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Beth: Let's talk about Mannerist sculpture.
Sal: When we're talking about Mannerist sculpture,
one thing to keep in mind is that it shares
the same basic characteristics as
Mannerist painting that we've already discussed.
Beth: So elegance, complexity ...
Sal: The more inenigmatic and
puzzling it is, the better; complicated,
extreme sense of sophistication and gracefulness
and a demonstration of the artist's skill.
Beth: Okay.
Sal: A great example of that is Benevenuto Cellini's
bronze sculpture of Perseus which
he makes from about 1545 to 1554 and ...
Beth: How big is this?
Sal: It's about life size and it's on
a very tall pedestal and it is located in
its original location where it was made for,
the Piazza della Signoria,
the Loggia just to the right of the
town hall if you're facing its entrance.
Beth: That's an important location.
Sal: It's a very important location and
its location is a very important part of its meaning
which we'll talk about.
Beth: Who commissioned this?
Sal: This if for Duke Cosimo I de' Medici
who was the first really great powerful of the
de' Medici Dukes who rules 16th century Florence.
He comes to power in the 1530s and
rules up in towards the end of the century.
Beth: Okay.
Sal: The first thing we should talk about is
what the subject matter is,
we'll come back to it again, but
generally this is a sculpture of Perseus.
Perseus is a figure from Greek and Roman mythology.
He is the hero of, in a way, a regular guy
who defeats the Gorgon monster, Medusa.
Medusa is the terrible Sorcerous who's so
ugly and [her snakes were hair] that
when you look at her, you turn to stone
because she's so terrible-looking.
This was not the way she was born.
She was originally very beautiful and seductive,
but she tried to seduce Zeus.
Zeus' wife, Hera, puts this curse on her
that makes her so ugly that if anyone
looks at her, they turn to stone.
That's her punishment for being seductive.
In any case, Perseus goes off to defeat her
and the way that he's able to beat her, even though
she has this power to turn people to stone,
is that Athena gives him a shield that's
very, very highly polished like a mirror
so when he goes to fight Medusa,
he holds the shield up,
she looks at her own reflection, she turns to stone.
Still while he's not looking at her,
he reaches out with a sword and slices her head off.
He beheads her, but he quickly puts her head
in a bag because even when she's dead,
she can still turn people to stone.
Then he flies off to fight another monster
and he pulls Medusa's head out of the bag
and defeats that other beast as well.
He's able to fly, by the way, because just how
Athena gave him a shield,
the god Mercury, or Hermes, gave him
his winged hat and winged sandals that
allows him to fly.
We see all of these things in the sculpture
We'll come back to them again.
Beth: Perseus is really blessed.
Sal: He's helped by the gods.
He's got the winged sandals here,
he's got the winged helmet here,
this of course, is Medusa's decapitated head,
here is her body spurting blood in bronze over here,
and the shield is actually what they're all
standing and lying on.
You can't see it from this particular angle.
Anyway, the story of this particular sculpture,
this particular representation of Perceus,
is that Cellini had been working in France
for King Francis I.
Beth: Who Leonardo had also worked for.
Sal: Who Leonardo had worked for
some years earlier, and Cellini makes some
sculptures for the King of France,
but then he comes back to his home town of
Florence where Cosimo de' Medici is the Duke.
There's several different versions of this story.
One of the accounts comes from the autobiography
that Cellini himself writes in the 1550s.
Basically the story is that Cellini
approaches the Duke and says,
"I have a great project that you're going to
want to fund and have me make."
He shows the Duke sketches and models
made out of clay and wax of this figure.
The Duke likes the subject matter a lot,
and we'll come back to why, but
he likes the idea and he likes the subject
and where it's going to go, but
the Duke thinks of himself as an artistic connoisseur.
So he says to Cellini,
"I like this idea, but it's never going to work
because ... For several different reasons."
Beth: A little presumptuous on his part.
Sal: Well, this is again part of Mannerism.
Here's a leader of Florence and he thinks that
he's such an artistic expert that he can
tell a sculptor what can and can't be done.
He says one reason it's not going to work is
that it's going to topple over.
Bronze may be very strong, in other words,
a bronze sculpture can stand on its own two feet
in a way that marble cannot.
Beth: Marble always needs that sort of tree stump ...
Sal: Marble is very brittle.
It would never be able to have an arm that
sticks out like this,
that would snap off in marble.
It would need some kind of support for the legs.
Bronze can do all of that, but the Duke says,
"Even though I know bronze can do that,
this figure is going to tip forward.
It's not going to be balanced well.
The way you've made it is not going to stable."
More importantly, the Duke says that
the bronze casting is never going to be successful
because essentially, the way that bronze is made,
if we look at a diagram of the bronze
casting process is that you have
an inner mold of clay, an outer mold of clay,
and then what's in between there is wax
in this inner layer that you have made
basically in the design of what you want
your finished sculpture to be.
Then what you do, as you can see on the right,
is you pour hot molten bronze in here.
Everywhere the wax was, which floods out,
the bronze then goes.
After the bronze cools off,
you then break the outer mold and there
essentially is your bronze sculpture.
Beth: And this is called the "lost wax" process
because we lose the wax
Beth: ... And in its place, you get the bronze.
Sal: So when the Duke looks at Cellini's designs,
he says, "This is never going to work in
the bronze casting process because you have
so many things sticking out in different directions;
the arm, the sword, the hands, the feet,
that the bronze is not going to flow fast enough
to all of these places that it needs to fill.
When you break open the mold,
you're going to find that the cast isn't complete,
that there are things missing because
the bronze didn't get everywhere.
It wasn't hot enough, it wasn't fluid enough."
Anyway, so Cellini listens to these arguments and
he says essentially to the Duke,
"I am such an expert. I am such a good sculptor.
I can pull it off. You just need to trust me."
So the Duke says, "Okay, you can go ahead, but
I'm warning you, you're going to humiliate yourself."
Beth: (laughs)
Sal: Cellini gets to work, he prepares the molds,
he prepares everything the way it needs to be done,
he starts pouring the molten bronze into the mold,
but he quickly realizes that in fact, the Duke was right.
The bronze is not flowing fast enough
to fill up the whole mold. It needs to be hotter.
So what he does is he instructs all of his
assistants and servants to break all of the
wood furniture in his house and throw it on
the fire so that the fire will burn hotter
and the bronze will run smoother and faster.
They do that and that works, but it's still not
fast enough, so they throw in some silverware
and other kinds of pewter things that he has
lying around the house because if you add that to
the bronze mixture, that also makes it more liquidy.
And then they wait with baited breath for the ...
Hoping to cool off and they break it open
and there's the whole sculpture ... complete.
Beth: He did it.
Sal: It's a miracle that he was able to do it,
he was able to cast it without any flaws he claims,
no missing parts like the Duke had said
would happen and that it needs to be finished off
and then also once it's installed in the pedestal,
it does in fact, stand very firmly without
toppling over.
Beth: Bronze casting has been a lost art for
the whole middle ages virtually, right?
Sal: Things of this complexity certainly,
so again, even without thinking about
what the subject matter is,
without thinking about how it relates
to its surroundings,
part of the meaning of this work of art
Beth: That he could do it.
Beth: Right.
Sal: ... That's practically the subject matter
is that he was able to accomplish what was said
Beth: Impossible.
Sal: And this makes it mannerist.
It makes a statement of the artist's skill at
taking on an artistic challenge.
Beth: And amazing virtuosity.
Sal: And that virtuosity is not just in the casting,
but it's also in the finishing of this
surface which is incredibly well polished
and has a tremendous amount of detail.
Of course, it's also mannerist because of the
rather live, elegant, athletic, slim form
that corresponds to the dominant aesthetic
of the time, but again, it's this issue of
the artist's skill that's foregrounded
that makes this in part, so important.
Beth: Was there something you were going to
tell us about the patrons and about where this is?
Sal: Okay, exactly. Another part of this sculpture
that's so important is how it relates to its setting
and like I said, this is in front of the town hall,
in front of the Palazzo della Signoria,
where at the time there were already several
other sculptures as we can see in this photo
which is sort of taken from the point of view
of where the Perseus is located.
In other words, this seems to be what ...
Beth: Perseus is seeing.
Sal: Of course, although it's now a replica,
one of the things that stood there is ...
Beth: Michelangelo's David.
Sal: ... Where a replica stands in the
original location ... Michelangelo's David here
and then also this figure of Hercules that
was installed some years later.
Originally part of their commission by the
Republic, but then eventually completed
under de' Medici themselves.
Both of these figures, Michelangelo's David and
this figure of Hercules by Bandinelli, in a way,
they were symbols of the Republic of Florence.
David who defeats the stronger beast, Goliath,
was seen as a symbol of the Republic even from
the beginning of the 1400s because it was
a symbol of how the good and the weak
can defeat the strong if God is on their side.
The 15th century de' Medici,
de' Medici of the 1400s,
they had essentially stolen this imagery away
when they had several sculptures of David made,
when the Republic expels de' Medici in the 1490s
and then returns to power in the 1500s,
the Republic gets this sculpture by Michaelangelo
in a way as a statement of their return,
a statement of their defeat of de' Medici.
Hercules too, in some ways, functioned in that role
because Hercules was also a symbol
of the Republic, the hero who with the help of God,
was able to defeat stronger enemies.
Beth: These are both symbols of Florence
as a democracy, whose power's in the hands of
the citizens of Florence.
Sal: That was definitely one of their ...
Beth: And not in the hands of a single family
like de' Medici.
Sal: Exactly
Beth: And so it was always a struggle.
Sal: This was always part of their meaning, especially
that was definitely understood as the primary meaning
of Michaelangelo's David standing right here.
So we we think about Cosimo de' Medici,
this member of the family who leads
the family's triumphant return and taking power back,
from the Republic, reconquering the city for de' Medici ...
Beth: Did they do that violently?
Sal: Not at first, although they were
tyrants in some other respects,
they do stamp out this short-lived Republic
at the beginning of the 1500s,
we need to understand the Perceus figure
and its commission in this location
in that kind of historical context because
when we think of the Perseus standing here
holding up that head of Medusa,
what does it look like has happened here?
Beth: It looks like it's turned David to stone.
Sal: Exactly.
Beth: It turns this symbol of the Republic ...
Beth: ... To stone.
Sal: Exactly. It looks as if, especially
Michaelangelo's David is looking right at
Cellini's Perseus and the head of Medusa
and there's a suggestion that Hercules is
as well, and that because they're looking at
this head of Medusa that's being held up by
the triumphant hero, that they have turned to stone.
So the tricky, almost humorist,
but very sophisiticated, and hence
typically Mannerist illusion is that de' Medici,
with their sculpture of Perseus,
have turned these figures,
representing the Republic, into stone and
have defeated their enemies once again.
Beth: You know it's funny because I think
we tend to look at these sculptures as
images of beautiful figures during the Renaissance
and we forget this really intense political
meaning behind them.
Sal: Absolutely, and we need to understand
their historical context, their locations,
all of this helps us understand what they are,
but in the end, they still are also very beautiful objects.
That's another way to understand why these viewers,
Hercules and David, have turned to stone
because it was a rather common rhetoric to say
that an object could be so beautiful,
where an artist's skill could be so beautiful,
that it takes your breath away.
It stops you in your tracks.
It petrifies the viewer.
The viewer can be slain by beauty and so
maybe that's another meaning of these
figures turning to stone is that they
look at Perseus' creation and they're so
astonished by his skill and his mastery as
an artist that they are turned to stone
in astonishment.
Beth: They're incredibly beautiful.