun.
33. Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and every other esoteric tradition known in the
Renaissance maintained that the union of male and female comprises the highest
form of knowledge. Therefore the merger stood for power. See, for instance,
Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, eds. Konrad Eisenbichler and Zorzi Pugliese
(Ottowa, Canada: Dovehouse, 1986). See also Battistini, 100.
34. Conti, 375. The fact that Prudence is wise helps to characterize Perseus as
intelligent. See Florence Cathedral’s plaque of Prudentia, a woman whose
attributes are a book and another symbol of wisdom – the snake (fig. 23).
35. Michael Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 2002): 130ff.
94
37. Cole, 132.
38. Niccolo degli Agostini, Di Ovidio le Metamorphosi cioe Trasmutazione, tradotte dal
Latino diligentemente in vulgar Verso, con le sue Allegorie, Significationi, & Dichiarationi
delle Fauole in Prosa (Milan, Italy: Bernardino di Bindoni, 1548): 47. See Cole, 129-
132, 137, 141 for evidence of Cellini’s knowledge of Agostini’s views. Bernardo
Segni conceded that Andromeda embodied mente. Bernardo Segni, L’Ética
d’Aristotile tradotta in Lingua volgare fiorentina et comentata (Florence, Italy: Lorenzo
Torrentino, 1550): 474.
39. Cosimo I identified with King Solomon (1 Kings, 3:28) and with King David (1
Kings, 5:9-14), who both possessed God-given wisdom. For example, see van
Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, 34,
36, 117, 139. Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: its Rise and Fall (New York:
William Morrow Press, 1980): 263 notes that Cosimo proclaimed that his wisdom
was divinely endowed.
42. Gospel of Peter, ed. Leon Vaganay (Paris, France: Librarie Lecoffre J. Gabalda et
Fils, 1930): 298ff. See H. L. Stack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentor zum Neuen Testament
aus Tolmud und Midrasch, vol. 4 (Munich, Germany: Verlag G. H. Beck, 1928): 888,
where Rabbi El’azar maintains that the first man extended from earth to heaven,
but ‚inasmuch as he sinned, the Holy One<placed his hand upon him and made
him small.‛
43. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalms XCI, II, PLXXXVII, 1178; XC, V, PLXXXVII,
1163. Depictions matching Augustine’s image appear in art of the eleventh
century through the later Middle Ages.
44. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, an Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974): 54. For information on
the Renaissance’s conception of vessels as symbols of women’s bodies see
Elizabeth Cropper, ‚On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the
Vernacular Style,‛ Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 374-395.
95
45. Cellini may have known that many classical Mediterranean monuments bear
the head of Medusa surrounded by garlands of fruit.
47. Fulgentius, 61 states that Gorgo is related to the Greek ‚georgi,‛ the term for
farmer.
49. Leone Ebreo, The Philosophy of Love, trans. F. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H.
Barnes (London, England: Soncino Press, 1937), quoted in The Medusa Reader, eds.
Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge Press, 2003): 58. See
Balas, 32-33, 103 for evidence that Ebreo’s text was known at the Medici court.
50. Eugene Dwyer, ‚The Temporal Allegory of the Tazza Farnese,‛ American Journal
of Archaeology 96:2 (1992): 255-282.
54. The image of Mary standing upon a globe is similar to ancient depictions of the
Mother Goddess standing upon a mound of earth, which she embodies, flanked by
two lions. Cellini and Cosimo I may have known Vincenzo Berruerio’s early
sixteenth-century Libellus de natura animalium, which states that God descended
from heaven to earth, that is, to the Virgin Mary. In 431 the Council of Ephesus
announced Mary the ‚Mater Dei, Thronus Dei‛ (the Mother of God, the Throne of
God). As soon as the Catholic Church identified Mary as the Mother Goddess or
Great Mother, her stone chairs outside of the Chapel of Saint Silvestro, Rome
became birthing chairs. At this same moment in history rebirth became an
obligatory rite of passage for the pope-elect. Specifically, he was spiritually reborn
96
of this enthroned Great Mother. In Bertelli’s terms, ‚if the Ecclesia was perceived
to be a mother, there was only one possibility in the Christian world‛ for the
sovereign to proclaim his ‚divine‛ origins: to ‚assimilate‛ his ‚image to another
even more important mother – Mary as Mater Dei, definitively, the Great Mother.‛
Bertelli, 186. Cellini and Cosimo I may also have been aware of Cosimo Tura’s
decoration for Lionelle d’Este’s Belfiore Studiolo (1447), where the muses Calliope,
Thalia, Erato and Terpsichore are enthroned and pregnant.
55. For Capricorn’s value as a symbol of the sun to whom the Earth gave birth see
Cooper, 154. The Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano includes a set of panels with the
theme of the Cycles of Time. The last picture in the series is Birth of the Day, which
a Perseus term introduces. The panel is divided into three sections that suggest
the transition from dark to light: Night precedes Dawn and Apollo-Sol’s Day
follows Dawn. As a sun figure, Perseus may support the panel’s solar theme.
56. For information on the solar prince see H. P. L’Orange, Studies in the
Iconography of Cosmic Kingship in the Ancient World (New York: Caratzas Brothers
Publishing, 1982): 87-88, 105-106. For more information on solar spirals see Julius
Schwabe, Archetyp und Tierkreis (Basel, Switzerland: Verlag, 1951): 115-558.
57. For a treatment of the Ouroboros’ traditional symbolism see Cooper, 124. The
symbol of the snake biting its tail became common in the Renaissance due to
Neoplatonism’s influence. The sixteenth century knew Ptolemy’s hypothesis
about the sun’s orbit in space.
58. The image of the Ouroboros with Earth Mother figures is ubiquitous
throughout history. See Neumann, 19 for the Ouroboros’ link with the earth.
59. The famous omphalos at Delphi, Greece had uterine significance because
‚Delphys‛ is a Greek term for ‚uterus.‛ See A. A. Barb, ‚Diva Matrix: a Faked
Gnostic Intaglio in the Possession of P. P. Rubens and the Iconology of a Symbol,‛
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 200 for a discussion of the
Delphic site and the navel’s value as a symbol of the uterus. The river Okeanos,
where the Gorgons lived, was for Homer (Iliad, Book XIV, 201, 246) the place from
which all life originated. In the sixteenth century Peracelsus stated that ‚the
Creator has formed heaven and earth to a womb (matrix) in which Adam was
conceived, and..just as man lives in this womb of the outer world so the unborn
child lives under the firmament of the mother’s womb.‛ (quoted on Barb, 203)
97
60. For more information on the gnostic gems discussed here see Campbell
Bonner’s Studies in Magical Amulets, chiefly Graeco-Egyptian (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Studies, 1950).
61. Medusa was also a uterine symbol in the Middle Ages. See Barb, 235. Barb, n.
214 indicates that terracotta statues of uteri were popular among Italian collectors
of the Renaissance. There is, Barb noted, an ancient cult of the ‚divine uterus‛
which may be connected to the amulets in question. The Orphics knew about the
cult. Therefore, intellectuals at the Medici court who were steeped in Orphic
thought must have been familiar with the cult as well.
62. Cole, 62, 128-133, 138, 148 discusses the figure of Perseus and Cellini’s Perseus
as models of virtù, as well as poems for the Perseus that laud it as a work of virtù.
See n.1 of my Introduction for poems about Cellini’s Perseus. Pirro Ligorio,
Cellini’s contemporary, believed the statue to be an allegory of virtù. See Libro
dell’Antichità, MSS vi, fol. 156r, Archivio di Stato Segnatura, Turin, Italy. An
anonymous fifteenth-century treatise published in Georg Heinrich Bode’s
Scriptores rerum Mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti (Hildesheim, Germany:
Olms, 1968): 42 refers to the figure of Perseus as a ‚figura virtutis.‛ Fulgentius, 62.
63. Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X and the
two Cosimos (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984): 253-254, 275.
64. Cellini, My Life, 324-332. Cellini also channeled his animosity through his
Perseus by writing a poem, ‚Perseo che si maraviglia di questa innusata e favorita
braveria grifona‛ in which he speaks through the statue. Here, Perseus, himself a
mythical avenger, tells the Piazza della Signoria’s Neptune that Bartolomeo
Ammanati, Cellini’s inferior, will ‚ruin‛ the god of the sea.
69. In Martina Droth’s words: ‚The story of the Perseus’ casting suggests that the
demiurgic powers of bronze recognized by the ancients were still palpable to
sixteenth-century artists. <The possibility of accidental and unforeseen outcomes
meant that a successful bronze cast not only evinced the founder’s technical
knowledge, but his intricate connection and empathy with nature’s ways< By
thus identifying himself bodily with bronze and its determining factors, Cellini
suggests that the very act of engaging with materials implicated one in the cycles
of nature.‛ Droth, Introduction to Bronze: the Power of Life and Death, 14. Many
sixteenth-century metallurgical treatises prove that contemporaries sexualized and
personified the process of mining and casting medal. The basis for their views was
the belief that ores formed in the earth under astral influence and that mines and
quarries were wombs and ores their embryos. The sexual symbolism carried into
that of Mother Earth. The preceding comprises concepts dating from antiquity
that everything coming out of the earth is alive.
71. Cole, 70. Aristotle’s theory of generation, with which Cellini was familiar,
purportedly told that ‚there is moisture in the earth, spirit in that moisture, and a
life heat in all of those things, such that all, in some way, are charged with soul.‛
Aristotle, De Generatione Animalivm Libri, trans. Theodoro Gaza (Venice, Italy:
Heironymus Scotus, 1545): Book V, 276. Similarly, sixteenth-century metallurgist
Antonio Allegretti stated that ‚metal is a material holding living spirit which
infuses all created things. It cannot show its forces unless its hot and lively virtue
is quickly freed from where it lies, unencumbered.‛ Antonio Allegretti, De la
Trasmutazione de Metalli, ed. Mino Gabriele (Rome, Italy: Mediterranee, 1981): 52.
Cole, 60 notes that Cosimo I was interested in the practical application of alchemy
and metallurgy. Therefore, the duke would have known about the preceding
premises.
72. Barb (193-238, esp. 208ff) has noted that gnostic accounts state that beheading
Medusa was a creative act because it enabled her to spawn.
99
Chapter 3 Renaissance Political Theory and Paradoxes of Power
Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa testifies to the fact that coercion and force were
central to Cosimo I’s rise to power and to his vision of state formation. The Medici
duke’s political bravado was responsible for his entry into Florence as a larger-
than-life sovereign. And yet, aspects of early modern theory on gender and the
state which problematize virtù inform Cellini’s bronze in ways that could have
who held the value of republican liberty close to their hearts, would have been
keenly aware of the insecure foundation of their past traditions as times changed
rapidly while Cosimo consolidated his power. The controversy over the merits of
government by the many versus by the elite few was still an unresolved point of
imposed on Cellini were signs of the tighter vigilance and control of the public and
private spheres besetting the development of the early modern state.1 Those
fashion.
Much political writing and visual imagery dating from the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance treats the ruler’s head and body as symbols of the state.
of the Sabine, a later pro-Medici sculpture, on the Piazza della Signoria (fig. 24).2
Perseus and Medusa, which does much to suggest tension, struggle and disturbance,
thus drawing the viewer into the scene. In part, this effect stems from the fact that
Perseus’ attack on Medusa is an assault on the female gender. Chapter 3 will show
that the theories of Machiavelli, which found a wide audience in the Renaissance
and even made their way into Florence’s Grand Ducal Library, are enormously
contrasts between the sexes is the essence of politics. Politics stems from the
nature of man and, in kind, it cultivates manliness. Virtù was Machiavelli’s most
important concept. For him it was largely about energy and virtuosity (recall, a
hallmark of Cellini’s manly artistry). Machiavelli’s virtù was the main instrument
through which one could cross the fine boundaries between autonomy and
dependence. For Florentine males, perhaps especially those living during the
age of state formation, individual and political glory and security depended on
autonomy, which one cannot separate from psychic and personal matters.
and dependence, then linked to the term, were perilous traits in men. However,
101
problems and contradictions invest his separatist view.
man’s ability to control the world around him which, in turn, reflect the anxious
nature of Renaissance masculinity. Pico della Mirandola’s words are telling in this
regard: ‚If man lifts himself to the full height of mind and soul he rises higher than
the sky‛: ‚man possesses ... almost the same genius as the Author of the heavens.‛
Indeed, man could even author the heavens if, alas, he only had ‚the instrument
and the heavenly material.‛4 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has proposed that the preced-
ing statement most likely couches a certain degree of anxiety and doubt about
energy responsible for orchestrating world activity and infringing upon male
autonomy --- the goddess Fortuna, whose identity had already undergone various
spindle fastened the eight spheres of heaven, and the goddess of destiny had the
the whole world’s axis revolving in her womb, which controlled everything.6 The
early Christian author Boethius made Fortuna appear evil, deceiving.7 Already one
form.
ings about Fortuna led to the practice of portraying her with either a beautiful face,
moon, to which her wheel, an emblem of the cosmos with all its contradictions,
also compared. The moon governs the tides, while Fortuna controlled the tides of
human life. As one can see, the profile of the Mother Goddess, the mistress of all
to deal with Fortuna as a cosmological entity. For instance, Castiglione and Cellini
forcefully confronted her thus.8 Now, early modern writers, such as Machiavelli,
suggested that men ally with her, sometimes in such a way that they might access
discussed in light of Cosimo I’s patronage, gives one a most compelling reason to
the Florentine theorist’s tercets in which Fortuna is, like Medusa, an intelligent
divinity and queen. She is the epitome of duality, for she has ‚two faces,‛ one
fierce and the other mild.‛10 Men suffer much when she ‚cuts off‛ the ‚horns of
103
their fame,‛ that is, she injures their manly honor.11
Images of the battle between virtù and Fortuna appeared ever since the days
of Cicero, but became more frequent during the time Machiavelli sexualized this
power and military conquest and treated eros as a matter of capture and domina-
tion. In the last chapter of The Prince, Italy is a woman ‚beaten, despoiled, bruised,
trampled, subject to every kind of injury< she prays to God to send her someone
who will rescue her from barbarian insolence and cruelty.‛13 Despite the
a state, of a ruler’s power and victory, and of loss and honor in battle.
as Vasari’s decoration for the Sala di Giove in the Palazzo Vecchio, where each of
Cosimo I. In addition, Vasari’s First Fruits of the Earth Offered to Saturn shows
just above the goddess Fortuna. One discerns an intended association between the
latter and the abducted women, the point being that Saturn (Cosimo) could seize
Another well known work by Cellini likewise glorifies sexual violence and
104
even seems to have inspired his vision for the Perseus and Medusa. Cellini’s medal
for King Francis I (1537, fig. 25), which we know only in the form of later bronze
copies, has a portrait of the king as a Roman emperor. On the reverse, an armed
nude woman with his large baton. The work testifies to Cellini’s familiarity with
Machiavelli’s theories, for the inscription on its rim reads: VIRTVE DEVICIT
does stand for generic Renaissance prescriptions for handling Fortuna. The
goddess lies sprawled on the ground, beneath the horse’s deadly rearing hoofs.
One may construe the large baton as a substitute for the male member. Further,
Fortuna is nude. Thus, Cellini highlighted the sexualized nature of the horseman’s
medal as more passive than ancient images of Fortuna. The woman on the king’s
medal is a variation of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Night (fig. 26) on the left side of
Giuliano de’ Medici’s tomb in San Lorenzo, a derivation connoting sleep and death
Fortuna with Night enhances the former’s astrological significance, while evoking
the threatening Mother Goddess. Cellini would have thought as much, for
heaven, the spent womb (witness her sagging abdomen), and even the tomb, or
underworld.
than day because conception takes place during the night.16 As such, the sculpted
mother with all her creative powers rivals the male Day on Giuliano de’ Medici’s
tomb. In a similar fashion, Fortuna on Francis I’s medal wears a crown which
Precedents for Francis’ medal were Roman coins, for instance, a silver
adversaries and the words VIRTVS AVG (‚The virtue of the emperor‛).17 The coin
for Severus is almost a mirror image of Francis I’s: it is complete with a male
wielding a baton, a rearing horse and a victim below its two front hooves.
However, the earlier work shows the woman fully clothed, which supports the
earlier observation that Cellini, like Machiavelli, indulged in the sexual nature of
translates into a sexualized conquest. The hero’s foot presses against the Gorgon’s
nude abdomen. Her nudity, especially her bare breasts, and the pillow beneath
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her are erotic, while the sword’s proximity to the penis indicates the sexual nature
of this violent political deed.18 Indeed, it is telling that Cellini’s bronze model of his
Perseus evinces more distance between the hero’s phallus and his sword than the
statue’s final version does (fig. 28). The Perseus indicates that virtù and, indeed,
virtùous state building had phallic associations, which under the Loggia would
However, Cellini, the misogynist, once endearingly called his Gorgon, an epitome
of Fortuna, ‚la mia femina.‛19 In the same vein, Machiavelli’s writing denotes a
love/hate relationship with Fortuna: the ruler may handle her roughly even though
The sexual content of the Autobiography, like that of Cellini’s bronze for
Machiavelli’s comments about loving and abusing Fortuna. On one occasion, ‚she
asked me if I was still angry with her. I said I was not..the usual carnal pleasures
followed; then ...she provoked me so much that I had to give her the same beating‛
that she received the previous day.20 The artist’s talent of forcefully and
masterfully constructing his enormous bronze for Cosimo I matched the physical
exertion he employed to make Caterina comply with his professional and personal
interests. The accounts with Caterina are boastful and thus underscore the fact
fact that in the Renaissance seducing women, which Cellini proudly said he often
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did, and raping them, which Cellini did at least once, enhanced and legitimized
The sculptor’s relationships with females inspired him to write about the
women are repeatedly the ones responsible for Cellini’s misfortunes. His written
assaults, which made up for his inability to do some women actual harm, include
the one who cost him the commission for a colossal statue of Mars and thus
became ‚that damned woman‛ who ‚must have been brought into the world only
for its ruination.‛22 Eleonora di Toledo was similar to the Furies, for she cost him
Cosimo I’s favor. Cellini even vilified women from the ancient past: the Amazon
Fortuna with the intimidating females in his life. The conclusion to his story of
telling: ‚Now here one can recognize the way in which evil Fortune rages against
a poor man, and how shameless Fortune favors a wicked man.‛23 Thus, one can
see that on the Piazza della Signoria Perseus’ violent assault of Medusa reflects
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Cellini’s own ideas about powerful females. It seems that contemporary abuse of
women, whether real or imagined, betrays a certain degree of insecurity about the
seemingly women – must be held down and/or beaten in order for men to succeed:
Fortuna has her own power, which, without physical force from adversaries, can
oppress and dominate men. Women share Fortuna’s deceitful traits, and harm
men professionally and personally with their seductive wiles. In this context men
are weak and need to restrain their sexual appetites in order to avoid the clutches
of women. The autonomy of the state and of man depends on rapacious, virtùous
actions, like those of Perseus. Machiavelli asserted that men must avoid being like
women in order to preserve their political and personal autonomy and virtù, as
childish, bestial and dependent.24 Machiavelli’s tenets reveal the unstable nature
of Renaissance masculinity.
Women,‛ a chapter from his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius,
exemplifies his view: ‚Women have caused much destruction, have done great
harm to those who govern cities, and have occasioned many divisions in them...I
say, then, that absolute princes and governors of republics are to take no small
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account of this matter‛ (3:26).25 Women are a threat not only to rulers, but also to
the body politic, for they weaken citizens, just as women do princes.
women are dangerously seductive, older women are a greater political threat. For
example, mature women can be just as ambitious as men, since they often desire
much power for themselves and for their families. Older women’s powers are
almost superhuman, that is, almost like Fortuna’s, and undermine those of men.
Machiavelli cited the story of Tarquin the Proud, who came to power because of
his wife’s ambition, despite the fact that she was the daughter of the previous
legitimate king. As soon as her husband took the throne, the queen persuaded
distance from feminine wiles, but one contradiction is Machiavelli’s proposal that
men become like Fortuna and Woman in select ways. Machiavelli’s writing
simultaneously pits virtù and Fortuna against each other and also compares one
with the other: both forces control human lives. In essence, Man and Fortuna face
each other and govern the progress of history. Men must battle her by becoming,
like Perseus, cunning, illusory, even killers, just as Fortuna and Medusa variously
with their own passion, her actions with their own actions.‛ ‚The male depends on
Machiavelli’s claims that men must become like their adversary and that virtù
the violent effects of Medusa’s head, which figuratively reflected his self when it
appeared in Athena’s mirror-like shield. Recall as well that the adversarial nature
call to virtùous action and in the process it proves his ability to transcribe
indeed, the contemporary, insecure male desire (like that of Cosimo I) to display
Fortuna, who ended up controlling half the time and leaving the other half to
men’s will.
Cosimo’s case, those women were Eleonora di Toledo and Maria Salviati, the
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sisters of Fortuna, and so it is plausible that the duke, who was steeped in
heart in his effort to rise above knowledge of his continual dependence on his
mother and to validate his own masculine abilities in light of Eleonora’s perpetual
influence on the Tuscan state.29 However, Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa suggests
who exerted influence on the political world ‚from behind‛ – Caterina Sforza, the
Secretary to the Ten, or Second Chancery enabled him to meet the Countess of
Forli in 1499, the year she taught him how deceptive politics could be. She
instructed Machiavelli how to be a ‚fox‛ when one was too feeble to be a ‚lion.‛31
The ruling Medici, to whom Machiavelli dedicated his Prince, must have been
Caterina, for one of her anonymous portrait medals shows Caterina as a nearly
nude personification of Fortuna, who balances her right foot on a globe and holds
another globe in her right hand (fig. 29). The medal suggests that Caterina, the
‚mistress of Imola and Forli,‛ brings fortune and virtue to her political dominions,
but, as Joyce de Vries has observed, the medal’s salute ‚to virtue‛ may have been
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meant to advise Caterina to keep her family’s good fortune alive.32 The implication
here is that her role as the mistress of Forli and Imola was not entirely secure.
Thus, Fortuna and women like her, such as Caterina Sforza and Cellini’s Medusa,
within and without the Renaissance court.33 Recall that in the patriarchal culture
of ancient Greece Medusa also took on characteristics of the unknown and thus the
dangerous.
The fear of Fortuna/Woman may have reinforced men’s sense of their own
would have been particularly troubling. As the Renaissance progressed, that sense
may have intensified, for women’s education improved. Other traditional sex
roles changed and met with challenge, likewise to men’s fearful concern. For
instance, families became smaller and mothers began to exert most of the control
over children’s religious lives.34 Cosimo I and Eleonora, similarly, disagreed about
what constituted the best way to bring up their children.35 Meanwhile, the ‚battle
harped on the theme of the dominating wife. Telling too was the rise of woodcuts,
engravings and prints (for instance, the ‚Fatal Power of Woman‛ series) of
domineering women from the ancient past, such as Delilah, Eve, and Judith, who,
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like literary wives, were ‚devouring, pestering, exhausting‛ figures.36 It is no
wonder that hero worship and images of extraordinarily strong men, such as
Hercules, became more prominent in Renaissance Europe, for they were attempts
Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galateo, dueling manuals and legal decisions prescribed
aggression, specifically tells men not to act like a woman. However, The Courtier
indicates, paradoxically, that everything that can be said of the courtier can be said
Castiglione’s comment must have led men to think about similarities between
Fear of becoming like women also informed dress codes. The fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries were the only times in Western history when men wore the
codpiece. This fact seems to suggest a need in men to prove their sexuality to
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themselves and to others. As Mark Breitenberg has stated, ‚male anatomical
equation of male gender and sexuality with political and military power in ways
or marriageable men, who were responsible for maintaining social and political
order, illuminate the ambiguous nature of early modern manhood. Marriage was
violence (including murder) and profligacy.40 Leon Battista Alberti was one who
instructed the public about the typical young man’s behavior: ‚He disagrees with
others; he creates disorder in the halls of princes; and he corrupts all things with
quarrels and divisions.‛41 Lust also fed into the destructive nature of young men;
hence marriage would restrain (not extinguish) men’s carnal desires; only then
could a man be ready for political life.42 The belief that raping women could flatter
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male honor was, then, a paradox.
The sculptor proved to be, like Perseus, an adept swordsman. He committed the
crime of murder three times and on more than one occasion Italian authorities
sentenced him to death. His less serious offenses, including assault, likewise
resulted in legal charges. For example, in 1523 Cellini began to be hostile to the
goldsmiths Salvatore and Michele Guasconti, with whom he had been involved
professionally. The Autobiography states that Cellini hurt Gherardo Guasconti with
a blow to the forehead, and because he threatened some of the Guasconti family
with a dagger the clan sent authorities after him.43 Cellini became so furious that
reaction to Bandini’s comment about the Pistoian dagger. Virtù related to honor,
as shown, for being a man required defending one’s familias and one’s self. Even
Cellini said that he needed to behave violently because he was a man. I have
noted that in the sculptor’s day boys and men were obliged to experience trials
and rites of passage that would mold their maleness into an ideal, but this was a
more headaches for legal authorities and for the state as a whole. That such
authority interfered more often with private life in the era of state formation. This
was a time when new magistracies and regulations shaped the identities of men
and women. Men often had mixed feelings about hurting or killing others: guilt,
shame, and the like stemmed from the tensions and contradictions between
Christian doctrine and the call to honor. Of course, men were aware of the risk of
getting into legal trouble as a result of engaging in adversarial relations with their
opponents. The murder of Guasconti, for instance, had to be kept a secret, even
though the soldiers who arrived at the crime scene condoned Cellini’s revenge, or
so the sculptor said. In this context men like Cellini were constantly judged in
public and private. It is not surprising, then, that the institution of revenge met
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with criticism even while it prevailed.46
pronounced muscularity and its violent action. The nude muscle men on the
pedestal relief, who are alter egos of Perseus’ fighting self, do so too and in the
same way. Perhaps the fact that Perseus attacks Cetus without the aid of Medusa
is partly the result of a desire within the artist for virtù to free itself of
indicates that the artist identified with the Gorgon as only one who is hunted by
authority can. The sword, the severed head, even the visage at the helmet’s rear
may have appealed to the aggression of both supporters and foes of the artist and
the Medici family. In this way the statue could have called forth adversity.
However, the Perseus and Medusa suggests that adversary may turn against
Renaissance virtù realized itself partly through the act of controlling its ‚opposite‛
–-- female virtue. Women’s virtuous behavior depended mostly on chastity and
sexual passivity.47 In Breitenberg’s terms, female chastity was ‚invested with the
power to preserve or threaten‛ the blood ‚that figures the purity of status
men.‛48 Thus, female chastity could engender anxiety in men.49 Husbands and
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fathers often sensed that women’s virtue was ultimately beyond their control.50 In
this context, Woman, like Fortuna/Medusa, could not only confirm, but also
of the state. The notion of the composite body’s unity, which had been an ideal for
Europeans since antiquity, naturally conjures up the reverse, that is, the fact that at
one point this body was divisible, made up of fragmentary parts, which might still
break apart. The trope of the state as one body ‚affirms, even as it seeks to
which women bring into the masculinized political world, thereby undermining its
‚coherence.‛ One sees a like frame of mind behind the androgynous nature of
Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa: the likeness between the two bronze figures enables
the Gorgon to thwart Perseus’ potential to emerge totally victorious over the
the Florentine statesman ‚rejected the tamed, bounded, and decorous body of
what by his time had become authoritative tradition. He saw its contradictions
and unstable tensions, its potential for self-contestation and disruption, its founda-
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tions of fear and anxiety.‛52 Machiavelli’s (Discorsi, Book I, Chapter 17) ‚image of
the healthy, happy, headless body politic,‛ for instance, represents ‚rhetorical
violence‛ against the humanist canon of body imagery.53 In other words, the
ones.
absolutist state did meet with challenges of a practical nature and even clashed
republican exiles from the Battle of Montemurlo, who tried to revolt several times
controversial History of Italy (1530s), whose author had lost all favor with Pope
and bourgeois, to regain their dignity. Guicciardini made sure to include figures
of virtù in his History, characters whom he believed were more talented to rule
As Lauro Martines has observed, Fortuna’s wheel was a ‚fitting cipher‛ for
of the upper classes’ loss of power.55 Martines has also stated that if sixteenth-
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century writers attempted to:
It is worth stressing that in the preceding instances a female figure is to blame for
Thus, a strongly dialectical image, Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, matched the
state and in contemporary political theory. In doing so, the statue problematizes
nature is a mirror image of the ruler’s character, which breeds division in the
polity. In this respect the Perseus and Medusa becomes a speculum principis, a
‚mirror of the prince.‛ In Cellini’s day the speculum principis was a popular genre
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The Mirror of the Prince
topos is in certain respects that of the physical mirror, but the reflection of which it
speaks takes place within the ruler’s mind. According to Seneca, the prince must
examine himself and others in a rational fashion, which, in turn, will inspire others
to do the same and therefore be peaceful. The prince does not need to carry
the figure of Fortuna, who became a fixture in subsequent ‚mirrors for princes‛
and whom Seneca first described as male. As an instrument of the gods, one who
is endowed, like Cellini’s Perseus and Gorgon, with ‚divine reason,‛ the prince
determines the fortune of all individuals.58 This is the first instance where the ruler
becomes a mirror image of Fortune; hence the latter is, like Medusa, a character
However, Seneca also explained that a man can fight Fortuna with his virtù,
thought. In this respect Fortuna’s agency is violent and aggressive. She seeks out
the brave man so that she may war with him. Note that Fortune now becomes
female in the ancient Roman’s text, one who is worthy to fight the prince:
free and his own master and towering above all others. For what can possibly be
above him who is above Fortuna?‛ The ‚magnanimous prince looks down on
The war with Fortuna is an externalization of the inner fight for self-mastery,
that is, for the triumph of the rational.61 Now that Fortune is a woman, the meeting
of wits, of mente, becomes a struggle --- one between like and like.
this regard, attacked Seneca’s image of the prince and the principate. Critics have
noted that The Prince at once adheres to and subverts the genre of the speculum
merciful and to abstain from vice.62 The Prince exposes the injury, murder,
the tropes and figures of the Roman theory of monarchy into weapons which he
then deploys against it.‛63 In this way the Florentine statesman employed the
ironic strategy of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, an ancient text that was widely
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read in the Renaissance.64 The latter theorist once stated that ‚the most satisfactory
the same time, it can be ‚unsafe to speak openly.‛65 Machiavelli’s treatise is one of
epitomizes the variously ambiguous, deceitful, ironic, and illusory nature of his
era’s speech, comportment and action.66 Thus, the prince governs his court as
Fortuna does the world.67 I might add, Machiavelli himself became like Fortuna as
he wrote in Quintilian fashion. The Prince is a ‚mirror‛ into which the ruler may
look to find that he is the embodiment of that which the treatise pretends to
denounce.
Seneca had described relations among princeps, status, Fortuna and virtù. He
conceded with the Roman theorist that the prince holds the state ‚in his hand.‛68
political unity/stability by exposing what occurs to bodies when they fall under
princely rule.
Fortuna, a prince’s virtue would not be able to achieve anything, although without
the same virtue, the occasione would pass in vain. Here, the attack is directly on
Seneca, whose prince is carried aloft by his Fortuna to a pinnacle from which he
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cannot descend. From these heights the prince can lower his eyes to those he
governs. The Roman theorist stressed that even though the prince holds the
governed under his control, people are happiest to live in this form of respublica.69
The first chapter of The Prince reverses these claims, maintaining that all
claimed that principalities are either hereditary or they are the product of new
blood, that is, they are contingent, contestable, not innate possessions.71 The
concept of the prince’s ‚rape‛ of the state comes into play here. He warns in
Chapter 5 that in the case of republics ‚there is no sure way of possessing them,
other than by destroying them,‛ for a prince who desires to dominate republics
must ‚undo them, or else expect to be undone by them.‛72 These tenets strike a
Before Machiavelli put his ideas on paper, the Renaissance ideology of the
prince held that monarchy is the greatest hope for the preservation of libertas.
with the aid of Athena’s mirror-shield and thus to Cellini’s Perseus assumes a new
adopting her image as an elusive cosmic force, just as Cellini’s Perseus adopts the
prince), aware that his adversarial Perseus is a Machiavellian prince whose mirror
is the face of Perseus, itself a mirror image of Medusa. Like The Prince, Cellini’s
sculpture challenges the Senecan notion that virtue alone is responsible for the
prince’s rise to power. The themes of duality and deception relating to the mirror
of Athena beneath the feet of Perseus (another destructive ruler) suggest that the
down toward the mirror-like shield of Athena, for which the distorted circular
shared height and visualized as both a real image and a product of the mind, for
Perseus does not look directly at the head he holds. In this way Cellini implied
Cellini also seems to have borrowed the Senecan and Machiavellian notion
that looking down at his subjects (viewers on the Piazza della Signoria) from the
dissenters. Enemies of the Medici could be turned to stone, or, like Medusa,
tightly held in his punitive hand and trampled beneath his feet, as Fortuna’s broken
wheel (the Gorgon’s body) is under the Loggia. However, as noted, since the
statue upholds violence, it could have called forth adversity in others. Thus,
prince.‛ Cosimo I in Armor (1545, fig. 30) represents the ruler in luminous steel,
which in this instance is a virtual mirror, as Gabrielle Langdon has stated. The
portrait points up the duke’s role as exemplar at a time when the terms ‚ritratto‛
iconographer refers to the picture as a ‚mirrabile ritratto,‛ while a note from Vasari
to Ottaviano de’ Medici states that the armor in Cosimo’s portrait ‚shines, as
should the mirror of the prince so that his people and their actions can be reflected
the mirror metaphor, I propose. Their spikes, like the rest of the armor, shine
The circles may also be lunar and solar symbols, just as the mirror has long
been. Consider Leonardo’s statement: ‚the body of the moon <is a convex
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mirror.‛80 Remember as well Castiglione’s image of the sun as a mirror that
captures God’s likeness. Armor’s lunar and solar associations and its significance
as a symbolic mirror of the universe would have enhanced the divine legitimacy of
early modern age, when rulers and generals wanted to be depicted in divine form
they usually had themselves shown in armor. Note as well that in the Renaissance
portraits were considered to be divine mirrors in which the subject and the artist
were reflected in a similar way that Perseus and Medusa were in Athena’s mirror-
shield; that is, humans take on the likeness of divinity.81 Ficino once stated that:
has stressed, armor only seems permanent, for in actuality in rusts, decays and
transfers from one body to the next.83 ‚If armor is seen as conferring heroic
Cosimo’s power.
Robert Simon has noted that the tight frame around the duke offsets any
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threat from the right or left, but Cosimo is rather accessible from the viewer’s
point of view.85 Simon has further suggested that the duke’s uncovered head and
his white, ‚epicene‛ hand resting on his helmet contrast with the tough armor,
The Florentine theorist stated that an unarmed prince and one who does not give
the highest premium to building and maintaining his military must expect failure
as a ruler. He believed that an army was necessary if the people’s virtù and the
state were to survive. Recall that one cannot put virtù into action without battle
and/or war. The warrior prince must be armed at all times. In addition, those
cities without fortifications are effeminate and the first to fall. They fall,
other words, the feminine presence within the state is a foil for the prince’s
prophet, who also must be ‚armed,‛ that is, endowed with aggressive character
traits. Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus would never have been successful in
commanding their peoples to obey their laws if they had been ‚unarmed,‛ as
Savonarola was. His view matched contemporary interests in biblical heroes, such
as the Old Testament hero David, as well as the Famous Men series and other
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extant portrayals of leaders and their military campaigns. The latter populated the
prophet. His view would have appealed to rulers, such as Cosimo I, interested in
cultivating a personal association with fiery prophets like John the Baptist, whose
War was an art for Machiavellians. War involves the mind of the ruler, who
Cellini’s Perseus, for Cosimo I would have complimented the Medici duke’s
that Cosimo the Elder was unable to expand Florentine power because he was a
disarmed man.89
who transformed Medusa into a force of martial strength, also specifies her own
status as warrior goddess.90 Note that her right arm is raised, recalling depictions
Cosimo I.91 However, Perseus’ inability to look at Medusa reminds the viewer of
the state’s weaknesses, its need to empower itself with arms, in addition to the
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state’s dependence on the aid of deities.
that is, an epitome of the ruler’s imperfection. Even though Machiavelli claimed
The eighteenth chapter of The Prince ironically stipulates that a prince must act as a
beast who is hunted or hunting, that is, without care for rules and conventions -- as
Cosimo I had reason to identify with many of the diverse traits of the
Machiavellian beast- prince. Apart from being a ruthless military man, he once
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flew into a rage and murdered his servant Sforza Almeni by running a lance threw
him. Cellini’s Autobiography notes that the duke was responsible for the death of
his son Giovanni, who died while dueling his own brother. Similarly, Cosimo’s
desire to obtain the ducal title sometimes led to vocal outbursts which probably
also made him fearsome in others’ eyes. Yet, at times he proved to be (like Fortuna
and his wife Eleonora) quite fickle, ranging from sullenness and irritability to
friendliness, just as Cellini so wavered.94 To be near the duke must have instilled
varying degrees of anxiety and uncertainty about the future of ones career and
perhaps even about ones life. After Cosimo obtained the ducal title an observer at
festivities for the occasion noted that there was ‚little real joy to be discerned in the
profound distrust of many near him, from whom he withheld his feelings and
Hercules wearing the skin of the Nemean lion featured as an emblem of strength
on the reverse of one of Cosimo’s coins (fig. 31). Cellini’s bust of Cosimo I shows
the sitter with the intense, wide eyes of Florence’s mascot, Marzocco the lion; a
generous, ‚lionine‛ mane of hair; and several hoary male heads with grotesque,
composites on the ruler’s armor. For example, a small head of a lion, a solar
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animal on account of its color and fiery mane, rests on the clavicle and a large,
frightening head occupies the right shoulder (fig. 32).97 The lionine type further
associates the duke with the winged Medusa head on Cosimo’s breastplate, for
both beastly creatures have similar aspects, which include wide eyes, gaping
mouths, and manes of different sorts. Furthermore, the creatures support the
notion that the Gorgon head is solar. It is no wonder, then, that in the ancient
world lions could be apotropaic, just as the fierce gaze of the solar hero Cosimo
seems to be here.98
The gaping mouth of the large creature on Cosimo’s right shoulder shows
off four large fangs which seem incongruous with the ram’s horns on its head. The
figure is, I propose, a portrait of a satyr, for its humanized face indicates that this
is a composite being. It too has lionine traits, as well as solar power. Therefore,
one or more lions, suggesting cosmic power and sovereignty.100 Lionine power
informed Medusa’s ancient guises with a round head, large gaping eyes and
enormous teeth, or fangs (fig. 33). The association of Medusa and lions with
Cellini’s bust of Cosimo I and with related images of the Medici ruler, such as
Baccio Bandinelli’s marble bust of Cosimo I (1543-1544, fig. 34), represents the
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duke’s appropriation of the Gorgon’s power as the Earth Mother. Yet, Medusa’s
The Medusa head on Cosimo’s bronze breastplate associates his bust with
speculum principis; so do lionine creatures on Cellini’s bronze bust. Note that the
ball tip of Perseus’ sword has a lionine head (fig. 35). Equally significant as a solar
emblem is the lion mask near Cellini’s Mercury bronzette. However, on the crest of
The satyr’s fiery character is similar to Cosimo I’s, and he is closely related
to the Capricorn. Pan the satyr would have played an intriguing role at the duke’s
sumptuous residence at Castello. In designs for the Grotto’s wall fountains Pan
symbolized the earth, while Neptune featured in a second sketch for a wall
fountain as an emblem of water. Here, the statues of Pan, who would have
recalled Capricorn, and Neptune were rulers of land and sea, respectively, and as
such they would have stood for Cosimo I.101 However, since Pan is the god of
panics, his place at Castello and perhaps also the Capricorns on the Perseus’
pedestal could have recalled contemporary political adversity within the Tuscan
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state.
panic in them.102 How does panic set into the landscape as a result of Pan’s
fear, terror, confusion and disturbances. Panic usually involves the lack of a
visible cause. In other words, panic is a response to the unknown or the idea
Cosimo I’s bust to Pan’s fear and panic induction characterize the Medici ruler’s
The Medusa on Cosimo’s breastplate relates to Pan as one who instills fear.
Indeed, in ancient Greece Pan was a version of Phobos (fear). Medusa herself also
personified Phobos.104 In light of Cellini’s design for Duke Cosimo I’s bronze bust
it is telling that the ancient Greek world presented Pan as the Earth Goddess’ alter
ego. Both figures shared the same landscape as well as the power to petrify and to
distract humans.
The bronze bust of Cosimo I suggests, thus, that Cellini was aware of
Medusa’s animal origins. An artist of his caliber would have known that during
of heroes (fig. 37).105 She thus becomes, like Fortuna, the perfect companion and
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Notes
3. Van Veen, Cosimo I and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, 169-
170 indicates the Medici’s knowledge of Machiavelli’s works.
4. Pico della Mirandola, ‚On the Dignity of Man,‛ in The Renaissance Philosophy of
Man, eds. Cassirer, Rinsteller, and Randall (Illinois: Phoenix Books, 1956): 225.
5. Hanna Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Machiavelli
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 12.
7. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Victor Watts (New York: Penguin
Press, 1999): 3, 8-11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22-24, 26-31, 33-35, 39-40, 44-45, 47, 49, 53, 57,
101, 106-109, 111-113, 141.
8. In the Renaissance the image of Fortuna presiding over her court existed
alongside depictions of her as the cosmic mother of humankind. Note how the
roles of mother and queen come together as potentially threatening political forces.
137
Theodore de Bry’s engraving of Fortuna (1592) has the inscription: ‚Sometimes
Fortuna is a mother, sometimes an unjust stepmother‛ and thus exemplifies the
timeless nature of malevolence against cosmic/maternal women.
10. Quoted on Pitkin, 165. None that the Renaissance authors discussed in the
third chapter of my study equated Fortuna with Medusa. The comparison of the
two goddesses is mine.
12. For instance, at Poggio a Caiano one the battle between virtù and Fortuna takes
the form of the Hercules and Fortuna, which bears the inscription VIRTVTEM
FORTVNA SEQVETVR. For Duke Francesco de’ Medici’s wedding apparato of
1565 officials sculpted Virtù and Fortuna. See Cox-Rearick 148ff for a fuller
discussion of virtù and the goddess of fate in Medici iconography.
13. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Daniel Donno (New York: Bantam Books, 1966):
87. Diane Wolfthal’s Images of Rape, the ‚Heroic‛ Tradition and its Alternatives
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999) also discusses the early
modern equation of martial prowess with rape.
14. Philip Atwood, ‚Cellini’s Coins and Medals,‛ in Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor,
Goldsmith, Writer, eds. Margaret A. Gallucci and Paolo Rossi (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 2004): 109-110.
16. Michelangelo, The Poems, trans. C. Ryan (London, England: J. M. Dent, 1996):
#103.
17. Atwood, 109 indicates that Cellini knew the coin of Septimius Severus.
138
18. Patricia Simons’ ‚Alert and Erect: Masculinity in some Italian Renaissance
Portraits of Fathers and Sons,‛ 163-186 is a good study of early modern ideas about
the phallus. Numerous Renaissance portraits of military leaders and statesmen,
such as Titian’s Francesco Maria della Rovere, juxtapose the sitter’s phallus/codpiece
with his sword. In Simons’ words: ‚Sixteenth-century portraits often unabashedly
represent a young adult man’s artificially adorned and enlarged penis<bursting
out like the sword’s hilt not coincidentally nearby.‛ (169) ‚Titian’s Guidobaldo II
della Rovere and his son Francesco Maria II diminishes the codpiece and replaces the
huge dog, sign of masculine, outdoor vigor, vigilance, and phallic aggression with
an alternative sign of potency, his own son and heir. Armor and batons, signs of
office, are clustered near the son who will one day inherit the manly duties they
signify.‛ (172) The sixteenth-century academician Antonio Vignale’s Cazzaria (Book
of Cocks) mentions a power struggle between the large penises and the little ones,
who end up losing to their prodigious counterparts. The struggle takes place
within the context of a discussion about the best way to run a government. Rape is
central to the story of Perseus, for the latter was the product of Danae’s rape and,
as Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells, Poseidon raped Medusa in Athena’s temple. In
patriarchal Greece rape was a rite of passage for men. The act proved one’s
manhood, and men raped women in order to dominate them politically, not only
physically. See Keuls, 33-64.
19. G. Molini, ed., La Vita di Benvenuto Cellini: Scritta da lui medesimo tratta dal
l’Autografo, vol. 1 (Florence, Italy: Tipografia all’insegna di Dante, 1832): 628.
21. For Renaissance ideas about women, rape and violence see Gallucci, 5, 114, 124-
125, 134. Similarly, in Renaissance Florence, husbands who ‚disciplined‛ their
wives by inflicting physical pain on them, or who even killed their wives were
rarely punished. The preceding certainly accords with Machiavelli’s notion that in
order to rise above Fortuna one must physically beat her.
23. Trottein, 225. Cellini, My Life, 340. Machiavelli painted similar portraits of
female politicians. For instance, his Florentine Histories (Book I, Chapter 8)
maintains that Queen Rosamond was responsible for the Longobards’ failure to
dominate Italy.
139
24. See Pitkin, 231-232 for Machiavelli’s notions about virtù and dependence.
25. Machiavelli, Discourses, trans. Leslie Walker (New York: Penguin Press, 1974):
Book III, 26.
29. Langdon (33) has noted broadly that Cosimo I depended ‚on Maria’s image for
full credibility in the political arena.‛
32. Joyce de Vries, ‚Caterina Sforza’s Portrait Medals: Power, Gender, and
Representation in the Italian Renaissance Court,‛ Woman’s Art Journal 24 (2003): 25.
140
34. David Hale, ‚War and Public Opinion in Renaissance Italy,‛ In Italian
Renaissance Studies, ed. Fraser Jacob (London, England: Faber and Faber Press,
1960): 105-107. For information on Renaissance women’s education see also King,
157-240.
36. Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1959): 250.
40. Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity
(New York: Manchester University Press, 1997): 24-25.
41. Leon Battista Alberti, Opere Volgari, ed. C. Grayson (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1960):
vol. 1, 94.
44. -----, My Life, 89-90. Paolo Rossi’s ‚The Writer and the Man. Real Crimes and
Mitigating Circumstances: Il Caso Cellini,‛ in Crime, Society and the Law in
Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1994): 157-183 is a good study of the Guasconti case and the criminal justice
system in Florence.
45. See Gallucci, 109-141 for a discussion about Cellini and the cult of honor and
manliness.
141
46. See Edward Muir’s ‚The Double Binds of Manly Revenge,‛ in Gender Rhetorics:
Postures of Dominance and Submission in History (New York: MRTS, 1994): 68.
54. See Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-
Century Florence (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984) for further
discussion of contemporary criticism of Florentine politics.
58. Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 2007): 66. Seneca, De Clementia, in Moral Essays, vol.
1, ed. and trans. John W. Basore (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1928-
1932): 378. The link between ‚divine reason‛ and Perseus and Medusa is mine.
142
62. See Peter Stacey’s Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince as well as Harvey
Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 125-126.
65. -----, 257. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001): 72-74.
69. -----, 58, 77, 94, 234, 259. Seneca, De Clementia, in Moral Essays, vol. 1, 356.
72. -----, 262. Machiavelli, Il Principe e Discorsi, ed. Sergio Bertelli (Milan, Italy:
Feltrinelli, 1960): 29.
75. Cosimo I persuaded the Florentine Senate to ratify his election as duke by
stating that his would be a purely symbolic role and that all governmental power
would actually rest in the hands of the established magistrates. However, once the
Senate granted his wish, the young ruler convinced the senators to issue a decree
forbidding anyone from Lorenzo de’ Medici’s side of the family to rule. By the
time the Senate realized that granting the decree was a mistake Cosimo I had
already took the reins of all power within the Florentine state.
76. Langdon, 82 notes that Cosimo I was revered as a ‚mirror of the prince‛ in his
day. For Renaissance artists’ and writers’ propagandization of him as such see
143
Joanna Woods-Marsden, ‚Introduction: Collective Identity/ Individual Identity,‛
in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, ed. Mary Rogers (Vermont: Aldershot,
2000): 1-14. A contemporary example is Lucio Paolo Rosello’s 1552 translation of Il
ritratto del vero Governo del Principe, dal essempio vivo del Gran Cosimo .. con due
oration d’Isocrate conformi all’istessa material. Alciati’s emblem book represents the
face of Medusa as a type of speculum principis. A sarcophagus lies beneath her,
implying that death is the fate of the prince who does not keep order within his
realm. In this context the Gorgon is a mirror image of the prince’s potential to
destroy. Alciati’s concetto was a common one in the Renaissance.
78. Robert Simon, Bronzino’s Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Ph.D. (Columbia
University, 1982): 387-388. Karl Frey, ed., Der Literarische nachless Giorgio Vasaris,
vol. 1 (Munich, Germany: Muller Press, 1923-1930): I, x, 28. For more information
on Cosimo’s state portrait see Simon, ‚Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I in Armour,‛
Burlington Magazine 125 (1983): 527-539.
79. Ephesians, 6:11, 13 claims that the armor of God will protect its faithful wearer.
Darryl J. Gless, The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Charles Hamilton (Canada: University
of Toronto Press, 1997): 61-62. See Tinagli, ‚The Identity of the Prince: Cosimo de’
Medici, Giorgio Vasari and the Ragionamenti,‛ in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance
Art (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2000): 193 for a discussion of Vasari’s paintings for
the Palazzo Vecchio’s Sala di Ercole as mirrors of the prince. The pictures were
meant as allegorizations of Cosimo I’s role as ruler. The same article by Tinagli
also treats written celebrations of the Medici duke as an exemplary prince.
80. Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, vol. 2, ed. Jean Paul
Richter (New York: Dover Publications, 1970): 159.
81. On the Renaissance’s belief in armor’s divine associations see pages 61 and 62
of Gless, which discuss the chivalric tradition in literature. Consult Fulgentius’
and Prudentius’ treatment of armor and divinity. Pertinent studies are also
Carolyn Springer’s Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance (Canada:
University of Toronto Press, 2010): 37-53 and Matthias Winner’s ‚The Orb as the
Symbol of the State in the Pictorial Cycle by Rubens depicting the Life of Marie de’
Medici,‛ in Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation, ed. Allen Ellenius (Oxford,
England: Clarendon Press, 1998): 98.
144
82. Marsilio Ficino, Opera Omnia (Basel, Switzerland: Henricus Petri, 1576): 229.
86. Simon, Bronzino’s Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici, 142. In the Renaissance
portraiture started with the profile view of the sitter, then gave way to a more
assertive view, that is, the frontal. Bronzino’s Cosimo is not as bold as the frontal.
See Simon, ‚Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I in Armour,‛ 535, which states that the
duke’s hand gesture is passive and that in this portrait ‚Bronzino seems to portray
his subject as fearful as he is fearsome. It is of course expressed subtly ... but ...
Bronzino has introduced the same doubts, fears, misgivings, those cracks in the
mask that he so profoundly perceives in the rest of humanity.‛ The spiked
besagues are defensive in nature, as even Simon has observed. See Bronzino’s
Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici, 141.
87. One reads about the armed ruler throughout Machiavelli’s The Prince.
88. Chapter 6, The Prince. Pitkin, 20, 38, 76. For the belief in John the Baptist’s
blessing of Florence see Chrétien’s study. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 281ff.
90. Medusa was, in fact, a fixture in the warrior ideology of Archaic Greece
because of her association with the Amazons.
93. Alciati, A Book of Emblems, the Emblematum Liber in Latin and English, ed. and
trans. John F. Moffitt (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2004): 171.
145
94. For information on Cosimo’s character see Hibbert, 262-263, 266, 268, 272.
96. Cosimo listened to the advice of his secretary, Francesco Campana, and to his
mother, who knew much about elite Florentine families. The severity of Cosimo’s
suspicious nature showed when he threw real or imagined enemies into Volterra’s
dungeons and hired assassins to murder meddlesome dissenters and rivals. Due
to suspicion Cosimo always wore a coat of mail under his jerkin, a dagger, sword
and many stiletti stuck into the lining of his scabbard. He also had a bodyguard
present at all times. Cosimo had good reason to fear assassination, for more than
one attempt was made to murder him. Further, the Medici duke would not put up
with any dissension: that would have been a threat to his power. Surveillance at
the Medici court was tightest while he ruled. For instance, since 1546 he kept a
closer eye on governmental officials nearest him by bringing all of Florence’s
judicial and administrative offices as well as the city’s major guilds into one
building near the Palazzo Vecchio. It seems that Cosimo’s demand for intense
control was a symptom of a concern that he would lose power, even though his
astrological chart purported that his fortune would always be great. A sense of
insecurity also seems to have informed his belief that any hint of disturbances
within the polity’s institutions harbored the potential to spoil the state’s ‚stability.‛
Hibbert, 262-263, 265, 269, 270, 271. For Cosimo’s horoscope see Mandel, 168 and
Cox-Rearick, 206, 212, 217.
97. In ancient Roman times the placement of the Gorgon’s head on the ruler’s
chestplate meant that he shared in her divinity. The presence of lions as
complementary emblems of sovereign power was and still is ubiquitous in
Florence. For instance, sculptural lions with cosmic spheres reside on the Piazza
della Signoria (fig. 38). A large statue of a lion wearing a crown, whose spokes
mimic its mane, graces the courtyard of the Bargello Museum (fig. 39). All of
these and like instances represent the Medici faction’s emblem – the Gold Lion.
Witness the stone rendition of the Medici coat of arms on the Piazza San Lorenzo
which features two lion heads at the top of its stone shield (fig. 40). The solar
aspect of the animals would have complemented the Medici family’s cosmic palle
on the shield, which is perhaps an apotropaic device. In addition, in the 1550s
Cellini adopted the Marzocco for his own coat of arms, and thus he too became a
solar/beastly figure.
146
98. The material of Cosimo’s bust – bronze – would have been apotropaic in a
metaphorical sense, in keeping with ancient belief. See Scholten, 32 for a brief
discussion of bronze as a classical apotropaion. The Renaissance world knew
about the ancient belief in the apotropaic nature of lionine imagery on weaponry.
For example, the scholar Guillaume Du Choul cited the fourth-century scholar
Vegetius’ statement that lion heads ‚render the standard-bearer more ferocious
and terrible to the enemy.‛ See Du Choul’s Discours sur la Castramentation et
Discipline Militaire des Romains (Lyon, France: Guillaume Rouille, 1555): 152.
101. Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden: from the Conventions of
Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy
(Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1990): 179 states that at Castello Pan stood for
Cosimo I, an indication that the goat god merged with Capricorn. The ancient
world associated Pan with Capricorn in a zodiacal sense, while mythographers,
such as Hyginius, told that Jupiter put Pan into the heavens, where the latter took
the form of Capricorn. See also Claudia Conforti’s ‚Il Giardino di Castello comme
Immagine del Territorio,‛ in La Città effimera e l’Universo artificiale del Giardino: la
Firenze dei Medici e Italia del ‘500‛ (Rome, Italy: Officina, 1980): 153, 156, which
mentions the Pan for Castello as a surrogate for Cosimo I. Conforti believes that
the Neptune-Pan alliance would have symbolized the duke’s successful control of
chaos within the state. Alciati’s Emblem 98 states that Pan is the nature of things
and Natura associates with him.
102. See Philippe Borgeaud’s The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece (Illinois: University
of Chicago Press, 1988): 125.
147
103. The panic landscape, a mountainous terrain, is a place where strange events
occur, one reason why Pan is comparable to Fortuna, whose dwelling is situated on
a rocky promontory. The panic landscape is the epitome of the unfamiliar, of
danger. It is the ‚edge‛ of civilized life. The Gorgons’ landscape comes to mind.
For a description of Fortuna’s dwelling see Book I, Chapter 1 of Alanus de Insulis,
The Anticlaudian, as well as Romance of the Rose (Book I, 5921-6020) by Guillaume de
Lorris.
104. Hesiod’s ‚Shield of Hercules‛ states: ‚And upon the awful heads of the
Gorgons great Fear (Phobos) was quaking.‛
148
Chapter 4 The Goddess as Other and Same
Similarly, the mirror meeting between Perseus and Medusa is a metaphor for the
hero’s paradoxical position vis-à-vis the divine. As this chapter will show,
divine Other.
Medusa, as it appears in textual form and on the Piazza della Signoria, can be said
to epitomize Perseus’ divine alter ego. However, the mirror-shield reminds one
of his weakness as a man, for Perseus must use it to slay the Gorgon. Cellini’s
Perseus is unable to look at Medusa, as stated. He peers down toward the shield
at his feet, which, as mentioned, has an implied relationship to the faces above it.
The mirror-shield confuses Self and Other, just as the androgynous appear-
ance of Cellini’s bronze heads do. Indeed, in Victoria Rimell’s terms, ‚Medusa
thrusts unfamiliarity into our very I, and figures the dialectical relation between
Gorgon:
149
In this face-to-face encounter with frontality,
man puts himself in a position of symmetry
with respect to the god, always remaining
centered on his own axis. This reciprocity
implies both duality (man-god face each
other) and inseparability, even identification.2
The role of Cellini’s Medusa as Other and Same relates, thus, to her status as a
divinity.
Similarly, Cellini’s shield for Duke Cosimo I’s son Francesco I de’ Medici
juxtaposes the Other in the form of Medusa’s head with roundels portraying Old
Testament figures: the Jewish leaders Judith and David, whose triumphs stemmed
from the Lord’s favor (figs. 41, 42, 43). The latter as Other were once underdogs
with whom the Medici, at their lowest, identified. Images of the disadvantaged
In one bronze roundel David lifts his shield, ready to strike the fallen
Philistine giant beneath him. Judith places the Assyrian general’s head in her
pouch, while the upper half of Holofernes’ body looms from the folds of his bed
canopy. The abandoned shield above Bianca Cappello’s portrait roundel has the
grimacing face of a soldier emitting battle cries (fig. 44). All of the figures,
including the open-mouthed Medusa, are heroic warriors with whom Francesco
and the cuirassed, helmeted Bianca can identify. The figure of Medusa at the
150
center seems in supernatural fashion to encapsulate and to disseminate the power
the feminine stands for ‚the unearthly, the most pronounced form of Otherness
to humankind... Both the terror and the magnificence of Judith as Other signify
the terrifying mystery of the invisible deity.‛4 That Judith occupies a shield, a
weapon of war, indicates that her power was indeed terrible. Her position in the
Medici imagination proves that female divinity was highly meaningful for the
Women on Top
garden is thus worth discussing at some length. In the Renaissance, gardens were
(allegorically) places where concord ruled over social and political discord. One
work responsible for the conceptualization of the garden’s role as such was the
medieval De Fructibus Carnis et Spiritus. In this text the tree of vices, arbor mala, is
rooted in Superbia (Pride). The arbor mala bears the word Babilonia, which is
Babylon. Those coming into the Medici Palace garden would have found it
151
‚purgation‛ of evil, or political discord from Florence.5 Since Judith’s victory was
also that of God, her place in the Medici garden would have reminded rulers of the
dangers of pride and injustice and of the benefits of becoming, like Judith, God’s
spokesperson.
Long before the Elder’s day, the walled palace garden emerged as a hortus
tions of the Song of Songs (4:12) conclude as much, and by the fifteenth century the
hortus conclusus (an enclosed garden) became a feature in many paintings of the
Annunciation. Since Judith, Israel’s maternal founder, was a type for the Blessed
Mother, her place within the Medici Palace garden enhanced its role as a hortus
conclusus, a place where virtue deflected the threat of tyranny from Florence.6
Indeed, Dante’s celestial rose garden involves Judith sitting beneath a celestial
rose herself – the Blessed Virgin (Paradiso, Canto XXXII, 10). The Medici would
have known about the preceding associations from their immense knowledge of
Italian art and literature. For instance, Cosimo the Elder de’ Medici owned a copy
that the Virgin, like Judith, cut off the head of the devil, whom Holofernes
incarnates.8 Judith’s chastity and her fully clothed appearance in the Medici
garden enhance her Marian role. By contrast, the pillow beneath Holofernes; his
152
partial nudity; and the bacchanalian reliefs on the statue’s base all typify the
Assyrian general as Luxuria (Lust). Even Prudentius and Saint Jerome interpreted
chastity. Here was a way that the palace garden thematized sexual purity, or
marital fidelity, valuable virtues for the Medici men and women.10 In this context
the male assimilated himself to the Other in the form of the feminine divine.
parallel between the Medici Palace garden and the garden of Eden, where the
serpent first tempted human beings to satisfy forbidden desires of the flesh.
Indeed, Saint Antonine’s Summa equates the hortus conclusus with Eden.11
the Medici garden’s image as Paradise before the Fall. Paradise had courtly and
Cosimo’s role as state ‚creator.‛ The term ‚paradise‛ itself originated from the
ancient Persian term for royal parks. The Greek translation of the Bible referred to
royal gardens as heaven, or Eden. In the pre-medieval age ‚paradise‛ also became
the term for spaces where government affairs took place. In this context the
celestial garden of Mary became the royal court of Christ’s Queen of Heaven and
Earth.12 Christ, as the true king of kings, entered garden settings as sole Creator
153
and possessor of the cosmos. For instance, Dante’s Paradiso (Canto XXVI, 64-66)
names Christ as gardener, an image that would have appealed to Cosimo the
Judith has appropriated the sword of her foe and, concomitantly, his power as
ruler and man. Incidentally, the sword that Donatello’s Judith bears is a scimitar,
which Renaissance Italians associated with Eastern peoples -- the Other, and so her
the artist’s stylization of her chastity. Note how Holofernes, rumpled in posture,
crouches beneath Judith. His limbs, trunk and neck are contorted. In this way
Judith becomes like the sundry women in Greek mythology who injure
literally mingles with that of her Assyrian captive: her foot crushes his groin,
154
emphasizing the assault on male sexuality; the thick folds of her garments pile
confusedly near, or onto his head and upper body as she straddles his partially
nude form between her knees; her left leg merges with his right arm; his shoulder
rests between her legs. The minimal distance between them contradicts her
heavily veiled and draped aspect. A cloth from Holofernes’ bed wraps around
Judith’s body, tying her to her foe and implicating them in the same erotically
charged space.
attempt to downplay her political success and her godliness and, concomitantly,
chose to render his heroine with her sword-wielding hand raised above a partially
severed neck. It took Judith two strokes to decapitate Holofernes: unlike Perseus,
she was not physically strong enough to slice the head with one blow.
Others, but had reason to identify with Judith’s political attributes. Opportunities
for women to wield political influence existed during the time of Florence’s
enabled women to enjoy a certain amount of freedom in the public sphere, since
male family members, and the women even acquired power through their
Since the boundaries between the public and private spaces of the
Renaissance palace were blurred, women were able to affect the outcome of busi-
ness and political affairs transpiring in their homes. The political and domestic
realms of Florence became more permeable from the later years of Cosimo the
Elder’s rule on, that is, while power was focused more on the Medici living
quarters and less on the Piazza della Signoria. The process culminated in the
destruction of the republic in 1530 and the subsequent creation of Cosimo I’s state.
context of their deep devotion to and identification with the Virgin Mary, the
mize their involvement in public affairs as well as political events within their own
virtuous mothers and pious matrons. In suit, others represented them in the same
fashion. For instance, Clarice Orsini was highly instrumental in establishing new
ties with Rome which would later enable a Medici to hold the papal office. The
deed characterized her as a spiritual mother and guide.20 The Medici women
found for themselves a royal court in their ‚paradisiacal‛ garden, the hortus
156
conclusus of the family palace. Judith’s/Mary’s role as the Medici garden’s spiritual
queen reflected the power of the female family members. However, the Medici
against some of the most powerful women of the family. One target was
Alfonsina Orsini, who in effect ruled Florence from the summer of 1515 until after
her son Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, died in 1519. Francesco Vettori
accused Alfonsina of having too much control over her son and of being extremely
pesty and disorderly in the presence of the pope, whom she implored to give
‚nagging and whining woman‛ contrasts with that of her ‚good son.‛22
the republicans’ removal of the Judith from the Medici Palace garden in 1495 and of
the statue’s removal from the Loggia dei Lanzi in 1504. As Adrian Randolph has
stated, the displacement of Donatello’s sculpture might have stood for something
other than women’s ‚erasure‛ from Florentine public life. The Judith’s fate might
have been, instead, a reflection of the current fear of the feminization of the
posed a particularly poignant threat: that rule was tantamount to the loss of male
‚something which until this time was unusual <many women going up and
down the steps.‛24 Cerretani explained that the sight made many people uneasy,
since by law and custom women were excluded from the Signoria. The unrest
must have stemmed from a belief that the women would influence policy and
cosmic powers: ‚<a deadly symbol ..does not befit us whose insignia are the cross
and the lily, nor is it good to have a woman kill a man...‛ Judith’s ‚position under
an evil constellation‛ made events turn ‚from bad to worse, and Pisa has been
lost.‛26 Comments like these make the reader wonder if Judith’s implication in
Holofernes’ sinfulness downplays her political success, with the same implication
The Medici’s second exile furnished yet another opportunity for their
women to handle political affairs. Maria Salviati’s prominent place in the family
after 1537 owed itself not to her role as the one who brought Cosimo I to power,
but to her status as the duke’s mother. During this time she influenced her
domestic affairs that took place just after Duke Alessandro’s assassination on
January 6, 1537. For instance, she helped to ingratiate Cosimo with leading
158
members of the Medici family; and one must not forget the counsel she gave the
Thus, as this chapter has shown, the image of Woman as divine Other could
take different forms in the Renaissance imagination --- as Medusa, for instance, or
as Judith. The Gorgon’s role as divine Other comes through in a painting found in
the Medici collection, Pinturicchio’s Pala di Santa Maria dei Fossi (1495-1496, fig. 45),
where Medusa’s miniscule head occupies the Virgin Mary’s throne. The two
women are morally opposed to each other, but the fact that they share the same
throne suggests that they have an affinity with one another as Goddesses. Mary
and Medusa embody wisdom, which the throne symbolizes.27 Ultimately, Medusa
identification with the Virgin Mary and of how that identification filtered through
Donatello’s Judith, but was spoiled by the statue’s rejection.28 A type for the Holy
divine Other; hence the biblical heroine became a supernatural force with the
power to wreck political havoc. The Judith ultimately served as a reminder of the
Like the mirror that facilitated Medusa’s demise, the female/divine Other
could be a foil for virtù’s weakness. At the same time, the Other could be virtù’s
159
Same. The next chapter will show how that association assumes a most
160
Notes
1. Victoria Rimell, Ovid’s Lovers; Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 19. Perseus’ act of
borrowing the eye of the Graiae is the first instance of character doubling in his
tale.
3. For discussions of the Medici’s identification with political underdogs see Roger
Crum, ‚Donatello’s bronze David and the Question of Foreign versus Domestic
Tyranny,‛ Renaissance Studies 10 (1996): 440-450.
4. Margarita Stocker, Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture
(Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998): 10-11.
6. -----, 262.
7. -----, 262.
9. Book of Judith, Greek text with an English translation, commentary and critical
notes by Enslin and Zeitlin (Leiden, Holland: Brill Press, 1972): 48-49. See also
Wind, ‚Donatello’s Judith: a Symbol of Sanctimonia,‛ Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937-1938): 62-63 and V. Martin von Erffa, ‚Judith-Virtus
Virtutum-Maria,‛ Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 14 (1970):
460-465 for discussion of medieval and Renaissance interpretations of Judith’s
character.
161
13. -----, 263-264.
14. Stocker, 8.
17. Several critics have argued that Donatello’s David (c. 1440-1460, fig. 46), which
stood within the Medici Palace complex while the Judith was there, may have
spoken to the homoerotic/social subculture of Florence. (Homoeroticism/social-
ism, a modern term, refers in this study to the love of boys and men as well as to
sexual relations between mature males.) David’s nudity and his sword’s proxim-
ity to his penis, for instance, may suggest sodomical sex. See Randolph 173, 191,
254-255, 263 and Laurie Schneider, ‚Donatello and Caravaggio: the Iconography of
Decapitation,‛ American Imago 33 (1976): 76-91. In my view, however, the statue’s
nudity might have had a spiritual message for Florence’s leading family. The Old
Testament states that David threw off his armor so that he might better fight
Goliath. David’s nudity denoted his humility before the Lord and his trust that
God would lead him to victory. David also danced semi-nude before the Ark of
the Covenant. The Medici would have associated with David as a virtuous leader,
then.
18. See Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence for
information on the political infrastructure of Medicean Florence.
21. For information on Alfonsina Orsini see Tomas, 167-185. See Sheryl E. Reiss,
‚Widow, Mother, Patron of Art: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici,‛ in Beyond Isabella:
Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss (Missouri:
Truman State University Press, 2001): 125-140 for a discussion of Alfonsina’s
political ambitions and how they were perceived to be a threat to Florence’s
political establishment.
162
22. Francesco Vettori, ‚Sommario della Istoria d’Italia (1511-1527),‛ in Scritti Storici
e Politici, ed. E. Niccolini (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1972): 184-185, 267.
27. Medusa, il Mito, l’Antico, e i Medici (Florence, Italy: Uffizi Museum, 2008): 14-15
likewise states that Medusa and Mary appear on the holy throne together because
they are women of wisdom.
28. Mary Kisler, ‚Florence and the Feminine,‛ in Italian Women and the City: Essays,
eds. Janet L. Smarr and Daria Valentini (New Jersey: Associated University
Presses, 2003): 61 suggests that women moved within open spaces built alongside
their family dwellings, such as the Loggia dei Lanzi. Therefore, Donatello’s Judith
would have been visible to the Medici women while it stood under the Loggia.
163
Chapter 5 The Sexual Symbolism of the Perseus and Medusa
Mother. For instance, the coils of blood issuing from the severed neck parts of
Cellini’s Medusa recall the bleeding vagina. Since the neck parts and Medusa’s
mouth are open, they may characterize the Gorgon as an engulfing creature. A
similar image, that of the vagina dentata (‚toothed vagina‛) touched the
imaginations of sundry ancient artists and writers. Witness, for instance, ancient
Gorgon faces variously endowed with devouring tusks and fangs (see fig. 33).1
Such images from antiquity present the Gorgon’s head as a fearsomely engulfing
vagina that threatens the male. However, as mentioned in Chapter 2, the Gorgon’s
wives of Renaissance art and literature mentioned in Chapter 3 and of the ancient
image of Medusa as a goblin who eats children.3 The preceding indicates that the
The Gorgon’s sexual aspect on the Piazza della Signoria is, one must stress,
also androgynous. Her bronze serpents and the ball-tipped coil of blood issuing
symbols.4
Evidentially, the sexual symbolism of the Perseus and Medusa was personally
conflicted sexuality, for he as Perseus identified with the sexual Other in the form
of Medusa.
young men. The story of Cellini’s life indicates that life in his bottega involved
homosocial bonding.5 For instance, Cellini states that working with Francesco
Lippi ‚generated such a strong sense of friendship between us that neither day nor
night we were ever out of each other’s company.‛6 It is also clear that Cellini had
at least one sexual relationship with a youth. In February, 1557 (luckily when the
Perseus had already been completed) Florentine authorities convicted the sculptor
for keeping one Ferdinand from Montepulciano, ‚an adolescent, in his bed as his
wife and using him carnally very many times in the nefarious act of sodomy for
about the last five years.‛7 In March of the same year Cellini was imprisoned in
the Stinche. However, as a result of the artist’s appeal to Cosimo I to stay within
the city’s limits and another appeal for house arrest, the sentence, which
comprised four years in prison and the loss of the right to hold public office, the
Medici ruler commuted the penalty to house arrest. The new decision stemmed in
165
part from the duke’s desire to see Cellini’s marble Christ completed.8
during the time that he was discriminated against because of his sexual
orientation:
harks back to a fictive altercation (the Medici duke did not permit quarrels among
his artists) between Cellini and Bandinelli in the presence of Cosimo I.10 Cellini’s
Autobiography relates that while he voiced his ideas about restoring an antique
marble torso for the ducal court, his rival walked in and began criticizing the
thereby precipitating the latter’s subsequent insult: ‚Oh, keep quiet, you dirty
cast over those in his presence, while it legitimized the practice of sodomy by
Note how ambiguous the sexuality of Cellini is in his Perseus poem. The
artist does not deny that he loves men in a homosexual capacity. Perseus’
sexuality is, likewise, ambiguous. Cellini seems to suggest that the Greek hero
loves (perhaps in a platonic and sexual senses) both men and women; that is, he
does not love everyone except (‚but‛) women. Further, the ‚respected prize‛ of
Perseus (the ‚winged youth‛) is the head of Medusa. Perhaps in the poem the
Gorgon’s head assumes a sexual nature, just as it does on the Piazza della Signoria,
for it seems that in order to indulge his love Cellini/Perseus must have the head.
His poem explains why his bronze Medusa has a certain dignity and it elucidates
Cellini’s term for his bronze Gorgon --- ‚la mia femina.‛ Still, the poem is an
implied assertion of Cellini’s bisexuality. The poem’s defensive tone, like that of
bring about his conviction for sodomy. He was keenly aware of contemporary
Cellini’s Autobiography indicates that his trial for sodomy, his charge and
politics, which, along with the crime itself, resulted in Cellini’s loss of Cosimo’s
favor. The unfortunate episode effectively ended Cellini’s artistic career and it
probably influenced the Autobiography’s general tone of defense, for the sculptor
Cellini had reason to feel insecure about his sexuality. Paradoxically, police
Renaissance Florence, but that fear intensified when Duke Cosimo I implemented
new means to control male sexuality in its ‚deviant‛ forms. Harsher laws would
punish those convicted of sodomy. In addition, the duke cast a keen eye on the
appeal process for convicts. It is not surprising that Cosimo did away with
exile from the city in place of fines, the previous standard punishment for first-
time, older offenders. The duke respected the law for some of the most
men convicted of sexual relations with the same partner over a long expanse of
time.15
As the preceding indicates, by the 1540s Cosimo I was already using the
legal system to increase and to consolidate his power as well as to deter active
opposition against his wishes. His legal orders were in one capacity a weapon
against his enemies, who were feminized in the form of Cellini’s Medusa.
bitches and whores.16 Fear and insecurity about the future of his state seem to
the form of an earthquake. After lightning bolts damaged the Palazzo Ducale
Cosimo quickly wrote two new laws – one against blasphemy and one against
had the potential to ruin the Tuscan state. In other words, since male
heterosexuality and the state were equable, aberrations in the former could
One comes back to the ideal of the homogeneous state and to the futility of
that model. Aims to control ‚deviance‛ within the early modern state took the
most treacherous forms precisely because that imperative was most difficult. The
169
next chapter will demonstrate how Cellini’s Perseus indicates the same.
170
Notes
1. See Campbell’s The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, 73ff for a discussion of the
vagina dentata. Sonja Ross, Die Vagina Dentata in Mythos und Erzählung (Bonn,
Germany: Holos, 1994). Pages 168-169 of Neumann and 126, 205 of Keuls also
indicate that Medusa is the vagina dentata, which, Keuls notes, Greek men feared.
2. Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon Press,
1954): 87 states that ‚among the symbols of the devouring chasm we must count
the womb in its frightening aspect, the numinous heads of the Gorgon and the
Medusa, the woman with beard and phallus...The open womb is the devouring
symbol of the uroboric mother, especially when connected with phallic symbols.
The gnashing mouth of the Medusa with its boar’s tongue is obviously connected
with the phallus.‛ For a discussion of the ancient notion (known in the
Renaissance) of the earth’s womb as a deathly place see Balas, The Mother Goddess
in Italian Renaissance Art, 9-10. Onians, 157 relates that the root of MEDUS,
‚Mdhos,‛ derives from the idea of the genital. In Homer’s writing ‚Mdhos‛ means
the genitals. Andreas Vesalius’ famous De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) describes
the uterus as a mouth hungry for male seed. In the same vein, the character
Lucretia in Machiavelli’s La Mandragora appears to consume her mate. In order to
save her once she has swallowed a mandrake he must let her suck him dry. In the
play the deed takes the form of intercourse. Transferring the deadly food from one
to the other takes place in the prison of Lucretia’s bed, itself a trope for the womb
that ‚devours‛ the male, holding him captive.
5. See Gallucci, 34-35 about life in the Renaissance bottega. Her book says much
about Cellini’s conflicted sexual profile.
171
7. Gallucci, ‚Cellini’s Trial for Sodomy: Power and Patronage at the Court of
Cosimo I,‛ in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Konrad
Eisenbichler (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2001): quoted on page 37.
10. For information on Cosimo I’s injunction against quarreling see Karen-edis
Barzman, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: the Discipline of Disegno
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 39, which states that
from Cosimo I’s ‚perspective, unrest at any level, within any of the institutional
structures of the social polity, carried with it a potential threat to the internal
security of the state. For this reason, he would not tolerate any dispute or
disturbance, even within the context of professional rivalries and academic
discord.‛
11. Cellini, My Life, 321. Jupiter transformed himself into an eagle and, seizing the
young Ganymede, flew to the heavens to rape him.
14. -----, Benvenuto Cellini, Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance
Italy, 46.
15. Elena Fasano Guarini, ‚The Prince, the Judges and the Law: Cosimo I and
Sexual Violence, 1558,‛ in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor
Dean (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 121-141.
172
Chapter 6 The Public Face of Justice
of Cosimo I’s absolutist state, for through that system the Medici ruler could
impose his will on his constituents in the name of political and social cohesion.
In this context the heterogeneity of the Tuscan state required the strictest
measures. One of the most severe forms of the ducal legal system’s control of the
human body comes to light in the Loggia statues representing decapitation. Like
that the viewer standing in front of the statue beneath the Gorgon’s body receives
the impression that Perseus’ sword is about to alight upon his/her head. The
Greek hero seems to watch for the spectator’s reaction (fig. 47). Cellini’s actualiza-
tion of Perseus’ murderous act must have been most menacing in light of the fact
that when Cosimo’s sculpture was unveiled the Loggia dei Lanzi was still used for
important show executions, just as it had provided a setting for the beheading of
The research of Marco Chiari and Frederick Cummings suggests that in the
sixteenth century public executions in Florence averaged six per day; but the more
interesting statistic is that from 1530 to 1534 the Medici regime carried out in
173
record fashion more than ninety public executions, twenty of which entailed
hanging from the Palazzo della Signoria.2 The executions performed during
Cosimo I’s time in office were among the most barbaric recorded, despite the fact
that the Medici duke could display his power through grazia; that is, in order to
showcase his mastery of the law Cosimo sometimes pardoned criminals awaiting
their deaths.3
those who committed crimes against the state. The latter were concomitant with
crimes against the sovereign; hence the loss of one’s head mimicked the harm
intended for the ‚head‛ of state.‛ Since decapitating the Gorgon proved to be an
assault on the ‚head‛ of the matriarchal state, the Gorgon’s image on the Piazza
della Signoria is both denigrated and dignified. Thus, Cosimo’s Perseus and
Medusa reminds the viewer that decapitation was the honorable way to execute a
the law. Since the law was an instrument of the state and thus a part of the
sovereign, it naturally stood for the will of the ruler. The force of the law was the
The execution of a criminal communicated the absolute power over life and death
which was the absolutist ruler’s birthright. It comes as no surprise, then, that the
When Cellini’s Perseus was unveiled and its patron looked down at what
transpired, Cosimo I played the part of the all-seeing lord responsible for this new
Perseus, the demi-god, against the matriarchal goddess Medusa. Raised to a great
height on its pedestal, the Perseus provided a bridge between the duke and the
political and criminal worlds below him, while the Loggia arches above framed the
bronze and thus implied that the spectacle of public execution participated in a
‚whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored.‛5 The latter
included the coronation of a king or queen and his or her entry into a conquered
city, two events that usually took place beneath triumphal arches. In the preced-
ing context the Loggia statues ritualized Cosimo’s rise to power after Montemurlo.
they were attempts to define a dominion. Armed punishment, the state’s primary
175
form of repression, was a warning to neighboring states because it symbolized the
ruler’s monopoly of juridical, legal, political and military authority within the
state. The presence of a duke, count, king, or queen would supposedly daunt the
masses watching the grisly spectacle of execution into obeying the law, thereby
implying the sovereign’s control over all bodies – criminal and noncriminal ---
In my view the chaos of the execution scene mirrored the difficult, often
violent process of state formation. In the early modern period states developed
slowly. The open nature of territorial divides was one factor that contributed to
monopolies of authority. Thus, the effects of violent behavior were two-fold: they
tions were meant to materialize the state’s strength precisely because this power
was not yet consolidated. The preindustrial justice system needed publicity
because the ruler’s power over wrong doers had to be made visible: execution of
the body, the display of the corpse, even the practice of not refraining from
conducting execution in the chaos after riots all contributed to the propagandistic
headed a dominion not without its anxieties about political stability, as seen. The
Medici ruler’s own desire to control the law in the strictest of fashions betrayed his
sensitivity to dissent, which was tantamount to rebellion. The lack of control over
cities such as Lucca and Siena, which Cosimo did not wholly annex until 1557,
due to such factors as the ruggedness and remoteness of land that provided cover
for lawbreakers and the increased danger of banditry from the mid-sixteenth
century to the early decades of the next, a problem in Florence stemming from the
fall of Montalcino and general resistance against the Emperor and the Medici. The
revenge also generated a great number of criminal acts that contributed to the
instability of state formation. The same was the result of poverty, social
(specifically, republican) territories, and yet also of the threat of disorderly political
177
factions. The body of Medusa lies in a slump-like heap, a chaotic mass of flesh,
much as a mutilated and executed body would, and the Gorgon’s face evinces a
naturalistic vacuity. The adverse effects of her gaze symbolize ongoing cycles of
violence troubling Cosimo’s Tuscan state, and the blood that, tellingly, gave birth
violence to intimidate inimical forces into submission, but, as stated earlier, it also
could have called forth adversity. Foucault’s statement suits the statue’s
dynamics: ‚as a ritual of armed law, in which the prince showed himself,
indissociably, both as the head of justice and head of war, the public execution had
two aspects: one of victory, the other of struggle‛ to overcome the deviance of
adversary in the violent challenge which the ritual of execution posed to the
prince.8
Cellini also seems to have visualized the adversarial nature of the ritual of
public execution through his Greek hero’s physical similarity to the Gorgon, which
suggests that the infamy of his victim stained the Renaissance executioner.9
Perseus matches the ‚criminal‛ in the Gorgon’s image. The executioner’s profile is
similar to that of Cellini as the Autobiography describes the latter. The sculptor both
enjoyed the acceptance of patrons and friends and at other times was unfortunate
enough to be an outcast.
178
One may liken Perseus’ weapon to the large swords Renaissance executioners
used to decapitate condemned criminals. These arms were heavy, and so the
adept at their task were men who could finish their deed by striking only once, just
as Perseus so decapitated Medusa and just as Cellini almost took Guasconti’s head
with one blow, feebly falling short, as Judith did, of such a feat. As such, the act of
punishment became for the executioner/Perseus a rite of passage into the male
world of juridico-penal authority, which oversaw the body sacrificed through the
penal ritual.10
Although the figure of Cellini’s Medusa has a severed neck, its configura-
tion recalls an additional form of sacrificial ritual — breaking with the wheel
(fig. 48). Note how the Gorgon’s arms and legs are folded and contorted in ways
suggesting broken bones, even the shape of the body strung between the spokes of
a wheel. In the northern and central parts of early modern Europe, after hanging,
breaking with the wheel was the most common aggravated way to bring criminals
to justice. Although Italy seldom employed the technique, Italians were familiar
with the breaking wheel through such media as prints, paintings and written
accounts of its horrors.11 The executioner would lay the criminal’s body across a
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hard surface, such as a ladder, to which he would tie the victim’s hands and feet,
then he would knock the wheel against the victim’s limbs and/or chest. The latter
was either left to die on his back or lifted up and strung between the spokes of a
wheel on a pike. As the pike’s wheel rotated, more bones broke. At times just the
forms of public execution. However, breaking with the wheel was an aggravated
Breaking with the wheel was just one way of sacrificing the criminal for the
sake of social order. In Cellini’s day the trope of the scaffold as an altar derived
sacrifice for humankind.13 On the Piazza della Signoria Medusa’s broken body
It is not a coincidence that Cellini chose to include images of Mercury, Athena, and
Jupiter on his altar-pedestal, for as Ovid stated, Perseus built altars to these three
symbolism that ‚the very shape of the wheel and the cross<point to ideas of a
cosmic order and would be senseless but for a victim sacrificed for a cosmic
180
purpose.‛15 On the Piazza della Signoria that purpose becomes an affront against
the Mother Goddess. The wheel is an attribute of the Great Mother in the forms of
Nemesis (Vortumna) and Fortuna: its whorl symbolizes the revolutions of the
universe, which the Goddess controls. The spiral form of Medusa’s bronze body,
Italians living in Cellini’s day would have known the wheel’s time honored
symbolism. It has stood for solar power; the sun, whose rays are its spokes,
turning in the sky; the cycle of life and death; rebirth and renewal; change, Fate,
Time; and, as noted, Fortuna, the Gothic rose window having originated in
Romanesque art as a wheel of Fortuna. The ancient ceremony of rolling the wheel
signified the sun’s rotation through the heavens. Since the wheel is an attribute of
all sun gods, including Zeus and Apollo, it symbolizes domination of the cosmos.17
As a wheel-like spiral, the body of Cellini’s Medusa stands for solar power as well
as the increase and decrease of the sun, for generation and death have their part in
have already noted the link between the Ouroboros and the sun as well as the
wheel.
Gaddi’s Holy Francis appearing to his Disciples, which shows the saint in an inflamed
181
chariot whose wheel mimics the halo of light around him (fig. 49). The similarity
Karl von Amira and Hans von Hentig have written that the breaking wheel
was indeed an archetypical emblem of the sun. Thus, torture with the wheel,
which dates back to ancient Greece and Rome, was, in their view, a type of pagan
sacrifice to the sun god Zeus. To support their claim, von Amira and von Hentig
have cited the famous myth of Ixion, a mortal who incited Zeus’ anger for
which would roll through the sky for eternity. In the ancient Mediterranean world
Ixion’s wheel did become an emblem of the sun.19 Perhaps Ixion’s eternal
punishment corresponded to the slow death one suffered from the breaking wheel.
In the opinion of Erwin Roos the medieval torture wheel had nothing to do
with that of Ixion, since his limbs were not laced between spokes. Ixion was,
rather, strapped to the face of the wheel and his limbs were unbroken.20 However,
I would like to bring attention to the fact that at least one ancient Roman sarco-
phagus represents Ixion’s limbs intertwined between the spokes of a torture wheel
(fig. 50). Here, flames light its rim. Ixion’s right foot is missing, which is, perhaps,
an effect of time, or possibly a result of the wheel’s rotation. Ixion’s right arm is
also mangled. This and similar artifacts showing Zeus’ victim may have been
available to medieval and early modern Italians, who thus may have better
182
understood the link between Ixion’s lit wheel and the breaking wheel.
Pagan saturnalia, that is, feasts of renewal, influenced the medieval and
early modern breaking wheel’s sacrificial significance, for during these festivals a
criminal would stand in for the Divine King, whose original sacrifice fertilized the
earth.21 The ritual of breaking with the wheel offered up the criminal’s death as a
sacrifice in the name of earthly and cosmic order.22 In the preceding context the
wheel’s association with the earth would have enhanced the profile of Cellini’s
Indeed, the wheel has long been an emblem of the earth and of the cosmos
as a whole. Book XIV of Isidorus of Seville’s (c. 570-636) Etymologiae explains that
the earth is like a wheel, meaning, no doubt, in shape, for the author did not
conceive of the world in motion.23 In addition, Psalm 76:19 tells of the ‚voice of
thy thunder‛ in the wheel. This is the voice of God, whose cosmic throne is the
wheel. Ezekiel’s vision represents the throne of God on wheels (Ezekiel, 1:15ff)
which, as Marcell Jankovics has observed, are really the rims of an astrolabe
revolving within each other. They are cosmic circles and the wheeled mechanics
of heaven.24
Columbus’ voyage to the New World in 1492 some Europeans knew the earth to
be round. Consider that the ancient Greek belief that the earth has nine circles
183
conforming to its shape survived into the fifteenth century.25 Renaissance Europe
would have known, in addition, that the emblematic orbs of Pompey, Caesar and
Augustus stood for earthly and even cosmic sovereignty and that Hadrian’s
official coinage bears the inscription, ‚restorer of the circle of the earth‛ (‚restitutur
orbis terrarum‛). Witness the many visual images of early modern leaders holding
the symbolic terrestrial orb as their ancient predecessors did (fig. 51).
Neptune Fountain, which followed Cellini’s Perseus (fig. 52). The northern wheel
bears the zodiacal signs of spring and summer, while the southern has those of
autumn and winter. Van Veen has stated that the zodiacal emblems pertain to
link among Earth, the cosmos, and the wheel discussed previously, thereby
suggesting that Cellini would have known the same. It is not coincidental that
medallions with the head of Medusa, the Earth Mother, grace the rim of the
fountain’s wheels.
184
Mater Iuri
imaginations earthly justice was a reflection of God’s plan for cosmic order.
judicial themes from biblical writing, most frequently the Last Judgment. Criminal
procedures commonly took place in the presence of such images. Arches within
judicial buildings framed high magistrates and stood for God’s cosmos, just as the
females who derive from the ancient Mother of Justice (Iustitia/Mater Iuri).
Donatello’s Judith is one such example and so is Cellini’s Medusa, who rivals the
supreme judge Zeus on the pedestal beneath her. Just as Medusa was responsible
for Perseus’ ability to bring enemies to justice at various points in his story, the
Piazza’s della Signoria’s Gorgon is the means through which Perseus punishes his
Perseus and Medusa maintains that Cosimo I would usher in a new Golden Age
because the duke descended from the firmament with Iustitia.27 Note how Cellini’s
heavens.
Cellini must have known that in his time Justice was inseparable from the
185
Almighty and associated with an absolute and deified State. The earthly body
and the spiritual body of the prince shared in Iustitia’s eternal nature. Significant
in the preceding regard is the fact that Duke Cosimo I personally embraced the
paradoxical notion that the prince’s two bodies embodied the law and, perhaps
partly in a spiritual sense, stood above it.28 His belief becomes more meaningful in
light of the preceding poem on Iustitia: the Medici duke would have assimilated
his personae to both the spiritual nature of Iustitia and her manifestation in earthly
relates to her role as the Mother Goddess, one must travel to the ancient world.
Here, in her first religious-mythical guise, justice appeared as a face of the Mother
Goddess. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey present the Mother Goddess as a judgmental
entity, for she punishes those who ignore, or challenge her. In addition, Hesiod’s
Theogony states that Dike (Justice) is the daughter of Zeus and Themis and that she
resides at the center of religious and moral affairs, embodying divine will. Themis
entity. Shortly before the end of the fifth century B.C. the Mother of the Gods
received cult honors in the Council House of Athens, where she resided,
186
enthroned at the center of the building housing all of the official texts of Athenian
laws and all other documents belonging to the government. By the end of the fifth
century the Athenian state archives became known, therefore, as the Shrine of the
Mother, the Metroon. The edifice was the veritable embodiment of Athenian
democracy.31
The Mother Goddess’ role as the protectress of laws stemmed from her
status as the source of sovereignty, a fact that should remind one of Medusa’s role
such dates back to her involvement with King Midas, who was keenly adept at
administering justice. The king’s mother, the Phrygian Great Goddess, was
responsible for founding, foreseeing and protecting Midas’ just kingship. Even
though Midas’ ability to turn all he touched to gold moralizes the evils of greed,
his golden touch might also have stood for his ability to impose justice, for in
187
The Shield Device as a Judicial and Cosmological Emblem
The original gilding on Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa would have enhanced
the statue’s judicial power. Further, as Cellini and his contemporaries may have
known, in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. Roman statutes, decrees, treatises and
edicts were all written on bronze tablets. Bronze’s durability symbolized the
is no wonder, then, that Romans often placed bronze legal tablets on hilltops for all
to see. Further, bronze’s sacred connotations may have informed what Callie
that is, as a resplendently divine, lasting monument to its patron’s judicial will,
made visible on the Piazza della Signoria for viewers to admire and to fear. An
indication that the preceding was so is the pose of Francesco di Giovanni Ferrucci
del Tadda’s sword-bearing Justice, which is nearly identical to that of the Perseus
(fig. 53). Del Tadda’s female personification of Cosimo I’s judicial power is made,
tellingly, of porphyry, which ducal Florence valued for its hardness and durability
and associated with justice.34 Like the bronze legal tablets of Rome, Justice
occupies great heights: she stands on top of a Roman column on Florence’s Piazza
Santa Trinità, where she proclaims Cosimo’s judicial strength to those beneath her.
188
The gilded weaponry of Cellini’s Perseus has a particular way of defining
the Greek hero as a judicial figure. Cellini may have known the following example
from Homer’s Iliad, which endows bronze weaponry with judicial connotations:
Here, the sovereign’s bronze spears are a metonym for political power, including
the ability to wage war and to impose justice. Similarly, in his poem, ‚On Nature‛
believed, is like the sun. The Romans, meanwhile, swore by the sun.35 As the seat
monarchs placed the image of the sun on their breast-plates was their belief that
solar power would protect the wearer’s heart in times of peace and in times of
war.36 Perhaps the preceding ideas informed the choice to render the Gorgon’s
head on ancient and early modern breastplates, including that of Duke Cosimo I’s
shield compares. Witness, for example, Vasari’s Allegory of the Quartiere of San
Giovanni and Santa Maria Novella, which includes a shield decorated with a lion
whose mane mimics the suns’ rays and even Medusa’s snakes (1563-1565, fig. 54).
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Ancient authors and artists consistently employed the circular form of the
shield device as an allusion to the sun. Hence, the shield of Achilles, as it appears
in the Iliad, features the sun. In the preceding context the solar shield serves as an
emblem of a ruler’s ambition for the just outcome of battles and/or the conquest of
territories.37
perhaps as cosmic bodies, on the aegis’ outer rim (Electra, 455f). The Iliad proves
that the Gorgon face on the cosmic shield of Agamemnon is a sign of cosmic
domination.
The early iconography of Eastern and Western kingship indicates that when
a ruler is represented in the zodiacal ring, or on the cosmic clipeus -- the circular
Consider a passage from Corippus De laudibus Justini which pays homage to the
The image of the emperor raised on a shield had the same solar significance
in the Middle Ages and beyond. Manuel Holobolos of the thirteenth century, for
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instance, stated that the act of raising a shield from earth to heaven greets the
emperor on the aegis as a ‚great Sun.‛39 As the Sun of Justice, Christ also appears
image as such:
In the preceding eras, raising a figure on a shield was also a way of proclaiming
as a solar hero, one who looms large between heaven and earth as a cosmocrator.
The sculpture testifies that not only the ruler’s physical person, but also his/her
artistic rendition as standing on the shield meant that he/she was the new sun.
The original golden sheen of Cellini’s aegis would have indicated so. Perseus’
mirror-shield is analogous to the body of Cellini’s Gorgon and even brings ancient
Iliad’s (Book XI, 33-36) depiction of Agamemnon’s shield with a central circle
191
portraying a Gorgon face. The spiral shape of the Gorgon’s bronze body is similar
Medusa’s and Athena’s power, the fact that the Greek hero steps on the shield
suggests that he is the rival of both women. Simultaneously, his powerful form as
it rises from the shield and Medusa’s body implies that his sovereignty owes itself
hence Aischylos and his contemporaries compared the clipeus to a rotating wheel,
which simultaneously symbolized the universe, heaven, and Sol (the sun) in his
orbit.42 The similarity between the aegis and the wheel enhances the role of
Medusa’s body as an emblem of the wheel, the cosmos, and the sun. One
exemplification of the similarity between the wheel and the clipeus that must have
been known to Cosimo I was the shield of the Medici duke’s idol, Alexander the
Great, which bore a picture of the heavens and whose rim featured the wheel of
the Zodiac.43 In the shield’s middle were the sun, moon and stars. Alexander’s
aegis leads one to believe that the legendary Greek ruler might have thought of
Another way of representing the sun of the clipeus was to present the head
of the sun god Helios at the disk’s center – Sol in suo clipeo. Several ancient Greek
clipei in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston feature the sun god with flaring rays
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about his head (fig. 55). They are images that are similar to the decapitated head
of Medusa sporting ‚fiery‛ tendrils at the center of shields, canon devices, and
In antiquity Sol, the sun-ruler, even assumed the role of Sol Iustitiae (Just
Sun) with his right hand raised. His gesture entered into Roman imperial ritual as
an expression of the ruler’s power to judge. Sol, in the ‚magic sign of his ingens
dextra rules and moves the Cosmos, sends the spheres spinning in their eternal
orbits, thus affecting everything that happens in our earthly sphere. It is the
gesture of the cosmocrator.‛44 The raised hand of Cellini’s Perseus likewise has
connotations of the solar cosmocrator, for in the early modern world, as in the
ancient, the lifted, or outstretched hand (ubiquitously the right, but in the Perseus’
case the upheld left derives from the same concept) had a divine significance
emanate from emperors’ outstretched right hands.45 In the case of Cellini’s Perseus
the outstretched hand is the vehicle through which the hero imparts the
supernatural effects of Medusa’s gaze, while the sword-bearing right hand holds
the power to destroy or to execute justice. As the Perseus proves, the raised hand
The motif of the powerful raised hand also recurs throughout the Bible. For
193
instance, Psalm 89 proclaims, ‚You have a mighty arm; your hand is powerful;
your right hand is lifted high. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of
Your throne.‛ The Lord says, ‚By My great strength and outstretched arm, I made
the earth.‛ (Jeremiah, 27:5). The tradition legis seen in numerous mosaics, paintings
and sarcophagi since Constantine’s late reign comprises the image of Christ giving
the world the new law, His right hand raised in all-powerful command. The
judicial power of the raised hand comes into play in Michelangelo’s Sistine Last
Judgment, which shows Christ welcoming souls with an upraised right hand
(fig. 57). The sun behind the Lord Christ characterizes Him as Sol Invictus.
judge points up Perseus’ power over foes, Cellini’s iconography once again
negates the Greek hero’s independence and elucidates Perseus’ implication in the
Gorgon’s power. The next chapter shall demonstrate how the formal design of
Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa complements that hero’s involvement in the Gorgon’s
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Notes
1. As a backdrop for the Loggia, the Palazzo Vecchio’s austere façade would have
reminded viewers of the Bargello, formerly the city hall, which since the
thirteenth century served as the headquarters of the podestà (the chief police
magistrate for the city). At the Bargello, one found criminal and civil law courts,
torture chambers, and close cells for those awaiting execution. The ‚Book of the
Executed‛ is still housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, and outlines the
different types of executions performed in the city from 1420 to 1744. The
account shows that the years of greatest turmoil, including those of the Pazzi
conspiracy, the fall of the Medici, and the reign of Duke Alessandro, met with an
increase in the number of capital punishments.
2. Frederick Cummings and Marco Chiari, eds., The Twilight of the Medici: Late
Baroque Art in Florence, 1670-1743 (Centro di Firenze, Italy, 1974): 19.
3. Samuel Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during
the Florentine Renaissance (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985): 203. See
Nicholas Scott Baker, ‚For Reasons of State: Political Executions, Republicanism,
and the Medici in Florence, 1480-1560,‛ Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 444-473
for a discussion of the relationship between the increasing number of political
executions in the city and Florence’s transformation from republic to duchy. The
records of the Compagnia de’ Neri, the confraternity that cared for the
condemned criminals prior to execution, states that from 1480 to 1560, sixty-two
Florentine men were executed for political reasons. Baker, 447. Over one third
of these executions took place during the reign of Cosimo I. Baker, 465. Such
findings show that the law became an increasingly important means to defend
the state: due to the state’s centralization, absolutists became more and more
suspicious about dissenters. In Baker’s view the increase of executions under the
Medici duke suggests a ‚continuation of a significant minority of opposition
from within the Florentine elite.‛ Baker, 467.
4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan
(New York: Vintage Press, 1977): 48. Information I have given about what public
execution meant in historical terms derives from Foucault’s book.
5. -----, 50.
195
6. Peter Spierenberg, The Spectacle of Suffering, Execution and the Evolution of
Repression: from a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1986): 78-80, 201-202.
8. Foucault, 50.
11. The Golden Legend describes saints’, such as Saint Juliana’s, experiences with
the breaking wheel.
12. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment
in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, England: Reaktion Press, 1999).
13. A good study of the sacrificial and spiritual significance of execution in Italy
is The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. Nicholas
Terpstra (Missouri: Truman State Press University, 2008).
14. Weil-Garris Brandt, 409-410 states that the Perseus’ pedestal is an altar to the
Olympian gods who safeguard Perseus/Cosimo I. Therefore, Cellini’s work
might have recalled the fact that the ringhiera of the Palazzo Vecchio had, in
Trexler’s terms, ‚the effect of an altar‛ for relics, Mass offerings and sermons.
Trexler, 49.
196
15. Wind, ‚’The Criminal-God’ and the ‘Crucifixion of Haman,’‛ Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937-1938): 244.
16. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (New York: Penguin Press, 1955): 126.
17. On the wheel’s traditional symbolism see Cooper, 191-192. The wagon of
Demeter, a face of the Earth Goddess, was a symbolic wheel, that is, the circle of
the earth rimmed with snakes. 2 Kings 23:11 exemplifies the traditional
association of chariot wheels with the sun and fire: ‚And he took away the
houses that the Kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entering in of the
house of the Lord, by the chamber of Nathanmelech the chamberlain.. and
burned the chariots of the sun with fire.‛
18. For a discussion of links between the wheel and the sun see Goodison, 126ff.
De Voragine’s Golden Legend, 336 notes that the wheel that is spun on John the
Baptist’s feast day symbolizes the sun’s cyclical decline. See Cooper, 156 for the
spiral’s symbolic significance as the sun’s increase and decrease.
20. Erwin Roos, ‚Das Rad als Folter und Hinrichtungswerkzeung in Altertum,‛
Opuscula Archaeologica, Proceedings from the Swedish Institute in Rome (Lund,
Sweden: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1952): 87-104.
21. Merback, 162. Wind, ‚’The Criminal-God’ and the ‘Crucifixion of Haman,’‛
243-248.
23. See Seznec, 14-16, 56, 164, 172, 221, 306 for the Etymologiae’s importance to the
humanist imagination.
197
25. I am grateful to Dr. Carolyn Corretti for giving me this bit of information.
26. Van Veen, Cosimo I and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, 109,
112.
27. Cox-Rearick, 135-137, 219-220, 265-266, 269, 286 discusses Cosimo’s courtly
personification as and with Justitia-Astraea. For further information on Justitia-
Astraea see Rousseau, 346-347 and Suzanne B. Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan:
Sculptors’ Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence (Florence, Italy: Olschki
Press, 1996): 93. Justitia-Astraea was the last deity to leave the earth at the end of
the Golden Age and the first to return to the earth to restore that glorious time.
28. Kantorowicz, 92-106, 127-143, 143, 147-148, 473 include treatment of the
personification of law and justice as a mother. The notion of the ruler’s two
bodies – an earthly one, and one with a divine right to rule – informs Cosimo’s
desire to be seen as a divinely assisted lawgiver. See Cox-Rearick, ‚Bronzino’s
Crossing of the Red Sea,‛ Art Bulletin 69:1 (1987): 47ff. The joint images of
Cosimo’s apotheosis and his earthly funeral respond to the preceding notion.
See Eve Borsook, ‚Art and Politics at the Medici Court I: the Funeral of Cosimo I
de’ Medici,‛ Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 12 (1965): 31-54.
29. Cosimo I considered the law as a maternal force even when he said that his
mother’s words were his ‚precept and law.‛ This quotation of Cosimo’s letter to
Maria Salviati of January 28, 1530 can be found in Cecily Booth’s Cosimo I, Duke of
Florence (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1921): 38.
30. In subsequent Orphic traditions Dike was a great goddess who shared Zeus’
throne. She appears on some third and fourth-century B.C. Italian vases with a
sword in her right hand, sitting among divine judges. The term ‚dike‛ as
employed in the Iliad and the Odyssey refers to customs that accord with human
laws, and it also means the order of the universe. Since Neith was the Mother
Goddess of war, her derivative, Athena, became a maternal goddess of justice.
Renaissance Tarot cards show Athena in this guise, indicating that the early
modern world was aware of the Mother Goddess’ ancient significance as an
embodiment of judicial power.
31. See Balas, The Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance Art, 9, 15 for the Metroon.
Balas’ discussion suggests that the Metroon was known in the Renaissance.
198
32. The scepter, a symbol of justice, is, not coincidentally, made of gold. On
Midas see Mark Henderson Munn, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny
of Asia: a Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006): 331ff.
34. Page 92 of Butters’ study indicates that Cosimo I and his iconographers
associated porphyry with justice.
35. For the Roman practice of swearing by the sun see Tim Parkin and Arthur
Pomeroy, Roman Social History: a Sourcebook (New York: Routledge Press, 2007):
9.
36. Philip R. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, England:
Clarendon Press, 1986).
41. Moshe Barasch, The Language of Art, Studies in Interpretation (New York
University Press, 1997): 289-294 also discusses elevation on a shield, including
the act’s cosmic, military, and political significance. Elevation on a shield was a
common symbolic image in the visual arts of the pre-modern Western world.
Book IV of Tacitus’ Histories contains the earliest literary reference to the act of
proclaiming a new ruler by elevating him on a shield.
199
42. L’Orange, 90.
43. Van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and
Culture, 33.
44. L’Orange, 148. Diverse poetic texts from the ancient Mediterranean, such as
those of Statius and Martial, praise the emperor’s right hand as the magna manus,
the ingens manus, and the divina manus. Numerous coins, medallions, statues and
triumphal arches depict emperors in the same way. For example, the Arch of
Constantine shows both the emperor and Sol with the gesture.
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Ch 7 Classical and Grotesque Polities
imaginations and therefore inspired reversals of the classical body politic, tamed
and sealed at the borders. Chapter 3 demonstrated how Machiavelli made more
of composite bodies than integral ones. His image of a headless, content body
politic shatters the humanist polity. The head separated from the body has the
capacity to wreck havoc in the state and to destroy life.1 The preceding image is
enemies of the Medici. Machiavelli’s statement also undermines the idea of the
holistic state by implying that the head may turn against itself, just as Cellini’s
penchant for violence turned against him. Indeed, this chapter will detail how
the Perseus and Medusa responds to and disrupts the humanist model of the state.
Najemy’s words:
body’s physical boundaries. Early modern individuals knew that the ‚mixed
body of humankind‛ must ‚face dangers from within and without, and it is
humoral body fed into this preoccupation. For instance, Ficino stated that the
statement indicates that the marriage of matter and form was especially unstable:
matter could fluctuate at any given time and thus take on a different form – an all
202
too frequent occurrence in an age beset by a multitude of diseases.
I must turn to Mikhail Bakhtin‘s image of the anti-classical body, that is,
the grotesque were ubiquitous in the mythology, art and folklore of the ancient
Mediterranean, but during the classical age the grotesque was relegated to
‚low,‛ that is, nonclassical forms, such as comic masks, symbols of fertility,
satyrs, satiric drama, Attic comedy, and the like. The grotesque was not,
name. One discovery helped to bring the grotesque into Renaissance conscious-
Roman Emperor Titus, which contained ornaments with fanciful plant, animal,
and human features. The decorations became known as grottesche (from the
this genre is actually a part of all lives, Bakhtin asserted, for the degradation of
the grotesque body, its act of coming down to earth in death, is the fate of all
people.8 The earth is, as shown, able to swallow the person and to give life
hags as epitomes of the grotesque.10 Their laughing faces evoke the culture of the
the flesh; but, more importantly for my purposes, the hags are similar to Mother
Earth. They are ‚pregnant death, a death that gives birth.‛ The hags comprise
static, never complete, and merging with different forms. It is even marked by
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doubling. Furthermore, the grotesque body is transgressive. It exceeds its own
limits. Representations of the grotesque body stress those parts that are open to
the world and that emit substances into it: the phallus, the womb, the eyes, the
mouth, etc; as well as other parts that protrude: the breasts, the tongue, and the
like.12 As such, the grotesque body is the personification of the lower strata of
state. The former comprises an ‚opaque surface‛ that acquires ‚essential mean-
ing as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies
and with the world.‛13 Bakhtin noted that although one may characterize the
and paradoxically they were not fixed, but were diacritical, each body formed by
The grotesque and classical paradigms come into play in Cellini’s Perseus
and Medusa. The bronze Gorgon is a grotesque image par excellence, as her
severed head and body merge death and life and cast blood into the world. Like
Bakhtin’s grotesque body, Cellini’s Medusa emphasizes parts that are disclosed:
the breasts, which flare outward, her eyes, the open-mouthed serpents, the
205
severed neck and head, and the open mouth --- all suggest transgression.
Bakhtin’s claim that the carnivalesque hags of Kerch embody a death that gives
birth echoes the Gorgon’s ability to generate life after her decapitation. Her
power of generation, along with the Gorgon’s open form are vital to one’s
challenge of controlling and doing away with evil in the state.15 The figure of
Medusa, like the early modern state, is open to invasion and capable of
retaliating, even against those who were not enemies of the Medici.
Cellini’s Gorgon evinces a highly unstable pose in the twists and turns of
the legs and arms. One struggles a bit, even at different angles, to follow just
how her limbs are arranged in relation to each other. Medusa’s body is a
clumped mass that is opened up by spatial confusion and contortion. She thus
imagined reactions to the Gorgon’s visage are similar to the terror, shock, and
anxiety one may feel while confronting the grotesque. In Medusan fashion, the
grotesque in their own right, for they multiply to excess and imply the
emergence of substance (milk) into the world. The breasts also merge with the
206
garlands of fruit gracing the pedestal.
was in the Renaissance, and of the holistic absolutist state, but the upraised
Perseus’ left arm and sword break away in transgressive fashion from a closed
silhouette.17 The monstrous face on the hero’s helmet and the statue’s beastly
aspects likewise deviate from the classical ideal to which the hero’s perfect
proportions otherwise adhere.18 In other words, parts of the bronze that mark
Cellini’s hero as a classical male ‚merge‛ with their antitheses. Recall that the
classical and the grotesque body canons developed by retracing the other’s
boundaries. The orifice of Perseus’ phallus is exposed to the viewer and is able
to emit substance into the world. The phallus is truant and protean, much as the
snakes on Medusa’s head are. Note that Perseus’ penis is caught between the
open forms of the Gorgon’s neck and head, to which it is also akin. Like the
grotesque body, the Perseus mingles old (the visage at the back of the bronze
helmet) and young – thus decay and life -- and is marked by doubling (the Janus
face at the helmet’s rear and Perseus’ physical similarity to Medusa). I propose
that the Perseus’ deviation from the classical ideal stands for the destructive traits
of Cellini’s hero, of the statue’s artist and patron, and for political, social, and
207
criminal fissures within Duke Cosimo I’s state. Machiavelli’s refracted, hetero-
geneous body politic has a certain reflection in Cellini’s sculpture, which gives
are similar to the bronze Medusa in appearance. They remind one that Capricorn
is similar to the typically grotesque satyr, whose grimaces are Medusan in their
own right. The fact that the torches belonging to the grotesque heads merge with
the Capricorns’ horns indicates that these beings have a moral affinity with one
another. Both the Capricorns and the grotesque heads find moral echoes in the
grotesque animal forms on Perseus’ equipment and in the elderly visage at the
of the Greek hero’s implication in power of the Gorgon -- the Earth Mother,
notions of female sexuality. The latter, which, early moderners must have
known, comprise Gorgonian traits, may have informed the role of Cellini’s
208
Scholz’s terms, ‚the grotesque style < envisaged in images of protruding or
women’s bodies; that is, the humoral, open body ‚gradually emerged as the
blood and hair exemplify just how noxious women were supposed to be.
Renaissance culture borrowed the idea from Aristotle that hair forms when sooty
vapors (waste products) which are exhaled through the body’s pores come into
the air. Since female constitutions were, to the Renaissance mind, cold and
moist, women’s bodies were believed to have an excess of secretions, and what
their bodies did not use to make hair they expended as menstrual blood.21
suggesting that woman’s serpentine nature derived from her interior. When a
result of age, elderly women are too cold to synthesize and to emit their harmful
fluids, which in the young accrue into deadly poisons. The unexpelled residues
collect within the skull and, after having contracted near the brain, permeate
through the scalp as snakes.22 It is interesting that dung’s role in the generation
of snakes recalls that of dung as fertilizer for the grotesque body. There is also a
209
snake-headed women as hags.
trees, to make dogs rabid, to rust metal and to blacken bronze. The gaze of a
menstruating woman was also toxic: her polluted blood would corrupt the air of
those near her. A menstruating woman could also dull a mirror or stain it with
her glance. Even in a solidified state, as marble, or bronze, for instance, female
blood, like Medusa’s, harbored the potential for destruction and decay.23
Such theories betray a personal insecurity that results in fear of the female
body and serve to deny potency by labeling female physiology deviant. They
suggest that woman’s evil nature is deliberate and yet also beyond her control,
for she is a fiendish, beastly figure whose interior and exterior are constantly
woman’s evil influence, whether unleashed or contained within her, escapes the
control of others. No matter how carefully locked up she is, this grotesque
creature will always transgress and escape. She is, like the uterus itself, the
‚gaping mouth, the open window, the body that exceeds its own limits and
negates all those boundaries without which property could not be constituted.‛24
Woman is, then, a suitable metaphor for and even the cause of disorder
210
(Discordia). I propose that Cellini’s Medusa is an exhibition of such transgressive
Renaissance texts, such as Alberti’s Della Famiglia, stipulate that women must
remain enclosed within the home. Here, the transgressive parts of the grotesque
body become a threat to the patriarchal status quo. That is why her mouth must
remain closed much of the time, unmarried women must be virginal and the
married ‚chaste.‛25
The Renaissance ideal of keeping women enclosed within the home was
similar to the metaphorical image of the hortus conclusus. The secured garden
was usually a symbol of female virginity and, as suggested earlier, of the Virgin
Mary, which underscores the fact that the closed body meant something different
for men and women. Stallybrass has termed the ideal ‚Woman‛ of early modern
the perfect emblem of the state’s integrity.27 A pertinent model was Sandro
Botticelli’s Primavera (c. 1482), which hung in Cosimo I’s villa at Castello as a
legacy of the duke’s forebears (fig. 58). Critics have identified the heavily clad
woman bearing a basket of flowers as the spring goddess Flora, whose name
plays on Florence, the city she personifies.28 Botticelli’s landscape, which may
211
have suggested the hortus conclusus due to its partial enclosure, would also have
stood for the Florentine state, for the petals strewn on the ground refer to the
contemporary myth that the city of Florence was born on a bed of flowers.
Medusa. Although the latter bears the mark of male domination, Cellini’s
long lived image testified to her undeniable potency. The preceding is a point to
212
Notes
2. Najemy, 260.
3. -----, 259.
4. -----, 248.
5. Ficino, Three Books on Life, eds. and trans. Carol Kaske and John Clark (New
York: MRTS, 1989): 75.
6. See Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky
(Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1968): 30-31.
7. -----, 32.
8. -----, 19-21, on Vasari see Bakhtin, 33. Vasari described the grotesque
throughout his monumental Le Vite di piu Eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, e Scultori
Italiani (1550).
9. Since Cellini worked at Francis I’s Fontainebleau for several years (the late
1530s and early 1540s) he would have been familiar with the literary culture of
the French court.
14. See Stallybrass, ‚Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,‛ in Rewriting the
Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds.
213
Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Illinois:
University of Chicago Press, 1986): 123-144. Bakhtin, 30.
15. One of Medusa’s evil effects was the generation of the monster Chrysoar.
16. For the grotesque’s generic nature in the arts, including its ability to stun see
Michael Steig, ‚Defining the Grotesque: an Attempt at Synthesis,‛ Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39/40 (1970): 252-260.
18. Androgynes are not classical because they are not individualistic.
19. The bodies making up the Perseus liberating Andromeda and the bronze
statuette of Hermes represent a third canon --- the high Mannerist. Their svelte,
curving forms embody a mixture of masculine and feminine, just as the Perseus
and Medusa do. Note that Andromeda’s body is rather muscular.
20. Quotation of Susanne Scholz, Body Narratives, Writing the Nation and
Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2000): 67-68. See also Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature
and the Unmarried Queen (New York: Routledge Press, 1989). Susan Koslow,
‚’How Looked the Gorgon then<’: the Science and Poetics of The Head of Medusa
by Rubens and Snyders,‛ in Shop Talk, Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995): 147-149, 349-350. See Ian
214
MacLean’s The Renaissance Notion of Woman: a Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism
and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1980) and Mary Russ’ ‚Female Grotesques: Carnival and
Theory,‛ in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Indiana
University Press, 1986): 215-230. The Renaissance artist Cennino Cennini wrote
in his Il Libro dell’arte that there is no need for the artist to study the anatomy of
woman because the female has no fixed proportions. See Cennini’s The
Craftsman’s Handbook: ‚Il Libro dell’Arte,‛ trans. Daniel V. Thompson (New York:
Dover Publications, 1960): 48.
25. See Kisler, 61: ‚The house was the mechanism by which women’s fluid
sexuality, more dangerous when mobile, might be controlled.‛ A story known in
the Renaissance, that of Pandora, epitomizes contemporary notions of women.
Diverse versions of the tale exist, but its crux maintains that Pandora was the
first female, who opened a forbidden box, thereby unleashing all the evils known
to the world. Pandora is a type for Eve and also a Medusan character, since the
box (sometimes a vase), which symbolizes her person, imparts evil effects.
Pandora might have originated from an earth goddess. For a detailed discussion
of the preceding see Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box, the Changing
Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962).
28. On Botticelli’s Flora see Randolph, 220; Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of
Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the
Magnificent (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992): 9, 13, 30-33, 37ff, 41,
215
44, 49, 54, 60-62, 65, 67, 70ff, 76, 118, 120, 123, 130ff, 135ff, 145, 159, 163ff.; Lilian
Zirpolo, ‚Botticelli’s Primavera, a Lesson for the Bride,‛ in The Expanding
Discourse, Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard
(New York: Harper Collins Press, 1992): 101-109.
29. For the myth that Florence was born on a bed of flowers see Randolph, 220.
Another interesting exemplification of the ideal woman, albeit one that may not
have been known in Renaissance Italy, is the Ditchley portrait of Queen Elizabeth
I of England by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. The picture shows the queen
standing upon a map of England as an imperial virgin who symbolizes and is
symbolized by the hortus conclusus of the state (fig. 59). Her white gown, the
color of purity, with its many roses, symbols of the Virgin Mary, epitomizes
Elizabeth’s virginity and thus the state’s integrity.
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Chapter 8 Eleonora di Toledo and the Image of the Mother Goddess
Earth Mother Goddess and an embodiment of the Tuscan state and its power.
The pages that follow will examine her role as a ‚divine‛ and earthly Mother
who had the ability to handle stately affairs on her own and to act as intercessor
Pierfrancesco, ‚I feel like a Pope.‛1 However, even when the duke resided in
Florence, there was, in Konrad Eisenbichler’s words, ‚little in town that did not,
somehow, feel the power of‛ Eleonora di Toledo ‚and the effect of her insist-
ence.‛2 Despite the paucity of information about precisely how the duchess
exerted her power and influence, it is known that she owned much land in
Tuscany and even made sure that a portion of Florence’s agricultural output
reached Spain and other foreign markets. When her husband was away military
Christian piety and devotion, was even responsible for introducing the Jesuits
into Florence.
217
Time and again artists depicted Eleonora as a divine matriarch, and they
did so through pagan allegory and Christian figuration. She was, in the words of
Anton Francesco Cirni Corso, ‚a more than earthly queen‛ having a ‚super-
human majesty.‛3 However, despite the high praise Eleonora received, she was
also the object of disdain. At the beginning of her life Eleonora’s foreignness
enhanced her image as a divinity. But with time her character alienated many of
her subjects, for she was imperious, haughty, mysterious, and she never smiled
to subjects who were not Spanish. Florentines were also fearful that Eleonora
would enable Charles V to wield perpetual authority over their state; hence they
were unable to accept Cosimo’s statement that Tuscany was independent from
the Spanish emperor.4 As Pamela J. Benson has observed, the preceding seems to
have incited many Florentines to see the duchess as ‚an enemy and to have
among those still devoted to the republic.‛5 Benson has also pointed out that the
that ‚the Florentine Republicans hated Cosimo’s wife‛ throughout the 1540s and
1550s. She was, in Marucelli’s words, ‚a proud woman and an absolute enemy
of the Florentines.‛6 During the 1540s and 1550s republicans believed that the
duchess had a negative effect on Cosimo I’s policies and feared that she would
218
come to control all of Tuscany on her own. One must consider Cellini’s adverse
The preceding suggests that because the duchess’ influence was great
her gender made the duchess the target of republican antipathy. Perhaps such
disdain would have led Cellini and his viewers to perceive mixed reactions to
divine Mother.
part, from her great fertility. Niccolo Tribolo’s large Fecundità for Eleonora’s
nuptial entrata into Florence seems to have been a prognostication for the eleven
births the duchess would give during the time she was married to Cosimo I.
Officials placed the statue, which embodied hopes that Eleonora would
perpetuate the Medici dynasty, at the city’s entrance. Here, Fecundità resided
alongside three other statues – those of Security; Eternity, around whose neck
hung the Moon and Sun; and the old man Time. Security held the sprouting
219
branch proved that the ability to procreate was closely related to political power.
Once again, redemption tied into the topos of generation. The Sun and Moon as
deities that looked over the Medici corresponded to the duke’s and duchess’
status as ‚divine‛ rulers with cosmic powers. Interestingly, artists linked the
just as Cellini described a nexus of cosmic power in the form of his Perseus and
the wedding festivities to proclaim Eleonora the mother of the Tuscan state, an
Cybele which referred to the duchess as the Earth Mother. Cybele’s headpiece
was the turreted crown she wore in antiquity. Its shapes mimicked civic
buildings and, compositely, an entire city (here, Florence). Cybele stood for the
Medici court. In fact, Cybele held her attribute of Abundance – the fruit-bearing
branch, which, like her being, epitomized Eleonora’s contribution to the city’s
and the Medici estates’ agricultural production and, therefore, wealth.8 The
220
Cybele also represented the duchess’ fertility, to which the earth’s riches
homage to the duchess’ pregnancy with her second son, Eleonora was ‚another
spouting Gaia.‛9
Shortly after Eleonora joined the Medici family, artists began decorations
for the Palazzo Vecchio’s living quarters and chapel. Here, the themes of fertility
marriage, and the queen of divinities whose head housed a genius that was also
Vasari said that since Juno was the wife of Jupiter (Cosimo’s surrogate), the two
the intellectual nexus between Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa and suggests that
the Medici court was aware of the significance of mente, outlined above, to
Cellini’s statue. It is telling, then, that Juno’s peahen, a symbol of divine wisdom,
wealth, with Eleonora informed the decision to place Ammanati’s statue directly
across from Cosimo’s throne in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo Vecchio. The
221
partnership. However, the plan to pair statue and throne was never realized.
accompany the Sala Grande’s Juno.12 The Ceres’ intended installation in the Sala
Grande would have made it a match for Bandinelli’s Ceres in the Boboli Gardens.
Palazzo Vecchio and the Pitti estate. In the preceding context water became an
emblem of the earth’s fertility and of the state’s wealth. Thus, the sculpture
Elementi also includes Juno, Ceres and Ops as references to Eleonora. His First
Fruits of the Earth offered to Saturn features the figure whom Vasari called Mother
Earth.13 Edelstein has stressed that the woman stands for Eleonora, the consort of
Saturn (Cosimo I).14 Here, the Earth Mother is responsible for Saturn’s riches, a
state portrait of Eleonora di Toledo (1545, fig. 61), the pendant to Bronzino’s
Cosimo I in Armor. The pictures each have a dark background and luminosity.
222
Emblems of fertility, the laurel branch behind Cosimo and his codpiece (perhaps
Earth Mother. In addition, throughout the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire the
fruit was valued as a symbol of unity, that is, its seeds stood for subjects united
under one ruler. Langdon has observed that the pomegranate’s place on the
Eleonora to the Medici and also the imperial crown’s ultimate control of the
Tuscan state.16 Therefore, the portrait of the duchess, the daughter of Emperor
Langdon has noted that the duchess recalls the iconic depiction of the
Throne of Wisdom, the Sedes sapientiae.17 I propose that, in addition, the Earth
Mother’s role as the throne responsible for kingly power comes into play in
Bronzino’s state portrait of Eleonora. Little Giovanni has neared his mother’s
lap, a move that may symbolize his future role as Bishop of Pisa and cardinal.
The mother-and-son format reminds one of pictures of Mary and the Christ
223
Child and therefore complements the other portrayals of the duchess as divine
and even brings Eleonora close to the Medici women who identified with the
Blessed Virgin.
a divinity. Behind the duchess is a landscape with a river beneath a night sky.
The heavens appear in regal ultramarine, which lightens around her head,
forming a type of nimbus, or halo, but from the front both sitters are evenly and
has observed that in Bronzino’s portrait the nimbus of moonlight behind her
head represents this Spanish ideology, which also corresponds to the ray of light
that hits the water and landscape in back.18 This light in turn ‚mirrors‛ the sky.
I propose that the conventional trope of the Virgin Mary as a spotless mirror
of the beloved, chaste consort, regent of Cosimo’s earthly dominions, the ideal,
‚reflected‛ in a ‚mirror.‛
The mirror’s solar and lunar significance comes into play in Eleonora’s
224
portrait as a match to the mirror metaphor in the story of Perseus and in
Bronzino’s Cosimo I in Armor. One may construe the light around Eleonora’s
head as a reminder of Mary’s attributes – the sun and moon. The duchess’ state
portrait quotes the image of the Virgin Mary of the Apocalypse clothed with the
sun and moon, for Eleonora is ambiguously illuminated: frontally lit by daylight,
solar and lunar light. The preceding concetto is also found in Petrarch’s poetry.22
For instance, ‚Vergine bella‛ evokes night even as it speaks of the sun:
return from night: ‚Alla dolce ombra dell’amata pianta <Membrando il Sol<
The fertile landscape and river behind her present the duchess as a type
for the Earth Mother and a counterpart to Cellini’s Medusa.25 As noted, water
has been an emblem of woman, of which Eleonora is the ideal paradigm. Water
is also an attribute of the Virgin Mary, and so its presence in Bronzino’s painting
amidst a cosmos that is unified around and through her person; that is, the
225
duchess embodies and controls the natural cosmos.
Here, the body is not the equivalent of the spiritualized Earth of Bronzino’s
portrait, but is a composite of humanity. The notion of the Tuscan state as the
progeny of Eleonora probably would have come into play in this frame of vision.
The Medici and probably Cellini were exposed to Cattani’s writing through
Varchi. Cellini also may have known that Bartolomeo Goggio dedicated his De
laudibus mulierium, which maintains that women are superior to men, to Eleonora
‚fitting to accept, and to bear‛ by the Medici court. Just as Duke Cosimo I
realized the need to counter rumors about being overly dependent on his
mother, he might have felt a need to compete with his wife as a result of written
226
statements about women’s/Eleonora’s ‚supremacy.‛ Indeed, Cosimo I had good
reason to feel this way, given that Eleonora was superior in rank to him, enjoyed
financial independence and Charles V’s confidence, and had power and
influence of her own. In this context it is worth stressing that the duke did not
for the duke was aware of the contemporary need to rise above that power.
be the estuary around Pisa, which the duchess governed in Cosimo’s absence.29
Bronzino’s painting thus compares to Cosimo and Eleonora with Maps, which
shows the couple perusing greater Pisa and its water supply (1546, fig. 62).
During Eleonora’s time as Regent of State she bought much marshland and had
the time the double portrait was created Cosimo and Eleonora were joint owners
of the merchant navy, whose base lay in Pisa.30 One must consider Bronzino’s
state portrait of Eleonora and the Erlanger painting as part of a greater effort to
employ nature as an expression of Medici power. The same effort fed into
227
The Pitti Estate
the Palazzo Pitti, located on the south side of the Arno River, near the Oltrarno
district (fig. 63). In 1569, when Cosimo became duke, it served as the ducal
couple’s primary dwelling outside of the urban space of Florence. After the
purchase Vasari stepped in and more than doubled the palace’s size. He also
built what is now known as the Vasari Corridor, a walkway that runs from the
Palazzo Vecchio through the Uffizi, above the Ponte Vecchio and to the Pitti. The
Corridorio was, as Franco Cesati has noted, one of the many signs of the
towers and churches, thus symbolizing the duke’s power over his subjects.31
Because of the corridor Cosimo and Eleonora could now cross the Arno and part
brilliance include the Boboli Gardens, which are located behind the palace’s corps
de logis. Ammanati later created a large courtyard behind the principle façade.
This would link the Pitti to its new gardens. Between the years 1558 and 1570
Ammanati extended the wings on the garden front that embraced a courtyard
excavated into a hillside at the same level as the piazza’s façade. The palace’s
228
two ‚arms,‛ whose open ‚gesture‛ embrace the natural world of the Boboli
Gardens on the distant hill, might have stood for Eleonora’s influence, which
the Earth Mother Ops at the top of a basin epitomizes, I propose, Eleonora’s role
as Mother, for the grotto is an emblem of the womb. The basin, which would
have contained water, corresponds to the body of woman (fig. 65). One enters
and exits the grotto as if into and out of the womb of Mother Earth. The grotto
serves as a place of initiations, while water, as life and a feminine motif, adds to
the grotto’s symbolic significance. Nearby, an oval room, whose egg shape
The Labyrinth at the right and left of the Pitti’s Viottolone is, likewise, an
emblem of birth, rebirth, and the womb. Ancient representations of the spiral, or
the labyrinth on the Mother Goddess’ womb must have been known throughout
the early modern age, for a spiralesque ornament is found on the lower abdomen
of Issi, the ancient Egyptian goddess of motherhood and fertility, as she appears
prove that the labyrinth is the earth’s womb from which the hero who has
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traveled its path emerges, as if reborn. The hero’s entrance into its center could
signify his regression from the active life on earth into the womb.32
Thus, the garden complex of the Palazzo Pitti essentializes the symbolic
association between the Earth Mother’s riches and Eleonora’s wealth and power.
and Antaeus Fountain (fig. 67). The statue’s subject also appears on the reverse of
one of Cosimo I’s coins, which indicates that the fountain was personally
meaningful to the Medici ruler. Tribolo’s work celebrated the duke as the solar
Hercules embodied, and water spouted from decorative goat heads on the
fountain. In addition, Hercules was the mythical founder of Florence. The statue
may have touted Cosimo’s victory over enemies (personified by Antaeus), but
monster Antaeus.
them, for Antaeus’ strength would always be superior to his victims as long as he
stayed in contact with his mother Gaia. Earth renewed her son’s strength each
time Hercules threw the Libyan monster to the ground. However, Hercules
triumphed when he finally realized what Earth was up to and, raising Antaeus
Imagines (third century). The text relates that Gaia helps her son counteract
downward thrust against the head of Hercules. Tribolo depicted the solar hero’s
back and right leg slightly bent in reference to Gaia’s intensification of the
compression of Antaeus’ body onto his foe and thus the interrelatedness of all
three antagonists. Edward J. Olszewski has discerned that ‚bend the knee‛ was
an Homeric topos for resting, which the Imagines says Hercules did not do after
taking the apples of the Hesperides. The hero’s bent knee denotes his uneasy
that Hercules’ physical position is thus a metonym for his weakness or instability
as a man. The struggle that Tribolo portrayed acknowledges that same weakness
231
mouth comes from the earth. Just as Hercules squeezes water out of Antaeus’
mouth, so Duke Cosimo I was able to bring water out of the earth through
ingenious means --- his aqueduct system. But even though Hercules robs
water/strength from Antaeus, Cosimo’s fountain still depends on Earth for its
Had Ammanati completed his Ceres, his statue would have matched
for the Pitti, lies beneath Castello’s Hercules and Antaeus. Taken together, the two
fountains would have reinforced the political ties between Cosimo I and Maria
of Machiavelli’s Discorsi. Here, Brutus, the father of Roman liberty, dons traits
that remind one of Duke Cosimo I. The oracle of Apollo as Livy recorded it
relates that the first among a group of young men to kiss his mother would rise
to the highest office in Rome. The clever Brutus, one among the group, states
that his mother is the earth, then pretends to fall so that he can kiss her. Brutus’
behavior in this passage recalls Antaeus’ attachment to Gaia as well as the role of
232
power. Clearly, the preceding story and Brutus’ worthiness in Machiavelli’s eyes
prove that the ancient idea of the Earth Mother’s ability to breed power was
As shown, the estates of Eleonora di Toledo and Cosimo I de’ Medici, like
the Loggia dei Lanzi and the Palazzo Vecchio, were spaces where matters of
female empowerment. As those within and from without the Medici court
moved within and among these spaces they must have realized that within the
Medici state versions of the Earth Mother Goddess, such as Cellini’s Medusa,
Goddess within Florence rivaled Duke Cosimo’s image as ruler, even while some
233
Notes
2. Eisenbichler, ed., The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and
Siena (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2004): 1.
3. Anton Francesco Cirni Corso, La reale Entrata dell’Ecc.mo Signor Duca e Duchessa
di Firenze in Siena con la Significazione delle Latine Inscrittioni, e con alcuni Sonetti
(Rome, Italy: Antonio Blado, 1560): 4.
5. -----, 153.
6. -----, 153. Marucelli, Cronaca fiorentina: 1537-1555, ed. Enrico Coppi (Florence,
Italy: Olschki Press, 2000): 25, 128.
7. For Eleonora’s image as mother of the Tuscan state see, for instance, Bruce
Edelstein, ‚La fecundissima Signora Duchessa: the Courtly Persona of Eleonora
di Toledo and the Iconography of Abundance,‛ in The Cultural World of Eleonora
di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, 71-97. Cox-Rearick, ‚La Ill.ma Sig.ra
Duchessa felice memoria: the Posthumous Eleonora di Toledo,‛ in The Cultural
World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, 259. The Medici family
234
were dwindling in numbers before Eleonora produced heirs and daughters who
strengthened the family through marriage with other elite families.
8. Edelstein, 72.
9. Paolo Giovio, Lettere, in Opere, vol. 1, ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Rome, Italy:
Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1956-1958): 306-307 (March 10, 1543).
12. On the Juno and Ceres for Eleonora di Toledo and their significance as Earth
Mothers see Lazzaro’s ‚The Visual Language of Gender in Sixteenth-Century
Garden Sculpture,‛ in Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian
Renaissance, eds. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1991): 71-113. M. Campbell’s ‚Observations on the Salone dei
Cinquecento in the Time of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, 1540-1571,‛ in Firenze e la
Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ‘500 1 (1983): 819-830 also associates the fountain
statues with Eleonora di Toledo.
13. Vasari, Le Vite di piu Eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, e Scultori Italiani, vol. 8, ed.
Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, Italy: Sansoni, 1878-1885): 31.
15. Cosimo’s friend Paolo Giovio indicated that the Medici ruler employed the
laurel branch at the start of his rule, that is, when Cosimo was most in need of
showcasing his power and ability to perpetuate the Medici name. See Giovio,
Dialogo dell’Imprese Militari e Amorose, ed. M. L. Doglio (Rome, Italy: Bulzoni,
1978): 72ff.
16. For the pomegranate’s attribution and symbolism see Balas, The Mother
Goddess in Italian Renaissance Art, 59-61, 97, 101. The pomegranate’s symbolic
significance is also discussed in Langdon, 69, 70.
17. -----, 74. Langdon, 73 notes that G. Domenico Fiesole’s altarpiece of 1425
would have furnished a precedent for Bronzino’s state portrait of Eleonora, as it
235
shows the Virgin Mary before a lapis cloth of honor.
18. -----, 82. Benson, 136 quotes a letter from Eleonora’s mother, found in the
Archivio di Stato, Florence, Mediceo del Principato, 487, f. 514r, that says the
duchess will be a mirror and light for all women. Andrea M. Gáldy, ‚Tuscan
Concerns and Spanish Heritage in the Decoration of Duchess Eleonora’s
Apartment in the Palazzo Vecchio,‛ Renaissance Studies 20:3 (2006): 293-319
discusses the influence of treatises on female education and devotion on
Eleonora. Here, one reads that famous women from the Bible, classical antiquity
and contemporary legends served as models of virtuous behavior and strength
of character for women of the Spanish Renaissance court. The previous practice
was also popular in early modern Florence, as shown. See Gáldy, 304. Robert W.
Gaston, ‚Eleonora di Toledo’s Chapel: Lineage, Salvation and the War against
the Turks, in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena,
157-180 believes that Spanish devotional treatises inspired the decoration of
Eleonora’s chapel.
19. The Hebrew Bible describes Wisdom as an unspotted mirror of God (Wisdom
of Solomon, 7:26), which seems to explain why Mary sometimes appears in art
looking at herself in a mirror. The preceding trope signifies the fact that Jesus
was immaculately (spotlessly) conceived within Mary, who mirrored Him
through her person.
21. Eleonora’s horoscope also included a joining of the sun and moon, as Cox-
Rearick has noted. See Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X and the
two Cosimos, 290.
23. Petrarch, canzone 366, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert Durling
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976): 574-575.
25. Langdon (77) believes that in her state portrait Eleonora represents Earthly
Venus.
236
26. Langdon, 83.
28. For Goggio’s text see Tinagli, ‚Eleonora and her ‘Famous Sisters.’ The
Tradition of ‘Illustrious Women’ in Paintings for the Domestic Interior,‛ in The
Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, 126. Langdon,
82 mentions Varchi’s interest in Diacceto’s work.
31. Franco Cesati, The Medici, Story of a European Dynasty (Florence, Italy:
Mandragora, 1999): 77-78.
32. For information on the spiral’s association with the Mother Goddess see Anne
Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (New
York: Penguin Press, 1993): 40, 50-51, 57, 108, 135-137, 620. Although
Renaissance Florence would not have known the following, it is interesting to
note that in the Upper Paleolithic parts of Old Europe images of a Medusa figure
appeared on labyrinth designs, suggesting that she emerged as a version of the
Mother Goddess even before her persona developed a few thousand years later
in Greece. It is no coincidence that women usually preside over labyrinths in art
and in literature, such as the tale of Minos. The story of Theseus, who killed the
Minotaur at the labyrinth’s center, is an allegory of rebirth. For a similar
interpretation of Theseus’ legend see Baring, 137-144. On the labyrinth’s
symbolism see Neumann, The Great Mother, an Analysis of the Archetype, 175, 177;
Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior (Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 2001), Helmut Jaskolski, The Labyrinth: Symbol of Fear, Rebirth, and Liberation
(Massachusetts: Shambhala Press, 1997): 53-66. In the medieval imagination the
labyrinth’s entrance signified rebirth. According to Christian belief, the labyrinth
stood for spiritual rebirths; hence labyrinthine octagons in Christian churches
epitomize resurrection and rebirth through baptism. See Jaskolski, 65. The
Christianization of the labyrinth came into being in early Christian times and
survived into the Renaissance, but during the early modern age it was not as
237
popular as secular treatments of the motif.
33. After the Battle of Montemurlo, as if in homage to Maria Salviati’s role in his
success, Cosimo ordered Jacopo Pontormo to paint Villa Castello and a few
portraits of himself and his mother.
34. Vasari stated that the neatly landscaped estate of Castello represented the
order that Cosimo I imposed on Florence after Montemurlo. See Lazzaro, The
Italian Renaissance Garden: from the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to
the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy, 167 for pertinent references to
Vasari.
36. Olszewski, ‚Framing the Moral Lesson in Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus,‛
in Wege zum Mythos, ed. Luba Freedman (Berlin, Germany: Verlag, 2001): 77-78
discusses the bent backs of Antonio Pollaiuolo’s bronze and painted portrayals of
Hercules as well as the Homeric topos in relation to this anatomical detail.
Philostratus, Book II of Imagines relates the story of Hercules and Antaeus.
37. In light of Castello one must recall a lesson of King Midas’ legend (Ovid,
Metamorphoses, Book XI; Herodotus, Histories, Book VIII) which becomes
paradoxical at Castello: water and birth from the earth sanctify rulership. Midas’
legendary power stemmed from his mother, the Earth Goddess, and ultimately
because of her he personified ideal kingship. His legend holds that his mother
was in the process of carrying water when he became king. Similarly, Jupiter’s
riches, like Midas’, included gold, a product of the earth. Jupiter’s ties to Gaia
suggest that the earth sanctified his rule. Clearly, Cosimo I would have known
as much, since Jupiter was one of his personal emblems.
238
Conclusion
This study has shown that Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa for Cosimo I de’
Medici pits virtù against the Gorgon, an embodiment of female power. The
sculpture’s androgyny proclaims, however, that the Greek hero, a surrogate for
Cosimo I de’ Medici, derives power from Medusa, whom Cellini conceptualized
as a version of the Mother Goddess. I have shown that the Medici duke’s
Cosimo I. The preceding examples support my argument that the bronze Perseus
depends on the power of a Mother figure. In turn, Cellini’s statue reminds one of
the fact that Cosimo I rose to power through the aid of two powerful women ---
his mother Maria Salviati and his wife Duchess Eleonora di Toledo.
tale of Perseus and Medusa in relation to Cellini’s statue. I also have examined
The Greek hero, a sun figure, matches the cosmic strength of his Gorgon. The
which is a symbol of political power. I have argued that in the preceding respect
the head of Cellini’s Perseus symbolizes the enduring caput mysticum of the state,
239
which Cosimo I himself embodied. Thus, the Greek hero rivals the fertile power
of Medusa’s head.
Medusa as epitomizes not only their shared power, but also Machiavelli’s tenets
that virtù must assimilate itself to its adversary in order to triumph. The male
depends on the female and must become like her in order to flourish.
aware of the relevance of Machiavelli’s tenets to his own political career. Thus,
The fifth chapter supports my premise that Medusa’s role as the Mother
Goddess was a threat to male power. Cellini fashioned his Gorgon as sexually
symbolic and thus demonstrated that Medusa’s significance as womb and the
vagina dentata informs her frightful aspect. The Perseus and Medusa’s sexual
I have shown that Cellini’s role as a figure hunted by legal authority led
240
the sculptor to identify with his Gorgon, for the bronze Perseus is also a surrogate
for Cellini himself. Cellini’s experience with his illustrious Medici patron stifled
the sculptor and in paradoxical manner proved that if he were to lose his patron
then Cellini would lose his freedom as an artist. Thus, the Perseus and Medusa is
virtùous man, such as Cellini considered himself to be, may turn against himself.
Perseus’ androgynous nature once again comes into play as a reminder of the
Medici state’s flaws. In this context it is telling that the Greek hero deviates from
the canon of the classical body, with which the absolutist state was
commensurate.
A foil for Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa was, then, the image of Duchess
ments and to her capacity to propagate the Medici dynasty through childbearing.
241
Gaia’s implied presence at Castello suggests that the Earth Mother was
also important for the political image of Cosimo I’s mother. The presence of the
Labyrinth at Castello reinforces the maternal theme at the heart of Antaeus’ tale,
I would like to stress that the denigrated and dignified image of Cellini’s
and threatening. Cellini’s Gorgon is, as the sculptor and his contemporaries,
including Cosimo I, may have realized, a foil for all benign representations of the
Earth Mother Goddess and a type for the latter. Medusa’s significance as such
Santa Maria dei Fossi. Taken together, the two faces of female power – benign and
separatism.
242
Illustrations
Fig. 1 Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus and Medusa, 1545-1555, Loggia dei Lanzi,
Florence, Italy.
243
Fig. 2 Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, c. 1446-1460s, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence,
Italy.
244
Fig. 3 Hercules killing an Amazon, red figure vase.
245
Fig. 4 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.
246
Fig. 5 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.
247
Fig. 6 Detail of Cellini’s Medusa.
248
Fig. 7 Cellini, Danae and baby Perseus from the Perseus and Medusa’s pedestal.
249
Fig. 8 Cellini, pedestal niche of the Perseus and Medusa featuring Jupiter.
250
Fig. 9 Cellini, pedestal niche of the Perseus and Medusa featuring Athena.
251
Fig. 10 Cellini, Mercury from the Perseus and Medusa’s pedestal.
252
Fig. 11 Cellini, Saltcellar, 1543, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.
253
Fig. 12 Cellini, Perseus liberating Andromeda from the Perseus and Medusa’s
pedestal.
254
Fig. 13 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus.
255
Fig. 14 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.
256
Fig. 15 Follower of Leonardo da Vinci, Milanese school, Head of John the Baptist,
1511, National Gallery of Art, London, England.
257
Fig. 16 Andrea Solario, Head of John the Baptist, 1507, Louvre Museum, Paris,
France.
258
Fig. 17 Cellini, Cosimo I, 1545, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.
259
Fig. 18 Tazza Farnese, interior, second century B.C., National Archaeological
Museum, Naples, Italy.
260
Fig. 19 Tazza Farnese, exterior.
261
Fig. 20 Raphael, The Sistine Madonna, 1513-1514, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie,
Dresden, Germany.
262
Fig. 21 Ouroboros, device for Lorenzo de’ Medici.
263
Fig. 22 Giorgio Vasari, The First Fruits of the Earth offered to Saturn, 1555-1557,
Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.
264
Fig. 23 Prudentia, Florence Cathedral, Italy.
265
Fig. 24 Giambologna, Rape of the Sabine, c. 1574-1580, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence,
Italy.
266
Fig. 25 Cellini, King Francis I on Horseback, medal, reverse, 1537, British Museum,
London, England.
267
Fig. 26 Michelangelo, Night, tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, San Lorenzo, Florence,
Italy.
268
Fig. 27 Denarius of Septimius Severus, reverse, 193-211, British Museum, London,
England.
269
Fig. 28 Cellini, bronze model of the Perseus, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.
270
Fig. 29 Caterina Sforza as Fortuna, medal, reverse, 1480-1484, British Museum,
London, England.
271
Fig. 30 Agnolo Bronzino, Cosimo I in Armor, 1545, Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy.
272
Fig. 31 Domenico di Polo, coin of Cosimo I, reverse featuring Hercules with the
Nemean Lion Skin, Museo degli Argenti, Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy.
273
Fig. 32 Detail of Cellini’s bronze bust of Cosimo I.
274
Fig. 33 Seventh-century cosmetic Gorgo-shaped vase.
275
Fig. 34 Baccio Bandinelli, Cosimo I, 1543-1544, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.
276
Fig. 36 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus.
277
Fig. 37 Perseus slaying Medusa, Boeotian amphora, c. 670 B.C., Louvre Museum,
Paris, France.
278
Fig. 38 Marzocco, Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy.
279
Fig. 39 Crowned lion, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.
280
Fig. 41 Cellini, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici, c. 1570.
281
Fig. 42 Cellini, David and Goliath, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici.
282
Fig. 43 Cellini, Judith and Holofernes, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici.
283
Fig. 44 Cellini, Bianca Cappello, shield for Francesco I de’ Medici.
284
Fig. 45 Pinturicchio, Pala di Santa Maria dei Fossi, 1495-1496, National Gallery of
Umbria, Perugia, Italy.
285
Fig. 46 Donatello, David, c. 1440-1460, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.
286
Fig. 47 Bottom view of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.
287
Fig. 48 Breaking with the Wheel, from the Book of Numquam, 13th or 14th century,
Cathedral Library, Soest, Germany.
288
Fig. 49 Taddeo Gaddi, Holy Francis appearing to his Disciples, 1330-1335, Santa
Croce, Florence, Italy.
289
Fig. 51 Francesco Bartoli’s drawing of Cellini’s cope pin for Clement VII, 1530,
British Museum, London, England.
290
Fig. 53 Francesco di Giovanni Ferrucci del Tadda, Justice, 1581, Piazza Santa
Trinità, Florence, Italy.
Fig. 54 Vasari, Allegory of the Quartiere of San Giovanni and Santa Maria Novella,
1563-1565, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.
291
Fig. 55 Terracotta clipei featuring Helios, 310-240 B.C., Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, Massachusetts.
292
Fig. 56 Alberghetti family, ‚Furies‛ gun featuring Medusa, 1773, Royal
Armouries Museum of Artillery, Fort Nelson, Fareham, England.
293
Fig. 57 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Last Judgment, 1537-1541, Sistine Chapel,
Vatican Palace, Rome, Italy.
294
Fig. 58 Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, c. 1482, Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy.
295
Fig. 59 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, The Ditchley Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I of
England, 1592, National Portrait Gallery, London, England.
296
Fig. 60 Ammanati, Ceres, 1555-1563, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy.
297
Fig. 61 Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo and son Giovanni, 1545, Uffizi Museum,
Florence, Italy.
298
Fig. 62 Anonymous, Cosimo and Eleonora with Maps, 1546, Collection of Mrs. A.
Erlanger, Connecticut.
299
Fig. 63 Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy.
300
Fig. 65 Giambologna, Ops (Florence?), 1565, Boboli Garden, Florence, Italy.
301
Fig. 66 Athanasius Kirchner, Isis, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652.
302
Fig. 67 Niccolo Tribolo, Hercules and Antaeus Fountain, after 1536, Castello, Italy.
303
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