Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/109

Rh group of two naked men and a naked woman, above the blatant incapacity of Bandinelli and the dull pomposity of Ammanati, the Perseus soars into a region of authentic, if not pure or sublime, inspiration. No one who has seen it once will forget that ornate figure of the demigod, triumphant in his stately pose above the twisted corpse of the decapitated Gorgon.

Much might be urged in depreciation of Cellini's Perseus. Contrary to the traditions of later Florentine design, the hero's body is too thick, his limbs too coarse, and his head too large for statuesque dignity. Why this should be so tempts our curiosity; for the small wax model made by Cellini, and now preserved among several precious relics of like sort in the Palazzo del Bargello, exhibits the same figure with longer and slimmer proportions. There the Perseus stands as light and airy as Gian Bologna's Mercury, without any loss of his superhuman vigour. I have sometimes indulged the conjecture that Benvenuto deliberately shortened and thickened his statue with the view of working it in bronze. We know that he was anxiously preoccupied with the problem of casting the whole figure in such wise that the liquid metal should fill all parts of the mould, from the upraised head of Medusa to the talaria and feet of Perseus, at one jet. He succeeded in this tour de force of technical dexterity. But possibly he sacrificed the grace and elevation of his own conception to the ambition of the craftsman. Be this as it may, the first defect to notice in the Perseus is this of physical vulgarity. Then the face