Perseus with the Head of Medusa

Under the open arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus stands on the slumped body of the Gorgon and holds her severed head aloft, snakes still writhing and blood pouring from the neck. Naked but for a sash, a helmet and winged sandals, the hero looks down rather than out, towards whoever stands below. The bronze, cast between 1545 and 1554, is one of the defining sculptures of Florentine Mannerism, and on the back of the hero's helmet the artist left a discreet portrait of himself.

Cosimo I de' Medici, the second Duke of Florence, commissioned the statue for a square already crowded with political imagery: Michelangelo's David, Bandinelli's Hercules and Cacus and Donatello's Judith were all in place when the Perseus was unveiled on 27 April 1554. The theme was pointed. Medusa turned men to stone, and the statue faces a piazza of marble men; Perseus, the slayer of a monster, stood for the Medici, who presented themselves as the saviours of the city. Bronze had not been used for a monumental figure in Florence for decades, and Cellini, trained as a goldsmith, set out to cast the hero in a single pour rather than in joined sections as Donatello had done. His autobiography turns the casting into an epic: the furnace failing during a storm, the sculptor in a fever, the workshop catching fire, and the metal saved, he claimed, by throwing in all the pewter plates and dishes of the house. Analysis of the alloy has not confirmed that story, and in fact the right foot and part of the leg had to be cast again, but the main figure did come out of the mould essentially whole.

The tall marble pedestal, carved with niches holding small bronze gods connected with the myth and a relief of Perseus rescuing Andromeda, shows Cellini's goldsmith's precision at a small scale; the original statuettes are now in the Bargello museum and copies stand in their place. With its base, the monument rises to over five metres. Together with Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women, it is one of the only works in the Loggia made specifically for that spot, and the bronze seen today is the original, moved only for a thorough restoration completed in 1998.

Florence, cradle of the Italian Renaissance, gathers its civic heart around the Piazza della Signoria, where the Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia dei Lanzi have served for centuries as an open-air gallery of sculpture.

Getting there

The statue stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi on the Piazza della Signoria, in the historic centre of Florence, beside the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi. Florence Airport, Peretola (FLR), is about 6 km away.