Cellini's blood - painter Benvenuto Cellini

Michael Cole

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond its symbolic promotion of Cosimo and his executor Cellini as new founders of the arts, moreover, the blood reinforced what Martelli, like Cellini himself, specified as the primary challenge of the artist's assignment - to make a match for Donatello's Judith and Holofernes [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED], the work that then stood in the Loggia's westernmost archway, and had long been the Piazza Ducale's unique work of bronze.(15) Consider Giorgio Vasari's description of the Judith, written in the very years the blood was being designed:

The exterior simplicity in Judith's habit and countenance manifestly reveal what is inside, the great mind of that Woman, and the aid of God; in the same way, the air of Holofernes reveals wine, sleep, and the death in his members, which, having lost their spirits, show themselves to be cold and cascading.(16)

Holofernes's limbs are "cascanti," Vasari writes, because they have lost their spirits. Having been struck once already with Judith's sword, the giant's life has retreated from his extremities; on the verge of death, warmth lasts only in 0his heart.(17) As nearly every writer on Cellini's Medusa, in turn, insists, the sequel to Holofernes would make dying even more vivid, realizing the loss of spirits as the pour of blood. "Perseo miro," an anonymous sonateer thus celebrated, "e sotto a lui caduto/Il spirto e 'l corpo prezioso e caro/di Medusa" (I gaze upon Perseus, and upon what is fallen beneath him, the spirit and body, precious and dear, of Medusa).(18) In syntax and conceit, the lines steer away from both the impetuousness of the pour and its equine destiny. At issue, rather, is the statue's antithesis between containment and privation, between a hero great with his possessing soul and a victim from which spirto is being tapped. Francesco Bocchi's terms are even closer to Vasari's: "Medusa's body is . . . dead and cascading [cascante]; it makes wholly manifest how flesh and bones deprived of spirit are disposed."(19) And Cellini himself offered this description:

Qualche saggio di me Perseo pur mostra in alto ha 'l testio e 'l crudel ferro tinto, sotto ha 'l cadavro e non di spirto privo.(20)

(Perseus shows my essay: above, he holds the head and the cruel, colored sword; beneath he has the cadaver, its spirits not gone.)

Medusa is a cadaver, as good as dead, even if her life, like Holofernes', has not quite vanished. As her muscles contract and her heart gives its final beat, she comes to her end. The body's distortion updates Donatello's cascading loss, while the blood presents the spirit's own desperate motion. Cellini's poem, like those of his contemporaries, looks beyond the point of Ovid's story; the key topic is rather the depletion of corporeal vitality. With its second body, the sculpture explores the relationship of exhaustion and beauty; with its blood, it reveals what life drains from the face and from the limbs [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 6, 7 OMITTED].

There are, then, at least two available historical explanations for the incorporation of the blood into the program of the Perseus, one involving the narrative that blood entailed, the other involving the sculptural inheritance it claimed. In both cases, the advent of the blood not only served Cosimo's purposes, it also facilitated the individuation of Cellini's own role as Florence's new star bronze maker. The aim of what follows is to show how, even beyond its strictly programmatic rationale, the blood brought Cellini's own artistic identity into focus. Considering how the artist's horizons of thought could color the blood's significance, and how his interpreters' conceits could form around the blood's issue, I want to linger on the means both Cellini's and his viewers' writings offer for addressing the blood directly. Employing contemporary texts about the Perseus and its making, I will pursue a two-stage argument. First, I will consider the work's adoption of Donatello's emptying body, proposing why Cellini's given task made this antithesis of the full and the vacant all the more material. Following that, I will reconsider Cellini's use of his literary sources, examining more closely just what it is that the artist was trying to render. Throughout, I will attempt to remain faithful to his viewers' belief that Medusa's blood was fundamental to Cellini's artifice - my proposal, in fact, will be that blood is here the medium of a sculptural execution.

Casting Blood

Oh, would that by my father's arts I might restore the nations, and, like my father, infuse breath into the molded clay! - Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.363-64

In the climactic scene of his autobiography, Cellini rises from his deathbed, cuffs his traitorous assistants, quenches the fire that is consuming the roof of his house, and battles even the lightning that the heavens direct at his studio, all to cast the Perseus. It is an incomparable episode in sixteenth-century literature, not only for Cellini's skill as a raconteur but also for the momentousness of the historical event it ostensibly records: Cellini, having appropriated the pouring of his statue from the artillery makers who threatened to ruin it, has succeeded in casting the biggest single-piece bronze the world had known.

By the time he came to writing, years after the Perseus's success, Cellini knew that it was as a caster that his fame would live. He recognized that his small-scale metalwork had prepared him for his Florentine patron's monumental commission, and he believed that it was through metallurgy that he had addressed the challenge of colossal figure sculpture. Within the context of early modern sculpture theory, accordingly, Cellini's claim involves a remarkable statement of vocation. In his Vita and elsewhere, his narratives resist the belief, articulated forcefully by Pomponius Gauricus half a century earlier and still alive in the new Florentine Accademia di Disegno, that casting was at best a mechanical process subordinate to modeling, at worst a disreputable task better handed off to a different person.(21) Cellini's writings, which begin with the controversial premise that goldsmithing is the basis of sculptural training, comprise a series of claims that defend his established field as an honorable one.(22) Rather than isolating his works as a clay shaper, he exaggerates his importance as a caster, even to the point of fiction. The pour itself, Cellini insists, is his. He makes the complete execution of the cast the feature activity of his studio, and he declares his personal responsibility for it through the final moments.(23)

Unlike Gauricus, Cellini was prepared to claim that founding, no less than modeling, must be ingenious. Fully aware that his schemes placed new demands on the skills of experienced founders, his comments exploit the tensions between idea and execution that his initiatives implied. When he writes that "my workers understood my method, which was very different from that of other masters in the profession," he acknowledges, backhandedly, that casting is collaborative, but he also underscores the novelty of his task.(24) Left in the hands of the "foundry masters," the Perseus cast would have been wrecked; only Cellini's own last-minute resourcefulness allowed its completion.(25) In the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci and Guglielmo della Porta, Cellini proved the design and operation of furnaces and channeling apparatuses to be a scene for artistic originality.(26)

Cellini moreover relied on founding, and not just forming, when articulating his most ambitious imitative claims. For the Michelangelesque marble sculptor, the prime exercise of design was the extraction of a composition from a single hunk of stone. Cellini appreciated this challenge. Commissioned for the Loggia, his Perseus had to stand before Michelangelo's David, the century's most enviable posting of the feat; in his Treatise on Sculpture, he attacks sculptors who, having planned badly, are forced to piece together their figures.(27) While planning the Perseus, Cellini undertook his own first two marble sculptures, both as complicated arrangements discovered in single blocks. Because bronze is not carved, Cellini could not think of the Perseus as a matter of recognizing the form in the stone. The act of metallic fusion, however, offered Cellini a way to emulate the accomplishment of a monumental piece without joins. Transposing the demand for material unity into the technical problem of managing the single pour,(28) Cellini rejected the safer and more practical option of casting the Perseus in sections (as the caster of Donatello's Judith had done), intentionally making the operation more difficult.(29) And when he came subsequently to describe his feat, he conveniently suppressed the fact that not only the blood from Medusa's head but also the wings on Perseus's feet and head had been made separately. Cellini presented the achievement of his cast as one that happened in a single gesture, and thereby both likened his achievement to that of the greatest stonecutters and set the standards for a new kind of work. The design of both figure and apparatus were to push the limits of the large, freestanding, unpieced sculpture.

Corollary to this, casting allowed Cellini to confront the most visible technical difficulty of marble sculpture, that of raising an arm holding something in its hand without having it break. In stone, the effort was that of competing with the block's strength, extending a cantilevered piece from the core as dramatically as possible.(30) With a one-piece cast, this could be converted into the difficulty of leading the metallic flow through the entire mold without interruption. In his Vita, Cellini gives us the following conversation with his patron:

The Duke said, "Now, tell me, Benvenuto, how is it possible that this beautiful head of Medusa, which is way up there in Perseus's hand, can ever come out [in your cast]?

I responded without hesitation, "Now look here, my Lord, if your most illustrious excellency had the knowledge of art which he claims to have, he would not be afraid, as he says he is, that the beautiful head would not come out. Rather, he would be afraid for the right foot, which is way down there, and a bit displaced.(31)

The exchange, written after the fact, is almost certainly a fiction, but it pursues an important point. The duke's ignorance (as Cellini would have it) lies in the fact that he has been trained only to appreciate marble: by habit, he looks at what is raised in the hand. Cellini's lesson is on how to see the difficulties of his art. The lifted marble arm is trumped by the stepping bronze foot, and the legible signs of his predecessors' greatness are translated from results of cutting to results of casting.

In promoting his Perseus as his most important sculptural legacy, then, Cellini was convinced that its significance depended on its ultimate accomplishment in metal. Dramatizing his use of the furnace, Cellini domesticated the defining challenges of the fields of his competitors into the terms of his own profession. What needs to occupy us most, however, is the vantage of casting that Cellini took to be the paramount evidence of its virtuousness, the function that let it trump even the greatest marbles. This he found not in a problem of design per se, but in a mythical notion that focused more directly on the cast itself. Presenting himself as a pourer of metals, Cellini discovered, he could do something no stonecutter could: he could explain just how he spirited his figures.

At the deciding moment in the Vita scene, as Cellini recounts the outcome of the almost disastrous clotting of the metal, he narrates as follows:

I had [my assistants] get a half cake of tin, one which weighed about 60 pounds, and I cast it [lo gittai] into the clot in the furnace. This, with help from the fire and from stirring with iron bars and pokers, became liquid in a few minutes. Once I saw that I had resuscitated the dead, against the belief of all of those idiots, so much vigor returned to me that I no longer felt any fever or fear of death.(32)

Much has been written on Cellini's account of this revivification, but what has not been emphasized is that when Cellini says he has raised the dead, he is not speaking of his sculpture at all, but only of the bronze itself. His assistants' betrayal was to let the metal clot, his salvation is to make it remelt. Cellini rejoices even before the metal enters the channels. Later, once it has moved, he repeats the idea:

as everyone saw that my bronze had so perfectly been made liquid, and that my form was filled, they all helped and obeyed me with spirit and joy, and I ran about commanding and helping, calling out: "O Christ, how with your immense virtu you resuscitated from the dead, and climbed gloriously to Heaven!"(33)

Only the second time he brings up revival, with the invocation to Christ, does Cellini refer more generally to the enlivening of the sculpture itself. And even here, he preserves the original resuscitation: the assistants are cheered, first, because they see that the bronze has liquefied.

The idea that bronze could be brought to life is not something Cellini made up. It draws on conceptions about metals that he would have understood as both ancient and contemporary, scientific assumptions about their nature, their origins, and their potential. Fundamental here is the ancient Greek belief, questioned but never fully rejected in the Renaissance, that the primary ingredient in metals was watery, and that metals formed when waters (or waters-to-be) became trapped in the earth and congealed.(34) One implication of this, for sixteenth-century readers, was that the "natural" state of metals was not quite solid, but rather "unctuous." Acknowledging this hydrous basis of metals, sixteenth-century metallurgists could not overlook what Aristotle said about water itself: "in water pneuma is present, and in all pneuma soul-heat is present, so that in a way all things [made of water] are charged with soul."(35) While neo-Aristotelians argued over the details of the generative process the philosopher described, none disputed the idea that metals, originating with water, were animated. As the sixteenth-century metallurgist Giorgius Agricola summed up: "Aristotle says that the material of metals is not mere water, but rather a water found in some sentiment and passion."(36) Aristotle's association of metal, liquidity, and pneuma suggested that the hard metals of the world were found at the edge of a spirited, liquid state.

We know that Cellini was familiar with the basics of Aristotelian theories of generation well before he began work as a bronze caster. His saltcellar, devised in Rome in early 1540, shows the combination of earth and water responsible for salinity and rehearses a similar principle of origination. By the time Cellini came to write about his casting of the Perseus, decades later, he would have been able to think through (and express) such ideas in even more refined ways. He might, for instance, have considered the writings he knew by his friend Antonio Allegretti. With "art," Allegretti explains, one can "dissolve the perfected metals, disposing them, or rather forcing them, to turn back into water; for water is their first material, that from which they were created and made."(37) Allegretti's lines, like Cellini's own, not only remember the Aristotelian etiology but also reverse it, finding in metals' watery constitution a prime challenge: if the origins of metals require that there be a spirit within, experience showed that that spirit could be witnessed. A dilettante alchemist like Allegretti, getting this far, would have gone a few steps further:

[Metal is] a hard and dense material holding within it that living spirit which infuses all created things [che a le create cose infonde] and which alone gives them life, motion and sense. It cannot show its forces unless its hot and lively virtue is quickly freed where it lies encumbered.(38)

If one could witness the spirit of metals, Allegretti thought, then one should be able to isolate it. And if one indeed could isolate it, then one should be able to capture it and harness its virtue.

Allegretti's conjoining of movement, liquidity, heat, and life in metals is representative of the kind of naturalist understanding and language Cellini had available when contemplating his own challenges and accomplishments.(39) Of interest to us here, however, is less Cellini's alchemy and more his pyrotechnics. For this reason, the handling of the theme in another book Cellini probably knew, Vannoccio Biringuccio's De la pirotechnia, is still more revealing:

[Alchemists want to] separate spirits from bodies [of metals], and would return them there at will, as if they were daggers taken from their sheaths. I would believe that it is possible, with the will of fire, to extract those substances in things that are called spirits and to reduce them into vapors. But I will not believe that, once extracted, they can be returned there, for such an effect would be nothing other than a knowledge of how to resuscitate the dead.(40)

Biringuccio neatly describes the venture of metallic respiriting, but also emphasizes its unrealizability. Here he makes light of alchemists, just as elsewhere he mocks those who "believe that even outside a woman's body one can generate and form a man or any other animal with flesh, bones, and sinews, and can animate him with a spirit."(41) That his remarks should appear in a book on casting, however, is telling, and their place invites us to think further about the way Cellini brings similar language into his own story.

Had Cellini viewed the vain exercises Biringuccio was imagining, perhaps he, too, would have denounced them. As a sculptor, however, Cellini's perspective on the business was different. Occupied, like every other artist of his time, with the question of how to give his figures life and motion, Cellini could not have overlooked the suggestiveness in what we have seen Allegretti call the "infusion" of one's "created things." From Biringuccio's sense that the vain alchemical dream of restoring spirits lay dangerously close to his very practical business of casting, it will seem a small step to change the emphasis while maintaining the analogy. When the bronze clot melts, Cellini describes what results as an elixir of life. And his larger enterprise presented a schema in which such life could be made, then imported into the body.(42) Poured into the statue, the metal animates it; simultaneously, it cures Cellini of his own mortal illness and invigorates everyone around him. Cellini's vocation, unlike Biringuccio's, could let him treat the founding of statues as a fulfillment of the impossible alchemical assignment.

Both in the Vita and elsewhere, Cellini plays out this plot against a background of God's own acts:

Quel immortal divin Creator degno die l'alme a noi, simil al suo valore; poi le vesti di questo bel furore, qual fe' di terra, e non d'ombra o disegno.

(That worthy immortal divine Creator gave us souls, in likeness to his virtue, then clothed them with this beautiful furor, which he made of earth, and not of shadow or design.)

Note the sequence of creation here. God started with the soul, then he clothed it ("le vesti") in clay. To those who have been following Cellini's repeated descriptions of what the bronze maker does, this will sound familiar: after making the anima (the "soul," or core form) for his Perseus, Cellini writes, he "clothed this with those earths" that he had prepared ("io vestivo il mio Perseo di quelle terre che io avevo acconce").(43) Knowing that God made his first man of terra, we might now wonder whether God, doing so, was exemplifying the modeler's or the founder's art.

Elsewhere, Cellini suggests that God's sculpting paradigm includes not only the work of clothing but also that of infusing:

Dio fe' il prim'uom di terra, e poi l'accese coll'immortal suo spirto, vivo e santo; e gli die 'l mondo in guardia tutto quanto; poi 'n virgin vaso a rivederlo scese.(44)

(God made the first man of earth, then lit him with his immortal spirit, living and holy. He gave him the whole world to watch over, then, to see him again, redescended into the virgin vessel.)

God's figure here, as previously, is of terra, earth or clay, the same material with which Cellini works, both when forming models and when forming molds. The poem itself goes on to make this analogy, repeating its story of God's career by summarizing Cellini's: "Fe' Perseo Benvenuto, e Cristo in croce" (Benvenuto made Perseus, and Christ on the cross). The truncated verb fe' is identical with that of the poem's opening, as is the sequence: Cellini, like God, made his first man, then he made his savior. The argument here is a variation on a familiar paragone theme: sculpture defeats painting because God sculpted.(45) Cellini's novelty is to insist that the ultimate sculpting gesture is the addition of, as the poem says, a "spirto vivo." This makes his argument suitable not only as a case for the superiority of work in terra, but also as an apology for casting. Cellini's resuscitation, first of his bronze, then of his statue, schematically repeats the bringing of the first man to life.

At points, Cellini makes the autobiographical element in these arguments explicit:

Poi che dal gran Fattore s'accese 'l lume mio, Sia 'l Benvenuto, disse 'l mio buon Giove.(46)

God, the great Maker, gave spark to Cellini, then named him, just as he had done once before with Adam. But crucial this time is the last phrase, where Cellini refers to God as Jove. In Cellini's time, Glove could be used generally as a classicizing designation for the singular generator of humanity, and Cellini uses the name elsewhere in specifically Christian contexts. In this case, however, mio buon Giove has a second obvious reference as well, for there was but one sculpture of Jove by Cellini in Florence, and it was on public display [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. This was, of course, the mythological father of Perseus; Cellini had advertised this geniture on the front of his statue in the piazza, and the comparison was not missed.

Cellini's friend Agnolo Bronzino, in fact, underscored the importance of Perseus's parentage to Cellini's own creation myth. In one of the poems about the statue he sent to Cellini, Bronzino begins by addressing not the Perseus/Medusa pair, but rather the statuettes of baby Perseus and his mother, Danae, which, like the Jupiter, appear in the socle of Cellini's monument [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 8 OMITTED]:

Ardea Venere bella; e lui ch'in pioggia D'oro cangiasti, Amor, che tanto puoi, Chiedeva; ond'egli a' dolci preghi tuoi Le scese in grembo, ov ogni grazia poggia.(47)

(Beautiful Venus burned, and he whom you, Love, who can do so much, changed into a shower of gold, beseeched. Then he, answering your sweet prayers, climbed down into her breast, where every grace is posed.)

In Bronzino's tale, Danae burns for Jupiter until Love makes the god himself turn into a shower of gold that fills Danae's breast. The wordplay is dense, for Bronzino apostrophizes Cellini's figures not as Danae and Perseino but as Venus and Cupid. The child is thus both the desire that causes Jupiter's transformation and the warm result of Danae's fulfillment, the actual burning within her breast and the child from it, now at her side. Looking to the other face of Cellini's pedestal, Bronzino then addresses Minerva [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED]:

Starete, disse, omai, Minerva in terra; E fe' d'entrambi un sol giovin, chall'ali E al tronco Gorgon, Perseo dimostri.

E quinci appar divina agli occhi nostri L'opra, che il bene e la bellezza serra, Suprema gloria de' tuoi dolci mali.

(He said, "You will remain, Minerva, on earth," and he made of both a single young man. Thus winged, Perseus appears at the trunk of the Gorgon. And so the work, which encloses the good and the beautiful, appears divine to our eyes, the supreme glory of your sweet pains.) At the moment Minerva, the protectress of art and of alchemy, enters the poem, the agency of Perseus's creation is shifted from the conjunction Love-Jupiter-Danae to Cellini alone. The bellezza of the boy is no longer just Danae's gift to Perseus but is an aspect of the opra. The "sweet pains" of Danae's desire for Jupiter are now Cellini's own, becoming the labor of love that is his work. Especially interesting for our purposes is how these final lines allow a rereading of the unmistakably Petrarchan stanza that precedes them. Describing Danae's heat as Jupiter's gold enters her, Bronzino writes:

Ma come avvien s'a fuoco esca s'appoggia O qual di neve al Sol, quaggiu fra noi S'accese e strusse al caldo seno; e poi Seco s'unio viepiu che pietra in loggia.

(But as it happens if tinder rests in fire, or snow in the sun, so down here among us [the gold] is lit and melts in the hot breast, and then unites with it [to make something] much more than stone in the loggia.)

How literally is Bronzino imagining Cellini's repetition of Jupiter and Danae's act? When the fire burns, Minerva arrives, and a statue "viepiu che pietra" appears. Are we, then, directed to think specifically about Cellini's heated filling of the body with his own golden metal?(48)

Poetic inventions like Bronzino's illustrate the kinds of creation myths the Perseus allowed, and Cellini's own later refashioning of his art indicates how important it was that this creation took place, so to speak, within the breast of the earth.(49) Making man will have to go beyond giving him a form in clay; it must also involve ignition. If the making of the first man is to be emulated, one cannot just shape bodies, one must also, Prometheus-like, animate them.(50) Cellini's stories of casting are consistent with his poetry insofar as the marvel of Cellini's fusione (casting) is its capacity for infusione (infusion). Once liquefied metals are understood as living, the pouring of them into the armed mold could reproduce the archetypal act of life-giving. This lets Cellini hold his casting up to painting, just as he would hold it up to marble sculpture. Conversely, the poetry inflects Cellini's technical vocabulary. The earthen mold has an anima, an inner form that determines its shape, and an ossatura, a steel "skeleton" that holds it together. The infusion goes into its bocca, its mouth.(51)

This brings us very nearly back to our primary topic of blood and spirits: although it is metal, Minerbetti says, it seems to be blood. Are we seeing the blood's effusion, we will now want to ask, or do we see proof that the body that emitted it was metallically infused?

Minerbetti's probably innocent remark could have been amplified in Cellini's time along various lines. Mining experts would have observed that metal formed in "veins" in the earth, "almost like the veins of blood in the bodies of animals." The alchemist whom Cellini asked for an explanation of mining must have commented on this.(52) Aristotelian pneumatology, furthermore, offered homophonic accounts of the origins of human blood (hence spirit and life) and of metals; both were infusions of water into earth. One could, as Agricola did, make the point by quoting Timocles: "silver is the soul and the blood of mortals."(53) Alchemists, on the other hand, might have pointed to the theories of metallic etiology according to which metals were generated of "seeds" and blood, just as people are. "Whoever claims that vapor is the material of metals, says nothing other than he who calls the material of birth the blood of the male and the female, whence seeds are generated."(54) "Menstruum" (mestruo), a solvent in which metals dissolved, was a standard ingredient in sixteenth-century attempts at metallic transmutation.(55) And Biringuccio, citing proof of antimony's proximity to metals, noted that a "bloody liquor" could be extracted from it.(56)

Most interesting, though, is Cellini's own poetry. In 1559, on learning of Vincenzo Danti's triple failure in attempting to cast the statue of Hercules and Antaeus for the garden fountain of the Medici villa at Castello, Cellini wrote a series of sonnets at Danti's expense. Most of these pun on the word gettare (cast), comparing Danti's miscasting to Hercules's own tossing away of Antaeus. But one sonnet in particular ends with more interesting lines:

Voi che nel mondo put gittar volete o roba o sangue o pregiati metalli, per romar gloriosi al flume Lete;

gittai nel tier 'lion, pria infra i Galli; se ben feci, 'l mio premio voi sapete: brutto e 'l creder saper poi far tre falli.(57)

([O] you who want to cast substance or blood or prized metals into the world, to return glorious to the river Lethe - I cast in proud Florence [in 'Lion: Ilium/home of the Marzocco] and earlier among the Gauls [i galli: Gauls, cocks]; although I did it, you know my reward. It is condemnable to believe you know how, then make three failures.)

The first stanza is intentionally difficult. In Cellini's Florence, the river Lethe could not have been mentioned without awareness that Dante placed it at the top of Purgatory; nevertheless, Cellini's clarification that the return to Lethe is glorious, as well as his implication that the return was allowed through the champion's worldly deeds, distances us from the passive suffering that a pointedly Purgatorial scene would require. Cellini's specification that one returns to Lethe sooner evokes Virgil's and Plato's stories of how, after death, the river purges the spirit so that it can reenter the body reborn. The protagonist who casts blood and metals into the world arrives at the beginning of immortality. This affects how we understand the deeds at the center of the poem. We might take "casting blood" to mean spewing blood, and thus to be a labor that is ultimately redemptive, or redeemable; elsewhere Cellini insists that work on his marble Christ was the contrary of "casting away his hours" on vain activities.(58) Situating sangue between roba and pregiati metalli, the pun in this case invites a comparison between the suffering of bloodletting and the sculptor's work.(59) As Michelangelo allegedly remarked to Ammanati, "In my works, I shit blood."(60) Alternatively, we might read "casting blood," as Torquato Mabellini has, to mean the spilling of others' blood; to gettar sangue is to do violence. It is, of course, easy to imagine the unrepentant double murderer Cellini intending such a sense, and the virtue rewarded in this respect, too, brings Cellini close to Plato's or Virgil's spirits.(61) Perseus, we should observe, is surely meant to be "glorious" as he spills Medusa's blood.

For whatever opacity remains, the poem binds blood and metals, and does so in ways that implicate both the imagery of the Perseus and the sculptural act behind it. If we allow the third line, "per romar gloriosi al flume Lete," to set the parameters for the gloss on what precedes it, these conjunctions will contribute to one conception of sculptural virtu. We might, however, also question this conception by looking more critically at the form in which the sonnet has appeared ever since its first publication in the nineteenth century.(62) The poem exists in one draft. It was never intended for print, and was never even rewritten so as to make it presentable to others. In the manuscript, it happens, we find that the original third line of the stanza was not "per tornar gloriosi al flume Lete," but rather "non vi mettete a far se non sapete.'(63) Cellini, perhaps attempting to make his conceit sound more erudite, changed his mind about how to conclude the stanza. It is tempting to think that the first two lines were written with the draft's deleted conclusion, rather than the one known today, in mind. Left intact, the original nugget of the stanza would have been simpler and more grammatical: "you who want to cast substance or blood or prized materials into the world, don't begin if you don't know how." Such a remark highlights the second face of the central pun, the reference to the enterprise of metal casting at which Danti failed. Blood and precious metals, in this case, could betoken each other interchangeably: one can found with the blood of the earth, and one can throw one's mettle into the task.

The related threads of the discourses we have been following can now be drawn together. Cellini, assigned to undertake a monumental bronze response to Donatello's Judith and Holofernes, studied in particular his predecessor's depiction of lost spirits; with his Medusa, Cellini imitated Donatello's own drained figure, but portrayed those spirits directly. Cellini gave the spirits a medium in metal, and as such attempted to meet the poetic expectation that his bodies, like Donatello's, be infused. Exposing blood, he demonstrated just what infused the body, and he illustrated how that essence could move across the container's threshold. The metal of this blood, moreover, could seem, to one with Cellini's science, specially resonant as the carrier of the infusing spirits. Rendering liquidity in metal effectively recalled spirits already there. By the same token, the status of his bodies as infused was naturalized by descriptions of the act that generated them, the act of pouring that Cellini insisted was at the center of his profession. Ultimately, domesticating the terms of metallurgy allowed the artist to corroborate his fulfillment of the assigned aesthetic of infusion. The fictive blood, as liquid metal, could, in retrospect, record the spirits that Cellini had literally poured into the sculpture. Retold, the act of turning real bronze into the fictive insides of Medusa illustrates the process of turning real bronze into the real insides of the statue's ossatura, or corpo. Cellini cast blood.

This reading is enriched when we take into account some of the other ways the statue has, in the recent literature, been framed. Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, for example, encourages us to look again at the base on which the Perseus stands: developing a suggestion from Christof Thoenes, she proposes that this socle be read as an altar. The idea is a powerful one; comparison with Renaissance renderings of Roman altars leaves little doubt that Cellini had such a form in mind. On this basis, Brandt enjoins us to read the pedestal as "an altar to the Olympian gods who protect the Medicean 'son of Jove,' now Duke Cosimo I."(64) Although the poems of Bronzino and others treat the statuettes Cellini includes on the base as Perseus's creators as much as his protectors, and caution us from limiting the figures to a statement of Medicean genealogy, much speaks for the kernel of Brandt's proposal: the base is dedicated to the gods it contains. Such dedicated altars, after all, play a prominent role in the story of Perseus. Having rescued Andromeda, Ovid writes,

Perseus builds to three gods three altars of turf, the left to Mercury, the right to thee, O warlike maid, and the central one to Jove. To Minerva he slays a cow, a young bullock to the winged god, and a bull to thee, thou greatest of gods.(65)

It is suggestive that Cellini's altar includes all three of the figures on Ovid's. The artist could thus well be alluding to a specific detail from the Perseus narrative, one he could have known not just from texts but also from other images, for instance, the etching designed by his friend Giulio Romano [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED]. If, as Brandt implies, Cellini intends his base to function as an altar (and not merely to incorporate classicizing, but contentless, shapes), then the object's role as a base becomes more consequential. We might think, for example, about what should be on an altar: as Cellini certainly knew, Medusa occupies the space of immolation, the space of fire.(66) Viewed against contemporary representations of pagan rites, we could infer that Medusa's blood pours in the midst of a notional heat. Along similar lines, we might question the effect, vis-a-vis the base, of Perseus's own gesture. It is intriguing to consider whether Cellini looked carefully at, for instance, the Pygmalion and Galatea by his friend Bronzino [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED], whether he thought about the relation of sacrifice to the sculptor's own act of transformation, about how life comes to be given through fire and death.(67) An argument in this direction could draw on Mircea Eliade's classic studies of the role of blood sacrifice in metal casting, and specifically on his thesis that "life can only be engendered from another life that has been immolated." The transfer of life, its shift from one being to another can be viewed as an almost primordial strategy in metal forging; Eliade's discussion of the importance of animal and human oblations in various cultures' founding rituals is one way to normalize Cellini's own act of creation.(68)

To expand our scope in a different way, we might also consider John Shearman's observation that Michelangelo's David and Baccio Bandinelli's Hercules can be (and were) read as having been enfolded into the Perseus's fiction. Cellini's group realized a subject that thematized the petrifaction of the beholder in a material that was perspicuously not stone, and it occupied an architectural plot on which two gigantic marble works seemed to gaze [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. The opportunity was extraordinary: Perseus could seem to transform his two stone predecessors into the first and lasting evidence of his own petrifying weapon. Shearman does not discuss just how Cellini hoped to make this gorgonization operate, how the artist could make plain that his sculpture was, as Bronzino put it, "viepiu che pietra." But if we can now say that it is through infusion that bronze exceeds marble, then we can infer that it is precisely the blood that guarantees the whole effect. It is its warmth, its red life, that differentiates Cellini's bronze from its petrified companions:(69) Ovid himself narrates that when Perseus held up the Medusa's head, he made his opponents into "stone without blood [silicem sine sanguine]."(70) Cellini's 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)

Rendering Blood

But after he felt the chilled bronze in his hand, he cried, could the Gods themselves be deceived by my pour? - Pagano Pagani to Cellini, 1554(72)

Between the comments of poets, the forms with which Cellini frames his work, and the setting the statue had to enter, perspectives accumulate that allow us to read Cellini's sculpture in much the way that he himself read Vincenzo Danti's: his picture of virtu might be taken as an allegory of casting. And it is by now tempting to see Perseus's gesture as the heroic (as Hercules' was the pathetic) pouring of metallic-blood/spirited-metal into the place where the monument should or does stand. One further piece of evidence, however, remains to be addressed. There is, it turns out, another document that bears directly on the blood, one that requires us to view its role in more complicated terms: surprisingly, Cellini gives his blood a name.

In the accounts preserved of the weighing of pieces of the monument cast subsequently to the Perseus, we learn of a Merchurio, a Danae, a Perseino, four alie (wings), and two gorgoni di Medusa.(73) All but the last of these items present no problem; they can be readily identified with components in Cellini's assemblage. The due gorgoni, however, have long remained something of a mystery. Since the Perseus figures were not the only metalworks Cellini had under way at the time of the record, one could guess that the document records more miscellaneous pieces. As there is also evidence that Cellini executed components for his monument that were ultimately omitted, it might seem possible, alternatively, that these gorgoni were extra Gorgons Cellini once intended for the statue.(74) Eugene Plon, in fact, the only Cellini specialist to comment on the phrase, was certain that the gorgoni were independently cast Medusa heads.(75)

Unknown to Plon, however, was a second, more specific, document of the weighing. From this we learn that Cellini made not just any Gorgons but the "gorgoni del collo e della testa della medusa" (gorgoni of the neck and of the head of Medusa).(76) The document leaves no doubt: the gorgoni are exactly the two blood formations that hang from Medusa's two parts. We are faced, consequently, with new considerations. How, to begin, should we now reconstruct Cellini's actual making of the blood? The Medusa was cast in June 1548, the Perseus in the winter of 1549, but the pieces mentioned here were cast only in the summer of 1552.(77) Cellini thus seems to have rendered the blood independently, designing it as a piece on its own, turning to it only after he had seen how the figures themselves would look in cleaned condition. Such a scenario, perhaps, helps make sense of another small work from Cellini's hand, the mysterious bronze study of Medusa's head, today preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED]. The function of this piece, datable on the basis of chemical tests to Cellini's lifetime,(78) and presumably identical with the "testa di Medusa di bronzo" listed in the inventory of Cellini's studio on his death in 1571,(79) has never been established. The wrist grasping the hair is curiously truncated, with no indication that the hand was ever intended to be attached to an arm. At the neck, however, the metal has been filed down to a fairly even plane [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED]. Did Cellini simply exclude the blood from the study, or did he rather design the head for the blood specifically, as a model onto which the artist could fit different versions of blood he had made separately, perhaps in a less durable material, in order to visualize them?(80) The date of the reference to gorgoni orients questions about the sequence of Cellini's work on the Perseus and may help us imagine how he thought about his different pieces. To discuss Cellini's actual treatment of the blood, however, we must also tackle the philological issues raised by the documents' wording. From modern Italian, we expect to find that Cellini's term gorgoni is the plural of gorgone, Gorgon. In his time, too, the word gorgone was familiar enough; mentioning a Gorgon, one could be speaking of a member of Medusa's family, the person of Medusa herself, or even (as Plon knew) her head in isolation.(81) However, no example of the Medusa story, nor any dictionary entry, early or recent, seems to allow the word gorgone to designate blood. What, then, are Cellini's items? One possibility is raised by Niccolo Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini's 1869 Dizionario della lingua italiana, which remarks that the plural gorgonii names not Gorgons as such, but rather a particular family of polyps - gorgonii are corals.(82) Tommaseo and Bellini give no source or example for this usage, but their word is very close to a term that Cellini could have found in Pliny's Natural History, namely gorgonia (English gorgonian), the term for a red coral "so named because it is converted into the hardness of stone." The Italian version of Agricola's scientific writings, published two years before the Cellini documents in question were written, spotlights and explains Pliny's word:

[Coral] has also been called gorgonian, because the poets imagine that the gorgons were converted into stone. Thus Pliny, writing about gems, says these words: "gorgonian is, in effect, nothing other than coral, and the reason for this name is that gorgonian is transformed, converted into the hardness of s tone."(83)

Surprisingly, Agricola glosses Pliny's definition not with reference to the petrifying power of Medusa's face, but rather with the assertion that Gorgons themselves, like gorgonian corals, rigidify.(84) Cellini's term gorgoni accordingly requires us to consider the possibility that Medusa's metal not only flows but also hardens.(85)

For this, we might return to Ovid's telling of the Perseus story. Now, though, we need to read not about the beheading of Medusa but about the rescue of Andromeda:

Having killed the dragon, Perseus came down from the rock and sat on the bank of the sea to wash himself, for he was soaked with the dragon's blood. As he did this, the head of Medusa got in his way, so he set it on the ground. So that the head did not crack, Perseus gathered some seaborne sticks of wood to set it on, and put them on the ground. Immediately those sticks hardened as stone does, and from the blood of the head they became vermilion. It is thus that coral is made, and this was the first coral. Seeing this, and the death of the dragon, the sea nymphs marveled greatly. And as Perseus entered the water, the nymphs came to the bank, took those corals and disseminated them through the sea, where they immediately began to grow. Because of this, there is now an abundance of coral in the world.(86)

The quotation comes from the earliest published Italian translation of the Metamorphoses, written by Giovanni Bonsignore in the fourteenth century, but first printed in 1497. Bonsignore's version of the story, like those that follow his, modifies several significant details of Ovid's Latin.(87) Ovid, as it happens, did not even mention blood, specifying that seaweed was petrified at Medusa's touch, transformed through the vim monstri.(88) The early Italian versions, in contrast, do not name the cause of the petrifaction, but do explain that once coral hardened, Medusa's blood made it red.

That Cellini has blood itself become coral may indicate that he knew Ovid in translation; that he omits seaweed as an ingredient, however, makes his own metamorphosis one of a new sort. In part, his variation depends on his having located the generation of coral in the scene of Perseus's confrontation with Medusa, rather than Andromeda. What is striking, though, is how, in departing from Ovid's Andromeda tale, the sum of Cellini's details approaches not only the earlier moment in Ovid's narrative but also some ideas from Pliny. In the Natural History, it is not the Gorgon that petrifies but the removal of the coral-to-be from its native wet conditions: soft in the water, coral becomes hard only when it meets air. Pliny also has this to say about it:

In shape, coral is like a shrub and its color is green. Its berries are white under the water and soft; when taken out they immediately harden and grow red, being like, in appearance and size, to those of cultivated cornel. It is said that at a touch it immediately petrifies; and that therefore it is quickly severed and pulled away in nets or cut off by a sharp iron instrument. In this way, the name "coral" is explained.(89)

The passage is suggestive, inasmuch as Cellini, like Pliny, has coral become coral only when it is cut. If Cellini knew his Ovid not from translations but rather (or also) from Raphael Regius's popular Latin edition, he would have found the commentary referring him directly to Pliny's discussion.(90) And if Cellini read one of the many available editions of the Storia Naturale, then he knew Pliny's etymological hypothesis - curalius (probably because of the Greek [Greek Text Omitted], to cut, shear) is so named for the way it is collected.(91) Cinquecento Italian editions render Pliny's "acer ferramentus" as "un tagliente ferro." Coincidentally enough, Cellini himself refers to his Perseus's sword exclusively as a ferro. And in the sculpture, this is rendered in the most literal sense, for the sword, unlike the rest of the statue, is made of iron.(92)

We might expect that Cellini, who remembers that he once passed every day of an entire month on a beach, collecting "the most beautiful and rare pebbles, snails and seashells,"(93) would have been interested in coral for its visual properties alone. This he would have had in common with his patron, who, like other European princes, avidly sought coral as a marvelous objet.(94) In his profession, Cellini must have known goldsmiths who had mounted coral in brilliant settings; perhaps he had done the same himself. Coral, in sum, was precious - a point emphasized, among others, by Vasari, whose Perseus and Andromeda for Francesco I's studiolo puts the coral (like Cellini's, more decisively blood-shaped than Ovid's text requires) in the good company of pearl-bedecked nymphs, Minerva's sparkling shield, and the hero's own ermine-fringed boots. Originally, this painting designated and commented on objects hidden behind it, objects that very likely included gorgonian.(95) Looking from Vasari's coral to Cellini's, we might decide that the latter's participates in what is sometimes described as his goldsmith's aesthetic; it agrees with the monstrous heads on the hilt of the sword, the dragon finial on the helmet, and the extraordinary fineness of the Medusa head itself. It is as if Cellini has turned the whole statue into a colossal setting for the marvelous coral, calculating how best to show its qualities to the piazza.

But Cellini and Cosimo would both also have been fascinated by the transformative properties Ovid and Pliny attribute to the substance. As Philippe Morel has demonstrated, coral is a meaningful participant in Renaissance grottoes, where its behavior likens it to spugna, the dripping ooze that covers the walls and ceilings. Coral was a "juice apt to become stone [sugo atto a diventar pietra]"; it, like spugna, seemed to harden before the viewer's eyes. Morel compares the generation of coral to that of rocks, stressing that the fundamental process in its generation is one of glutination.(96) Such a view works well with Cellini's gorgoni: he renders a material with traces of its past as a moving current of liquid and a present in the coagulated stillness of metallic stone.

Beyond Morel's account, it should be stressed that in the sixteenth century, many thought that coral began as a plant. Its nativity thus involves not only a process of solidification, but also one of preservation; coral's vegetative virtues remain within, and consequently allow the gem to function as an apotropaion, as a medicine, and even, ideally, as a philosopher's stone.(97) This adds a Plinian dimension to the collecting of coral, and we need to see Medusa's blood not merely as the product of Cellini's inspired fantasy but also as an ornament central to his patron's interests. Recognizing coral - and knowing its potency - the viewer must take even the Perseus's propagandistic intentions to involve more than menacing would-be rebels with beheading, or recording the violent appropriation of the piazza's space. The naturalist view of coral lets the statue illustrate transformation as much as butchery.(98) Perseus's smiling gesture, allowably more benign than it is now usually said to he, involves the conversion of the rough into the fine, the dangerous into the valuable. The outstretched arm offers coral to the ducal city, to which its bearer has guaranteed safety. It constitutes both a claim for the richness of the arts that accompany the keeping of peace and a reassuring amulet of protection from the hero that has guaranteed it.(99) It is the Gorgon, as much as the beholder, that is transformed: from the pride that threatens to upset civic calm, Medusa becomes the object that both arises from and guarantees that pride's removal, the petrified prize of Perseus's blade.

All of this assumes, of course, that Cellini's accounting note is sufficient to demonstrate that coral is what we see. We might find his actual rendering more equivocal. The main stalk of blood reaching from Medusa's head, perhaps, will appear to have grown rather than fallen, stretching a knobby trunk into space, twisting like a vine [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 6, 14 OMITTED]. And perhaps Minerbetti should not have been worried about being soaked with the blood from Medusa's body: it has stopped the outward trajectory of its spray and has turned downward, dangling for perpetuity in bobble-tipped strands [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 3, 15 OMITTED]. Maybe these ends, like the small globules that hide within, are to be taken as the berries Pliny mentions, white when under water, red and hard when brought into the air. We should note that all of the blood that emerges from both head and body moves in individualized serpentine stems. And the surprising volume of the blood may, as well, suggest its vegetative state: compare especially the amount of blood we see coming from the head with the size of its container.

At the same time, incontrovertible features of coral are absent. Its forms are not branched, and, having probably been gilded, it lacks the telltale blood red color. Its hang fairly reproduces what we would expect of liquids drawn by gravity; from the head the substance moves straight to the ground, from the body it curves downward as well. There is, furthermore, the difference, already remarked, between Cellini's scene and the narratives of coral generation that are its presumed sources. More suspiciously, we are faced with the ineluctable fact that not one of Cellini's contemporaries, a number of whom we have already heard commenting on the blood, mention recognizing it as gorgonian. For Minerbetti, the blood "seems. . . to be real"; for the poet Pagano Pagani, "a true wave of blood flows from the neck."(100) Even Cellini, we have seen, later refers to the blood in terms consonant with his viewers' descriptions. If the artist wants us to see coral, he wants us to see it at the threshold of its existence, at the moment when it stops being blood. Ovid and Pliny will cue us to read this backward, from the coral toward its source.(101) But we could just as well approach the transformation from the other side, starting with blood. Blood itself, after all, is nothing less than a "nutrient in potential," a substance ready to change into other substances as soon as it enters the right conditions. As Varchi asserted while lecturing on blood just two years before the Perseus was begun, blood even contains an ingredient called cambio, so-named because blood is changed and transformed as it moves from one environment to the next.(102) Is what we see, then, better described as coral that was blood or, rather, coral-to-be, the aptness of blood to become coral?

Either way, taking coral to be the end of Cellini's blood leads us to understand it as something more than infusion revealed. To say that blood can become coral is to say that it can itself be rendered; as a medium, it not only bears spirit, it also accepts form. Blood, writes Galen, "is like the statuary's wax, a single uniform matter, subjected to the artificer."(103) Molding blood in wax, Cellini proved the simile. And casting metal after this wax, Cellini found not just shape but also value. His medium becomes vivid: in its featured preciousness, and in its aptness to form, the blood-cum-coral is as functional a token of bronze as any Cellini could have offered. The coral emphasizes that Cellini's blood is dear, and comments on the marvelous object into which it is made. We come back to Cellini's punning phrase on the pouring of "sangue o pregiati metalli" and to the anonymous viewer's description of the spirit and body of Medusa, "prezioso e caro." If the rendering of metal into blood could, through poetic and alchemical discourses, typologically fulfill the quest of bringing metal into spirit, then rendering that blood as coral, making it simultaneously congealed and precious, brings the achievement full circle. Cast, the metal hardens into immortal life.

Notes

I undertook the research for this article while a fellow at the Kunsthistoriches Institut in Florence. I am deeply grateful to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for sponsoring my tenure there and to Professor Max Seidel for the Institute's hospitality.

Professor Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann read an early version of this paper in the summer of 1997; in approach and in detail my discussion is indebted to his remarks. Professor Elizabeth Cropper kindly invited me to deliver the paper at the Charles Singleton Center for Italian Studies in March 1998, and I owe her thanks both for reading my work and for the opportunity to present it in Cellini's city. On the invitation of Professor Berthold Hinz, I was able to present related material in a talk entitled "Leben und Tod in Benvenuto Cellinis Perseus und Medusa" at the University of Kassel, and I benefited from the comments I received there as well. Dott. Giovanni Morigi, who is currently restoring the Perseus, allowed me to follow his progress and generously shared his findings with me. I am grateful to Dr. Ulrich Pfisterer, Professor John Paoletti, Madeleine Viljoen, and the two anonymous readers from the Art Bulletin for commenting on drafts of the article. Francesca Toffolo checked my Italian translations, Larry Kim my Latin. Eike D. Schmidt and Dimitri Zikos discussed several technical problems with me and allowed me to use their photographs.

Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.

1. Bernardetto Minerbetti, in a letter to Giorgio Vasari, Aug. 20, 1552, in Barocchi, vol. 2, 1198-1200: "Dico che quests figura si vede nel volto una fierezza mirabile in una faccia dolcissima; el moto del braccio manco, che sostiene per e' crini la testa di Medusa, e cosa incredibile, che vedendola par che vivamente la mostri al mondo; et in quella testa si vede la roofte negli ochi e nella bocca fare el suo crudele offizio. E quel che non posso saziarmi di guardare con stupore e el sangue, che impetuosamente esce del tronco, che, ancorche di metallo sin, par niente di meno tanto da dovero, che scaccia altrui per paura di essere insanguinato." Brandt comments on the letter, 411.

2. This interpretation of the Perseus has been the standard one at least since the influential monograph on the statue by Wolfgang Braunfels. Braunfels takes the statue to represent the "power and cleverness" of the sovereign, and he contends that it demonstrates how "the people are wont to do homage to no one more than the one who oppresses them"; Braunfels, Benvenuto Cellini: Perseus und Medusa (1948; Stuttgart: Reclam, 1961), 7. In a similar spirit, Mary McCarthy writes, "When Cosimo I installed himself as dictator, he ordered from Cellini the 'Perseus and Medusa,' to commemorate the triumph of a restored despotism over democracy"; McCarthy, The Stones of Florence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 22. More recently, Pope-Hennessy has associated the Perseus subject with "the dogma of the divinely inspired wisdom and ruthless heroism of. . . the Duke," (168). And Philippe Morel, citing Pope-Hennessy, has written that "the head presented to the public could serve as a threat to [Cosimo's] enemies, the rescue of Andromeda as a metaphor for the liberation of Florence from the republican monster"; "La chair d'Andromede et le sang de Meduse: Mythologie et rhetorique dans le Persee et Andromede de Vasari," in Andromede, ou le heros a l'epreuve de la beaute, ed. Francoise Jiguret and Alain Laframbroise (Paris: Louvre, 1996), 70 n. 6. The most forceful exponent of this view however, is Volker Breidecker, who compares the scene Cellini shows to actual executions Cosimo staged and oversaw on the piazza, including the beheading of republican rebels in 1537; see Breidecker, Florenz, oder 'Die Rede, die zum Auge spricht': Kunst, Fest und Macht im Ambiente der Stadt (Munich: Fink, 1990), 25ff. I am grateful to Rainer Donandt for this reference.

3. Cellini, letter to Bartolommeo Concino, in Tassi, vol. 3, 334-42. For a more extensive citation, see n. 9 below; see also Pope-Hennessy, 169.

4. For the medal and its connection to the statue, see Karla Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 15th-18th Centuries, vol. 1 (Florence: SPES, 1981), 76. Also frequently cited as a visual source for Cellini is a statuette now in Hamburg; see Braunfels (as in n. 2); also Brandt, 411 n. 181; and Pope-Hennessy, 168.

5. Cellini writes that when Cosimo first proposed the sculpture, he offered to make it either in bronze or in marble. See Ferrero, 474-75.

6. See Varchi, Questione sull'alchimia (Florence: Stamperia Magheri, 1827), 4; also cited in Suzanne B. Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan: Sculptors' Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence (Florence: Olschki, 1996), vol. 1,242, and vol. 2, 460.

7. W. Chandler Kirwin's recent book on Bernini suggests that the monumental bronze baldachin the sculptor designed for Urban VIII could have brought to mind cannons, which were forged from the same materials and produced with the same technology. Although the context of Cosimo's commission and the circumstances of Cellini's studio leadership were in important ways different from those of Urban and Bernini, the gist of Kirwin's argument is suggestive with regard to the earlier work as well. The Perseus, unlike the baldachin, was an image of violence; Cellini tells us that artillery masters helped him cast it (Ferrero, 769) and describes the fiery scene of its casting in language that evokes a battle. See Kirwin, Powers Matchless: The Pontificate of Urban VIII, the Baldachin, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), esp. chap. 2; also Kirwin with Peter G. Rush, "Bubble Reputation: In the Cannon's and the Horse's Mouth (or, The Tale of Three Horses)," in Leonardo da Vinci's Sforza Monument Horse: The Art of Engineering, ed. Diane Cole Ahl (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1995), 87-110.

8. Niccolo Martelli, letter to Luigi Alamanni, Aug. 20, 1546, in Detlef Heikamp, "Rapporti fra accademici ed artisti nel Firenze del '500," Il Vasari 15 (1957): 139-63: "egli si vedra con stupor delle genti nel rialto della Piazza di sua Eccza Illma nell'altro arco della Loggia di fit dalla Giudetta di Donato, quasi luogo vacuo e privio riserbato fino a questo tempo, con l'invenzione nella idea del famoso Duca nostro, dalle fatali stelle per adornar la patria di quanto bello in metallo, natura, arte, ingegno, norma e stil put fare."

9. See esp. the letter Cellini sent to the duke's secretary, Bartolommeo Concino (as in n. 3): ". . . 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 Glove, e Mercurio, e Danae, e il Bambino, 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 five 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 storia of Andromeda, as you see"). In his autobiography, Cellini narrates that the duke asked him to make "solo un Perseo," and that he returned several weeks later with a wax model; the duke accepted the design and it became the basis for the large statue (see Ferrero, 475). If this wax modelletto is identical with the wax group in the Bargello [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED] - Cellini mentions only one, and this is the only one that survive - we might infer that the two-figure group had been accepted practically from the outset, and that the base (and blood), however implicitly now needed, were actually designed some time later. My inferences here follow those of Pope-Hennessy, 169.

10. For the inscriptions, see Tassi, vol. 3, 491-92, and Heikamp (as in n. 8), 145 n. Varchi's move to the duke's employ in Florence preceded Cellini's by two years, but the two had been friends from at least the 1520s. Who initiated Varchi's participation in the Perseus, and how extensive that participation was, are matters for speculation; it may be that Varchi simply offered suggestions appropriate to an already established program, or he may have played a role in formulating the iconography. Varchi's personal interest in the sculpture is suggested by his academic lectures. When discussing the nature of sculpture in his now-famous Sulla la pittura e scultura, he took as his example "un Perseo"; see Opere di Benedetto Varchi, vol. 2, ed. G. B. Busini (Trieste: Lloyd Austriaco, 1859), 620. When he conducted his survey on the relative nobility of sculpture and painting, Cellini was one of the eight artists he invited to submit opinions. When the Perseus was unveiled in 1554, Varchi led the charge in writing encomiastic poems, composing at least two himself and having the longer versions of the Latin inscriptions translated into Italian. A poem by Bernardo Vecchietti, moreover, associates Varchi and Cellini explicitly in the mutual honor they do to Cosimo: "As now only Cellini's chisel may boast of carving him, so it will be heard without contest how noble Varchi alone wrote about him [E come hot d'intagliarlo ha sol lo stile/Del Cellin grido, allot senza contesa/S'udira; solo il VARCHI alto ne scrisse] "; in I sonetti di M. Benedetto Varchi (Venice: Pietrasanta, 1555), 117. Later, Cellini sent both his poetry and his autobiography to Varchi "to feel the polish of [his] marvelous file"; see the letter of May 2, 1559, in Ferrero, 985-86.

11. Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.785-86, trans. Frank Justus Miller (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 233: "[E]ripuisse caput collo pennisque fugacem/Pegason et fratrem matris de sanguine natos."

12. "De sanguine autem Gorgonis natus est Pegasus, qui fama interpretatur; et pede suo fontem Castaliae sive Pegaseum produxit; quia virtus, omnia superans, bonam sibi acquirit famam": this is the interpretation given in one of the anonymous treatises published in Georg Heinrich Bode, Scriptores rerum mythicarum latini tres romae nuper reperti (Cellis: Schultz, 1834), 42. Compare the commentary on the beheading of Medusa in the most recent vernacular translation of the Metamorphoses Cellini could have seen: "Ovid says that from the blood of Medusa was born a horse with wings; this is to be interpreted as 'fame' which flies through the world. . . . Perseus killed Medusa, and the fame that flew from his victory was such that every person he encountered was petrified" (dice Ouidio che del sangue della detta Medusa nacque vno cauallo con le ali, questo sintende per la fama, la qual vola per lo mondo. . . la uccise et fu tanta la fama che volo di questa sua uittoria che ogni persona che incontraua diuentaua immobile); Agostini, 45v. The locus classicus of this idea is Fulgentius, Mythologies 1.21.

13. G. C. Capaccio wrote that the device of Pegasus, made for Pietro Bembo, meant "che l'attion virtuosa fa scaturir i fonti della gloria, e della lode," quoted in Anthony Hobson, Apollo and Pegasus: An Enquiry into the Formation and Dispersal of a Renaissance Library (Amsterdam: Gerard Th. van Heusden, 1975), 32. On the medal, see also the entry by Rudolf-Alexander Schulte in Pegasus und die Kunste, ed. Claudia Brink and Wilhelm Hornbostel, exh. cat., Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1993), 198, with further bibliography.

14. Ferrero, 821. For the connection between Pegasus and the origin of the visual arts, see esp. Claudia Brink, "Pegasus und die Kunste: Eine Einfuhrung," in Brink and Hornbostel (as in n. 13), 10-25; and Thomas Ketelsen, "Das Lob der Malerei: Pegasus und die Musen in der italienischen Kunst," in ibid., 46-60; both with further bibliography. Perseus is connected explicitly with the origin of the arts, for example, in a fresco cycle on the second floor of the Casa Zuccari in Florence; here a central image of Apollo and the Muses is surrounded by scenes from the story of Perseus. See also Agostini's interpretation of what Medusa's blood generated: "one should interpret the drops that fell from the head of Medusa as grains and other fruits; but one should understand the serpents generated by those drops as the seeds of the earth, which, multiplying through human cultivation, pour forth the wealth of the world [per le goccie che caderanno del capo di Medusa sintendino le biade & gli altri frutti, ma per gli serpenti generati di quelle si comprendono le semente di essa terra, che per il coltiuar delle genti moltiplicando abondano nelle diuitie del mondo]"; Agostini, 45r. This is a slightly modified plagiarism of Giovanni Bonsignore's 14th-century translation of the Metamorphoses, 27r (on the two texts, see also n. 87 below). Its relevance to Cellini's interests at the time he was making the Perseus is evidenced by the depiction of the head of Medusa on the breastplate of Cellini's portrait of Cosimo: there, Medusa's blood is rendered as fruit, again implicitly praising Cosimo as the founder and protector of the arts.

15. "[The Duke said,] 'If you, Benvenuto, would carry out this little model as a large work, it would be the most beautiful work in the piazza.' I answered, 'My most excellent Lord, in the piazza there are the works of the great Donatello and of the marvelous Michelangelo, who were two of the greatest men who have ever lived. Considering that, your most illustrious Excellency gives great spirit to my model. . . . [Per tanto Vostra Eccellenzia illustrissima da un grand' animo al mio modello. . . .]"; Ferrero, 475. 16. "[L]a semplicita del di fuori nello abito et nello aspetto di Giudit, manifestamente scuopre nel di dentro, l'animo grande di quella Donna, et lo aiuto di Dio: si come nella aria di esso Oloferne, il vino et il sonno, et la morte nelle sue membra, che per avere perduti gli spiriti si dimostrano fredde et cascanti. . . ."; Giorgio Vasari, Le Vile de' Piu Ecclenti Architetti, Pittori, et Scultori Italiani, da Cimabue insino a' Tempi Nostri (1550), ed. Luciani Bellosi and Lorenzo Torrentino (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 317.

17. My understanding of Vasari's comments depends on Charles Dempsey's important analysis of this passage, and I am grateful to him for discussing it with me further. See Dempsey, "Donatello's Spiritelli," in Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift fur Matthias Winner, ed. Victoria V. Flemming and Sebastian Schutze (Mainz: Von Zabern, 1996), 50-61, esp. 54-56.

18. Milanese, 411.

19. "Il corpo di Medusa e fatto con bella considerazione; & morto, & cascante fa palese a pieno, come la carne, & l'ossa spogliate di spirito sono disposte, & fatte quasi dalle mani di natura; Bocchi, Le bellezze della citta di Firenze (1591; facs. ed., with introduction by John Shearman, Amsterdam: Demand Reprints, 1984), 35.

20. Ferrero, 859.

21. Leon Battista Alberti's De statua distinguishes the fictor (modeler) from the faber (founder). Gauricus makes the distinction both more rigid and more morally loaded. He celebrates what he calls ductoria (modeling) inasmuch as it is here that the artist exercises invention and imitation, proportion and perspective. Fusoria (casting), on the other hand, has much less to speak for it: it enables one to melt valuables and pay armies, becoming indirectly responsible for the suffering and destruction brought by war. See Gauricus, De sculptura, ed. Robert Klein and Andre Chastel (Geneva: Droz, 1969), esp. 225. On the topic in Alberti, see Marco Collareta, "Considerazioni in Margine al De Statua ed alla sua fortuna," Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 3, no. 12 (1982): 171-87.

22. The importance of goldsmithing to Cellini's sense of his profession will need to be discussed elsewhere. Suffice it to note here that in his Trattati, chapters on topics like "Cardinals' Seals" and "How to Fashion Vessels of Gold and Silver" collapse modeling and casting into a single sequence of activities.

23. Here and in what follows, I argue for a perspective different from the one recently offered by Elisabeth Dalucas, who writes of Cellini: "The creative act has been shifted entirely into the invention [of the figure], even if the execution of the cast, as that act's extended arm, must still be supervised by the creator in order to ensure the quality of the product. The creation of the figure, not the cast, represents the true sculptural activity." See Dalucas, "'Ars erit archetypus naturae': Zur Ikonologie der Bronze in der Renaissance," in Von Allen Seiten Schon: Bronzen der Renaissance und des Barock: Wilhelm Bode zum 150. Geburtstag, ed. Volker Krahn, exh. cat., Staatliche Museen, Berlin, 1995, 70-81.

24. Ferrero, 517.

25. Cellini writes that when he fell sick in the process of casting the Perseus, he left the task in the hands of his "master founders and manual laborers and farm workers and shop employees."; ibid., 518. 26. For della Porta's claims about invention in casting, see his 1569 letter to Ammanati, published by Werner Gramberg in Die Dusseldorfer Skizzenbucher des Guglielmo della Porta, vol. 1 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1964), 122-28. On Leonardo and casting, see the documents in Luca Beltrami, Documenti e memorie rituardanti la vita e le opere di Leonardo da Vinci (Milan: Allegretti, 1919), and fols. 141-57 of Madrid Codex II, included by Ladislao Reti in The Madrid Codices (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979). The large secondary literature on the topic includes, most recently, the collection of essays edited by Diane Cole Ahl (as in n. 7); the articles by Ahl, Kirwin and Rush, Carlo Pedretti, and Virginia Bush have useful bibliographies. In addition to the works they cite, see Guglielmo Somigli, "Leonardo da Vinci e la fonderia," La Fonderia Italiana 7 (1952); Pedretti, "Un disegno per la fusione del cavallo per il monumento Sforza," Raccolta Vinciana 20 (1964): 271-75; Renzo Cianchi, "Figure nuove del mondo vinciano: Paolo e Vannoccio Biringuccio da Siena," Raccolta Vinciana 20 (1964): 277-97; Marcia Hall, "Reconsiderations of Sculpture by Leonardo da Vinci," J. B. Speed Art Museum Bulletin 29 (1973): 11-7; and Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1981), 203-7.

27. Ferrero, 790. On the relationship between the difficulty of the one-piece marble and the task of the giant-conquerer David it depicts, see esp. Charles Seymour Jr., Michelangelo's David: A Search for Identity (New York: Norton, 1974); and Irving Lavin, "David's Sling and Michelangelo's Bow: A Sign of Freedom," in Past-Present: Essays in Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1993), 29-61, with further references.

28. Cellini was by no means the first to pursue the one-piece cast. The contract for Ghiberti's Saint Matthew required that the sculptor attempt to cast it as a single piece. Leonardo, when planning the horse for his Sforza Monument, considered ways it might be made in one pour. For bell casters, furthermore, it was routine knowledge that, however monumental the work might be, it could have no joins. My argument here is merely that, in the emulative context of Cellini's Perseus assignment, he would as likely have thought about the specific difficulta his contemporaries admired in marble sculpture as about the history of bronze casts. For the Ghiberti documents, see A. Doren, Das Akenbuch fur Ghiberti's Matthausstatue an Or S. Michele zu Florenz, Italienische Forschungen, vol. 1 (Berlin: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, 1906), 26ff; also the summary in Richard Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 406, doc. 71. On one-piece bell casting, see Biringuccio, bk. 6, chap. 12. Virginia Bush traces the interest in the one-piece cast back to Leonardo; see Virginia Bush, "Leonardo's Sforza Monument and Cinquecento Sculpture," Arte Lombarda 50 (1978): 47-68, esp. 59-61; as well as the discussions in Martin Kemp (as in n. 26); idem, "Leonardo's Drawings for 'Il Cavallo del Duca Francesco di Bronzo': The Program of Research," in Ahl (as in n. 7), 64-78; Kirwin (as in n. 7); and Dalucas (as in n. 23).

29. For technical aspects of the Judith, see B. Bearzi, "La tecnica fusoria di Donatello," in Donatello e il suo tempo: Atti dell'VIII Convegno Internazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1968), 102-4.

30. The most pointed written description of this difficulty comes, surprisingly enough, from the painter Jacopo da Pontormo: "a sculptural figure, made in the round and finished on all sides and in every place with chisels and other taxing instruments, so demonstrated in certain places that it is impossible to imagine how one could have entered there and finished the details, it being of stone or of another hard material - such a figure would, for the labor which brittle stone requires, be difficult: even beyond the difficulty of raising an arm with something held in its hand into the air, it would be difficult and subtle to carry out the work in such a way that it does not break"; in Barocchi, vol. 1,504.

31. Ferrero, 515.

32. Ibid., 521: "io feci pigliare un mezzo pane di stagno, il quale pesava in circa a 60 libbre, e lo gittai in sul migliaccio dentro alla fornace, il quale cone gli altri aiuti e di legne e di stuzzicare or co' ferrie or cone stanghe, in poco spazio di tempo e' divenne liquido. Or veduto di avere risuscitato un motto, contro al credere di tutti quegli ignoranti, e' mi torno tanto vigore, che io non mi avvedevo se io avevo piu febbre o piu paura di morte."

33. Ibid., 522: "[V]eduto ogniuno che 'l mio bronzo s'era benissimo fatto liquido, e che la mia forma si empieva, tutti animosamente e lieti mi aiutavano e ubbidivano; e io or qua e or la comandavo, aiutavo e dicevo: - O Dio, che con le me immense virtu risuscitasti da e' morti, e glorioso te ne salisti al cielo!" On the casting, see esp. Somigli, 9ff., who examines the technical issues implied by Cellini's addition of pewter (stagno) to his broth; also Bruno Maier, Umanita e stile di Benvenuto Cellini scrittore (Milan: Luigi Trevisini, 1952), esp. 84-94; Victoria C. Gardner, "Homines-non-nascuntur-sed-figuntur: Benvenuto Cellini's 'Vita' and the Self-Presentation of the Renaissance Artist," Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 447-65; and Margherita Orsino, "Il fuoco nella Vita di Benvenuto Cellini: Aspetti di un mito dell'artista-fabbro," Italian Studies 52 (1997): 94-110. Regarding Cellini's claims that he caught a fever in the process of executing the cast, see Mircea Eliade's comments on forgers' transcendence of the human state through their own heat, The Forge and the Crucible, trans. Stephen Corrin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 80.

34. Plato, Timaeus 58d-59b: "The kinds of water are primarily two, the one being the liquid, the other the fusible kind. . . . Of all the kinds of water which we have termed 'fusible,' the densest is produced from the finest and most uniform particles: this is a kind of unique form, tinged with a glittering and yellow hue, even that most precious of possessions, 'gold.' which has been strained through stones and solidified. And the off-shoot of gold, which is very hard because of its density and black in colour, is called 'adamant.' And the kind which closely resembles gold in its particles but has more forms than one, and in density is more dense than gold, and partakes of small and fine portions of earth so that it is harder, which it is also lighter owing to its having large interstices within it - this particular kind of the bright and solid waters, being compounded thus, is termed 'bronze'"; trans. R. G. Bury (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 145-47. Aristotle (Meteorologica 389a), similarly, writes: "The following are therefore composed of water: gold, silver, bronze, tin, lead, glass and many kinds of stone which have no name"; trans. H.D.P. Lee (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 365. Elsewhere, Aristotle gives a more complicated account of the formation of metals, which is not quite consistent with this; see Meteor: 378a.

35. Aristotle, Generation of Animals 762a; trans. A. L. Pack (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 357. Compare, for example, Bernard Palissy, "Comme toutes especes de plantes, voire toutes choses animees sont en leur premiere essence de matieres liquides, semblablement toutes especes de pierres, metaux & mineraux sont formees de matieres liquides, en leur premiere essence" (See that all animate things, like all species of plants, are in their first essence liquid matter; similarly, all species of stones, metals and minerals are formed of liquid matter, in their first essence); Oeuvres completes, vol. 2, ed. Keith Cameron et al. (Mont-de-Marsan: SPEC. 1996), 376; and Giovanni Vittorio Soderini, who writes that water is "the soul of cities and gardens [anima delle ville e degli orti]," Trattato degli arbori (Bologna: Bacchi dalla Lega, 1904), 261, quoted in Alessandro Rinaldi, "La ricerca della 'terza natura': artificialia e naturalia nel giardino toscano del '500," in Natura e artificio: L'ordine rustico, le fontane, gli automi nella cultura del manierismo europeo, ed. Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Officina, 1971), 165.

36. Giorgio Agricola, De la generatione de le cose, che sotto la terra soho, e de le cause de' loro effetti e nature. Libri V.; De la Natura di quelle cose, che da hi terra scorrono. Libri IIII.; De hi Natura de le cose Fossili, e che sotto la terra si cavano. Libri X.; De le Minere antiche e moderne. Libri II.; Il BERMANNO, o de le cose Metallice, Dialogo; Recato tutto hora dal Latino in buona lingua Volgare (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1549), 66: "Aristotele . . . bene dice che non sin l'acqua pura la materia de' metalli, ma quella, che in qualche affetto e passione si truovi."

37. Allegretti, 85-86: "Quella parte mezzana riserbata/Riduce in acqua, con la qual poi solve/Gli metalli perfetti, e gli dispone/Anzi gli sforza a ritornare in acqua/Che la materia prima, sendo d'acqua/Creati e fatti." On Allegretti's relationship with Cellini, see Gabriele's introduction, esp. 11ff.

38. Ibid., 52: ". . . materia dura e densa,/Che tiene in se rinchiuso il vivo spirito,/Ch'a le create cose infonde, e dona/Egli solo la vita, il moto e 'l senso/Dove mostrar le forze sue non puote/Se da pronta virtu vivace e calda/Fuor non e tratto ond'impedito giace."

39. As several scholars have suggested, there may even be an alchemical dimension to Cellini's writings. A poem in his hand refers to the pursuit of oro potabile, drinkable gold, the elixir that could make the sick well and the old young; he seems to have been perfectly familiar with the hypothetical process by which one arrives at such gold. In the Trattati, Cellini also observes that a smalt he uses was invented by alchemists. See Ferrero, 882, 617. Allegretti asked the goldsmith to deliver his alchemical writings to Varchi, who also wrote on alchemy; see Gabriele, introduction to Allegretti, 11-14. See also Ivan Arnaldi, La vita violenta di Benvenuto Cellini (Rome: Laterza, 1986), 19ff.; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, "Kunst und Alchemie," in Moritz der Gelehrte: Ein Renaissancefurst in Europa, ed. Heiner Borggrefe, Vera Lupkes, and Hans Ottomeyer (Erausberg: Minerva, 1997), 371-77; and Paolo L. Rossi, "Sprezzatura, Patronage, and Fate: Benvenuto Cellini and the World of Words," in Vasari's Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court, ed. Philip Jacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55-69, esp. 63-64.

40. Biringuccio, 6r: "[Alchemisti] separano gli spiriti da corpi & a lor volonta vegli ritornano come se fussero il coltel dela lor guaina; creduto bene che quelle sustantie che nele cose si chiamano spiriti sin possibile con la violentia del fuocho cavarli e ridurli in vapori, ma cavati non credero gia che mai ve li ritornino che un tale effetto altro non sarebbe si non un saper far resuscitare i morti." All translations from Biringuccio are my own, but depart from the edition by Cyril Smith and Martha Gnudi (New York: Dover, 1990). 41. Ibid., 8r: 'Et con questa & con molte altre ragioni vogliano che si creda che fuor del ventre feminile generar & formar si possa uno homo & ogni altro animale con carne & ossa & nervi & ancho animarlo di spirito."

42. Relevant in this regard is the story of Daedalus, who allegedly gave mobility and speech to his sculpture by filling it with liquid mercury. See Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist, trans. Alastair Laing and Lottie M. Newman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), esp. 66-69; and Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1995), esp. 47-51. Cellini's animation is the inverse of Michelangelo's marble project, which was to enliven the figure by withdrawing it: "[I]t is by removing, lady, that one places in hard, alpine stone a living figure, which grows greater precisely where the stone grows less [. . . per levar, donna, si pone/in pietra alpestra e dura una viva figura,/che la piu cresce u' piu la pietra scema. . . .]"; Michelangelo: The Poems, ed. and trans. Christopher Ryan (London: Dent, 1996), 140.

43. Ferrero, 971, 516. Cellini calls this earthen clothing a tonaca (tunic) and a vesta (husk, coat); Ferrero, 516, 755, 761. Vasari terms it a cappa, or cloak; Vasari (as in n. 16), 51.

44. Ibid., 854.

45. For this theme in Cellini, see Adolfo Mabellini, Delle rime di Benvenuto Cellini (Rome: Paravia, 1885), 42ff. On divinity as a paragone topic, see Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragone: Benedetto Varchi's "Due Lezzioni" and Cinquecento Art Theory (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 112ff.; and Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci's "Paragone": A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the "Codex Urbinas" (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 73ff. On God as a smith, see Norberto Gramaccini, "Zur Ikonologie der Bronze im Mittelalter," Stadel Jahrbuch 2 (1987): 147-70, esp. 163.

46. Ferrero, 961.

47. Milanese, 405.

48. The conceit, with its procreative overtones, resembles one used by Andrea Anguli: "Lysippum doctumque volens superare Myronem/Sculptor, non duxit Persea, sed genuit./Ipsum iterum genuit, viditque, Deoque replevit/Flatu iterum credens Juppiter esse suum" (The sculptor, wanting to outdo Lysippus and skilled Myron, did not model Perseus, but begot him. He then begot him a second time: he watched, and Ceres filled [Perseus] with breath, Jupiter believing him to be his own [son]); Tassi, vol. 3, 486. It is also close to one used by Michelangelo in a madrigal to Vittoria Colonna a few years earlier: "It is not unique, the mould which, empty of the work of art, finally stands ready to be filled by silver or gold melted by fire, and then brings forth the work only by being sundered; I, also, through the fire of love, replenish the desire within me, empty of infinite beauty, with her whom I adore, soul and heart of my fragile life. This noble and dear lady descends into me through such narrow spaces that, for her to be brought forth, I too must be broken and shattered [Non pur d'argento o d'oro/vinto dal foco esser po' piena aspetta,/vota d'opra prefetta,/la forma, che sol fratta il tragge fora;/tal io, col foco ancora/d'amor dentro ristoro/il desir voto di belta infinita,/di coste' ch'i' adoro, anima e cor della mie fragil vita./Alta donna e gradita/in me discende per si brevi spazi,/c'a trarla fuor convien mi rompa e strazi]"; Ryan (as in n. 42), 140-41. Note especially Michelangelo's treatment of the casting mold as a body, and his puns on forma and anima.

49. On Medusa as Earth, see Bonsignore, 27r: "Vediamo le allegorie di facti di Perseo dico prima tanto vien a dir gorgon quanto che terra cioe gorgin agicos che vien a dire in greco terra & vene interpretato opera di la terra" (Regarding the allegory of the adventures of Perseus, I maintain 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). Bonsignore's interpretation is recycled by Agostini, 45r. Also suggestive for the interpretation of Cellini's Perseus pursued here is an extraordinary 1953 article by A. A. Barb, who underscores the fact that Perseus's victim is, in the classical stories, pregnant, and who, from gnostic sources, argues that "the beheading is clearly a creative act"; see Barb, "Diva Matrix," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 193-238, esp. 208ff.

50. One viewer of the Perseus wrote: "Quod stupeant homines, viso uccisore Medusae,/Non est vipereum, quod great ille caput, Sed manus Artificis, quae tot iam saecula nobis,/Mortua, quae fuerant corpora, viva facit./Igne lutum potuit sublato animate Prometheus:/Saxaque cure cara coniuge Deucalion:/Persea CELLINUS; sed siquis comparet unus/Hic vivit Perseus, mortua sunt reliqua" (What astonishes men when the killer of Medusa is viewed is not the serpent-bearing head that he presents, but the hand of the Artificer, which, [for the first time] after so many centuries, makes us, the dead, who were but cadavers, come alive. Prometheus could animate clay with stolen fire, Deucalion, with his beloved spouse, could animate rocks; Cellini could animate Perseus; if anyone appears here, [he will find that] Perseus alone lives, the others are dead); Tassi, vol. 3, 482. Reinhard Steiner cites this poem for different purposes; see Steiner, Prometheus: Ikonologische und anthropologische Aspekte der bildenden Kunst vom 14. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert (Munich: Klaus Boer, 1991), 69-71.

51. For the term bocca, see Ferrero, 764, 766. Describing his preparations for casting the Medusa, Cellini writes: "I had made the iron skeleton [for the Medusa], and had then made her form of earth, as in anatomy [avevo fatto la sun ossatura di ferro: di poi fattala di tetra, come di notomia]"; ibid., 490. The hollow, "negative" form of this body, it might be noted, genders it female; this makes the overtly sexual perspective on the casting process that Bronzino's language allows even more apposite. Two perceptive analyses of the role sexual violence plays in Cellini's art can be found in Nancy J. Vickers, "The Mistress in the Masterpiece," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 19-41, and Margaret D. Carroll, "The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence," reprinted in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norton Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 139-59; see also Yael Even, "The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation," in ibid., 126-37, and Geraldine A. Johnson, "Idol or Ideal? The Power and Potency of Female Public Sculpture," in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 222-45.

52. Biringuccio, bk. 1 (n.p.): "Et queste si dimostrano quasi con quel modo che stan le vene del sangue ne li corpi de gli animali . . . . "For Cellini's conversation, Ferrero, 552.

53. Agricola, L'arte de' metalli, trans. M. Florio (Basil, 1563), 6.

54. Agricola (as in n. 36), 67.

55. See, for example, the anonymous recipe "Aqua, et Menstruo per preparar il solfo dal avere de li pianeti," Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Fondo Palatina, 863, fols. 89ff.

56. On this "licor sanguigno," see Biringuccio, 28r.

57. Ferrero, 945.

58. On Dec. 26, 1557, Cellini appealed to Duke Cosimo for release from prison "per non gittar via queste poche ore che Iddio mi presta. . . . Sendo chiamato dal mio bel Cristo"; Tassi, vol. 3, 77.

59. The word roba is equally curious. I have rendered it as "substance," intending to connote its economic senses of money or personal goods, as well as its sustentative possibilities as food, drink, or narcotic. In this regard, "stuff" might serve better, although to my ear that word is now too vague. Depending on how we interpret the rest of the line, we might, less neutrally, render it "works," or even "artworks" - the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana lists numerous examples of usages with this meaning.

60. Michelangelo, quoted in Paul Freart de Chantelou, Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France, ed. Jean Paul Guibbert (Paris: Pandora, 1981), 206: "nelle mie opere, caco sangue." Leonardo Bruno also compares blood and artworks: "Nam velut sanguis per universum corpus, sic ornamenta delitiaeque per universum urbem diffuse sunt" (Just as there is blood through the whole body, so are there ornaments and delights diffused through the whole city); Bruno, Oratio de laudibus florentine urbis, ed. Giuseppe de Toffol (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974), 22. I am grateful to Ulrich Pfisterer for this reference.

61. On Cellini's violence, see esp. Arnaldi (as in n. 39), 120-29; and Paolo Rossi, "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 and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 157-83.

62. The poem was first published by Milanese in 1857 (384); it has been reprinted many times, but Cellini's corrections have never been pointed out.

63. Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana ms 2353, fol. 85r. The page is illustrated in Michael Cole, "Benvenuto Cellini's Designs for His Tomb," Burlington Magazine 140 (Dec. 1998): 799, fig. 18.

64. Brandt, 409-10.

65. Ovid, Met. 4.753-57, in Miller (as in n. 11).

66. Ovid's own story describes how, as Perseus's opponent Chromis beheaded Perseus's ally Emathion, the head fell onto an altar, and "he breathed out his life in the midst of the flames [medios animam exspiravit in ignes]"; Met. 5.106.

67. In an epigram on Myron (an ancient sculptor who also made a bronze Perseus, and to whom Cellini was frequently compared), Ausonius adopts the voice of the famous cow the sculptor cast: "I had stood here a brazen heifer; a cow was slaughtered to Minerva; but the goddess transferred to me the life breathed forth [Aerea bos steteram; mactata est vacca Minervae;/sed den proflatam transtulit huc animam]"; Ausonius, Epigrams 72, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), vol. 2, 197. Also of interest here is Hendrik Goltzius's Venus, Bacchus and Ceres in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, which shows the artist tempering his burins at the altar/forge of Venus. On this, see Walter S. Melion, "Love and Artisanship in Hendrick Goltzius's Venus, Bacchus and Ceres of 1606," Art History 16 (Mar. 1993): 60-94, with further references; and Kaufmann (as in n. 39).

68. See Eliade (as in n. 33), 31, 62ff. One might consider, in this context, the alchemical process standardly referred to as mortification, the killing of the body that contained the life one sought to employ. Alternatively, one might view Cellini's animating gesture as the sculptural analogue of a technique credited to Titian in painting: "with a smear of his finger he would place a stroke of darkness in some of the corners, to strengthen them, elsewhere some smears of red, like drops of blood, to invigorate the feeling of the surface; proceeding thus, he reduced his animated figures to perfection" (con un striscio delle dim pure poneva un colpo d'oscuro in qualche angolo, per rinforzarlo, oltre qualche striscio di rossetto, quasi gocciola di sangue, che invigoriva alcun sentimento superficiale; e cosi andava a riducendo a perfezione le sue animate figure); Marco Boschini, La carta del navegar pitoresco, ed. Anna Pallucchini (Rome: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1966), 712; discussed by David Rosand, "Titian and the Critical Tradition," in Titian: His World and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 24 and n. 27; and by Patricia L. Reilly, "The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Color in Italian Renaissance Theory," in Broude and Garrard (as in n. 51), 91-92. More generally, Cellini's portrayal of blood can be compared with other means contemporary sculptors found to extract and display spirits for example, as breath.

69. John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 44-58. Tests of Cellini's metal composition reveal that his alloy had an unusually high proportion of copper (approximately 95 percent). We can imagine, then, that its original color would have been far redder than it appears today. See Somigli, 12ft. More exact analyses will soon be available from Giovanni Morigi.

70. Ovid, Met. 5.249.

71. Since Shearman's ingenious observations, it is impossible to view the statues in the piazza without considering medium. The basic lines of his reading of the piazza are irresistible, and 1 am cautious in following only a few of his inferences. The evidence suggests that it was not Cellini himself but rather his patron, Duke Cosimo I, who determined the site, the medium, and the subject of Medusa. This raises the question whether, for such petrification conceits, any bronze Perseus in the Loggia would have sufficed and, accordingly, what we should make of the actual thing Cellini spent the culminating decade of his career making. Shearman leaves no doubt about the cleverness with which the setting for Cellini's work was exploited. And even if we conclude that the decisions that allowed this were not Cellini's, the situation nevertheless invites us to view the artist's task as one that was specially bronze-specific and one that, confronting the David, had to face the tradition of Michelangelo. I follow Shearman's instinct that Cellini's use of bronze was the basis of his response to his predecessors, and that the subject of Medusa offered the means through which that response could be thought. In contrast to Shearman, however, I am attempting to take into account Medusa's function within the monument, and not just her conversion of the beholder. See Shearman (as in n. 69). Earlier discussions of art and the "Medusa effect" include John Freccero, "Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit," Yearbook of Italian Studies 2 (1972): 1-18; Louis Marin, Detruire la peinture (Paris: GalilEe, 1977); Neil Hertz, "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure," Representations 4 (1983): 27-54; Catherine Gallagher, Joel Fineman, and Neil Hertz, "More about 'Medusa's Head,'" ibid., 55-72; and Elizabeth Cropper, "The Petrifying Art: Marino's Poetry and Caravaggio," Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193-212.

72. Pagano Pagini, in Tassi, vol. 3, 489: "Sed postquam aera manu frigentia sentit, an ipsas/Exclamat, possunt fallere fusa Dens?"

73. See the document published by Milanese, 251.

74. Minerbetti notes that he saw two bronze reliefs, intended for the base of the sculpture, not yet poured (Barocchi, vol. 2, 1200). Only one of these, that depicting the plight of Andromeda, was finished and added to the work. Brandt hypothesizes that "the entire pedestal of the Perseus was to be freestanding" (411).

75. "With these words, Gorgoni di Medusa, Benvenuto no doubt means heads of Medusa. We know that the Gorgons were three sisters, Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, the daughters of Phorcys and Ceto; they had the power to change all who dared to look at them to stone. Thus, the head of Medusa, cut off by Perseus and placed on Minerva's aegis, was commonly called the Gorgon. Regarding the entry whence the weight of the Perseus comes, we can conclude that the sculptor had the head of Medusa, which the hero holds, cast separately; this is ali the more probable seeing that the inventory taken at his death includes a Head of Medusa in bronze"; Eugene Plon, Benvenuto Cellini, orfevre, medailleur, sculpteur (Paris: Plon, 1883), 219 n. 6.

76. The document was published by Somigli, 45.

77. The chronology of Cellini's castings is most accurately summarized by Dario Trento, Benvenuto Cellini, Opere non esposte e documenti notarili, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, 1984, 56-64; other important observations are made by Somigli, 9ft.

78. See Charles Avery and Susanna Barbaglia, L'opera completa di Cellini (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981), 95.

79. See Tassi, vol. 3, 256-58, no. 324.

80. The piece is carelessly modeled and poorly cast, and probably not intended for presentation.

81. For this last possibility, see Vincenzo Cartari, Le immagini degli dei, ed. Caterina Volpi (Rome: De Luca, 1996), 427.

82. Niccolo Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini, Dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin: Unione Tipografico Editrice, 1861-79), vol. 2, pt. 2, 1156: "Rammentando che Medusa dicevasi amata da Nettuno; e che quarta delle Gorgoni facevasi Scilla co' suoi cani mostruosi; e le Gorgoni abitatrici delle isole Gorgone nell'Atlantico, dicontro agli orti delle Esperidi, e lecito arguirne non tanto che questo sin nome d'isole serpentifere, quanto che questo fosse nome corn. di varie singolarita, quasi mostri marini. Onde non a caso fu detto Gorgonii un genere di polipi. . . . "(Remembering that Medusa was said to have been loved by Neptune, that the fourth of the Gorgons was made into Scilla with her monstrous dogs, and that the Gorgons were the inhabitants of the Gorgon islands in the Atlantic, opposite the place of the Hesperides, it is less legitimate to conclude that this [Gorgonii was the name of the serpentine islands, and more that it was the common name of various peculiar things that were virtually sea monsters. It is thus no chance thing that a family of polyps was called gorgonii).

83. Agricola (as in n. 36), 246v: ". . . e stato ancho chiamato Gorgonia; perche i poeti fingono, chele Gorgone fossero convertite in pierre: Scrivendo dunque Plinio de le gemme dice queste parole; la Gorgonia non e altro in effetto, che ii Corallo: e la cagione del nome si e, perche si muta e converte in una durezza di pietra."

84. Contrast the entry for gorgonia in Jacobi Facciolati's Totius Latinitatis Lexicon (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1828), 494: "Gorgonia, ae, feminine gorgonia, 'coral,' from the genitive gorgonos, because it was born from the blood of the Gorgon Medusa, or because, when removed from water, it was immediately converted into the hardness of stone, just like those who look upon the Gorgons. See Pliny, Nat. Hist. 37.10.59."

85. The lexical issues here are convoluted. Tommaseo and Bellini (as in n. 82) list no singular for gorgonii, but we might infer that the singular should be gorgonio. If this noun exists, then it is plausible that Cellini's own word, gorgoni, is an alternative plural; many Italian words ending in -io take both -i and -ii as acceptable plurals (principi/principii, omicidi/omicidii). The noun gorgonio, however, appears in no dictionary. It is possible that gorgonii is an irregular plural for gorgonia, perhaps because, coming from Greek, the -a goes to -i (cf. poeta/poeti). This does not preclude Cellini's gorgoni as another irregular plural. It is also possible that gorgoni (and gorgonii) are nominals formed from adjectives: gorgonio, as an adjective, means gorgonlike, and gorgoni(i) could thus be gorgonlike things. On this score, it should be added that gorgonia itself functions the same way; like the English cognate gorgonian, the word means both "coral" and "gorgonlike." Furthermore, the word, taken as an adjective, can involve the noun: gorgonian can mean gorgonianlike (coral-like) as well as gorgonlihe. To all of this, finally, should be added Agricola's implication that gorgons are gorgonian inasmuch as they themselves harden like coral. For the moment, I am considering the possibility that, through one of these circumnavigations, Cellini's word gorgoni might suggest, a priori, that his blood is also coral. However, a nice alternative suggestion offered to me by Conte Niccolo Capponi will prove relevant in a later stage of the discussion: conceivably, gorgone could be an augmentation of gorgo, which (in addition to being synonymous with gorgon) can mean a whirlpool, eddy, or gurgle. This would place the emphasis, again, on the liquid movement of Cellini's blood, about which, see below.

86. Bonsignore, 26v: "Come Perseo hebbe ucciso la belva dicese dal scoglio & posese a sedere sopra el lito del mare per lavarse: che era tutto insanguinato dil sangue di la belva. Ma percio chel capo di Medusa gli dava impedimento: si lo pose in terra: & perche quello capo non fesse alchuna lebone ala terra. Tolse alquante verge di legno lequal erano nati in mare: & subito quelle verge se induraro in modo de pietra: & del sangue di quello capo ne fecero vermiglie: & cosi sono facti Ii corali & questi fu li primi corali. Vedendo questo le nymphe del mare se maravegliaro molto: & si anchora per la morte dela belva. & intrando Perseo ne lacqua vennaro le nymphe ala riva del mare & tolsero quelli corali & si li seminaron per mare & subito cominciaron a crescere: in questo modo e abundantia di corali per lo mondo."

87. Bonsignore's translation went through numerous editions until 1521, at which point it was superseded by Agostini's. It is evident that Agostini worked closely with both Bonsignore's earlier translation (which is extensively recycled and paraphrased) and with a Latin version. For the story of the generation of coral in particular, Agostini seems not to have controlled Bonsignore against Ovid, but rather to have converted the vernacular prose into ottava rima: "Comhebbe morta il giouine p(re)giato/l'iniqua Belua, uenne su la riua/del mar, doue perch'era insanguinato/lauar si noise, e la testa copriua/di Medusa c'hauea con seco alato/d'un bel cespo di uerge che n'usciua/fora de l'acqua, le qual s'induraro/e per il sangue rosse diuentaro" (When the prized young man had killed the frightful monster, he came to the water's bank. There, because he was covered with blood, he wanted to wash himself. He covered the Medusa's head, which he had at his side, with a beautiful tuft of branches that had been sticking out of the water: this hardened, and, because of the blood, became red); Agostini, 44v. Lodovico Dolce's philologically more ambitious translations of bks. 4 and 5 of the Metamorphoses first appeared in 1553, too late for Cellini to have consulted them.

88. Ovid, Met. 4.740-52: "He washes his victorious hands in water drawn for him; and, that the Gorgon's snaky head may not be bruised on the hard sand, he softens the ground with leaves, strews seaweed over these, and lays on this the head of Medusa, daughter of Phorcys. The fresh weed twigs, but now alive and porous to the core, absorb the power of the monster and harden at its touch and take a strange stiffness in their stems and leaves [virga recens bibulaque etiamnum viva medulla/vim rapuit monstri tactuque induruit huis/percepitque novum ramis et fronde rigorem]. And the sea-nymphs test the wonder on more twigs and are delighted to find the same thing happening to them all; and, by scattering these twigs as seeds, propagate the wondrous thing throughout their waters. And even till this day the same nature has remained in coral so that they harden when exposed to air, and what was a pliant twig beneath the sea is turned to stone above" [nunc quoque curaliis eadem natura remansit,/duritiam tacto capiant ut ab aere quodque/vimen in aequore erat, fiat super aequora saxum]; trans. Miller (as in n. 11), 231.

89. Pliny, Nat. Hist. 32.22, trans. W.H.S. Jones (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 477-79: "forma est ei fruticis, colos viridis, bacae eius candidae sub aqua ac molles, exemptae confestim durantur et rubescunt qua corna saativa specie atque magnitudine. aiunt tactu protinus lapidescere, si vivat; itaque occupar, evellique retibus nut acri ferramento praecidi, qua de causa curalium vocitatum." The cinquecento Italian text reads: "Ha forma d'arbuscello. Il colore e verde le coccole sue sotto l'acqua sono bianche, & morbide, ma spiccate diventano dure, & rosse di forma, & di grandezza di Corniole dimestiche. Et dicono che toccandogli mentre che sono vivi di subito diventano pietra. Et per questo anticipano in tirargli fuori colle reti, o mozzaargli con tagliente ferro. Per questa cagione interpretano che e sia chiamato Corallo"; Historia naturale di C. Plinio Secondo, di Latino in volgare tradotta per Christophoro Landino, et nuovamente in molti luoghi, dove quella mancava, supplito. . . . (Venice, 1543), 787-88.

90. P. Ovidii Metamorphosis cum luculentissimis Raphaelis Regii enarrationibus (Venice: Leonardo Laredano, 1517), 50r: "narratur quemadmodum virgae in marl nascentes in coralia fuerunt coversae: inquit eas a Perseo Medusae capiti subiectas induruisse lapidisque figuram contraxisse: q(uan)d(o)q(ui)dem nereides admiratae multa & ipsae virgulta capiti Medusae subiecerunt: atque in mare disiecerunt. q(uae) q(uam)diu aqua teguntur mollia sunt. extracta ad aerem statirigescunt. Quare quidam coralium Gorgoniam vocant Plinius ait quod extractum e mari in duriciam lapidis mutetur tanq(uam) viso Gorgonis capite" ([Ovid] tells how branches born in the sea were converted into coral. He says that these [branches], having been placed by Perseus under the head of Medusa, hardened, and that a figure of stone came together. The sea-nymphs marveled much at this, and they themselves placed twigs under Medusa's head, then strew them through the sea. These things are soft as long as they are covered by water. Extracted, they harden in the air. Pliny says that the reason why certain people call coral Gorgonia is because it is transformed into the hardness of stone when extracted from the sea, just as if the head of a Gorgon had been seen).

91. Pliny, 1963 (as in n. 89), 478 n. a.

92. Pope-Hennessy, 185.

93. Ferrero, 122.

94. On the collecting of coral in 16th-century Europe, see esp. Erich Schneider, "Korallen in furstlichen Kunstkammern des 16. Jahrhunderts," Weltkunst 52 (1982): 3447-50. The Medici were interested not only in carved corals but also in fabricated ones: see, for example, the formulas in the 1561 Recettario, Florence, Bibl. Naz., Fondo Paint., 1001, fols. 14r ff.

95. Morel (as in n. 2), 60.

96. Morel, "La theatralisation de l'alchimie de la nature: Les grottes artificielles et la culture scientifique a Florence a la fin du XVIe siecle," Symboles de la Renaissance 3 (1990):154-83, esp. 167-68.

97. At the beginning of the 17th century, Michael Maier would write that coral's vegetative origins provided coral with "as much curative power as all herbs together." He cautioned, however, that coral "has to be cut very carefully under water, so that the juice and blood is not lost"; Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems, ed. H.M.E. de Jong (Leiden: Brill, 1969), 227-28. De Jong cites as the source for Maier's passage the Artis Auriferae, a 1572 compilation of earlier alchemical texts. Maier evidently had also read Pliny.

98. Compare the comments by Braunfels, McCarthy, Pope-Hennessy, Morel, and Breidecker in n. 2 above, as well as Thomas Hirthe, "Die Perseus-und-Medusa-Gruppe des Benvenuto Cellini in Florenz," Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 29-30 (1987-88): 197-216. Brandt interprets the killing of Medusa as Cosimo's elimination of Discord, but also observes, suggestively, that: "the sculptor transforms [the pedestal] into art, much as the duke tames and cultivates nature's abundance for the good of his people and glorifies his rule by patronizing the arts" (410).

99. On the protective value of coral as an amulet, see Pliny, Nat. Hist. 32.24; and Agostino Del Riccio, Istoria delle pietre, ed. Raniero Gnoli and Attila Sironi (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1996), 163-71; in the secondary literature, see Elfriede Grabner, "Die Koralle in Volksmedizin und Aberglaube," Zeitschrift fur Volkskunde 65 (1969): 183-95; and Corinne Mandel, "Mythe, mariage et metamorphose: Piazza della Signoria," in Jiguret and Laframbroise (as in n. 2), esp. 369, with further references. On the coral worn by the Christ Child in Piero della Francesca's Montefeltro Altarpiece, see Marilyn Aronberg Lavin and Miriam I. Redleaf, "Heart and Soul and the Pulmonary Tree in Two Paintings by Piero della Francesca," Artibus et Historiae 31 (1995): 9-17. On bronze as an apotropaion, see Gramaccini (as in n. 45).

100. Pagano Pagini, in Tassi, vol. 3,488: ". . . collo veri sanguinis unda fluit."

101. Compare Morel (as in n. 2), 66, on Vasari's coral: "It would not be born from the transformation of seaweed on contact with the head of Medusa, as Ovid recounts, but from the petrification of her blood on contact with water."

102. Varchi, 1859 (as in n. 10), vol. 2, 286-87.

103. Galen, On the Natural Faculties 2.3, trans. Arthur John Brock (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 131. Galen's comparison is extended, and he goes as far as to say that semen is a great artificer, "analogous with Phidias, whilst the blood corresponds to the statuary's wax."

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Pope-Hennessy, John, Cellini (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985).

Somigli, Guglielmo, Notizie storiche sulla fusione del Perseo (Milan: Associazione Italiana di Metallurgia, 1958).

Tassi, F., ed, Vita di Benvenuto Cellini orefice e scultore fiorentino scritta di lui medesimo resituita alla lezione originale sul manoscritto Poirot ora Laurenziano ed arricchita d'illustrazioni e documenti inediti, 3 vols. (Florence: Guglielmo Piatti, 1829).

Michael Cole is a Whiting Fellow and a Center for Human Values Graduate Prize Fellow at Princeton University, where he is completing a doctoral dissertation on Benvenuto Cellini. He has previously contributed articles to Word and Image and to the Burlington Magazine [Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08544].

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