Cellini's blood

The blood of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa group [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1-3 OMITTED] was a marvel of sixteenth-century sculpture. With its implausible volume, Cellini breached everything he knew of human physiology and voided his tireless insistence on anatomical accuracy. With its vivid rush, he contravened the determined self-containment of his hero's pose and focused his figures into two points of convulsive animation. The statue's first viewers were overwhelmed: "I cannot get enough," wrote Bernardetto Minerbetti in 1552, "of watching the blood that pours impetuously from [Medusa's] trunk. This, although it is metal, seems nonetheless to be real, and it drives others away out of fear that they will be soaked with it."(1)

Knowing about the harsh rule of the statue's patron, Duke Cosimo I, and remembering the violent history of its site, Florence's Piazza della Signoria, many have found Cellini's "impetuous pour" to be simply gruesome. The submission of Medusa to Perseus's blade can remind us of real bodies that met similar or worse fates in Cellini's Florence, and the hero's triumphant act may accordingly seem the very identity of political tyranny.(2) As this essay will argue, however, such a visceral reaction is but one of the responses the blood might provoke, and it is a historically narrow one at that. The first admirers of the blood were not all admirers of Duke Cosimo, and they did not couch their praise as praise of Cosimo's rigor. They did not assume that Perseus's violence manifests Cosimo's, nor that it was addressed exclusively to the duke's enemies. They allowed it, as we shall see, a more complicated role.

The possibilities for this role are bound up with the story of how and why blood entered the program of the Perseus in the first place. Cellini tells us that the duke initially required "just a Perseus," "a statue of Perseus, three braccia high, with the head of Medusa in hand, and nothing more."(3) This basic motif, as Karla Langedijk first recognized, was already current in the imagery of Cosimo's predecessor, Alessandro I, and the similarity of Cosimo's limited request to the (bloodless) picture of Perseus on a medal coined by Francesco del Prato a few years earlier may indicate that, even before speaking with his new artist, Cosimo was imagining what might be done with a monumental display of Medusa's head.(4) The decision - also, we should presume, Cosimo's - to commission this as a work of bronze rather than marble must have had its own attractions.(5) Culturally, Cosimo's bronze would revive a classic Florentine material that had lapsed for nearly half a century; technologically, it would demonstrate his regime's premier pyrotechnic capacities. In 1544, the year before the work was begun, the poet-philosopher Benedetto Varchi was already writing that Cosimo's "knowledge and study of metals re-splend[ed] among his virtues."(6) A new metal Perseus in the Ducal square could state much the same thing, making science an implicit factor in the rebirth of art that Cosimo's new order allowed.(7) The ideal place for such a work, finally, all but awaited its arrival. As Niccolo Martelli, writing in 1546, put it, "The people will look at [the Perseus] with amazement [when it is] on the platform of his Excellency's piazza, in the other archway of the Loggia, beside the one with Donatello's Judith. This space has been empty, and virtually reserved until now for the invention, [come] from the fateful stars, into the mind of our famous Duke; it will adorn the realm with all that metal, nature, art, ingeniousness, knowledge, and style can make."(8)

Cosimo, it would seem, had calculated the combination of Perseus subject, bronze medium, and site. Neither what the sources reveal about these calculations, nor other evidence, however, contradicts a further claim Cellini himself twice makes: the ultimate additions of the body of Medusa, the marble base on which the figures stand, and that base's ornaments could all be distinguished from Cosimo's first idea; all exceeded Cosimo's original desires [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED].(9) Inasmuch as at least one of these assertions appears in a letter meant to be read by the duke, it may well be that the amplification of the Perseus was indeed urged by the artist - presumably with the support and advice of Varchi, then director of Florence's academy and Cellini's close friend; we know, at the very least, that Varchi eventually authored the four inscriptions on the statue's base.(10) An expanded project, Cellini and Varchi would both have recognized, could meet Cosimo's desire for a display of metallo, arte, and ingegno in even more concrete ways; it could also, however, fulfill that desire in terms of newly specific interest to the artist. And this, it can be argued, had everything to do with the new place made for blood.

By changing the composition to include not only Perseus's petrifying display of Medusa's head but also the beheading itself, the point in the story of Perseus that the composition would de facto illustrate shifted. Set neither over the sea (as del Prato's medal was) nor in the realm of Atlas (where Ovid's Perseus "held out from his left hand the ghastly Medusa head"), the notional setting became the land of the Gorgons, and the time the moment when "[Perseus] smote [Medusa's] head clean from her neck, and from the blood of the mother swift-winged Pegasus and his brother sprang."(11) In the new scene, that is, blood was not gratuitous; it multiplied the myths to which the new sculpture was keyed. Initiating the birth of the winged Pegasus, the blood could synecdochally invoke Pegasus's own eventual role in originating poetry: "From the blood of the Gorgon was born Pegasus, who is interpreted as fame; he produced with his foot the Castalian fount or the Pegaseum, [and he is interpreted as fame because] virtue, overcoming all, wins itself noble renown."(12) The blood, anticipating the flow of the Hippocrene waters, linked the act of virtue to its glorification. Through mythographic logics, its flow could become the origin of art itself, the principle that glorious deeds mandate their artistic celebration, and thus the very justification of both Cosimo's commission and Cellini's work. As one later sixteenth-century writer explained, referring to the imagery on Cellini's own earlier medal of Pegasus, "virtuous action makes the fountains of glory and praise spring forth."(13) And when Cellini himself points out that "valorous and wise poets," recognizing the virtu of his sculpture, "covered its base with Latin and Italian verses," he reminds us that the spilling of Medusa's bronze blood did indeed result in poetry and fame.(14)