Cellini’s Perseus & the Violence of Renaissance Art

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Inventing the Renaissance comes out in one month in the UK (2 months USA), so I’m going to try to post daily this month on social media to share cool pictures and stories of things related to the book. I thought I would also gather them here, posting them sometimes as individual posts, sometimes gathering a few together when they’re shorter. So to start here are some notes on Benvenuto Cellini’s stunning Perseus, my pick for a cover illustration (thank you, editors!)

Left: A bronze statue of naked Perseus, beautifully muscular and youthful, holding aloft the severed head of Medusa from whose neck gore is dribbling in streams. He wears a beautiful classical helmet with wings on it, and holds a curved classical sword. In the background one can see the arched roof of the Renaissance loggia above him. Right: An orange book cover showing the same statue in much the same position, though one can also see Medusa's headless body at Perseus's triumphant feet, her neck streaming gore. The title "Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age" is superimposed over the statue, with the word "the" pierced by the sword.

For me, this statue personifies the Renaissance because, by standing opposite Michelangelo’s David by the Palazzo Vecchio, it’s part of a suite of famous statues every one of which commemorates some big & often violent tumult. When we meet famous Renaissance art we often hear about the artist but not the context. The severed head is there for a reason!

Photograph of the same bronze statue of Perseus from behind. To the lower right Michelangelo's David stands cattycorner to it, with the Medieval stone wall of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio behind it. A balcony above is crowned by the flags of the European Union, Italian Republic, and Florentine Republic.

Cellini lived in the rocky decades when (after the death of the famous Lorenzo de Medici) the Medici family had been kicked out and strove to return and seize control of the city by force. Duke Cosimo I took over in the 1530s, and commissioned the Perseus in the 1540s right after a bloody revolt.

A detailed image of Perseus's torso as he holds up the severed head. You can see the name of the sculptor "Benvenuto Cellini" written on a strap which goes diagonally across Perseus's naked chest, holding his scabbard - the helmet and scabbard are the only clothes he wears. A pigeon sitting on the sword is humorously positioned just in the right spot to hide the penis.

Perseus’s face deliberately resembled the then-teenaged duke, and Florence had long displayed corpses of traitors that square, often hung from battlements, sometimes as heads on pikes. When the statue was unveiled Medusa’s head in the duke’s hand represented very real & recent rebel heads! Detail from Bronzino's painted portrait of Duke Cosimo I, his bold straight nose and face shape resembling the face of Perseus.

Detail of Perseus's face.

A zoomed-in shot of the severed head of Medusa. Her eyes are closed as if in sleep, and her face beautiful, her hair snakes curled up like the beautiful classical curls common on ancient statues. Bronze streams of gore come down from her neck as if she was just killed.

To increase the gore factor, the statue is positioned at the edge of a roof, so when it rains Perseus remains dry, but water drips down the gore streaming from her head, from the sword point, and from her severed neck!

A photograph of the same statue angled from below shows how the sword, severed head, and the body's neck streaming gore all stick out forward from the body, so they can be in the rain while the body is under the roof above.

To hammer the message home, a relief at the bottom shows Perseus rescuing Andromeda (a personified Florence). In the top right corner a cavalry battle (which does not appear in the Perseus story!) shows the defeat of the rebels, as Perseus “rescues” Florence from the “dragon” of republican rule.

A photograph of the square bronze frieze described in the main text: in the middle Andromeda sits on a stack of stones which look conspicuously like the stones the Palazzo Vecchio itself is made of (the seat of government and symbol of the city). Above her, Perseus flies down with upraised sword to slay the sea dragon which threatens her from the bottom left. To the right, mourning citizens watch the dramatic scene, but above and behind them men on horses clash and the pikes and halberds of German-style soldiers of the era the statue was made stick up above the crowd.

In the base, Jupiter, Perseus’s father, threatens to strike anyone who harms his son, a warning of reprisals from Cosimo’s allies, especially the Emperor whose Landsknecht knights Cosimo quartered under the very roof where the statue stood! Giving it its current name “Loggia dei Lanzi.”

Another angle of the same statue from below shows the elaborate white base covered with decorations, and at the center a niche with a small statue of Jupiter, holding lightning aloft to threaten the viewer.

When we celebrate Renaissance art w/o acknowledging the terror & violence that shaped it, we repeat the myth of a bad “Dark Ages” & Renaissance “golden age” a very potent piece of propaganda, which is what Inventing the Renaissance is about, and it has plenty more Cellini anecdotes, he was a wild man who lived a wild life, documented by his book which I will always call “The Implausibly Interesting Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.”

I hope you’ll enjoy more tidbits like this in coming days!

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