CELLINI’S PERSEUS AND MEDUSA: CONFIGURATIONS OF THE

BODY OF STATE

by

CHRISTINE CORRETTI

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree

of Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Advisor: Professor Edward J. Olszewski

Department of Art History

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

January, 2011
 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

Christine Corretti

candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree.*

(signed) Professor Edward J. Olszewski

(chair of the committee)

Professor Anne Helmreich

Professor Holly Witchey

Dr. Jon S. Seydl

(date) November, 2010

*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

Chapter 1 The Story of Perseus and Medusa, an Interpretation 28

of its Meaning, and the Topos of Decapitation

Chapter 2 Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa: the Paradigm of Control 56

Chapter 3 Renaissance Political Theory and Paradoxes of 100

Power

Chapter 4 The Goddess as Other and Same 149

Chapter 5 The Sexual Symbolism of the Perseus and Medusa 164

Chapter 6 The Public Face of Justice 173

Chapter 7 Classical and Grotesque Polities 201

Chapter 8 Eleonora di Toledo and the Image of the Mother 217

Goddess

Conclusion 239

Illustrations 243

Bibliography 304

3
List of Illustrations

Fig. 1 Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus and Medusa, 1545-1555, 243

Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 2 Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, c. 1446-1460s, Palazzo 244

Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 3 Heracles 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 249
Medusa’s pedestal.

Fig. 8 Cellini, pedestal niche of the Perseus and Medusa 250

featuring Jupiter.

Fig. 9 Cellini, pedestal niche of the Perseus and Medusa 251

featuring Athena.

Fig. 10 Cellini, Mercury from the Perseus and Medusa’s pedestal. 252

Fig. 11 Cellini, Saltcellar, 1543, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 253

Vienna, Austria.

Fig. 12 Cellini, Perseus liberating Andromeda, from the Perseus 254

and Medusa’s pedestal.

Fig. 13 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus. 255

Fig. 14 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. 256

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. 17 Cellini, Cosimo I, 1545, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy. 259

Fig. 18 Tazza Farnese, interior, second century B.C., National 260

Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy.

Fig. 19 Tazza Farnese, exterior. 261

Fig. 20 Raphael, The Sistine Madonna, 1513-1514, Staatliche 262

Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, Germany.

Fig. 21 Ouroboros, device for Lorenzo de’ Medici. 263

Fig. 22 Giorgio Vasari, The First Fruits of the Earth offered to 264
Saturn, 1555-1557, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 23 Prudentia, Florence Cathedral, Italy. 265

Fig. 24 Giambologna, Rape of the Sabine, c. 1574-1580, Loggia 266

dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 25 Cellini, King Francis I on Horseback, medal, reverse, 1537, 267

British Museum, London, England.

Fig. 26 Michelangelo, Night, tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, 268

San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 27 Denarius of Septimius Severus, reverse, 193-211, 269

British Museum, London, England.

Fig. 28 Cellini, bronze model of the Perseus, Bargello Museum, 270

Florence, Italy.

5
Fig. 29 Caterina Sforza as Fortuna, medal, reverse, 1480-1484, 271
British Museum, London, England.

Fig. 30 Agnolo Bronzino, Cosimo I in Armor, 1545, Uffizi Museum, 272

Florence, Italy.

Fig. 31 Domenico di Polo, coin of Cosimo I, reverse featuring 273

Hercules with the Nemean Lion Skin, Museo degli Argenti,
Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy.

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, 276

Florence, Italy.

Fig. 35 Cellini, detail of the Perseus. 276

Fig. 36 Detail of Cellini’s Perseus. 277

Fig. 37 Perseus slaying Medusa, Boeotian amphora, c. 670 B.C., 278

Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

Fig. 38 Marzocco, Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy. 279

Fig. 39 Crowned lion, Bargello Museum, Florence, Italy. 280

Fig. 40 Medici coat of arms, Piazza della Signoria, 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’ 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. 45 Pinturicchio, Pala di Santa Maria dei Fossi, 1495-1496, 285

National Gallery of Umbria, Perugia, Italy.

Fig. 46 Donatello, David, c. 1440-1460, Bargello Museum, 286

Florence, Italy.

Fig. 47 Bottom view of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. 287

Fig. 48 Breaking with the Wheel, from the Book of Numquam, 288
13th or 14th century, Cathedral Library, Soest, Germany.

Fig. 49 Taddeo Gaddi, Holy Francis appearing to his Disciples, 289

1330-1335, Santa Croce, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 50 Ixion and the Torture Wheel, Roman sarcophagus. 289

Fig. 51 Francesco Bartoli’s drawing of Cellini’s cope pin for 290

Clement VII, 1530, British Museum, London, England.

Fig. 52 Bartolomeo Ammanati, detail of Neptune Fountain, 290

c. 1565, Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 53 Francesco di Giovanni Ferrucci del Tadda, Justice, 1581, 291

Piazza Trinità, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 54 Vasari, Allegory of the Quartiere of San Giovanni and 291

Santa Maria Novella, 1563-1565, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 55 Terracotta clipei featuring Helios, 310-240 B.C., 292

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

Fig. 56 Alberghetti family, ‚Furies‛ gun featuring Medusa, 1773, 293

Royal Armouries Museum of Artillery, Fort Nelson, Fareham,
England.

7
Fig. 57 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Last Judgment, 1537-1541, 294
Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace, Rome, Italy.

Fig. 58 Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, c. 1482, Uffizi Museum, 295

Florence, Italy.

Fig. 59 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, The Ditchley Portrait of 296

Queen Elizabeth I of England, 1592, National Portrait Gallery,
London, England.

Fig. 60 Ammanati, Ceres, 1555-1563, Bargello Museum, Florence, 297

Italy.

Fig. 61 Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo and son Giovanni, 1545, 298

Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 62 Anonymous, Cosimo and Eleonora with Maps, 1546, 299

Collection of Mrs. A. Erlanger, Connecticut.

Fig. 63 Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy. 300

Fig. 64 Detail of Pitti Palace. 300

Fig. 65 Giambologna, Ops (Florence?), 1565, Boboli Garden, 301

Florence, Italy.

Fig. 66 Athanasius Kirchner, Isis, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652. 302

Fig. 67 Niccolo Tribolo, Hercules and Antaeus Fountain, after 303

1536, Castello, 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

overcoming an adversary personified as female, but the sculpture’s androgynous

appearance (the heads of Perseus and Medusa are remarkably similar)

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

as Mother Goddess. In the preceding context it is telling that additional works

of art celebrating the duke’s political greatness align Cosimo’s image with

9
maternal agency.

The Perseus’ androgynous nature problematizes the Greek subject’s role

as an epitome of virtù (virility). Thus, the statue points up the contingent nature

of patriarchal power, which in Cellini’s day was synonymous with virtù. I

discuss the Perseus as a reflection of Niccolo Machiavelli’s theory that virtù

depends upon adversary in the form of Fortuna, a version of the Mother

Goddess, for its political purposes.

The similarity between the heads of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa

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

bred more divisions in the absolutist state by perpetuating violence. Similarly,

Cellini’s statue implies that violence may turn against itself by appealing to the

aggression of its viewers.

My study concludes with an analysis of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo’s

image in art as Mother Goddess, a force who rivals the power of Cosimo I. Thus,

the duchess’ image ultimately served as Medusa’s counterpart.

10
Introduction

Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s vision of an absolutist Tuscan state informs

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

paradoxical. Critics have perceived the statue, which Cosimo commissioned

while Cellini resided in his native Florence, as a propagandistic symbol of

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,

which, some contemporaries believed, was distasteful because the heroine

dominates a man by trampling his body and severing his head (fig. 2).2 The

hierarchical arrangement of Cellini’s figures, which mirrors that of Judith and

Holofernes, has no politically symbolic value, Even has surprisingly proposed.

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-

century Florence.3 The ‚titillating sexual fantasy‛ of Cellini’s bronze formulation

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

Her observation followed Margaret D. Carroll’s article on rape imagery which

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

Perseus and Medusa’s counteraction of Donatello’s formulation. McHam has

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

merely allegorizes Florence’s liberation from republican enmity. Margaret A.

Gallucci concurs with Mandel’s stance.8

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

Sixteenth-Century Italy (1996) by Mary Hollingsworth are imprecise because they

interpret art made in the 1560s as straightforward reflections of his absolute,

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

his increase of power in a ‚one-to-one‛ fashion.10 Van Veen believes in the

propagandistic value of much of Cosimo’s patronage, but he nuanced the matter

when he wrote that:

Cosimo preferred emphatically royal, dynastic,

and territorial imagery at first, when in fact he
was still only an elected leader whose power, not-
withstanding his ducal title, was limited. Then,
starting in 1559, by which time his annexation of
Siena had taken his power to new heights, he charted
a radically different course. He embraced the city’s
republican tradition, which prized the bene commune
and virtù civile. When he was made duke in 1569, he
grafted his new dignity onto the republican, florentinist
decorum that he had adopted in 1559.11

Van Veen briefly treated Cellini’s Perseus as a symbol of the

‚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-

coming an adversary personified as female. However, the statue’s iconography

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

limitations of male power in early modern Florence, while implying Cellini’s

awareness that matriarchal influence was palpable in the Medici state.

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

image as a ruler sometimes overtly, or covertly aligns with maternal power. In

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.

Artists created images of the Mother Goddess, whose ancient cult

survived into the Renaissance, as surrogates for Eleonora di Toledo, while Cellini

fashioned his Medusa as a version of the Mother Goddess.14 This is not

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

profundity of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa compare with iconographies in which

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

Perseus and Medusa’s arresting androgynous appearance proves as much.

‚Androgynous,‛ an ambiguous term in the Renaissance, variously refers in this

study to the physical, including sexually symbolic, similarity between Cellini’s

Greek characters.

The conventional critical view that the Perseus celebrates Medicean

patriarchism and Cosimo’s political success overlooks insecurities besetting the

political and cultural worlds of the Medici state. The Perseus and Medusa’s

gendered conflict is a symptom of perceived and real threats to the establishment

of Cosimo’s absolutist dominion.17

Florentines, like most Renaissance Italians, believed that male rule was

orderly, legitimate, and correct. Conversely, female authority was, they claimed,

disorderly, illegitimate, and threatening. I borrow the terms ‚public woman,‛ a

woman who wielded political power and influence, from Natalie R. Tomas’ The

Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (2003).18

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

matters of psychological struggle and tension, which expressed broader social,

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

function as a creative psychological ground for culture‛ and that Renaissance

images could epitomize the ‚generative‛ and ‚destructive‛ capacities of their

culture.20 Indeed, the characters of Perseus and Medusa merit these descriptive

terms and blur the line between ‚good‛ and ‚evil.‛

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1 includes a summary of Perseus’ story as well as an

anthropological/social-historical analysis of the tale of Perseus and Medusa,

including the legend’s significance for ancient Greek matriarchy and for

patriarchy’s response to matriarchal power. The same chapter provides a

summary assessment of the symbolic value that the topos of decapitation

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

capacity of Medusa’s head warrants this discussion.

Chapter 2 relates many of the symbolic components of Perseus’ tale to

16
Cellini’s bronze for the Loggia dei Lanzi. In sum, it is a story of solar forces

against maternal divinity. I speak of the similar appearances of Cellini’s

mythological figures and of how they compare and compete as solar powers.

Chapter 3 examines the figure of Fortuna in ancient through early

modern times. The writing of several political theorists, especially Machiavelli, is

the focus of my attention here, and I am particularly interested in the

personification of the state as a female and of Fortuna as a woman who must be

beaten even though she may be loved. Contemporaries, such as Cosimo I, who

embraced Machiavellian notions of virtù linked (literally and metaphorically)

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

political, but sexual as well. Cellini’s statue is a simultaneous acknowledgment

and denigration of female power and potency.

Chapter 4 focuses on the role of Donatello’s Judith as a type for the Virgin

Mary, whose image is found alongside that of Medusa in a fifteenth-century

painting for the Medici, and what that role meant for the influential women in

Florence’s leading dynasty. The sexual symbolism of the figure of Medusa is

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

Mother Goddess, herself a personification of Justice in the ancient Greek world,

comes into play as a source of judicial power.

The seventh chapter argues that Cellini’s Medusa is an epitome of the

grotesque (fragmented) body, while the Perseus is seemingly classical (integral),

a symbol of the absolutist state. However, the exceptions to this binary stand for

the difficulty of creating and maintaining a holistic Tuscan polity.

Visual and written portrayals of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo as the

Mother Goddess are the main focus of Chapter 8. I treat the duchess’ characteri-

zation as a divinity in relation to Francesco Cattani di Diacceto’s panegyric of

woman as superior to man, which he penned in the context of praising Eleonora.

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

of Eleonora as divine, there is no evidence that he publically refuted

contemporary criticism of her. The result was a paradoxical reassertion of her

18
influence within the Tuscan state. Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa likewise indicates

the futility of denying the power of the hero’s feminine counterpart.

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

capacities. My endeavor comprises an iconographical inquiry which explores the

individual and symbolic meaning and significance of images. Images, myth,

symbols and allegories are, in Erwin Panofsky’s words, complex ‚manifestations

of underlying principles,‛ that is, what Ernst Cassirer termed ‚symbolic

values.‛21 I demonstrate that different ‚symbolic values‛ from antiquity were

highly significant for the culture in which Cellini lived. In the Renaissance

symbols -- like myth, images and allegories -- had psychological force, for

symbols embodied aspects of reality that encompassed human nature and

human experiences of the world.22 Though personal and versatile:

the symbol cannot be created artificially or invented

for some purely personal interpretation or whim: it
goes beyond the individual to the universal and is
innate in the life of the spirit. It is the external, or
lower, expression of the higher truth which is symbol-
ized, and is a means of communicating realities which

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

The story of Florentines’ reception of Cellini’s Perseus suggests, indeed,

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

offered a multiplicity of interpretations. I propose that, as the unique formula-

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

comprising a princely surrogate for Cosimo I was particularly multi-dimensional

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

contemporaries, for Medusa’s head referred not, as the head of Donatello’s

Holofernes did, to enemies who threatened Florence from outside, but to

Florentine citizens themselves, at least those who had resisted the new Medici

ruler’s power. Here, a part of Florence, decapitated, hung in front of

20
Perseus/Cosimo I.25 In my view the personal link between the Gorgon’s head

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

1545 as a politically suspect, anti-Medici exile.

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

vocal judgment to comments on the statue’s aesthetic value. Although the

Perseus contains a strong political statement, Cosimo indeed got favorable

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

political charge; rather, each element worked with the other.26

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

homogeneous fashion.27 Florentine sculpture reception was ‚independent,

unpredictable, and stubbornly inventive.‛28

A curious event predating the bronze Perseus’ construction illuminates

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

strike viewers’ sensitivity and imaginations in unpredictable fashions as they

22
come to stand for contemporary concerns that may not have been in the minds of

their patrons or artists.

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

back the suppressed into Cellini’s frame of vision.

23
 Notes

1. T. Hirthe, ‚Die Perseus-und-Medusa Gruppe des Benvenuto Cellini in

Florenz,‛ Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 29/30 (1987-1988): 197ff. John Pope-
Hennessy, Cellini (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985): 185ff. Kathleen Weil Garris,
‚On Pedestals: Michelangelo’s David, Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus and the
Sculpture of the Piazza della Signoria,‛ Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20
(1983): 409-411. Sixteenth-century poems written in honor of the Perseus as a
surrogate for Cosimo I are found in I Trattati dell’Oreficeria e della Scultura di
Benvenuto Cellini, ed. C. Milanesi (Florence, Italy: Le Monnier, 1857): 403-414.

2. Yael Even, ‚The Loggia dei Lanzi: a Showcase of Female Subjugation,‛

Woman’s Art Journal 12 (1991): 10-14.

3. -----, 11.

4. -----, 11.

5. -----, 11.

6. Margaret D. Carroll, ‚The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification

of Sexual Violence,‛ in The Expanding Discourse, Feminism and Art History, eds.
Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper Collins Press, 1992):
139-160.

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.

12. -----, 11, 16, 51.

13. -----, 11.

14. For information on the importance of the Mother Goddess’ iconography in

the Renaissance see Edith Balas’ The Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance Art
(Pennsylvania: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002). Renaissance Florence
experienced a revived interest in the Mother Goddess which lasted into Cellini’s
time and beyond. Some of the city’s premier scholars who publicized her cult
were the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino and his followers, whose thinking played
an important role at the Medici court. Balas (17) has noted that the Medici
Library included ancient and medieval literature concerning the Mother
Goddess. By the middle of the sixteenth century, such ancient mythographers as
Apollodorus, Hyginus and Antonius Liberalis had joined the stage with classical
historians, including Heraclitus and Diodorus Siculus. Many of their humanist
compilations included illustrations of the Mother Goddess’ ancient faces,
including Medusa as she appeared in ancient art. Thus, early modern artists had
ample opportunity to experiment with her image. See as well Don Cameron
Allen, Mysteriously Meant: the Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical
Interpretation in the Renaissance (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979)
for further information on Neoplatonism at the Medici court; the humanist
movement; and the allegorization and symbolization of ancient deities, such as
the Earth Mother (see, for example, pages 203, 231). Balas’ book also contains an
extensive compilation of authors who wrote about the Mother Goddess and
whose works were also popular in sixteenth-century Italy.

15. Quotation of Margaret L. King, Women in the Renaissance (Illinois: University

of Chicago Press, 1991): 238.

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.

17. The centralization of power (military, bureaucratic, etc.) within the

25
sovereign’s person was the rationale behind the formation of absolutist states.
The sixteenth century used the term ‚stato‛ to refer to both the ruler and the
power he/she enjoyed, as well as to his/her dominion.

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.‛

23. J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols (London,

England: Thames and Hudson Press, 2005): 7-8.

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

detailed analysis of the historical evolution of Medusa’s image as a maternal deity

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

the value of Medusa’s head as a symbol of power.

The Textual Sources for Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa

Books IV and V of Ovid’s Metamorphoses include the version of Perseus’

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

Ovid’s account, unless specified otherwise.1

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

Danae. However, she refused him. Angered by his misfortune, Polydectes

ordered Perseus to perform an impossible task so that he would be rid of Danae’s

son for good: to bring him the head of Medusa.

At one time Medusa was a mortal whose beauty intrigued Poseidon

(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

upon it would be turned to stone. Medusa unleashed a vengeful plan to destroy

the world. However, with the aid of the gods, Perseus was able to overtake the

Gorgon. He came to Medusa’s lair, which, according to Hesiod’s Theogony (274),

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

information about the Gorgons’ whereabouts from them.

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

warrior with the golden sword.3

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

and that by sparring winds through heaven’s great immensity, as though of no

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

rise to serpents in the Libyan desert.

Air borne in Mercury’s (Hermes’) winged sandals, Perseus saw Atlas’ tree,

‚whose leaves of shining gold concealed gold fruit and branches underneath.‛

(Metamorphoses, Book IV, 871-872) Perseus, whose name appropriately means

‚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

the giant into a mountain decorated with trees.

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

shadow on the water’s surface. An implied comparison of Perseus and Medusa

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.

(Metamorphoses, Book IV, 1016)

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.

Their daughter, according to Pausanias’ Description of Greece, was named

Gorgophone (‚Gorgon killer‛), which testifies to the fact that Medusa’s power

lived on after her demise.

Another test of Perseus’ abilities was his encounter with Phineas, a rival for

Andromeda’s hand, who stormed Perseus’ and Andromeda’s wedding festivities.

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

Gorgon’s powers of destruction in the troubling instances after her capture.

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

her right side raised the dead.5

The oracle is fulfilled late in the story when Perseus kills Acrisius with a

quoit, as Pausanias’ Description of Greece claims. Pherecydes’ Argonautica (Book IV)

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’

murderer, Perseus chose to rule Tiryns instead.

Origins and still a Search for Meaning

The close consideration of Medusa’s history which follows is a composite of

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

B.C. Renaissance Italy knew the following information, which characterizes

Medusa as a goddess with cosmic power, from such classical sources as Hesiod’s

Theogony and Herodotus’ Histories.6 I shall demonstrate that Cellini’s conceptualiz-

ation of Perseus and the Gorgon derived from many of the ideas outlined here.

Medusa was the shadow side of Athena’s powerful femininity. Herodotus’

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

when they invaded North Africa.7

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,

or Medusa (meaning ‚mother,‛ ‚ruler,‛ ‚queen,‛ ‚cunning intelligence,‛ and

‚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

that he could rival Medusa’s fertile power.

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

referred to the moon as ‚Gorgonios‛ because of the face described on it.8

Serpents were, in keeping, long honored symbols not only of wisdom,

cunning and feminine wiles, but also of healing, and they had an affinity with the

moon as a reflector of divine intelligence. Serpents were also matriarchal signs,

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,

renewal, and of dark moon mysteries.9

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.

In the preceding context Perseus’ sword has additional significance. The

Greek hero’s harpe resembles the lunar sickle, and thereby suggests a symbolic tie

to a maternal deity. An awareness of the moon’s significance to Medusa’s myth

might have informed Petrus Berchorius’ reference to Perseus’ sword as sickle-like

(Moralized Ovid, 219).11 The harpe would have been, then, a suitable instrument

with which to confront the Gorgon’s cosmic force.

In addition to being symbolic of the moon, Medusa’s face was, in a certain

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-

sitated employing a mirror because a direct stare would cause blindness. It is

telling, then, that Perseus needed to use Athena’s mirror-shield to look at

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

mark on Athena’s shield is telling. A description of the Mother Goddess (Venus)

in Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (second century) brings the preceding motifs

together with a resulting image that is rather Medusan:

Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a

mirror, or like the bright face of the moon, which
told me who she was. Vipers rising from the left-
hand and right hand partings of her hair supported
this disc.13

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

position of the benevolent/destructive sun god Apollo/Helios. A well known fact

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,’

or ‘on both sides.’‛15 However, Medusa was not always so exalted.

Versions of Medusa’s story cutting out the transitional episode of

Metis/Medusa and claiming that Athena was conceived and birthed solely from

Jupiter seem to mark the assimilation of matriarchal divinity to the standards of a

new patriarchal order, firmly established around 1100 B.C. with the Dorians’

invasion into Greece, which championed Athena as benevolent and denigrated

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

opponents.16 For instance, Medusa’s erotic nature opposed Athena’s virginal

character, which suggests a wish to downplay the latter’s sexuality in an effort to

play up Jupiter’s procreative capacity. That capacity is more than a metaphor for

political power. Procreation is necessary to dynastic continuity. It may even have

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

had. Her powers remained integral in themselves and, paradoxically, an

instrument of her father. The preceding indicates that a drive to incorporate the

feminine in divinity existed during the patriarchal age.

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

Mother Goddess informed ancient descriptions of the Amazons.17 As Josine Blok

has stated, ‚matriarchy was a stock feature of the speculative systems of the

development of humanity, and the Amazons were an equally stock feature of

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

presided over Amazon women in Libya.19 Diodorus Siculus’ Historical Library

(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

Pausanias as well, Medusa was an Amazon.20 She was an epitome of female

power and of matriarchy.

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

were threatening, though simultaneously fascinating in the patriarchal Greeks’

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

and death, was horrific and anomalous to the Athenians.21

The emergence of the new patriarchy coincided with the destruction of the

Amazonian ‚chaos‛ of state. In mythical accounts, which the Renaissance knew,

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

patriarchism’s restrictive system of marriage coincided with the destruction of the

matriarchal state.

I propose that in the preceding context – and as matriarchal/matrilineal

societies prove -- the mother was the epitome of matriarchy. That is why Perseus’

myth aimed to suppress what Athenians perceived to be the Mother’s negative

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

worshiped, as the cult of the Mother Goddess indicates.

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,

I would stress, as a sign of patriarchy’s fear of woman, and Medusa’s influence is

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

to stone when gazing upon Medusa’s face.

Fear of Woman also resulted in the patriarchal practice of portraying

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

betrayed an insecure need to reassure oneself of matriarchy’s defeat.

The Hellenistic practice of showing Medusa’s beautiful face to the

patriarchal Mediterranean world suggests that fascination with her remained

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

to the anxious nature of new societies.26

A fuller answer to why the myth of Perseus and Medusa developed when it

did requires a separate study, and so my consideration will continue to be

abbreviated. As suggested, classical literature which was available to Renaissance

individuals proves that the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy changed

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

patriarchal state of Athens, shows the Gorgon head surrounded by a battle

42
between Amazons and Greeks. Other reliefs on the same temple also narrate the

Greek-Amazonian war.27

The Amazon’s role as an epitome of female power likewise comes through

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

have informed representations of patriarchal heroes with spears, clubs, swords,

and other phallic attributes which are both literally and symbolically pitted against

the female gender.28

The preceding artistic trends complemented males’ reaction to changes in

the Greek family structure: fathers and sons needed to prove themselves as

warriors, statesmen and even as sexual aggressors.29 Thalia Phillies-Howe has

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

new imperative to separate themselves from dominating mothers and to become

domineering themselves. Clearly, a fashion of thinking in polar terms led Greeks

to conceive of household and state rule as either by men or by women:30

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

characterize Medusa as a threat to children. Take the example of Strabo’s

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:

..heroes like Perseus, Herakles, Theseus, <decisively

coped with the violent evils that beset the people. These
evils were not moral ones, but harsh and physical,
symbolized by monsters that wrecked the land or held
the people captive. It is significant that these heroes
were usually not wholly mortal; they were demi-gods,
only half human. But while the people identified them-
selves with this human part, they also made certain that
where it might fail, the other half, the divine part, would

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

political culture, of a return to matriarchy. In some ways she responded to

ancient anxieties about woman, which manifested themselves in art and literature,

as dangerously seductive, ferocious, curious and destructive – all traits that were

seemingly fabricated to distort and to mask her original power.33

The Topos of Decapitation

As the accounts of the generative powers of Medusa’s decapitated head

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

the head’s intelligence is divine.37

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

wide audience in the Renaissance, whose authors also clung to ancient

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,

who claimed that the soul’s primary seat is the head.

The notion of the head as a life force and therefore a source of power seems

to have informed the symbolic significance of crowns, whose spokes were

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 head contained the life soul.

Since antiquity, beheading was believedly a dignified form of punishment,

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,

dignified decapitation as a form of punishment. The pages that follow will

demonstrate how Cellini’s Medusa epitomizes many of the preceding ideas about

the head’s dignity, power and potency.

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.

2. All quotations of the Theogony come from Catherine Schlegel’s translation of

2006 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

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).

5. References to Asclepius in Medici art prove that the canonical version of

Perseus’ tale was known in Italy.

6. M. L. West, ‚The Medieval and Renaissance Monographs of Hesiod’s Theogony,‛

Classical Quarterly 14 (1964): 165-189. The classical texts discussed here were
known to early modern Italy. See, for instance, Balas, as well as Seznec, The
Survival of the Pagan Gods, the Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance
Humanism and Art; R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (New
York: Routledge Press, 1964).

7. F. M. Muller, Die Wissenschaft der Sprache, eds. R. Fick and W. Wischmann

(Leipzig, Germany: W. Englemann, 1892). F. G. Welcker, Griechische Götterlehre
(Göttingham, Germany: Deterich, 1857-1863). In Sardinia and Cyprus there was
contact with the Egyptian goddess Hathor and Bea, whose depictions sometimes
took on Gorgonian forms. Cheikh Anta Diop’s The Cultural Unity of Black Africa:
the Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (Illinois: Third
World Press, 1978) discusses the goddesses of matriarchal Africa and their
influence on the Greek pantheon of female divinities. According to Herodotus, all
48
the Greek gods and goddesses came from Egypt. See Diop, 76-81.

8. Seznec, 25. Balas, 25 acknowledges that the writing of Clement of Alexandria

was popular in intellectual circles at the Medici court. The link between women
and Wisdom and Truth pervades world mythology. For instance, the Egyptian
goddess Maat was Truth. The Hebrew name of Emeth, a fertility goddess, means
‚truth.‛

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.

15. Quoted on Frothingham, 353.

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.

Although material in Chapter 1 of my study indicates that the Renaissance would

have been aware of the transition within the ancient Mediterranean world from
matriarchy to patriarchy (see my discussion of the Amazonomachia, for instance),
the field of Renaissance studies as a whole would benefit from more research on
the early modern age’s knowledge of this transition.

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.

25. Tyrrell, 109.

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.

30. Thalia Phillies-Howe, ‚The Origin and Function of the Gorgon-Head,‛

American Journal of Archaeology 58 (1954): 209-221.

31. Tyrrell, 28.

32. Phillies-Howe, An Interpretation of the Perseus-Gorgon Myth in Greek Literature

and Monuments through the Classical Period, Ph.D. (Columbia University, 1975): 85-
86.

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.

36. Onians, 116.

37. -----, 107-108, 116-119. See, for instance, Plato’s Timaeus, 44ff.

38. Stahl, 160ff.

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

Medusa’s powerful interior. What follows is a discussion of Cellini’s bronze for

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

influence of women played a crucial role in Cosimo I’s rise to greatness.

The Commission and Cellini’s Innovation

In 1545 Cosimo I commissioned Cellini to sculpt Perseus holding the head

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

frame of vision. An unprecedented configuration exists in her spiralesque form,

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

other foot rests on his victim’s stomach (fig. 5).

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

closed and her mouth gapes open (fig. 6).

The base of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa contributes to the sculptural

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).

Caryatids at the corners of the pedestal represent the bisexual Diana of

Ephesus, the multi-breasted figure of procreation who appears in the work of

Benedetto Varchi, iconographer for Cellini and author of the inscriptions.

57
Garlands of fruit appear above the Ephesian women, who are benign versions of

the Mother Goddess. Interestingly, Danae looks similar in appearance to the

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

highly knowledgeable about ancient traditions.3

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

bottoms of these open-mouthed, hollow-eyed masks, which all connect to torches

that expand behind the ears of the adjacent Capricorns. The goats’ horns, in turn,

merge with the masks’ tops.

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

woman, all on horseback, appear to be combating in an area in the sky farther

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

horsemen are, and his open-mouthed visage is rather menacing. Andromeda

58
stands chained to a rock, gazing up at the enormous Perseus and Medusa under the

Loggia.

An Interpretation of the Statue’s Meaning

Duality is central to Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. Character doubling

involves the Greek hero’s headdress, which has a most intriguing aspect: its back

features a grotesque, elderly, lionine male visage framed by a mane of curls. It is a

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.

Representations of heads with two faces usually stood for prudence – a

virtue requiring memory of the past, intelligence, which acts upon the present, and

foresight, which affects the outcome of future events, as Berchorius’ Repertorium

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

The Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola maintained that souls

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

the beginning humanity comprised spherical hermaphrodites with two identical

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

60
significance as the site of identity, where a person might make known his or her

merit and pretension.8

The likeness between the heads of the bronze Perseus and Medusa denotes

shared identity. Victor’s and victim’s identities are practically interchangeable:

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.

The Perseus and Medusa’s faces thus take on an androgynous characteriza-

tion that suggests a union of ‚opposites.‛ Historically, the motif of physically

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.

Indeed, Medusa’s ability to turn onlookers to stone survived her decapitation, as

noted.
61
 The power of Perseus and Medusa is cosmic. One way that Janus faces may

stand for power that is cosmic, a namesake of Cosimo I himself, is by signifying

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

surrogate. Perseus’ status as a solar hero is fitting in the preceding astrological

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,

therefore, a suitable emblem of power.

The original gilding on Cellini’s Perseus complemented the statue’s solar

significance and the importance of the bronze hero as a demi-god.12 Renaissance

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
62
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

immortality, as the medium of bronze did.14

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

inspired by Boccaccio’s On Famous Women (Chapter 22), which states that

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

the sun<exhibits to the world, as if in a mirror, a certain likeness of God.‛17

As a solar force, Medusa’s blood, which compares to her serpents, emblems

of solar and lunar rays, contributes to her cosmic power and her fertile nature.
63
Cellini was probably aware that, viewing the human as microcosm, solar

theologian Marsilio Ficino described correspondences between the rising of the

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

procreate. Interestingly, the phallus was a solar emblem in the Renaissance.18 In

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

transformed reflection of himself. Remember that the shield is a solar/lunar

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.

Cellini’s conceptualization of Perseus’ and Medusa’s heads has a marked

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
64
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

sun’s greatest intensity. Florentines interpreted John’s nativity as mirroring the

sun’s reappearance after the darkness of winter.19 Naturally, Florentines

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

Christians developed into celebrations of birth. It comes as no surprise, then, that

Florentines lit an immense candle at the Baptistery as well as bonfires and

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

It is no wonder, then, that John’s head has appeared in art as a symbol of

the solar disk. For instance, a sixteenth-century panel by a follower of Leonardo

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
65
heavens, the vault of the sky, issuing from the human head.21 Such depictions

evoke the divinity of the Baptist’s head.

Similarly, the Baptist’s martyrdom was thought to have occurred on August

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

shearing life-sustaining grain, long a symbol of death, recalled his beheading.

John’s death was in Christ-like fashion a type of spiritual nourishment,

Comparable to the nourishing value of grain.22 Note how his role as such has

much to do with the fertile properties of severed heads in mythic contexts.

It appears that Cosimo I was aware of the generative significance of the

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

Cosimo I, in itself is immortal.24 Remember that the sign of Capricorn

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.

All of these facts align Cosimo I with the Baptist.

66
 The florin’s role as such becomes even more compelling when one considers

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:

the participants at the feast of the Baptist were mostly

mature males. All feasts reflected male domination of
a society and showed the liens and conflicts that defined
a male political order< In these festivities, it seemed that
the city had been generated by male lineages married to
each other and to the commune, and not by sexual copula-
tion and daily work. Visitors to the patron’s feast in this
period marveled at a commune that could work endlessly
at ritual at the expense of the shop, whose political males
seemed able to generate life without women and without
workers, a commune that with seeming ease produced
genius and imagination from a seedbed of grave governors.
Over it all stood the image, altar, and spirit of Saint John the
Baptist, the virginal male prophet of Christ and Christianity.
Saint John’s day provided means for Florentine, politically
enfranchised men to represent themselves within a mythical
frame, bracketing out the unruly bodies that might disturb
the image of an orderly, symbolic hierarchy, a harmonious
body politic. A society regenerates itself. The men imagined
that they alone gave birth to the commune, and resurrected it.25

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

counterpart within his cult.26

A similar episode transpired early in Cosimo I’s political career. In 1537,

shortly after taking office, an army of republican exiles marched on Florence.

67
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

as his personal resurrection, which he punctuated by adopting the zodiacal title of

Capricorn, also that of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Emperor Charles V, Alexander

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

highly meaningful to Cosimo’s conception of his rulership. The Battle of

Montemurlo also seems to have been the scourge responsible for Florence’s rebirth

as stipulated in Giovanni Villani’s thirteenth-century Chronica de origine civitatis.28

Since Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa commemorated the Battle of Montemurlo, it is

plausible that the Gorgon’s generative power would have corresponded in

Cellini’s and Cosimo’s minds to the bloody battle’s ‚redemptive‛ effect.29

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

ruler. It even appeared in his nativity chart.30

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
68
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

dynasty. As Chapter 8 will discuss in detail, Eleonora’s fecundity tied into

contemporary characterizations of her as a Mother Goddess.

In this context one cannot help but to think of the contentious relationship

of Jupiter, one of Cosimo I’s emblems, to Metis, the ‚mother‛ of ‚sovereign

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

of wisdom and intelligence. For instance, Nicholas Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus

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
69
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

connection to a fundamental concept of all pagan religions, Eastern and Western,

dating from the first millennium B.C. which holds that:

the inward turning of the mind<should culminate in a

realization of an identity in esse of the individual (microcosm)
and the universe (macrocosm), which, when achieved, would
bring together in act and realization the principles of eternity
and time, sun and moon, male and female.32

The meaning of Perseus’ name, ‚cutter,‛ is relevant. Plutarch’s citation of

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

androgyne, a joining of male and female, was in the Renaissance an emblem of

princes and emperors: it stood for universal knowledge.33

In Natale Conti’s words, Perseus is the ‚sun as an agent of divine mind,‛ a

reference to Athena, whose bronzette features, as mentioned, on the pedestal of

Cellini’s Perseus.34 Michael Cole has suggested that the statuette of the goddess of
70
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‛

(Minerva), a term that may refer to their intellectual affinity, or ‚union.‛

Not surprisingly, Renaissance mythology coming out of the school of

Fulgentius conceived of Athena’s shield as a gift of divine wisdom.36 As Cole has

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

graciously impart to my brother a mind, so that he might be knowing, and a

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

ille manu).37 In addition, Niccolo degli Agostini fashioned Andromeda as ‚the

71
noble mind which was taken and removed from God,‛ the mind that Perseus

married.38 I propose, in light of the preceding, that Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa

served as a means to compliment Cosimo I, who purportedly possessed God-given

wisdom, but the statue also reminds one that the wisdom that brought the duke to

power was a product of female agency.39

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,

Boccaccio’s Genealogie Deorum (Book I, 3) states that Perseus’ flight is mind’s

elevation to the celestial.

The figures of Mercury and Andromeda on Cellini’s pedestal acknowledge

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

Perseus’ ability to employ cunning strategies to defeat the Gorgon. Mercury

appears in the ancient allegorical tradition as Logos, Ratio, for he is the mind of the
72
sun god Apollo, who is, like Mercury himself, Perseus’ alter ego. Alciati also

stated that Mercury is wisdom.40 Similarly, Berchorius’ Moralized Ovid (219-220)

allegorizes Mercury’s flight, which the bronzette’s active pose suggests, as celestial

contemplation.

The enormity of Cellini’s Perseus, reaching to heaven as it were, reminds one

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

suggested heavenly ascent. Immensity was a feature ingrained in early Christian

teaching, especially in gnostic and docetic learning, and may even have drawn

from a Rabbinic tradition concerning Adam: ‚the first man extended from the

earth‛ (a dam) ‚to the firmament.‛42 Comparable to this line of reasoning is an

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
73
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

form. By adding the Gorgon’s body to Cosimo’s commission Cellini underscored

his assault on the female form. In this way the artist matched the ancients who

aimed to assure themselves of matriarchy’s defeat by including Medusa’s body in

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.

The severed neck of Cellini’s Medusa recalls the opening of a vessel, a

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

Container.‛44 Noteworthy in the preceding respect are Medusa’s breasts, which

Cellini accentuated by rendering them nude and pointing to the space above them.
74
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

Mother, they are Medusa’s alter egos.

The garlands of fruit above the Ephesian goddesses refer to Medusa’s

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

signify in comparable fashion nourishment and therefore life. Similarly, the

garlands on the Perseus’ pedestal probably refer to the Medici palle and thus

symbolized dynastic continuity, prosperity and abundance.

Cellini may have been inspired by Ovid’s essentialization of Medusa’s role

as the fertile Earth. Medusa’s blood worked its magic on the turf near Cetus’
75
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

soil and the Atlas mountain sprouted trees, as Ovid claimed.

Cellini and Varchi would have known that Fulgentius allegorized Medusa

as agriculture, while Giovanni Bonsignore characterized Medusa as Earth.47 In the

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

shown, snakes are earth emblems.

Only a decade before Cellini began to work on his Perseus Italy saw the

posthumous publication of the influential Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’Amore (1490s).

The text, which influenced Florentine Neoplatonism, includes a theological

allegory of Perseus’ ascent from earthiness (Medusa) to spiritual purity (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

takes the form of an assault on Earth.

Medusa also emerges as the Earth Mother on the Tazza Farnese, which
76
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.

Medusa’s role as Earth Mother invests the iconographical significance of the

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

senses, does not overcome. In Neumann’s words:

As mother and earth woman, the Great Mother is the

‚throne‛ pure and simple, and, characteristically, the
woman’s motherliness resides not only in the womb
but also in the seated woman’s broad expanse of thigh,
her lap on which the newborn child sits enthroned. To
be taken on the lap is, like being taken to the breast, a
symbolic expression for adoption of the child, and also
of the man, by the Feminine. It is no accident that the
greatest Mother Goddess of the early cults was named
77
 Isis, the ‚seat,‛ ‚the throne,‛ the symbol of which she
bears on her head; and the king who ‚takes possession‛
of the earth, the Mother Goddess, does so by sitting on
her in the literal sense of the word. The enthroned Mother
Goddess lives in the sacral symbol of the throne. The king
comes to power by ‚mounting the throne,‛ and so takes his
place on the lap of the Great Goddess, the earth – he becomes
her son. In widespread throne cults, the throne, which was
originally the godhead itself, was worshipped as the ‚seat of
the godhead‛<later the throne becomes the sacral symbol of
the Great Mother.51

Neumann also stated that:

The king, the Great Individual, the god among men

and the intermediary between above and below – he
too remains the child of the great Mother Goddess, the
mother of all the gods, who bore him and rebore him
and through whom alone he is king.52

In keeping, the oracle of the Libyan Sibyl proclaims:

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
78
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

simultaneously appropriating it and attempting to supersede the agency that

brought Perseus and indirectly Cosimo I to power.

The sun’s/Perseus’ setting ‚into‛ Earth is a similar image of physical

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

whom the sun is attached.55

It is noteworthy that the Latin word ‚solium,‛ meaning ‚throne,‛ derives

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
79
the form of births from her blood and severed head. The Gnostics interpreted the

Ouroboros, the ‚Great Round,‛ as an emblem of self-renewal after destruction.57

At other times the snake biting its tail was an emblem of the Earth Mother, and so

the unprecedented, ouroboric shape of Cellini’s Medusa suggests that she is a

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
80
image that conflates the Gorgon with the Earth-as-Womb.

A related source of inspiration for Cellini’s bronze might have been

‚gnostic‛ gems, which were collected in the Renaissance.60 Some of the jewels

bearing images of the uterus with winged appendages resemble winged Etruscan

Gorgoneia (Medusa heads). A. A. Barb’s research on whether or not the Metra

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

commission for the Loggia dei Lanzi to completion.

81
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

understanding of the sculptor’s conceptualization of his own manhood and of art

making as an honorable process. However, Cellini’s rivalry against the forces of

Nature reveals much about the unstable nature of his masculinity.

Contemporary writing lauded Cellini’s Perseus as an allegory of virtù, that

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

behavior is central to Cellini’s virtùous persona as it emerges in the Autobiography.

82
 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

artist was tantamount to proving oneself as a man.

The story of the Perseus’ casting celebrates violence and destruction, two

aspects of Cellini’s virtù. Attempting to outdo his rivals, including Michelangelo,

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:

I was shouting now to one person and now to another..

‚Bring it here! Take it there!,’ so that, when they saw that
the cake was beginning to liquefy, the entire troop obeyed
83
 me< Then I had a half bar of pewter brought,.. and I threw
it onto the cake inside the furnace, which, along with the
help caused by both the wood and by stirring it, now with
iron pokers and now with iron bars, in a short space of time
became liquid. Now when I saw that we had brought a
corpse back to life.. I regained so much energy that I no
longer realized whether I still had any fever or any fear of
death.65

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,

and ascended gloriously into heaven!‛66

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;

84
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.

As he cast his Perseus Cellini assumed the role of progenitor. In doing so he

became like the Lord, who created Adam from clay, the human body’s original

material, according to those living in Cellini’s day. Indeed, as the Autobiography

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:

Sixteenth-century casting terminology, which was derived

85
 from human anatomy, underlined this belief: the flames that
heated the crucible, which represented a kind of womb, were
fanned with bellows, a symbol of breathing in the force of life,
while the ‚living,‛ molten bronze was shaped inside the mould,
itself thought of as a matrix. In the mould, which was kept
together by a metal skeleton or ossatura, was the model made
of clay and wax, called anima or soul. Thus the sculptor built up
his image by analogy to God, who created humans from clay and
breathed life into them; fusione (casting) and infusione (animating,
inspiring) followed on from one another.70

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

86
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

implication about Renaissance masculinity.

Why, in this context, should Cellini/Perseus have chosen to rival Medusa if

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

insecure foundation of patriarchy.

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

mentioned, in antiquity competing impulses gave rise to rendering the Gorgon as

ugly and beautiful.

Cosimo I did not refute Cellini’s acknowledgement of Medusa’s strengths.

87
The duke’s acceptance of the Perseus and Medusa’s final form speaks volumes about

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.

88
 Notes

1. Cellini’s letter to Cosimo I’s secretary, Bartolommeo Concino discusses the

commission for the Perseus: ‚Il mio Illustrissimo ed Eccellentissimo Signor Duca mi
commisse, che io gli facessi un Statua di un Perseo di grandezza di tre braccia,
colla testa di Medusa in mano, e non altro. Io lo feci di piu di cinque braccia con la
detta testa in mano, e di piu con il corpo tutto di Medusa sotto i piedi; e gli feci
quella gran basa di marmo con il Giove, e Mercurio, e Danae, e il Bambino Perseo,
e Minerva, e di piu la Storia di Andromeda, si come si vede.‛ (‚My most
illustrious and excellent Lord Duke commissioned me to make a statue of Perseus,
three braccia high, with the head of Medusa in hand, and nothing more. I made it
more than three braccia high, with the said head in hand and, in addition, with the
entire body of Medusa under his feet; I also made him that great marble base, with
the Jupiter, Mercury, Danae, the Baby Perseus, and Minerva, and, in addition, the
story of Andromeda, as you see.‛) This letter is quoted in Opere di Benvenuto
Cellini, ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Turin, Italy: UTET, 1980): 474-475.

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.

4. Wind, 100n., 201n., 231, 260n.

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.

7. Wind, 201. Plato’s Symposium, trans. Seth Bernadete (Illinois: University of

Chicago Press, 2001): 105-109.

8. See Cooper, 80 on the head’s symbolism as a seat of honor, identity and the like.

9. On the androgyne see Battistini, 94. See Kathleen P. Long, Hermaphrodites in

Renaissance Europe (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2006): 7, 189-214.

10. See Cooper, 81, 154 for factual information on Janus’ symbolic value.

11. -----, 193.

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.

31. Valerie Shrimplin-Evangelidis’ translation of Nicholas Copernicus’ De

Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Nuremberg, 1543, ed. J. Dobrzycki (London,
England: Macmillan Press, 1978): Book I, Chapter 10.

32. Quotation of Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, 164.

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.

36. Cole, 132. Fulgentius, 161-162.

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.

40. Seznec, 102 discusses Mercury’s role as Wisdom.

41. Niccolo Martelli’s statement is part of a letter to Luigi Alamanni dated to

August 20, 1546 and is found in Cole, 61.

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.

46. Cole, 190, note 80; Agostini, 45.

47. Fulgentius, 61 states that Gorgo is related to the Greek ‚georgi,‛ the term for
farmer.

48. Giovanni Bonsignore, P. Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare novamente stampato,

diligentemente correcto & historiato (Milan, Italy: Nicola da Gorgonzola, 1520): 27.
Boccaccio’s On Famous Women (Chapter 22) suggests that Medusa’s name signifies
her knowledge of agriculture. Similarly, Neoplatonists and Hermeticists at the
Medici court asserted that Earth is female.

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.

51. Neumann, 98-99.

52. -----, 130.

53. Quoted in Esther Gordon Dotson, ‚An Augustinian Interpretation of

Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, Part II,‛ Art Bulletin 61 (1979): 426.

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.

65. -----, My Life, 329.

66. -----, My Life, 330.

67. I am grateful to Edward J. Olszewski for bringing to my attention the early

modern belief in clay as matter for the body. See also Scholten, 26, 33. Consult My
Life, 325-326 for Cellini’s explanation of his use of clay and earth to prepare his
Perseus and Medusa. Cellini’s most detailed description for his Accademia del
Disegno seal mentions that God ‚sculpted with earth.‛ See Cole, 124. The artist
also once said that ‚God made the first man out of sculpture in earth.‛ See Piero
98
Calamandrei, Scritti e Inediti Celliniani, ed. Carlo Cordié (Florence, Italy: La Nuova
Italia, 1971): 167.

68. Cole, 58.

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.

70. Scholten, 26.

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

reminded viewers of problems with the construction of the ruler’s power,

specifically, the transformation of Florence from republic to duchy. Florentines,

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

tension in sixteenth-century Florence. Some of the legal and cultural constraints

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

restrictions affected Cellini’s vision of the Perseus and Medusa in a provocative

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.

Sixteenth-century art epitomizing the body of the male ruler adoring, or

100
overcoming the state personified as a woman’s body include Giambologna’s Rape

of the Sabine, a later pro-Medici sculpture, on the Piazza della Signoria (fig. 24).2

The preceding ideological configuration takes a more complex turn in Cellini’s

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

helpful to our understanding of the hero’s treatment of the Gorgon.3

In different writings, elaborately so in The Prince, Machiavelli shows that

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.

Conversely, one of Machiavelli’s loathed epithets was effeminate because passivity

and dependence, then linked to the term, were perilous traits in men. However,
101
problems and contradictions invest his separatist view.

Gendered theories in Machiavelli’s texts intertwine with paradoxes about a

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

masculine capabilities.5 Pico might have been thinking of a competing divine

energy responsible for orchestrating world activity and infringing upon male

autonomy --- the goddess Fortuna, whose identity had already undergone various

changes before she touched Machiavelli’s imagination.

The ancient Roman world conceived of Fate as the goddess Fortuna. A

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

has an instance where the perceived malevolence of Woman took on mythical

form.

Fortuna retained her human character traits in the Renaissance, which

102
perhaps made it easier for people to associate her with Woman. Conflicted feel-

ings about Fortuna led to the practice of portraying her with either a beautiful face,

or an ugly one, like Medusa. Fortuna’s changeability led to a comparison to the

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

life and cosmic processes, merged with that of Fortuna.

The Renaissance’s interest in the pagan pantheon inspired men’s attempts

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

divinity. Their free will had the potential to rival her.

Machiavelli’s most influential writing, which criticism has not sufficiently

discussed in light of Cosimo I’s patronage, gives one a most compelling reason to

associate Fortuna with Cellini’s Medusa.9 In the Florentine statesman’s writing

Fortuna is most provocatively violent, aggressive, malevolent and deceiving.

However, Machiavelli sometimes connected Fortuna with God, or Heaven. Recall

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

fight in his best writing.12 In Machiavelli’s imagination the sexual conquest of

Fortuna interrelated with politics, history, and manliness. He eroticized political

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

preceding, in Machiavelli’s writings Fortuna is also in charge of the government of

a state, of a ruler’s power and victory, and of loss and honor in battle.

The Medici court enjoyed sexualized images of a Machiavellian nature, such

as Vasari’s decoration for the Sala di Giove in the Palazzo Vecchio, where each of

Jupiter’s sexual conquests corresponds to a specific military exploit of Duke

Cosimo I. In addition, Vasari’s First Fruits of the Earth Offered to Saturn shows

satyrs (Capricorns, references to Cosimo) abducting three partially clothed women

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

the goddess of Fate, as the satyrs do the helpless women.

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

soldier on horseback, a surrogate for the virtùous Francis I, is ready to strike a

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

FORTVNAM (He has overcome Fortuna by Virtue). Nevertheless, the statement

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

political and military conquest.

As Philip Atwood has observed, Cellini rendered the female on Francis’

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

which underscores Fortuna’s passivity.14 I would add that the association of

Fortuna with Night enhances the former’s astrological significance, while evoking

the threatening Mother Goddess. Cellini would have thought as much, for

Florentine Neoplatonism, the inspiration for Michelangelo’s Medici tombs,

105
characterized Night as a primordial maternal being.15 At San Lorenzo she is a star-

and-moon-bearing version of the Mother Goddess, a personification of earth,

heaven, the spent womb (witness her sagging abdomen), and even the tomb, or

underworld.

Michelangelo once wrote a poem stipulating that night is more important

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

characterizes her as a rival for the horseman, Francis I.

Precedents for Francis’ medal were Roman coins, for instance, a silver

denarius of Septimius Severus (193-211, fig. 27), showing horsemen defeating

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

domination and oppression.

Similarly, the hierarchical arrangement of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa

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
106
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

have complemented extant sexualizations of Cosimo’s military campaigns.

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

he may adore her.

The sexual content of the Autobiography, like that of Cellini’s bronze for

Cosimo I, is dialectical. Cellini’s treatment of his model Caterina, echoed

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
107
did, and raping them, which Cellini did at least once, enhanced and legitimized

one’s masculinity. Ironically, in contemporary opinion, rape controlled women’s

unruly nature, which mirrored Fortuna and Medusa.21

The sculptor’s relationships with females inspired him to write about the

‚nature‛ of women and their dangerous powers. Throughout the Autobiography,

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

his characterization of Madame d’Étampes of Fontainebleau as a Harpy. She was

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

Penthesilea was a courtesan from Italy.

Similarly, in one of Cellini’s poems, Fortuna is a bitch, for he believed that

she continually battled against him. It is no surprise that he sometimes conflated

Fortuna with the intimidating females in his life. The conclusion to his story of

Eleonora’s disappointment with his appraisal of one of her pearl necklaces is

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
108
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

merits of virtùous men.

There is, Machiavelli specified, a special reason why Fortuna – and

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

previously mentioned. To be under this second mother’s control means being

childish, bestial and dependent.24 Machiavelli’s tenets reveal the unstable nature

of Renaissance masculinity.

The following passage from Machiavelli’s ‚How a State Falls Because of

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
109
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.

Indeed, a common theme in Machiavelli’s thought is that while young

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

him to execute her father.26

It is no surprise that weak men can protect themselves by keeping a

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

are. The ability to change, to take on protean characteristics, as many of Ovid’s

characters do, is one way to overcome an opponent. Although Fortuna is fickle,

110
she yields to those who fight forcefully. Therefore, men must ‚match her passion

with their own passion, her actions with their own actions.‛ ‚The male depends on

the female and must assimilate himself to her.‛27

The interchangeable identities of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa reflect

Machiavelli’s claims that men must become like their adversary and that virtù

needs adversary in order to triumph. Remember, Perseus rose to power through

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

of casting the Perseus despite the fickleness of Natura contributed to Cellini’s

greatness. The defensive flavor of Cellini’s Autobiography as a whole answers the

call to virtùous action and in the process it proves his ability to transcribe

‚masculinity into artistic enterprise.‛28 Machiavelli’s idea and the Machiavellian

significance of Cellini’s androgynous Perseus and Medusa might have bolstered,

indeed, the contemporary, insecure male desire (like that of Cosimo I) to display

violence in a cavalier manner, a way of suggesting that men were superior to

Fortuna, who ended up controlling half the time and leaving the other half to

men’s will.

Duke Cosimo I’s ambition to achieve the status of an autonomous absolutist

mirrored Machiavelli’s belief that men should not be dependent on women. In

Cosimo’s case, those women were Eleonora di Toledo and Maria Salviati, the
111
sisters of Fortuna, and so it is plausible that the duke, who was steeped in

contemporary political theory, would have taken Machiavelli’s prescriptions to

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

that dependence on the maternal survives denigration of her power.

It is interesting that an inspiration for Machiavelli’s ideas about mimicking

Fortuna was his experience with a ‚public woman‛ of ‚overwhelming power‛

who exerted influence on the political world ‚from behind‛ – Caterina Sforza, the

grandmother of Cosimo I de’ Medici.30 Machiavelli’s first important mission as

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

aware of the Florentine theorist’s association of Fortuna’s cunning elusiveness with

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
112
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,

may have personified generic uncertainty, the unknown, as well as adversity

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

inadequacies and weaknesses, which in high profile spheres like government

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

of the sexes‛ burgeoned in literature fraught with anxious reactions to the

improving state of women. It is no coincidence, then, that contemporary literature

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,
113
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

to compensate for the ‚rise‛ of women.

As fear of women abounded, contemporary courtesy books, such as

Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galateo, dueling manuals and legal decisions prescribed

rules that contributed to the multiple, unstable nature of Renaissance masculinity.

A number of these echo Machiavelli’s contradictory rules to avoid effeminacy and

to emulate Fortuna/Woman. Castiglione’s The Courtier, which prizes violence and

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

of the women of the palace:37

...male and female always go naturally together, and

one cannot exist without the other. So by very defin-
ition we cannot call anything male unless it has its
female counterpart, or anything female if it has no
male counterpart.38

Castiglione’s comment must have led men to think about similarities between

themselves and women.

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
114
themselves and to others. As Mark Breitenberg has stated, ‚male anatomical

superiority must surely have been experienced as tenuous (and potentially

reversible), thus encouraging the symbolic importance of the codpiece as an

outward sign of something in actuality less secure.‛39 The act of effeminizing

vulnerability necessarily entrapped men in their own undesirable code of

meaning. In different contexts, then, Fortuna/Woman would have undermined the

equation of male gender and sexuality with political and military power in ways

which, paradoxically, men manipulated themselves.

Additional expectations about a man’s public and private images proved to

be contradictory. Ideas about what constituted appropriate behavior for married

or marriageable men, who were responsible for maintaining social and political

order, illuminate the ambiguous nature of early modern manhood. Marriage was

the culmination of a ritualized process that transformed disorderly youths into

trustworthy men. Supposedly, male youths were emotionally unstable, prone to

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
115
male honor was, then, a paradox.

Cellini’s profile in the Autobiography mirrors that of Alberti’s typical youth.

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

he attacked Gherardo with a stiletto, thereby avenging his murdered brother:

With great dexterity, I approached him with a large dagger

of the type made in Pistoia and spun him around with a back
stroke, hoping to cut off his head cleanly, but he turned quickly
and my blow hit him on the edge of his left shoulder and broke
the entire bone; he got up, leaving his sword behind, and confused
by the intense pain, he began to run, but I followed him and caught
up with him in four steps. After I raised my dagger above his head,
he lowered it as far as he could and took the blow at a point right
on the neck bone and halfway down the nape of the neck, and the
whole blade of the dagger went in so deeply that although I applied
tremendous force to extricate it, I could not do so. .. Giovan Bandini
arrived, and told<‛ ‚This dagger is mine, and I loaned it to Benvenuto
who wanted to avenge his brother.‛ The reactions of the soldiers were
many, and they all were sorry to have interrupted me, even though my
revenge was taken to excess.44

As the previous account from Cellini’s Autobiography suggests, violence was

116
prevalent in the Renaissance. Violence protected one’s honor; hence the soldiers’

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

chimera which they could gain and keep only by fighting.45

Paradoxically, the Renaissance code of honor perpetuated violence, causing

more headaches for legal authorities and for the state as a whole. That such

actions had widespread politicized ramifications is not surprising, for public

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
117
with criticism even while it prevailed.46

Cellini’s Perseus upholds the Renaissance cult of manhood with its

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

Fortuna/Woman/Medusa. However, the androgynous character of the statue

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

oneself, as it turned against Cellini.

Just as Perseus has a paradoxical relationship to the bronze Medusa, so

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

distinctions that were simultaneously construed as the necessary bonds between

men.‛48 Thus, female chastity could engender anxiety in men.49 Husbands and
118
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

disrupt masculine identity.

The instability of Renaissance manhood, and, for that matter Renaissance

womanhood, mirrors an underlying problem with metaphors of the holistic body

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

exclude, the possibility of fragmentation and disunity.‛51 The state’s divisibility is

implied in Machiavelli’s discussion of the elements of difference and aberration

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

feminine presence within the idea of the state.

Machiavelli himself had a similar breakthrough. In John Najemy’s words,

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-
119
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

Florentine political theorist made more of composite bodies than homogeneous

ones.

Likewise, though incontestable in many ways, Cosimo’s vision of his

absolutist state did meet with challenges of a practical nature and even clashed

with contemporary visions of a homogeneous state. Consider, for instance, the

republican exiles from the Battle of Montemurlo, who tried to revolt several times

and even attempted to spread anti-Medici propaganda. Another problem for

Cosimo I might have been the lingering popularity of Francesco Guicciardini’s

controversial History of Italy (1530s), whose author had lost all favor with Pope

Clement VII before beginning his bitter laments of Fortuna’s victory in

contemporary politics. He wanted those whom the Medici defeated, aristocratic

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

than the single despot, meaning, no doubt, Cosimo I de’ Medici.54

As Lauro Martines has observed, Fortuna’s wheel was a ‚fitting cipher‛ for

theoretical attempts, such as those of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, to make sense

of the upper classes’ loss of power.55 Martines has also stated that if sixteenth-
120
century writers attempted to:

enlarge the scope within which man-will-virtue, seen as unity,

could be successful, the mere fact that the problem was so
incessantly put, and so often answered in favor of Fortune,
was testimony to the loss of faith in voluntaristic action.
Rather, experience seemed to show that the scope of unreason
had expanded.56

It is worth stressing that in the preceding instances a female figure is to blame for

the political disappointments of men.

Thus, a strongly dialectical image, Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, matched the

variously disturbing and promising natures of events in the contemporary Tuscan

state and in contemporary political theory. In doing so, the statue problematizes

the prince’s relationship to Fortuna, suggesting that Medusa’s/Fortuna’s inimical

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

of political writing that instructed the sovereign in leadership. Before examining

Cellini’s bronze as a ‚mirror of the prince‛ it is necessary to travel back to ancient

Rome, where the genre originated.57

121
The Mirror of the Prince

Seneca’s De clementia is the earliest surviving speculum principis. The text’s

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

weapons, for his virtue wins the love of those he governs.

One of the most controversial characters in the Roman philosopher’s text is

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

who inspires the prince’s self-reflection.

However, Seneca also explained that a man can fight Fortuna with his virtù,

for the latter needs antagonism in order to flourish, as it does in Machiavelli’s

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:

A gladiator counts it a disgrace to be matched with an

122
 inferior, and knows that to win without danger is to win
without glory. The same is true of Fortuna. ....Those that
are most stubborn and unbending she assails, men against
whom she may exert all her strength.59

However, a wise man ‚possesses an undiminished and stable liberty, being

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

apparent misfortune and inuria with equanimity.‛60

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.

Peter Stacey has offered an original account of how Machiavelli, unique in

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

principis, especially one item in De clementia – the prince’s need to be constantly

merciful and to abstain from vice.62 The Prince exposes the injury, murder,

ruthlessness, greed, oppression and the instability of princely political regimes,

reversing the effects of the speculum principis by deconstructing, while ‚sharpening

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

123
read in the Renaissance.64 The latter theorist once stated that ‚the most satisfactory

thing is if you are in a position to derive an argument from your opponent.‛ At

the same time, it can be ‚unsafe to speak openly.‛65 Machiavelli’s treatise is one of

simultaneous ‚dissimulation and self-disclosure,‛ a most Quintilian technique that

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.

At the heart of Machiavelli’s philosophy is a rejection of many of the ways

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

However, Machiavelli undermined the prince’s ability to create and to maintain

political unity/stability by exposing what occurs to bodies when they fall under

princely rule.

In a paradoxical manner, Machiavelli stated that without the occasione from

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
124
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

states that dominate people are either republics or principalities.70 Machiavelli

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

chord with Cosimo I’s and Perseus’ rise to power.

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.

Now, in sixteenth-century Florence Machiavelli claimed that to live under a prince

is to be unfree, as Stacey has observed.73 It is no wonder, then, that Machiavelli

satirically counseled that Medicean rule could improve through republicanism.74

The theme of deceit which is so important to the tale of Medusa’s demise

with the aid of Athena’s mirror-shield and thus to Cellini’s Perseus assumes a new

political dimension in the context of Machiavelli’s discourse on the contingent

125
state. The deceptive prince, such as Cosimo I, assimilates himself to Fortuna by

adopting her image as an elusive cosmic force, just as Cellini’s Perseus adopts the

image of the Gorgon (Fortuna).75

Was Cosimo I, whom many praised as a ‚mirror of the prince‛ (a model

prince), aware that his adversarial Perseus is a Machiavellian prince whose mirror

image in bronze is an emblem of destruction?76 The ‚mirror reflection‛ of Cosimo

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

statue is a crafty, Machiavellian speculum principis. The figure of Perseus looks

down toward the mirror-like shield of Athena, for which the distorted circular

configuration of Medusa’s body is a foil. The implied ‚reflection‛ is up above, at a

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

that self-reflection and even seeing one’s Gorgonian reflection is intrinsic to

fashioning oneself as an artist, or a ruler – even ruthless ones.

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

heights to which Fortuna (Medusa, Maria Salviati, Eleonora di Toledo) brought

126
him and which he shares with Fortuna, the prince poses a threat to potential

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,

Cellini’s statue testifies to the instability of Seneca’s theory of a unified princedom.

Agnolo Bronzino also painted an image of Duke Cosimo as a ‚mirror of the

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‛

(portrait) and ‚specchio‛ (mirror) connoted excellence.77 A letter from Bronzino’s

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

in him.‛78 The contemporary belief that armor deflected evil is relevant to

Bronzino’s painting.79 Two large circles on Cosimo’s breastplate further support

the mirror metaphor, I propose. Their spikes, like the rest of the armor, shine

brilliantly and are tropes for the sovereign’s militarism.

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
127
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

Cosimo’s rulership and his metaphorical image as a demi-god. Indeed, in the

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:

in paintings and buildings the wisdom and skill of the artist

shines forth. Moreover, we can see in them the attitude and
the image, as it were, of his mind; for in these works the mind
expresses and reflects itself not otherwise than a mirror reflects
the face of a man who looks into it.82

The duke’s armor appears inviolable. Its spiked besagues, especially,

accentuate Cosimo’s adversarial nature. On the other hand, as Peter Stallybrass

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

identity, it is also detachable.‛84 Therefore, the armor (the Machiavellian speculum

principis) in Bronzino’s portrait becomes by default a reminder of the limitations of

Cosimo’s power.

Robert Simon has noted that the tight frame around the duke offsets any
128
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,

perhaps pointing up his humanity.86

The adversarial character of Machiavelli’s prince warrants close attention.

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,

Machiavelli strangely claimed, by the might of Fortuna and of womankind. In

other words, the feminine presence within the state is a foil for the prince’s

weakness. That weakness is what necessitates the ruler’s arms.87

Interestingly, Machiavelli implied a connection between the prince and the

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
129
extant portrayals of leaders and their military campaigns. The latter populated the

Palazzo Vecchio. At times, Machiavelli even suggested that the prince be a

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

‚armed‛ influence believedly had a share in Florence’s prosperity.88

War was an art for Machiavellians. War involves the mind of the ruler, who

must be steeped in military learning. Art bearing militaristic themes, including

Cellini’s Perseus, for Cosimo I would have complimented the Medici duke’s

erudition in warfare, even vengefully so since Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories tells

that Cosimo the Elder was unable to expand Florentine power because he was a

disarmed man.89

Cellini’s Perseus is a ‚real‛ warrior-prince who embodies the military might

of Florence under Medicean absolutism. The mythological figure of Perseus was,

in fact, a soldier, just as Cosimo I purportedly was. Cellini’s statuette of Minerva,

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

of her holding a spear. In addition, Vasari’s Ragionamenti considers the military

leader’s virtù to be associated with Mercury as a model of erudition, like Duke

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
130
state’s dependence on the aid of deities.

According to Machiavelli, taking up arms gives rise to one’s inner beast,

that is, an epitome of the ruler’s imperfection. Even though Machiavelli claimed

that bestiality is a sign of weakness, the man-beast is the epitome of perfection.

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

Cellini often did:

You must recognize that there are two ways of fighting:

by means of law, and by means of force. The first belongs
properly to man, the second to animals; but since the first
is often insufficient, it is necessary to resort to the second.
Therefore, a prince must know how to use both what is
proper to man and what is proper to beasts. The writers
of antiquity taught rulers this lesson allegorically when
they told how Achilles and many other ancient princes
were sent to be nurtured by Chiron the centaur, so that
he would train them in his discipline. Their having a
creature half-man and half-beast as tutor only means that
a prince must know how to use both the one and the other
nature, and that the one without the other cannot endure.92

Similarly, Alciati’s Book of Emblems contains a selection on Chiron that reads:

Whoever advises kings ought to be a professor who is

half-animal, and a centaur who is half-human. The king
becomes a beast when he ravages his allies and when he
annihilates his enemies; he becomes a man when he repre-
sents himself to his people as being devoted to them.93

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
131
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

faces of the people.‛95 The austerity of Cosimo’s temperament resulted in his

profound distrust of many near him, from whom he withheld his feelings and

opinions.96 In effect, he thought and behaved like Machiavelli’s hunted beast.

Did artists give Cosimo’s ‚beastly‛ nature a visual form? An image of

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,

open-mouthed visages mimicking those of the more obviously animal-human

composites on the ruler’s armor. For example, a small head of a lion, a solar
132
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,

the satyr is in this instance an emblem of sovereignty. Cellini’s bust of Cosimo I

characterizes the duke as a Machiavellian ruler with beastly traits.99

Medusa, like the Mediterranean Earth Mother, sometimes appeared with

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
133
duke’s appropriation of the Gorgon’s power as the Earth Mother. Yet, Medusa’s

presence on Cosimo’s chestplates reminds one of the beastly ruler’s vulnerability,

that is, his need to rely on her apotropaic force.

The Medusa head on Cosimo’s bronze breastplate associates his bust with

Cellini’s Perseus, another Machiavellian beast-ruler and, remember, another

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

Perseus’ bronze helmet one finds an open-mouthed, four-pawed animal whose

hump back characterizes him a deviant of nature and perhaps an embodiment of

Perseus’/Cosimo I’s – the beast-rulers’ -- moral imperfection (fig. 36).

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
134
state.

It is worth stressing the ability of Pan (a deceitful figure, like Cosimo I) to

disrupt the psychological and physiological balance of human beings by instilling

panic in them.102 How does panic set into the landscape as a result of Pan’s

presence?103 Ancient texts, such as Clearchus of Soli’s On Panic, describe panic as

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

thereof. I propose that references in the form of the frightening creatures on

Cosimo I’s bust to Pan’s fear and panic induction characterize the Medici ruler’s

presence as a contrived apotropaion which necessitates (as Machiavelli’s virtù does)

adversaries, known or unknown, within the landscape of Florence.

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

the Orientalizing period of artistic production in Greece Medusa sometimes

135
appeared as a centaur, and in this guise she served as both the adversary and tutor

of heroes (fig. 37).105 She thus becomes, like Fortuna, the perfect companion and

nemesis of the Machiavellian warrior prince (Cosimo I).

136
 Notes

1. Nicolai Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and

Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic (Oxford, England: Clarendon
Press, 1995): 64ff. For a discussion of new government-run restrictions placed on
individuals in Cosimo I’s absolutist state see John Brackett, Criminal Justice and
Crime in late Renaissance Florence, 1537-1609 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).

2. Paul Archambault, ‚The Analogy of the Body in Renaissance Political

Literature,‛ Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 29 (1967): 21-53. David Hale,
The Body Politic: a Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (Paris, France:
Mouton, 1971). Lynn Hunt, Eroticism and the Body Politic (Maryland: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991). Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. John
Najemy, ‚The Republic’s Two Bodies: Body Metaphors in Italian Renaissance
Political Thought,‛ in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown
(Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1995): 237-262. See Randolph, 19-75 for a
discussion of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s identity as the lover of Florence and of the
contemporary practice of allegorizing the state as a female object of desire.

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.

6. Howard Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Massachusetts:

Harvard University Press, 1927): 12-25.

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.

9. See Gwendolyn Trottein, ‚Battling Fortune in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Cellini

and the Changing Faces of Fortuna,‛ in Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and
Warfare in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pia Cuneo (Massachusetts: Brill Press, 2002):
218, 220-221 for the reception of Fortuna’s image in Medici Florence. Trottein
mentions Fortuna’s image in Machiavelli’s thought.

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.

11. Quoted on Pitkin, 145.

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.

15. For a discussion of Night as Mother Goddess and of Neoplatonism’s place in

Michelangelo’s vision for San Lorenzo see Balas, Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel: a
New Interpretation (Pennsylvania: American Philosophical Society, 1995).

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.

20. Cellini, My Life, 274.

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.

22. -----, My Life, 285.

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.

26. Machiavelli, Discourses, Book III, Chapter 4. In the second chapter of

Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories one reads that the first division in Florence
resulted from the treachery of two women – a rich widow and her daughter. The
story involved the widow’s desire to persuade a young knight to end his betrothal
to a wealthy girl so he could marry her more beautiful daughter. The rejected
girl’s family murdered the knight as revenge, an event that divided the city
between the Uberti, the slighted girl’s kin, and the Buondelmonti, the knight’s
family. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Harvey Mansfield (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1988): 55-56.

27. Quotation of Arlene W. Saxonhouse, ‚Niccolo Machiavelli: Women as Men,

Men as Women, and the Ambiguity of Sex,‛ in Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo
Machiavelli, ed. Maria J. Falco (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2004): 98, 99, my italics.

28. Quotation of Gallucci, 113.

29. Langdon (33) has noted broadly that Cosimo I depended ‚on Maria’s image for
full credibility in the political arena.‛

30. Pitkin, 109.

31. Maria J. Falco, ed., Introduction, Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo Machiavelli, 5.

Machiavelli’s Discourses, Book I, Chapter 9 discusses Caterina Sforza as a strong
maternal power.

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.

33. For Medusa as Discord, an embodiment, in my view, of uncertainty, chaos, and

adversity, see Giorgio Vasari, Le Opere, vol. 8, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, Italy:
G. C. Sansoni, 1906): 566. Peter Daly, ‚Alciato’s Emblem ‘Concordiae Symbolum’:
a Medusa’s Mirror for Rulers?‛ German Life and Letters 41:4 (1988): 354 acknow-
ledges that in the Renaissance Medusa was a frequent representation of discord.

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.

35. Hibbert, 269 includes a discussion of Cosimo and Eleonora’s marital

relationship. Here, one also reads that Cosimo did not get along with his mother
and neither did Eleonora.

36. Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1959): 250.

37. Castiglione, 220ff. Gallucci, 120.

38. -----, 220.

39. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge,

England: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 151.

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.

42. Tinagli, 25.

43. Cellini, My Life, xxxi-xxxii, 25-26.

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.

47. See Breitenberg, 73 for Renaissance standards of female virtue.

48. -----, 96.

49. See Breitenberg’s study for a discussion of the paradoxical nature of

Renaissance masculinity in itself and as it related to the feminine.

50. Breitenberg, 97ff.

51. Najemy, 241.

52. -----, 257.

53. -----, 258.

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.

55. Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy

(Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988): 327.

56. -----, 327.

57. The term ‚speculum principis‛ is medieval.

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.

59. Seneca, vol. 1, 16.

60. -----, vol. 1, 416.

61. Stacey, 72.

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.

63. Stacey, 210.

64. On the popularity of Quintilian in the Renaissance see, Stacey 212-214.

65. -----, 257. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001): 72-74.

66. Stacey, 257.

67. -----, 286-293.

68. -----, 234, 259. Seneca, De Clementia, in Moral Essays, 360-362.

69. -----, 58, 77, 94, 234, 259. Seneca, De Clementia, in Moral Essays, vol. 1, 356.

70. -----, 260ff.

71. -----, 260.

72. -----, 262. Machiavelli, Il Principe e Discorsi, ed. Sergio Bertelli (Milan, Italy:
Feltrinelli, 1960): 29.

73. Machiavelli, Il Principe e Discorsi, 29. Stacey, 265ff.

74. Machiavelli, Il Principe e Discorsi, 15.

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.

77. Langdon, 82.

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.

83. Peter Stallybrass, ‚Hauntings: the Materiality of Memory on the Renaissance

Stage,‛ in Gender and Representation in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early
Modern Europe, eds. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (North Carolina: Duke
University Press, 2001): 297.

84. -----, 297.

85. Simon, Bronzino’s Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici, 140-142.

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.

89. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 281ff, 329ff.

90. Medusa was, in fact, a fixture in the warrior ideology of Archaic Greece
because of her association with the Amazons.

91. Vasari, Le Opere, vol. 8, 199.

92. Machiavelli, The Prince, 62.

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.

95. -----, 266.

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.

99. See Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art

(Massachusetts: Brill Press, 2008): 247, which states that in the Renaissance ‚the
monstrous conjoining of part human and part animal expressed a threatening
dualism or hypocrisy.‛

100. Bernardino di Betto, also known as Pinturicchio (1452-1513), painted a picture

of the earth goddess Cybele with lions, thus proving that the link between the
animals and the Mother Goddess was known in the Renaissance. See Roller, 295
for an illustration of the ancient Mother Goddess in her lion-drawn chariot. The
eagles on Cosimo’s breastplate point up Jupiter’s significance to the duke’s
mythical image and they also link the bust to Cellini’s Perseus. Interestingly, the
inscription beneath the bust indicates that Jupiter will punish Perseus’ enemies.

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.‛

105. There is a correspondence between centaurs and Amazons as anomalous

Others in numerous ancient depictions of the Amazonomachy, for the Greeks’
battle with the centaurs frequently appears alongside Greeks’ battle with the
Amazons. Perhaps Medusa’s ancient guise as a centaur relates to the preceding
images. See Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the
Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982). The
Acropolis’ altar to the Mother Goddess includes two statues of Pan. In the
Medicean context Pan would have emerged as a version of Machiavelli’s prince,
for the goat god was a ‚founder.‛ He contributed his cave on the Acropolis to the
establishment of Athens. Likewise, Perseus and Cosimo founded great dominions.

148
Chapter 4 The Goddess as Other and Same

The conception of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa as a speculum principis

involves the paradoxical relationship between hero and victim, as indicated.

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,

Medusa’s role in that trope echoes fifteenth-century conflicts with Woman as

divine Other.

The shield of Athena is a ‚reconciler‛ and a ‚divider.‛ It represents

Perseus’ status as a demi-god. A mirror reflection in multiple ways, the face of

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

same and other.‛1

Jean-Pierre Vernant ‘s words are meaningful to Perseus’ encounter with the

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

played up the Medici dynasty’s ability to overcome misfortune, often seemingly

against the most terrible odds.3

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

of the men and women around her.

Cellini’s shield associates Judith with Medusa’s power as a divinity. Here,

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

Medici women as public Others.

Women on Top

The function of Donatello’s Judith as a female leader in the Medici Palace

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

significant to Donatello’s statue, since Holofernes served Nebuchadnezzar, king of

Babylon. Those coming into the Medici Palace garden would have found it

appropriate to conceive of Judith’s defeat of Holofernes as a symbol of the

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

conclusus, a symbol of Mary’s virginity. Saints Jerome’s and Ambrose’s interpreta-

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

of Saint Antonine’s Summa, which discusses Judith as Mary’s forerunner.7

The Medici probably would have known Saint Bonaventure’s explanation

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

Judith’s feat as Chastity’s punishment of Lust/Sodomy.9 It would have been

appropriate, therefore, to consider Donatello’s statue as an allegory of Christian

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.

The same difference between Judith and Holofernes created an ideational

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

A political turn of thought of probable interest to Cosimo the Elder invested

the Medici garden’s image as Paradise before the Fall. Paradise had courtly and

imperial connotations in the fifteenth century which would have complemented

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

Elder, a great gardener himself.13

However, Judith’s assault on Holofernes posed a challenge to the

patriarchal establishment of Medicean Florence. In Margarita Stocker’s words,

Holofernes’ decollation has:

the effect... to demonize masculine sexuality as the national

penetration of invasion, as Holofernes and his.. lust for power,
as the rapine which is an intimidating strategy of power politics.
In these symbolic patterns the Book of Judith deliberately portrays
sexual politics as a vehicle for its religious themes. When Judith
decapitates Holofernes — man, lover, ruler, commander --- she
beheads patriarchy.14

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

weapon symbolizes the connection between male, and female as Other.15

Donatello’s Judith is formally implicated in Holofernes’ sexuality, despite

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

masculinity by rendering it ‚formless.‛16 However, the bronze heroine’s body

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.

Perhaps Judith’s involvement in Holofernes’ sexuality is the result of an

attempt to downplay her political success and her godliness and, concomitantly,

to draw attention to her physical weakness as a woman.17 Note that Donatello

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.

One might reformulate Judith’s struggle into an epitomization of the binary

of gendered power in Medicean Florence, where women were denigrated as

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

transition from republic to princely state, as Tomas has shown.18 Republics

enabled women to enjoy a certain amount of freedom in the public sphere, since

informal, flexible networks were part of republican political machinery. At this

155
time the Medici women gained more and more influence as intercessors for their

male family members, and the women even acquired power through their

participation in the ‚undergovernment‛ of the Florentine state.19

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.

One should conceive of the Medici women’s role as intercessors in the

context of their deep devotion to and identification with the Virgin Mary, the

intercessor for God’s blessing on behalf of humankind. Indeed, in order to legiti-

mize their involvement in public affairs as well as political events within their own

home, the Medici women consciously and unconsciously portrayed themselves as

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

women were not always looked upon with favor.

Opponents of the Medici were known to direct their political antipathy

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

Lorenzo the duchy of Urbino.21 Vettori’s slanderous description of Orsini as a

‚nagging and whining woman‛ contrasts with that of her ‚good son.‛22

Consider the denigration of the Medici women’s image as rulers in light of

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

Florentine republic. In the eyes of Renaissance Florentines the rule of a woman

posed a particularly poignant threat: that rule was tantamount to the loss of male

liberty.23 Evidence supporting this conclusion is Bartolomeo Cerretani’s comment

157
that what he saw in the Signoria during Piero Soderini’s tenure in office was

‚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

domesticate the men working in the palace.25 Matching Cerretani’s comment is

Filarete’s characterization of Donatello’s Judith as a type for Fortuna with fatal

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

for ‚public women,‛ such as Alfonsina Orsini.

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

family’s relations with the papal court. In addition, Maria participated in

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

duke throughout his time in power.

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

is a denigrated version of the Holy Mother.

One should consider Pinturicchio’s painting in light of the Medici women’s

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

Mother, Judith nevertheless embodied, as Medusa did, the fearsomeness of the

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

merits of ‚public women.‛

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

pronounced sexual form in Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.

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.

2. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, Collected Essays (New Jersey:

Princeton University Press, 1991): 137.

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.

5. Matthew G. Looper, ‚Political Messages in the Medici Palace Garden,‛ Journal of

Garden History 12:4 (1992): 261-262.

6. -----, 262.

7. -----, 262.

8. Saint Bonaventure, ‚De navitate b. virginis Mariae,‛ sermon 5.3.

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.

10. Looper, 262.

11. -----, 262.

12. -----, 262-264.

161
13. -----, 263-264.

14. Stocker, 8.

15. I am grateful to Professor Olszewski for bringing the scimitar’s significance as a

product of Eastern or alien cultures to my attention. See Olszewski, ‚Bring on the
Clones: Pollaiuolo’s Battle of Ten Nude Men,‛ Artibus et Historiae 30:60 (2009): 23.

16. Remember, for example, Clytemnestra, who enveloped Agamemnon in a

garment that had no boundaries.

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.

19. -----, 45, 67-68.

20. -----, 45-46, 52, 56, 59.

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.

23. Randolph, 265-285.

24. Quoted on Randolph, 281.

25. -----, 281.

26. Quoted on Randolph, 280.

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

The sexually symbolic character of Medusa’s being enhances her role as

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

head is also uterine. Medusa is, in conclusion, an epitome of the devouring

Mother, whose fertile potency poses a threat to patriarchy.2

Medusa’s role as a voracious maternal power reminds one of the devouring

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

sexuality of Woman, which Medusa embodies, emerged as a threat to ancient and

early modern patriarchy.

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

from Cellini’s Medusa compare in shape to Perseus’ phallus. Cellini’s stylization

164
indicates that he was aware of the traditional role of serpents per se as phallic

symbols.4

Evidentially, the sexual symbolism of the Perseus and Medusa was personally

meaningful to Cellini. The statue’s androgyny as a whole epitomizes his own

conflicted sexuality, for he as Perseus identified with the sexual Other in the form

of Medusa.

His Autobiography indicates that Cellini had various relationships with

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

One of Cellini’s poems is an interesting revelation of his psychological state

during the time that he was discriminated against because of his sexual

orientation:

I’ve struggled through two months here in

despair: some say I’m here on Ganymede’s
account; Others, because I spoke out too
audaciously. To love anyone but women is
unknown to Perseus; I don’t have the fair
winged youth’s respected prize.9

Cellini refers to his sodomical crime as ‚Ganymede’s account,‛ an expression that

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

fragment. Cellini retorted by deprecating Bandinelli’s own Hercules and Cacus,

thereby precipitating the latter’s subsequent insult: ‚Oh, keep quiet, you dirty

sodomite!‛11 Cellini denied the accusation with the following remark:

Oh, you madman, you’ve taken leave of your senses;

but I wish to God that I knew how to exercise such a
noble art, for we read that Jove practiced it on Ganymede
in paradise, while here on earth it is practiced by the
greatest emperors and the greatest kings in the world.
I am but a lowly and humble little man, who neither
could nor would ever know how to meddle in such a
marvelous manner.12
166
This clever, humorous, self-serving speech dispelled the gloom that Bandinelli

cast over those in his presence, while it legitimized the practice of sodomy by

linking it to great emperors and kings.

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

the Autobiography as a whole, betrays the sculptor’s insecurity.

Gallucci has stressed that Cellini’s reputation as a transgressor helped to

bring about his conviction for sodomy. He was keenly aware of contemporary

social and legal restrictions on male sexuality, so he:13

violates Petrarchan conventions in his lyric, ridiculing

its language of love and celebration of female beauty, in
order to align himself with the oppositional voices of his
167
 day who sought to critique contemporary family values.
Like Bronzino and Pietro Aretino, Cellini chose to sing the
praises of a variety of transgressive practices in his poetry,
choosing sex over love, whores (or even boys) over wives,
sodomy over ‚natural‛ sexual acts.14

Cellini’s Autobiography indicates that his trial for sodomy, his charge and

subsequent house arrest provoked the sculptor’s enraged attack on Medici

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

wrote his memoirs while he was imprisoned for sodomy.

Cellini had reason to feel insecure about his sexuality. Paradoxically, police

institutions, such as the Ufficiali di notte, fostered a climate of fear in early

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

previous provisions enabling younger partners to remain exempt from prosecu-

tion. He also imposed a regulation for long-term imprisonment in the Stinche, or

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

promiscuous sodomites – that calling for punishment in the form of beheading.

168
Another law, the one that incriminated Cellini, entailed more severe penalties for

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.

Similarly, contemporary legal convictions against sodomites refer to the latter as

bitches and whores.16 Fear and insecurity about the future of his state seem to

have inspired Cosimo I to treat sodomites in severe fashions. The following

occasion suggests as much. On July 8, 1542 disaster struck northern Florence in

the form of an earthquake. After lightning bolts damaged the Palazzo Ducale

Cosimo quickly wrote two new laws – one against blasphemy and one against

sodomy. Thus, threats to virtù in the form of sodomy/homosexuality would have

had the potential to ruin the Tuscan state. In other words, since male

heterosexuality and the state were equable, aberrations in the former could

damage the latter, just as women 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.

3. Stocker, 52, 53 notes that a heightened ‚phobia‛ of women emerged in Europe

around 1500. At this time ‚a customary fear of women’s sexuality‛ merged with
‚complaints about women’s domineering impulses.‛ For a discussion of early
modern fears of the womb see David Miller’s The Poem’s Two Bodies: the Poetics of
the 1590 Faerie Queene (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988).

4. See Cooper, 147-151 on the snake’s traditional symbolism.

5. See Gallucci, 34-35 about life in the Renaissance bottega. Her book says much
about Cellini’s conflicted sexual profile.

6. Cellini, My Life, 21.

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.

8. See note 359 on page 458 of Cellini’s My Life.

9. Cellini’s poem is quoted by James M. Saslow in Ganymede in the Renaissance:

Homosexuality in Art and Society (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1986): 151.

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.

12. Vasari, Le Opere, page 700 of vol. 7.

13. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini, Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in

Renaissance Italy, 45ff.

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.

16. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini, Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in

Renaissance Italy, 26. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male
Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996):
107-109.

172
Chapter 6 The Public Face of Justice

Ducal manipulation of Florence’s judicial system was vital to the formation

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

Donatello’s Judith, Cellini’s Perseus comprises an implied threat of execution. Note

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

victims of the Battle of Montemurlo.1 As noted, Cellini’s sculpture commemorates

this glorious event of utmost importance to Cosimo’s rise to power.

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

In Cellini’s time decapitation was an appropriate form of execution for

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

king, queen, or other political dignitary.

Corporeal symbolism at the scene of punishment tied into messages about

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

force of the prince. In Michel Foucault’s words:

In punishment, there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince,

and, even when it is combined with the redress laid down, it constitutes the
most important element in the liquidation of the crime. Now, this portion
174
 belonging to the prince is not in itself simple: on the one hand, it requires
redress for the injury that has been done to his kingdom (as an element of
disorder and as an example given to others, this considerable injury is out
of all proportion to that which had been committed upon a private
individual).4

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

sovereign’s godliness manifested itself through the ritual of public execution:

he/she was present in spirit, if not in person, at the scene of punishment.

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

ritualized display of power and revenge. Cosimo’s ‚divine‛ justice infiltrated

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.

Public executions played an important role in early modern state formation:

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 ---

comprising the state.

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

societal discord. Understandably, early modern individuals were constantly

concerned about improving highly unstable and geographically limited

monopolies of authority. Thus, the effects of violent behavior were two-fold: they

disrupted stability where concord existed and were, in response, deemed

necessary to maintain stability. As Peter Spierenberg has stressed, public execu-

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

display of the sovereign’s power.6

176
 Likewise, while Cellini was preparing his Perseus, Cosimo I de’ Medici

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,

besetting his early tenure, he knew, contributed to the vulnerability of Tuscany’s

physical boundaries. Indeed, controlling Italian society was extremely difficult

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

structure of authority in Florence did not compare, moreover, to the fractured

police organization in the countryside. Tuscan law-breakers outside of Florence

found it easier to resist Florentine control. In Medicean Florence, the cult of

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

discontent, and turmoil from political factions.7

In light of the preceding, I conceive of Cellini’s Medusa as a terror-

inducing epitomization of the criminal body in disorder, of the partitioning of state

(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

to a monster continues to fall on the Piazza. Thus, Cellini’s statue employed

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

Reflecting both Cellini’s and the Renaissance executioner’s sinful characters,

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

executioner had to be a man of considerable strength to wield them. Those most

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

The Body Broken and Divine

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

179
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

revolving wheel on a pike was the condemned individual’s punishment. The

breaking wheel epitomized a perpetuation of violence and disorder, as did all

forms of public execution. However, breaking with the wheel was an aggravated

perpetuation because of the acute pain and physical disfiguration it caused.12

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

from a willingness to understand the condemned person’s death as a Christ-like

sacrifice for humankind.13 On the Piazza della Signoria Medusa’s broken body

assumes a sacrificial character when one considers Cellini’s pedestal as an altar.14

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

deities after he obtained Medusa’s head.

The bronze Gorgon’s wheel-shaped body also has a related cosmic

significance. Edgar Wind indicated in his study on the cross’ pre-Christian

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,

though it does not move, conjures up the Mother Goddess’ wheel.16

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

the symbolic system of the spiral’s expanding and contracting configuration.18 I

have already noted the link between the Ouroboros and the sun as well as the

resemblance of Medusa’s body to the Ouroboros. The latter compares to the

wheel.

A pertinent representation that was available to the Medici was Taddeo

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

implies a correspondence between the wheel and solar light.

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

attempting to seduce Hera, and, as a result, was bound to an enflamed wheel

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

Medusa as a terrestrial symbol.

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

As the previous discussion about the wheel indicates, even before

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).

Comparable images are the chariot wheels of Bartolomeo Ammanati’s

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

Earth, as responsible for seasonal rotation.26 Ammanati’s wheels encapsulate the

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

My consideration of Renaissance executions stresses that in contemporary

imaginations earthly justice was a reflection of God’s plan for cosmic order.

Sixteenth-century civic buildings often included elaborate murals representing

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

Loggia arches do.

Comparable personifications of cosmic/divine justice were sword-bearing

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

foes. Similarly, a sixteenth-century Florentine poem written in honor of Cellini’s

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

Perseus-Cosimo holds Medusa’s head aloft, as if in homage to her ties to the

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

laws.29 The head of Cellini’s Medusa epitomizes both of Iustitia’s guises.

In order to better understand the bronze Gorgon’s role as Iustitia, which

relates to her role as the Mother Goddess, one must travel to the ancient world.

The idea of justice as a living cosmic entity originated in pre-Socratic Greece.

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

and Dike descend from the Mother Goddess.30

Evidence indicates that Athenians conceptualized the law as a maternal

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

as source of Perseus’ political empowerment. The Mother Goddess’ dual role as

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

antiquity, as in the Renaissance, gold could symbolize justice – a point which

Cellini must have known.32

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

validity of Roman legal documents. Therefore, the metal’s strength suited

lawmakers’ intention for their decisions to be long-lived and long-remembered. It

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

Williamson has argued to be Rome’s conceptualization of bronze legal tablets as

sacrosanct.33 One should imagine Cellini’s bronze Perseus as a similar testament,

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:

He took his two sturdy, sharp spears, headed with

bronze. The bronze of the spears sent up to heaven
a far-reaching gleam; Athene and Hera shouted in
applause, in honor of the king of Mycenae, rich in
gold. (Iliad, Book XI, 43ff.)

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‛

the Greek philosopher Parmenides associates justice with gold: justice, he

believed, is like the sun. The Romans, meanwhile, swore by the sun.35 As the seat

of justice in ancient mytho-poetic traditions, the sun was highly appropriate as an

apotropaic image on weaponry, such as shields. The reason why Western

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

bronze bust by Cellini. The position of a lion as a solar emblem on a breastplate or

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).
189
 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

In Euripedes’ description of Achilles’ shield Perseus and Medusa appear,

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

shield with a border around its middle disk – he is a cosmocrator/divine judge.

Consider a passage from Corippus De laudibus Justini which pays homage to the

elevation of the just Emperor Justinus Minor:

Now he is present, the greatest benefactor of the world

community, to whom kings bend their necks in submission,
before whose name they tremble, and whose numen they
worship. There he stands on that disk, the most powerful
prince, having the appearance of the Sun. Yet another
light shines forth from the city. This day is truly a marvel,
for it allows two suns to rise together at the same time.38

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

190
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

lifted up to heaven on a clipeus. Berchorius’ Repertorium morale describes Jesus’

image as such:

Further I say of the Sun (the ‚Sun of righteousness‛)

that He shall be enflamed when exercising supreme
power, that is to say, when He sits in judgment, when
He shall be strict and severe< because He shall be all
hot and bloody by dint of justice and strictness. For,
as the sun, when in the center of his orbit, that is to say,
midday point, is hottest, so shall Christ be when He shall
appear in the center of heaven and earth<in Judgment
<.In the summer, when he is in the Lion, the sun withers
the herbs, which have blossomed in the spring, by his
heat of judgment, appear as a man fierce and lionine.40

In the preceding eras, raising a figure on a shield was also a way of proclaiming

the individual as ruler.41

The position of Cellini’s Perseus on Athena’s shield contributes to his status

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

descriptions of cosmic shields to bear upon Medusa’s configuration. Consider the

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

to the clipeus’ design. Since the shield of Cellini’s Perseus is an emblem of

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

to both mythological goddesses.

The ancients believed the clipeus to be an image of the revolving cosmos;

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

himself as the ‚great Sun.‛

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
192
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

other military paraphernalia, all of which point up Medusa’s solar

significance (fig. 56).

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

distinct from the gesture of benediction. Supernatural powers would, believedly,

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

could have the ability to curse, or to destroy.

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.

As this chapter has shown, judicial power essentializes Cellini’s Perseus as

an embodiment of the Medicean state. While the statuesque hero’s prerogative to

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

agency in a fashion that challenges the ideal of the holistic state.

194
 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.

7. Hibbert, 265. Julius Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Cosimo I’s police
force grew weaker throughout the duke’s time in office, for the Medici ruler
allowed the number of policemen to dwindle. Those men who were left worked
poorly because they were not adequately, or timely paid.

8. Foucault, 50.

9. Much of the information about the Renaissance executioner included in this

study derives from Foucault, 53, 255 and Spierenberg, 13-42. The early modern
executioner was, especially in pictorial representations, a swashbuckler, or Don
Juan, and he could even be the overseer of a bordello or the seller of necromancy
talismans. In this way, he matches Cellini’s profile as a young man given to
violence, sex, and necromancy rituals. See My Life, 117, 138 for Cellini’s interest
in the occult.

10. Foucault, 73-74.

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.

19. Wheels and fire frequently feature together in ancient Mediterranean

mythology. Hans von Hentig, Punishment: its Origins, Purpose and Psychology
(London, England: Hodge Press, 1937): 50-51. Karl von Amira, Die Germanische
Todestrafen. Untersuchungen zur Rechts und Religionsgeschichte (Munich, Germany:
Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1922): 240ff.

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.

22. Merback, 162ff.

23. See Seznec, 14-16, 56, 164, 172, 221, 306 for the Etymologiae’s importance to the
humanist imagination.

24. Jankovics, 181.

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.

33. Callie Williamson, ‚Monuments of Bronze: Roman Legal Documents on

Bronze Tablets,‛ Classical Antiquity 6:1 (1987): 160-183.

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).

37. Hardie’s study is important in this regard.

38. Corippus’ De laudibus Justini Aug. Min. 2, 137ff. This is Kantorowicz’s

translation, found in his article ‚Oriens Augusti – Lever du Roi,‛ Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 17 (1963): 152. For another discussion of the elevation of the solar ruler on
a clipeus see 88-89, 103-109 of L’Orange.

39. Manuel Holobolos, in J. Fr. Boissonade, Aenecdota Graeca, vol. 5 (Hildesheim,

Germany: Olms, 1962): 163.

40. Petrus Berchorius, Repertorium morale, first published in Nuremberg,

Germany, 1489; quoted on page 262 of Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts:
Papers in and on Art History (New York: Doubleday, 1955).

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.

45. -----, 139-140, 143.

200
Ch 7 Classical and Grotesque Polities

As shown, nascent states had serious concerns about geographical

boundaries’ becoming and remaining integral under the auspices of political

claimants. The fact that political unity remained an ideal is unquestionable.

However, as suggested, diverse factors, such as political factions and violence,

contributed to the instability of European polities, which troubled early modern

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

markedly Medusan: it matches the potential of Cellini’s Gorgon to threaten

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.

The preceding political situation mirrored a broad cultural dilemma. In

Najemy’s words:

Despite its reputation for having discovered (or rediscovered)

the canonical image of a body whose order, proportions, and
201
 harmony reproduced those of the entire universe and could
thus serve as a model, measure, or rule for the right ordering
of political communities, the Renaissance actually entertained
a bewildering variety of images of the body natural. It is perhaps
not so surprising that the humanists responded to this pervasive
ignorance and uncertainty about the body with ennobling myths
about the body’s perfect proportions and enduring dignity. Uncer-
tainty about the body was in all likelihood just as productive of
anxiety in the Renaissance as it is for us, and the myth of the body’s
harmony, order, and dignity (and of the actual or desired reflection
of the same in worlds outside the body) was summoned to deflect
the uncomfortable awareness of just how little was in fact known
about the body.2

Let me turn to Machiavelli’s example once again:

Bodies human and bodies politic, for Machiavelli,

are always involved in processes that subvert efforts
at closure, demarcation, and what Bakhtin called the
‚border of a closed individuality.‛3

In short, the age of state formation witnessed a growing awareness of the

body’s physical boundaries. Early modern individuals knew that the ‚mixed

body of humankind‛ must ‚face dangers from within and without, and it is

particularly vulnerable at the boundaries.‛4 The Renaissance obsession with the

humoral body fed into this preoccupation. For instance, Ficino stated that the

body is ‚perpetually in flux, changed by growing, shrinking, continuous

disintegration, liquefaction, and alternative heat and cold.‛5 The preceding

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 body, which pervaded the Renaissance imagination. Aspects of

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,

however, systematically analyzed, defined, or categorized; neither was it given a

name. One discovery helped to bring the grotesque into Renaissance conscious-

ness. Late fifteenth-century Italians unearthed the first-century baths of the

Roman Emperor Titus, which contained ornaments with fanciful plant, animal,

and human features. The decorations became known as grottesche (from the

Italian ‚grotto‛).6 In Bakhtin’s terms, the decorations of Titus seemingly merged

and thus gave birth to one another:

The borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in

the usual picture of the world were boldly infringed.
Neither was there the usual static presentation of reality.
There was no longer the movement of finished forms,
vegetable or animal, in a finished and stable world;
instead the inner movement of being itself was expressed
in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever
incompleted character of being.7

Vasari was the first Renaissance man to describe the grotesque.

203
Conceding with Vitruvius, he proclaimed that it is marked by monstrosity,

barbarism, and proves to be a violation of decorum and natural proportions. Yet

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

simultaneously; hence the Earth and Medusa are characteristically grotesque.

Degradation features in much Renaissance literature, such as that of

Fontainebleau author François Rabelais, where grotesque realism involves the

juxtaposition of death and life, of old and new.9

Bakhtin cited the famous Kerch terracotta sculptures of senile pregnant

hags as epitomes of the grotesque.10 Their laughing faces evoke the culture of the

masses, particularly the carnivalesque, where there is much laughter in addition

to bawdiness, lewdness and other types of low merrymaking and pleasures of

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

‚decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life.‛11

Bakhtin’s famous discourse on Rabelais as carnivalesque includes a

description of the grotesque body as always in the process of becoming, never

static, never complete, and merging with different forms. It is even marked by

204
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

life: the grave and the earth.

The antithesis of the grotesque body is that of the classical, which is

closed, holistic, static, monumental, completed, and emblematic of the absolutist

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

grotesque and classical bodies as pure and extreme in themselves, historically

and paradoxically they were not fixed, but were diacritical, each body formed by

retracing the other’s boundaries.14

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

understanding of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa as a sculpture that thematizes the

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

embodies a state of continuous becoming, for she is not static. In addition,

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 may serve as a weapon to stun viewers.16

The multiple breasts of the Ephesian goddesses on Cellini’s pedestal are

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.

On the other hand, the body of Cellini’s Perseus is almost entirely

classical. It is in different ways a symbol of closure, as the male body generally

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

one a new sense that the state is mortal after all.

The grotesque, open-mouthed heads on the pedestal of Cellini’s Perseus

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

back of the hero’s helmet.19

Thus, the grotesque aspect of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa is an expression

of the Greek hero’s implication in power of the Gorgon -- the Earth Mother,

which points up the ruler’s weaknesses, including the difficulties in fabricating

his absolutist state.

The grotesque image of Medusa compares to the Renaissance’s ‚scientific‛

notions of female sexuality. The latter, which, early moderners must have

known, comprise Gorgonian traits, may have informed the role of Cellini’s

Medusa as an embodiment of the terrifying power of the feminine. In Susanne

208
Scholz’s terms, ‚the grotesque style < envisaged in images of protruding or

dislocated members and leaky bodies‛ came in the Renaissance to represent

women’s bodies; that is, the humoral, open body ‚gradually emerged as the

materialization of femininity on earth.‛20 Early modern theories about female

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

Serpents were further extensions of the noxious fluids making up hair,

suggesting that woman’s serpentine nature derived from her interior. When a

menstruating woman places her hair in dung or earth it spawns a snake. As 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

link between Bakhtin’s terracotta hags and the consistent characterization of

209
snake-headed women as hags.

The early modern scientific community believed that menstrual blood is

venomous, having the capacity to wilt vegetation, to poison humans, to destroy

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

intermingling and changing to result in deviations of character. Moreover,

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

power, as her effects are difficult to ‚contain.‛

The preceding ‚scientific‛ theories help to explain why a diverse range of

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

times a sealed ‚container.‛26 She, as opposed to common woman, was therefore

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.

Logically, Flora’s status as the personification of Florence involves her

embodiment of the landscape and its riches.29

Renaissance depictions of the ideal Woman were foils for Cellini’s

Medusa. Although the latter bears the mark of male domination, Cellini’s

Gorgon is an icon of power who is comparable to the idealized Woman, whose

long lived image testified to her undeniable potency. The preceding is a point to

keep in mind as I turn to the subject of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo’s role in

Renaissance art and thought, the topic of the next chapter.

212
 Notes

1. See Chapter 26 of The Prince. For a pertinent discussion of Machiavelli’s

headless body see Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics, a Feminist Reading in
Political Theory (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988): 181.

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.

10. Bakhtin, 25.

11. -----, 25-26.

12. -----, 1-58, 303-367.

13. -----, 320.

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.

17. Stallybrass, ‚Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,‛ 124. Although

men’s and women’s knowledge of the male body included an understanding of
its genital orifices, men’s generic physicality was commensurate with harmony,
order, stability. As Springer, 36 states, the male body, politicized in armor,
‚embodied an ideal of masculinity inherited from the ancient Roman world ---
that of corporeal inviolability<In a regime of masculinity where sexual
penetration was considered demeaning and inherently emasculating, all’antica
armour reinscribed the boundaries of the elite male body – and betrayed a classic
anxiety to defend them.‛ The male body too was/is ‚leaky‛ in its own way.
Saint Augustine stated that as a consequence of the Fall man lost control of his
phallus, thereby indicating the male’s role in disobeying God: the phallus
provided ‚proof of man’s disobedience by a disobedience of his own.‛ Quoted
on Hall, 59. Perhaps early modern beliefs in marriage as an antidote to young
men’s unruliness stemmed in part from the preceding idea about the phallus.

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.

21. Vieda Skultans, ‚The Symbolic Signification of Menstruation and the

Menopause,‛ Man 5 (1970): 639-651. In antiquity the combination of blood,
serpents and women’s secret rituals could be fearsome to men.

22. -----, 639-651.

23. Koslow, 148.

24. Stallybrass, ‚Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,‛ 128.

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).

26. Stallybrass, ‚Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,‛ 129.

27. -----, 129.

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.

216
Chapter 8 Eleonora di Toledo and the Image of the Mother Goddess

Duchess Eleonora’s iconography characterized her as a type for the

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

for Duke Cosimo I. Ultimately, Eleonora’s iconographical image served as a

counterpart to Cellini’s Medusa.

In 1541 Eleonora became Regent of State. That August, while administer-

ing governmental affairs in the absence of Cosimo I, she told Majordomo

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

affairs were also the duchess’ order of business. Eleonora, an exemplar of

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

increased anti-Medicean sentiment generally, or at least to have aggravated it

among those still devoted to the republic.‛5 Benson has also pointed out that the

contemporary diarist Signor Marucelli paraphrased the situation when he wrote

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

opinions about Eleonora within this context.

The preceding suggests that because the duchess’ influence was great

Eleonora’s contemporaries perceived her as a threat. Further, it appears that

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

Eleonora’s role as duchess as akin to the simultaneous denigration and

dignification of Cosimo I’s Medusa as Mother Goddess. Indeed, Cellini would

have been keenly aware of contemporary characterizations of Cosimo I’s wife as

divine Mother.

Contemporary stylizations of Eleonora as a maternal goddess resulted, in

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

laurel, a time honored Medici emblem of perpetuity and redemption. The

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

cosmic bodies to husband and wife as thematizations of their shared rulership,

just as Cellini described a nexus of cosmic power in the form of his Perseus and

Medusa. Fecundità, now surrounded by numerous small children, returned at

the wedding festivities to proclaim Eleonora the mother of the Tuscan state, an

image that would become ingrained in the Florentine imagination.7

For Eleonora’s triumphal entry into Siena Ammanati created a statue of

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

wealth of Tuscany, including the monetary treasure Eleonora brought to 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

duchess’ influence on her city’s agricultural supply reinforced her characteriza-

tion as a politically powerful matriarch.

220
 Cybele also represented the duchess’ fertility, to which the earth’s riches

compared. Similarly, in the words of Paolo Giovio, which were written in

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

and abundance invested Ammanati’s Juno, the goddess of childbearing,

marriage, and the queen of divinities whose head housed a genius that was also

a procreative spirit. In this instance generation was a trope for intelligence.

Vasari said that since Juno was the wife of Jupiter (Cosimo’s surrogate), the two

mythological characters were of one mind.10 Vasari’s statement reminds one of

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,

was Eleonora’s emblem.11

The identification of Juno, who owned a monopoly of earthly power and

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

sculptures’ situation would have thematized Cosimo’s and Eleonora’s political

221
partnership. However, the plan to pair statue and throne was never realized.

Ammanati also made a large statue of Ceres, the goddess of

agriculture/earth and probably Eleonora’s surrogate (1555-1563, fig. 60), to

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.

Designed as a fountain, Ammanati’s Ceres was supposed to supply water to the

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

would have complemented Castello’s Hercules and Antaeus fountain, to which I

shall return shortly.

Vasari’s decorative program for the Palazzo Vecchio’s Quartiere degli

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

fact that may have referred to Eleonora’s contribution to Cosimo’s power.

Significant to the duchess’ image as a woman of influence was Bronzino’s

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

a needed reminder of his power to father) compare to the product of Eleonora’s

fecundity – her son Giovanni.15 The pomegranate, here at the center of

Eleonora’s bodice, was a Renaissance symbol of fertility and an attribute of the

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

duchess’ bodice therefore signified the Spanish emperor’s connection via

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

Charles V’s lieutenant-governor Don Pedro of Toledo, would have been a

reminder of the limits of Cosimo’s power.

Langdon has noted that the duchess recalls the iconic depiction of the

Virgin Mary enthroned on a long red cushion as if seated on the medieval

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.

The backdrop of Bronzino’s portrait contributes to Eleonora’s portrayal as

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

sharply illuminated. Eleonora had been reared in the Spanish pedagogy of

Woman as a shining mirror of prudence, valor, wisdom and chastity. Langdon

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

compares to Eleonora’s image as a virtuous mirror.19 The duchess is a ‚paradigm

of the beloved, chaste consort, regent of Cosimo’s earthly dominions, the ideal,

unattainable Petrachan women, and virtuous mirror of heaven on earth.‛20 The

duchess is thus an embodiment of the divine whose face, like Medusa’s, is

‚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,

but placed against a night sky.21 Eleonora herself is a luminous emanation of

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:

Beautiful Virgin who, clothed with the sun

and crowned with the stars, so pleased the
Highest Sun that in you he hid his light.23

Bronzino’s own poetry mentions ‚sweet darkness‛ as a reminder of the sun’s

return from night: ‚Alla dolce ombra dell’amata pianta <Membrando il Sol<

Che quanto stette a ritornar l’Aurora.‛24

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

brings Eleonora closer to Christ’s mother. The duchess is an image of wholeness

amidst a cosmos that is unified around and through her person; that is, the

225
duchess embodies and controls the natural cosmos.

Langdon has stated that Eleonora’s depiction as a deity presiding over

Nature came to echo Francesco Cattani di Diacetto’s description of Natura, which

treats the persona of the ideal woman:26

Just as the divine Plato described the body, it exists

still, and the soul is very different from it. The soul
has intellect, the body does not have this. The soul,
like a woman, has command over the body; this, as a
servant, is subject and ruled. The spirit is the fountain
of unity and of feeling, and of all the other affections
that we perceive in the body; this by its nature is fitting
to accept, and to bear, and we may conclude that the
soul, by far more perfect, has superior rank in the universe.27

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

di Toledo.28 One wonders if Cattani’s and Goggio’s premises were, in fact,

‚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

protest Cellini’s denigration of the Gorgon as an epitome of matriarchal power,

for the duke was aware of the contemporary need to rise above that power.

As Langdon has noted, the landscape in Bronzino’s portrait provided a

‚concrete context‛ for Eleonora’s power, since under magnification it proves to

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

it drained, thereby significantly contributing to Tuscany’s health and wealth. At

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

designs and decorations for Duchess Eleonora’s most illustrious estate.

227
The Pitti Estate

In 1549 Eleonora di Toledo bought the late medieval building known as

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

privatization of power in ducal Florence: it loomed above domestic dwellings,

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

of the city in total privacy.

The Medici hired Tribolo as landscape architect. The results of his

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

‚exuded‛ throughout the whole estate (fig. 64).

The Boboli Garden thematizes maternal influence through an additional

spatial concetto. A grotto housing Giambologna’s statue of Florence, or perhaps

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

represents life, repeats this concetto.

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

in Athanasius Kirchner’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652, fig. 66). Ancient myths

prove that the labyrinth is the earth’s womb from which the hero who has

229
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.

A similar configuration exists at the Medici estate of Castello, which Cosimo I

associated with his mother, the residence’s original owner.33

The Castello Estate

The garden of Castello is the site of Niccolo Tribolo’s monumental Hercules

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

hero Hercules, for Cosimo’s repertoire of virtues included Fortitude, which

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

there is something more complicated at work here.34 Before examining the

sculpture, it is imperative to consider the tale of Hercules’ triumph over the

monster Antaeus.

According to Greek mythology, Antaeus was a monster who lived in a

230
cave in Libya.35 He challenged passersby to wrestling matches and then killed

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

up high, crushed him to death.

Tribolo’s statue indicates that Cosimo I would have known Philostratus’

Imagines (third century). The text relates that Gaia helps her son counteract

Hercules’ crushing embrace by surging up and thereby countering Antaeus’

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

footing while Gaia surged beneath him, as Philostratus explained.36 I propose

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

in Antaeus: the water -- here, a symbol of strength -- issuing from Antaeus’

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

flow.37 At Castello, Hercules’ competition, like that between Cellini’s Perseus

and Medusa, epitomizes the ruler’s dependence on the Earth Mother.

Had Ammanati completed his Ceres, his statue would have matched

Tribolo’s fountain as a ‚spouting Gaia.‛ Tellingly, a grassy labyrinth, like that

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

Salviati and Cosimo I and Eleonora di Toledo.

Castello’s theme of maternal dependence echoed a story found in Book II

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

the Medici matriarchs in bringing about and strengthening their menfolk’s

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

meaningful in the Renaissance.

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

business and politics took place in the presence of visual representations 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,

served diversely as substitutes, or surrogates for the most powerful women in

ducal Florence. Compositely, contemporary visions of the Earth Mother

Goddess within Florence rivaled Duke Cosimo’s image as ruler, even while some

of those images were necessary to his political iconography and persona.

233
 Notes

1. Quoted on Langdon, 59. Our knowledge of Eleonora di Toledo is significantly

limited. The earliest monograph on her, Anna Baia’s Leonora di Toledo, Duchessa
di Firenze e di Siena (Perugia, Italy: Z. Foglietti, 1907), characterizes the duchess as
an intelligent, capable woman, but, overall, the text is not illuminating. Konrad
Eisenbichler’s dissertation for Harvard University, The Early Patronage of Eleonora
di Toledo: the Camera Verde and its Dependence in the Palazzo Vecchio, 2 vols., 1995
remains an important study of Eleonora’s iconography. The same may be said of
Cox-Rearick’s Bronzino’s Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993). The essays in The Cultural World of Eleonora
di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Vermont:
Ashgate Press, 2004) discuss the varied faces of Eleonora as divine and earthly
ruler and mother, as well as her political and economic contributions to the
fabrication of Tuscan absolutism.

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.

4. Pamela J. Benson, ‚Eleonora di Toledo among the Famous Women:

Iconographic Innovation after the Conquest of Siena,‛ in The Cultural World of
Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, 153.

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).

10. Vasari, Le Opere, vol. 8, 73.

11. On the peahen see Langdon, 86-87.

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.

14. Edelstein, 89.

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.

20. -----, 82.

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.

22. Langdon, 74-76.

23. Petrarch, canzone 366, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert Durling
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976): 574-575.

24. Quoted on Langdon, 75-76.

25. Langdon (77) believes that in her state portrait Eleonora represents Earthly
Venus.
236
26. Langdon, 83.

27. Francesco Cattani di Diacceto, I tre Libri d’Amore di M. Francesco Cattani di

Diacceto. Con un Panegirico all’Amore; e con la Vita del ditto Autore, fatta da M.
Benedetto Varchi (Venice, Italy: Vinegia, 1561): 15-17.

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.

29. Langdon, 78.

30. -----, 78, 80.

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.

35. See, for instance, Book IV of Lucan’s Pharsalia.

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

repertoire of personal imagery includes instances where he aligns with and

appropriates the power of Mother figures. A case in point is Cellini’s bust of

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.

I have considered the theme of maternal dependence at the heart of the

tale of Perseus and Medusa in relation to Cellini’s statue. I also have examined

the iconography of the Perseus and Medusa as a thematization of shared power.

The Greek hero, a sun figure, matches the cosmic strength of his Gorgon. The

solar significance of Cellini’s bronze figures encompasses the head’s fertility,

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.

The likeness between the facial appearances of Cellini’s Perseus and

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.

Machiavelli’s thought proves that the subject of maternal dependence was a

political concern in Renaissance Florence. Cosimo I, who found rumors of his

continual dependence on his mother to be distasteful, would have been keenly

aware of the relevance of Machiavelli’s tenets to his own political career. Thus,

the Gorgon’s relationship to Cellini’s Perseus points up the weakness of

Medicean patriarchism and of Renaissance masculinity as a whole.

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

symbolism provides a context for a discussion of Cellini’s bisexuality, which led

him into trouble with the law.

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

in different ways a testament to the enslaving ramifications of living in Duke

Cosimo I’s Florence.

I have argued that Cosimo’s Perseus suggests that the violence of a

virtùous man, such as Cellini considered himself to be, may turn against himself.

Similarly, violence contributed to the Medici state’s social instability. The

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

Eleonora di Toledo as ideal Woman. As shown, the iconography of the Earth

Mother Goddess was important to Eleonora’s political image, to her achieve-

ments and to her capacity to propagate the Medici dynasty through childbearing.

Contemporaries recognized the Earth Mother Goddess, an ideal Woman, as a

personification of the Tuscan state, which Eleonora herself embodied.

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,

with the same implication for Maria Salviati.

I would like to stress that the denigrated and dignified image of Cellini’s

Medusa echoes the contemporary notion of female power as both remarkable

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

comes through in a painting I have discussed earlier --- Pinturicchio’s Pala di

Santa Maria dei Fossi. Taken together, the two faces of female power – benign and

fearsome – are ultimately irreconcilable under the patriarchal model of

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.

Fig. 35 Cellini, detail of the Perseus.

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.

Fig. 40 Medici coat of arms, Piazza San Lorenzo, 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.

Fig. 50 Ixion and the Torture Wheel, Roman sarcophagus.

289
Fig. 51 Francesco Bartoli’s drawing of Cellini’s cope pin for Clement VII, 1530,
British Museum, London, England.

Fig. 52 Bartolomeo Ammanati, detail of Neptune Fountain, c. 1565, Piazza della

Signoria, Florence, Italy.

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.

Fig. 64 Detail of Pitti Palace.

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
Bibliography

Unpublished Primary Sources

Apollodorus, MS. 2.4.2., Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Italy.

Berchorius, Petrus, Ouidiana moraliter a magistro Thoma Walleys, Houghton

Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Libro dell’Antichità, MSS vi, fol. 156r, Archivio di Stato Segnatura, Turin, Italy.

Saint Bonaventure, ‚De navitate b. virginis Mariae,‛ sermon 5.3.

Villani, Giovanni, Chronica de origine civitatis, II. II. 67, Biblioteca Nazionale,
Florence, Italy.

Published Primary Sources

Agostini, Niccolo degli, 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).

Alberti, Leon Battista, Opere Volgari, vol. 1, ed. C. Grayson (Bari, Italy: Laterza,
1960).

Alciati, Andrea, A Book of Emblems, the Emblematum Liber in Latin and English, ed.
and trans. John F. Moffitt (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2004).

Allegretti, Antonio, De la Trasmutazione de Metalli, ed. Mino Gabriele (Rome,

Italy: Mediterranee, 1981).

Aristotle, De Generatione Animalivm Libri, trans. Theodoro Gaza (Venice, Italy:

Heironymus Scotus, 1545).

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Victor Watts (New York: Penguin
Press, 1999).

304
Boissonade, J. Fr., Aenecdota Graeca, vol. 5 (Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 1962).

Bonsignore, Giovanni, P. Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare novamente stampato,

diligentemente correcto & historiato (Milan, Italy: Nicola da Gorgonzola, 1520).

Castiglione, Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (New York:
Penguin Press, 1980).

Cattani di Diacceto, Francesco, I tre Libri d’Amore di M. Francesco Cattani di

Diacceto. Con un Panegirico all’Amore; e con la Vita del ditto Autore, fatta da M.
Benedetto Varchi (Venice, Italy: Vinegia, 1561).

Cellini, Benvenuto, My Life, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter

Bondanella (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002).

-----, Opere di Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Turin, Italy: UTET,
1980).

-----, Scritti e Inediti Celliniani, ed. Carlo Cordié (Florence, Italy: La Nuova Italia,
1971).

-----, La Vita, I Trattati (Rome, Italy: G. Casini, 1967).

-----, I Trattati dell’Oreficeria e della Scultura di Benvenuto Cellini, ed. C. Milanesi

(Florence, Italy: Le Monnier, 1857).

-----, La Vita di Benvenuto Cellini: Scritta da lui medesimo tratta dal l’Autografo, vol. 1
(Florence, Italy: Tipografia all’insegna di Dante, 1832).

Cennini, Cennino, The Craftsman’s Handbook: ‚Il Libro dell’Arte,‛ trans. Daniel V.
Thompson (New York: Dover Publications, 1960).

Choul, Guillaume Du, Discours sur la Castramentation et Discipline Militaire des

Romains (Lyon, France: Guillaume Rouille, 1555).

Cirni Corso, Anton Francesco, 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).
305
Conti, Natale, Mythologies, a Select Translation, trans. Anthony DiMatteo (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1994).

Copernicus, Nicholas, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Nuremberg, 1543,

trans. Valerie Shrimplin-Evangelidis, ed. J. Dobrzycki (London, England:
Macmillan Press, 1978).

Ebreo, Leone, The Philosophy of Love, trans. F. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H.

Barnes (London, England: Soncino Press, 1937).

Enslin and Zeitlin, trans., Book of Judith (Leiden, Holland: Brill Press, 1972).

Ficino, Marsilio, Marsilio Ficino, ed. Angela Voss (California: North Atlantic
Books, 2006).

-----, Three Books on Life, eds. and trans. Carol Kaske and John Clark (New York:
MRTS, 1989).

-----, Opera Omnia (Basel, Switzerland: Henricus Petri, 1576).

Fulgentius, Fulgentius the Mythographer, trans. Leslie G. Whitbread (Ohio State

University Press, 1971).

Giovio, Paolo, Dialogo dell’Imprese Militari e Amorose, ed. M. L. Doglio (Rome,

Italy: Bulzoni, 1978).

-----, Opere, vol. 1, ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Rome, Italy: Istituto Poligrafico
dello Stato, 1956-1958).

Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Catherine Schlegel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 2006).

Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, vol. 2, ed. Jean Paul Richter
(New York: Dover Publications, 1970).

Machiavelli, Niccolo, Florentine Histories, trans. Harvey Mansfield (New Jersey:

Princeton University Press, 1988).

306
-----, Discourses, trans. Leslie Walker (New York: Penguin Press, 1974).

-----, The Prince, trans. Daniel Donno (New York: Bantam Books, 1966).

-----, Opere, vol. 1 (Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 1960-1965).

-----, Il Principe e Discorsi, ed. Sergio Bertelli (Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 1960).

Marucci, V., et al., eds., Pasquinate Romane del Cinquecento, vol. 1 (Rome, Italy:
Salerno Press, 1983).

Marucelli, Cronaca fiorentina: 1537-1555, ed. Enrico Coppi (Florence, Italy: Olschki
Press, 2000).

Michelangelo, The Poems, trans. C. Ryan (London, England: J. M. Dent, 1996).

Mirandola, Pico della, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, eds. Ernst Cassirer, Paul
Kristeller, John Randall (Illinois: Phoenix Books, 1956): 223-254.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W. W. Norton and

Company, 2005).

Petrarch, Francesco, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert Durling
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976).

Plato, Plato’s Symposium, trans. Seth Bernadete (Illinois: University of Chicago

Press, 2001).

Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell

(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Segni, Bernardo, L’Ética d’Aristotile tradotta in Lingua volgare fiorentina et comentata

(Florence, Italy: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550).

Seneca, Moral Essays, vol. 1, ed. and trans. John W. Basore (Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1928-1932).

307
Vaganay, Leon, ed., Gospel of Peter (Paris, France: Librarie Lecoffre J. Gabalda et
Fils, 193).

Vasari, Giorgio, Der Literarische nachless Giorgio Vasaris, vol. 1, ed. Karl Frey
(Munich, Germany: Muller Press, 1923-1930).

-----, Le Opere, vol. 8, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, Italy: G. C. Sansoni, 1906).

-----, Le Vite di piu Eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, e Scultori Italiani, vol. 8, ed. Gaetano
Milanesi (Florence, Italy: Sansoni, 1878-1885).

Vettori, Francesco, ‚Sommario della Istoria d’Italia (1511-1527),‛ in Scritti Storici e

Politici, ed. E. Niccolini (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1972): 133-246.

Voragine, Jacobus de, Golden Legend, vol. 1, trans. William Granger Ryan (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Secondary Sources

Allen, Don Cameron, Mysteriously Meant: the Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and
Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1979).

Amira, Karl von, Die Germanische Todestrafen. Untersuchungen zur Rechts und
Religionsgeschichte (Munich, Germany: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1922).

Archambault, Paul, ‚The Analogy of the Body in Renaissance Political

Literature,‛ Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 29 (1967): 21-53.

Atwood, Philip, ‚Cellini’s Coins and Medals,‛ in Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor,

Goldsmith, Writer, eds. Margaret A. Gallucci and Paolo Rossi (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 97-122.

Bachofen, J. J., Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992).

308
-----, Gesammeltewerk, vols. 2, 3, ed. K. Meuli (Basel, Switzerland: B. Schwabe,
1948).

Baia, Anna, Leonora di Toledo, Duchessa di Firenze e di Siena (Perugia, Italy: Z.

Foglietti, 1907).

Baker, Nicholas Scott, ‚For Reasons of State: Political Executions, Republicanism,

and the Medici in Florence, 1480-1560,‛ Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 444-473.

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 1968).

Balas, Edith, The Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance Art (Pennsylvania: Carnegie
Mellon University Press, 2002).

-----, Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel: a New Interpretation (Pennsylvania: American

Philosophical Society, 1995).

Barasch, Moshe, The Language of Art, Studies in Interpretation (New York

University Press, 1997).

Barb, A. A., ‚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): 193-238.

Baring, Anne and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image
(New York: Penguin Press, 1993).

Barzman, Karen-edis, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: the
Discipline of Disegno (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Battistini, Matilde, Symbols and Allegories in Art (California: J. Paul Getty

Museum, 2005).

Benson, Pamela J., ‚Eleonora di Toledo among the Famous Women:

Iconographic Innovations after the Conquest of Siena,‛ in The Cultural World of
Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler
(Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2004): 136-156.
309
Berry, Philippa, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried
Queen (New York: Routledge Press, 1989).

Bertelli, Sergio, 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).

Blake McHam, Sarah, ‚Public Sculpture in Renaissance Florence,‛ in Looking at

Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sarah Blake McHam (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1998): 149-188.

Blok, Josine, The Early Amazons, Modern and Ancient Perspectives on a Persistent
Myth (New York: Brill Press, 1995).

Bode, Georg Heinrich, Scriptores rerum Mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti
(Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 1968).

Bolgar, R. R., The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (New York: Routledge
Press, 1964).

Bonner, Campbell, Studies in Magical Amulets, chiefly Graeco-Egyptian (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Studies, 1950).

Booth, Cecily, Cosimo I, Duke of Florence (Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press, 1921).

Borgeaud, Philippe, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece (Illinois: University of

Chicago Press, 1988).

Borsook, Eve, ‚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.

Breidecker, Volker, Florenz, oder ‘Die Rede, die zum Auge Spricht’: Kunst, Fest und
Macht im Ambiente der Stadt (Munich, Germany: Fink Press, 1990).

Breitenberg, Mark, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge,

England: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

310
Brinton, Crane, A History of Western Morals (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1959).

Brown, Wendy, Manhood and Politics, a Feminist Reading in Political Theory (New
York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988).

Bullard, Melissa, ‚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): 3-40.

Butters, Suzanne B., The Triumph of Vulcan: Sculptors’ Tools, Porphyry, and the
Prince in Ducal Florence (Florence, Italy: Olschki Press, 1996).

Campbell, Joseph, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Penguin
Press, 1976).

Campbell, M., ‚Observations on the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Time of Duke
Cosimo I de’ Medici,‛ in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ‘500 1 (1983):
819-830.

Carroll, Margaret D., ‚The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification
of Sexual Violence,‛ in The Expanding Discourse, Feminism and Art History, eds.
Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper Collins Press, 1992):
139-160.

Cassirer, Ernst, Essay on Man (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1944).

-----, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen: die Sprach (Berlin, Germany: Bruno
Cassirer, 1923).

Cesati, Franco, The Medici, Story of a European Dynasty (Florence, Italy:

Mandragora, 1999).

Chrétien, Heidi, The Festival of San Giovanni: Imagery and Political Power in
Renaissance Florence (New York: Peter Lang, 1994).

Cohen, Simona, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Massachusetts:

Brill Press, 2008).
311
Cole, Michael, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Conforti, Claudia, ‚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): 152-161.

Cooper, J. C., An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols (London, England:

Thames and Hudson Press, 2005).

Cox-Rearick, Janet, ‚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, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2004): 225-262.

-----, Bronzino’s Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1993).

-----, ‚Bronzino’s Crossing of the Red Sea,‛ Art Bulletin 69:1 (1987): 45-67.

-----, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X and the two Cosimos (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Creuzer, G., Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, vol. 4
(Leipzig, Germany: C. W. Leske, 1810).

Cropper, Elizabeth, ‚On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the

Vernacular Style,‛ Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 374-395.

Crum, Roger, ‚Donatello’s bronze David and the Question of Foreign versus
Domestic Tyranny,‛ Renaissance Studies 10 (1996): 440-450.

Cummings, Frederick and Marco Chiari, eds., The Twilight of the Medici: Late
Baroque Art in Florence, 1670-1743 (Centro di Firenze, Italy, 1974).

Daly, Peter, ‚Alciato’s Emblem ‘Concordiae Symbolum’: a Medusa’s Mirror for

Rulers?‛ German Life and Letters 41:4 (1988): 349-362.

312
Dempsey, Charles, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist
Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1992).

Diop, Cheikh Anta, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: the Domains of Patriarchy and
of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (Illinois: Third World Press, 1978).

Dominguez Leiva, Antonio, Décapitations: du Culte des Cranes au Cinéma Gore

(Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004).

Droth, Martina, Introduction to Bronze: the Power of Life and Death (Leeds,
England: Henry Moore Institute, 2005): 10-19.

DuBois, Page, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Prehistory of the Great Chain of
Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982).

Dwyer, Eugene, ‚The Temporal Allegory of the Tazza Farnese,‛ American Journal
of Archaeology 96:2 (1992): 255-282.

Edelstein, Bruce, ‚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, ed. Bruce Edelstein (Vermont:
Ashgate Press, 2004): 71-97.

Edgerton, Samuel, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the
Florentine Renaissance (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985).

Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed., Introduction to The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo,

Duchess of Florence and Siena (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2004): 1-17.

-----, The Early Patronage of Eleonora di Toledo: the Camera Verde and its Dependence
in the Palazzo Vecchio, 2 vols., Ph.D. (Harvard University, 1995).

Eisenbichler, Konrad and Zorzi Pugliese, eds., Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism
(Ottowa, Canada: Dovehouse, 1986).

Erffa, Martin von, ‚Judith-Virtus Virtutum-Maria,‛ Mitteilungen des

Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 14 (1970): 460-465.
313
Even, Yael, ‚The Loggia dei Lanzi: a Showcase of Female Subjugation,‛ Woman’s
Art Journal 12 (1991): 10-14.

Falco, Maria J., ed., Introduction to Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo Machiavelli

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004): 1-38.

Fasano Guarini, Elena, ‚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.

Forster, Kurt, ‚Metaphors of Rule: Political Ideology and History in the Portraits
of Cosimo I de’ Medici,‛ Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 9
(1960): 65-103.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan
(New York: Vintage Press, 1977).

Frothingham, A. L., ‚Medusa, Apollo, and the Great Mother,‛ American Journal of
Archaeology 15 (1911): 349-377.

G{ldy, Andrea M., ‚Tuscan Concerns and Spanish Heritage in the Decorations of
Duchess Eleonora’s Apartment in the Palazzo Vecchio,‛ Renaissance Studies 20:3
(2006): 293-319.

Gallucci, Margaret A., Benvenuto Cellini, Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity
in Renaissance Italy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003).

-----, ‚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): 37-45.

Gaston, Robert W., ‚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, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2004): 157-
180.

Gilbert, Felix, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century

Florence (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984).
314
Gillies, Jean, ‚The Central Figure in Botticelli’s Primavera,‛ Woman’s Art Journal 2
(1981): 12-16.

Gimbutas, Marija, 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).

Gless, Darryl J., The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Charles Hamilton (Canada:
University of Toronto Press, 1997).

Goodison, Lucy, Death, Women and the Sun: Symbolism of Regeneration in Early
Aegean Religion (England: University of London, 1989).

Gordon Dotson, Esther, ‚An Augustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo’s

Sistine Ceiling,‛ Art Bulletin 61 (1979): 405-429.

Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths (New York: Penguin Press, 1955).

Haarmann, Harald, ‚Why did Patriarchy supersede Egalitarianism?‛ in The Rule

of Mars: Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of Patriarchy, ed. Cristina
Biaggi (Connecticut: KIT, 2005): 163-174.

Hale, David, The Body Politic: a Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature
(Paris, France: Mouton, 1971).

-----, ‚War and Public Opinion in Renaissance Italy,‛ in Italian Renaissance Studies,
ed. Fraser Jacob (London, England: Faber and Faber Press, 1960): 105-107.

Hardie, Philip R., Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, England:
Clarendon Press, 1986).

315
Heikamp, Detlef, ‚Rapporti fra Accademici ed Artisti nella Firenze del’ 500,‛ Il
Vasari 15 (1957): 139-163.

Henderson Munn, Mark, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: a
Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006).

Hentig, Hans von, Punishment: its Origins, Purpose and Psychology (London,
England: Hodge Press, 1937).

Hibbert, Christopher, The House of Medici: its Rise and Fall (New York: William
Morrow Press, 1980).

Hijmans, S., ‚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.

Hirthe, T., ‚Die Perseus-und-Medusa Gruppe des Benvenuto Cellini in Florenz,‛

Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 29/30 (1987-1988): 197-216.

Hunt, Lynn, Eroticism and the Body Politic (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1991).

James, E. O., The Cult of the Mother Goddess: an Archaeological and Documentary
Study (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959).

James, Peter and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries (New York: Balantine Books,
1999).

Jameson, M., ‚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.

Janes, Regina, Losing our Heads: Decapitations in Literature and Culture (New York:
University Press, 2005).

316
Jaskolski, Helmut, The Labyrinth: Symbol of Fear, Rebirth, and Liberation
(Massachusetts: Shambhala Press, 1997).

Johnson, Geraldine A., ‚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): 222-245.

Just, Roger, Women in Athenian Law and Life (New York: Routledge Press, 1991).

Kantorowicz, Ernst, ‚Oriens Augusti – Lever du Roi,‛ Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17

(1963): 117-178.

-----, The King’s Two Bodies (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957).

Keuls, Eva C., The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995).

King, Margaret L., Women in the Renaissance (Illinois: University of Chicago Press,
1991).

Kisler, Mary, ‚Florence and the Feminine,‛ in Italian Women and the City: Essays,
eds. Janet L. Smarr and Daria Valentini (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2003): 60-75.

Koslow, Susan, ‚’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.

Langdon, Gabrielle, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal from the
Court of Cosimo I (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

Lazzaro, Claudia, ‚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.

317
-----, The Italian Renaissance Garden: from the Conventions of Planting, Design, and
Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 1990).

Leonard, W., Hettiter und Amazonen (Leipzig, Germany: B. G. Teubner, 1911).

Lo Re, Salvatore, Politica e Cultura nella Firenze Cosimiana: Studi su Benedetto Varchi
(Rome, Italy: Vecchiarelli, 2008).

Long, Kathleen P., Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Vermont: Ashgate Press,

2006).

Looper, Matthew G., ‚Political Messages in the Medici Palace Garden,‛ Journal of
Garden History 12:4 (1992): 255-268.

L’Orange, H. P., Studies in the Iconography of Cosmic Kingship in the Ancient World
(New York: Caratzas Brothers Publishing, 1982).

Luchinat, Cristina, et al., The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance
Florence (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002).

MacLean, Ian, 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).

Mandel, Corinne, ‚Perseus and the Medici,‛ Storia dell’Arte 87 (1996): 168-187.

Mansfield, Harvey, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Illinois: University of Chicago Press,

1996).

Martines, Lauro, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (Maryland:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

Matthews Grieco, Sarah, ‚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.

318
Medusa, il Mito, l’Antico, e I Medici (Florence, Italy: Uffizi Museum, 2008).

Merback, Mitchell, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of
Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, England: Reaktion Press,
1999).

Merck, Mandy, ‚The City’s Achievements,‛ in Tearing the Veil, Essays on

Femininity, ed. Susan Lipshitz (New York: Routledge Press, 1978): 95-115.

Miller, David, The Poem’s Two Bodies: the Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Muir, Edward, ‚The Double Binds of Manly Revenge,‛ in Gender Rhetorics:

Postures of Dominance and Submission in History (New York: MRTS, 1994): 65-82.

Muller, F. M., Die Wissenschaft der Sprache, eds. R. Fick and W. Wischmann
(Leipzig, Germany: W. Englemann, 1892).

Najemy, John, ‚The Republic’s Two Bodies: Body Metaphors in Italian

Renaissance Political Thought,‛ in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed.
Alison Brown (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1995): 237-262.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother, an Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974).

-----, The Origins and History of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon Press, 1954).

Ogden, Daniel, Perseus (New York: Routledge Press, 2008).

Olszewski, Edward J., ‚Bring on the Clones: Pollaiuolo’s Battle of Ten Nude Men,‛
Artibus et Historiae 30:60 (2009): 9-38.

-----, ‚Framing the Moral Lesson in Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus,‛ in Wege
zum Mythos, ed. Luba Freedman (Berlin, Germany: Verlag, 2001): 71-87.

Onians, Richard Broxton, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind,
the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1951).
319
Panofsky, Erwin, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

-----, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (New York:
Doubleday, 1955).

Panofsky, Dora and Erwin, Pandora’s Box, the Changing Aspects of a Mythical
Symbol (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962).

Parkin, Tim and Arthur Pomeroy, Roman Social History: a Sourcebook (New York:
Routledge Press, 2007).

Patch, Howard, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Massachusetts:

Harvard University Press, 1927).

Pateman, C., The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Phillies-Howe, Thalia, An Interpretation of the Perseus-Gorgon Myth in Greek

Literature and Monuments through the Classical Period, Ph.D. (Columbia University,
1975).

-----, ‚The Origin and Function of the Gorgon-Head,‛ American Journal of

Archaeology 58 (1954): 209-211.

Pirotti, Umberto, Benedetto Varchi e la Cultura del suo Tempo (Florence, Italy:
Olschki Press, 1971).

Pitkin, Hanna, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Machiavelli
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

Pope-Hennessy, John, Cellini (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985).

Randolph, Adrian, Engaging Symbols; Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-
Century Florence (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002).

Reiss, Sheryl E., ‚Widow, Mother, Patron of Art: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici,‛ in
Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E.
320
Reiss (Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2001): 125-140.

Rigoglioso, Marguerite, The Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).

Rimell, Victoria, Ovid’s Lovers; Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Robbins Dexter, Miriam, ‚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): 143-154.

Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in

Renaissance Florence (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Roller, Lynn E., In Search of God the Mother, the Cult of Anatolian Cybele (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).

Roos, Erwin, ‚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.

Ross, Sonja, Die Vagina Dentata in Mythos und Erzählung (Bonn, Germany: Holos,
1994).

Rossi, Paolo, ‚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.

Rostovzeff, M. I., Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1969).

Rousseau, Claudia, Cosimo I de’ Medici and Astrology: the Symbolism of Prophecy,
Ph.D. (Columbia University, 1983).

321
Rubinstein, Nicolai, The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and
Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic (Oxford, England: Clarendon
Press, 1995).

Ruff, Julius, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Russ, Mary, ‚Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,‛ in Feminist Studies,

Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Indiana University Press, 1986): 215-230.

Saslow, James M., Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society
(Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1986).

Saxonhouse, Arlene W., ‚Niccolo Machiavelli: Women as Men, Men as Women,

and the Ambiguity of Sex,‛ in Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo Machiavelli, ed.
Maria J. Falco (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004): 93-
116.

Schneider, Laurie, ‚Donatello and Caravaggio: the Iconography of Decapitation,‛

American Imago 33 (1976): 76-91.

Scholten, Fritz, ‚Bronze: the Mythology of a Metal,‛ in Bronze: the Power of Life
and Death (Leeds, England: Henry Moore Institute, 2005): 20-35.

Scholz, Susanne, Body Narratives, Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in
Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

Seznec, Jean, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, the Mythological Tradition and its Place
in Renaissance Humanism and Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953).

Shearman, John, ‚Art or Politics in the Piazza?‛ in Benvenuto Cellini: Kunst und
Kunsttheorie im 16. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Germany: Bohlau Verlag, 2003): 19-36.

-----, Only Connect<Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1992).

Simon, Robert, ‚Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I in Armour,‛ Burlington Magazine

125 (1983): 527-539.
322
-----, Bronzino’s Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Ph.D. (Columbia University, 1982).

Simons, Patricia, ‚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): 163-186.

Skultans, Vieda, ‚The Symbolic Signification of Menstruation and the

Menopause,‛ Man 5 (1970): 639-651.

Spierenberg, Peter, The Spectacle of Suffering, Execution and the Evolution of

Repression: from a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1986).

Springer, Carolyn, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance (Canada:

University of Toronto Press, 2010).

Stacey, Peter, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Stack, H. L. and P. Billerbeck, Kommentor zum Neuen Testament aus Tolmud und
Midrasch, vol. 4 (Munich, Germany: Verlag G. H. Beck, 1928).

Stahl, P. H., Histoire de la Décapitation (Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1986).

Stallybrass, Peter, ‚Hauntings: the Materiality of Memory on the Renaissance

Stage,‛ in Gender and Representation in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early
Modern Europe, eds. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (North Carolina: Duke
University Press, 2001): 287-316.

-----, ‚Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,‛ in Rewriting the Renaissance: the
Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Marilyn W. Ferguson,
Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Illinois: University of Chicago Press,
1986): 123-144.

Steig, Michael, ‚Defining the Grotesque: an Attempt at Synthesis,‛ Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39/40 (1970): 252-260.

323
Stocker, Margarita, Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture
(Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998).

Stone, Merlin, When God was a Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1976).

Terpstra, Nicholas, ed., The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in

Renaissance Italy (Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2008).

Tinagli, Paola, ‚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, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Vermont:
Ashgate Press, 2004): 119-135.

-----, ‚The Identity of the Prince: Cosimo de’ Medici, Giorgio Vasari and the
Ragionamenti,‛ in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art (Vermont: Ashgate Press,
2000): 119-135.

-----, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity (New York:
Manchester University Press, 1997).

Tomas, Natalie R., The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence
(Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2003).

Trexler, Richard, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press,
1980).

Trottein, Gwendolyn, ‚Battling Fortune in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Cellini and

the Changing Faces of Fortuna,‛ in Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare
in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pia Cuneo (Massachusetts: Brill Press, 2002): 213-234.

Tyrrell, W. Blake, Amazons: a Study in Athenian Mythmaking (Maryland: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1984).

Vanggaard, Thorkil, Phallos: a Symbol and its History in the Male World (New York:
International Universities Press, 1972).

324
Veen, Henk Th. van, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art
and Culture (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

-----, ‚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.

Vernant, Pierre, Mortals and Immortals, Collected Essays (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1991).

Vries, Joyce de, ‚Caterina Sforza’s Portrait Medals: Power, Gender, and
Representation in the Italian Renaissance Court,‛ Woman’s Art Journal 24 (2003):
23-28.

Weil Garris, Kathleen, ‚On Pedestals: Michelangelo’s David, Bandinelli’s Hercules

and Cacus and the Sculpture of the Piazza della Signoria,‛ Römisches Jahrbuch für
Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983): 377-415.

Weinstein, Donald, ‚The Myth of Florence,‛ in Florentine Studies: Politics and

Society in Renaissance Florence (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968): 15-
44.

Welcker, F. G., Griechische Götterlehre (Göttingham, Germany: Deterich, 1857-

1863).

West, M. L., ‚The Medieval and Renaissance Monographs of Hesiod’s Theogony,‛

Classical Quarterly 14 (1964): 165-189.

Wilk, Stephen R., Medusa: Solving the Myth of the Gorgon (Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press, 2000).

Williamson, Callie, ‚Monuments of Bronze: Roman Legal Documents on Bronze

Tablets,‛ Classical Antiquity 6:1 (1987): 160-183.

Wind, Edgar, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1968).

325
-----, ‚Donatello’s Judith: a Symbol of Sanctimonia,‛ Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937-1938): 62-63.

-----, ‚’The Criminal-God’ and the ‘Crucifixion of Haman,’‛ Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937-1938): 243-248.

Winner, Matthias, ‚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): 63-104.

Wolfthal, Diane, Images of Rape, the ‚Heroic‛ Tradition and its Alternatives
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Woods-Marsden, Joanna, ‚Introduction: Collective Identity/Individual Identity,‛

in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, ed. Mary Rogers (Vermont: Aldershot,
2000): 1-14.

Wright, Craig, The Maze and the Warrior (Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 2001).

Zemon Davis, Natalie, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays
(California: Stanford University Press, 1975).

Zirpolo, Lilian, ‚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.

Zografou, Mina, Amazons in Homer and Hesiod: a Historical Reconstruction (Athens,

Greece, 1972).

Zorach, Rebecca, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French
Renaissance (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

326