Perseus and the Medusa: what is behind its creation!

Do you know the legend of the Perseus and Medusa? I always loved reading to my daughter mythological stories. So interesting, this was the one that she mostly preferred.

In Florence you will find a lot of statues about this subject and the artists where all great and important artist. A very important artist like Caravaggio painted the astonished face of Medusa in the Uffizi Gallery, a masterpiece, but if you don't want to enter a museum, you can simply go to Piazza della Signoria where you'll find the statue of the Perseus with the Medusa head by Benvenuto Cellini. A Great artist, active also in Rome, he was the private artist of Cosimo I, the Grand Duke of Florence. He started the statue in 1545.

So under the Loggia dei Lanzi on the left side you'll find this young man holding the medusa's head, and her body under his feet. And people would turn to stone just by looking at her, and Perseus had luckily some helps from some nymphs: he received winged sandals to be invisible and a sack to put medusa's head in. And he finally found her, he watched her in the reflection of his shield and he cut her head.

A long hard work!

The statue that you'll see needed a long time to be cast. Nine years! Incredible! So long because the casting technique used by the artist was very long and complicated. In order to create a hollow sculpture you first had to model the figure in clay and then bake it. After you coated it with another layer of wax, modelling out the details and you covered it with three more layers of clay after. The three layers where nailed together and baked in the furnace. The wax would melt and drip out and molted bronze was poured into the hollow left by wax. Obviously if the statue is bigger you have bigger problems in distributing the bronze properly. Cosimo himself said to him that he was crazy! He couldn't make it!!!

Imagine this picture: it was raining cats and dogs, but things got worse, it was so hot in that place that the roof caught fire. Cellini was exhausted and he got ill, he was forced to leave the job, he told his assistant how to proceed but at a certain point he was recalled because the furnace had gone out. He sent people on the roof to extinguish the fire and the furnace, in turn, exploded.

But this was not the only problem. The bronze wasn't fluid, he needed more alloy and he didn't have it anymore. Idea!!! He had dishes made of pewter so he threw them into the furnace. And after all this... HE MADE IT!!! And in that moment he felt so good he never felt before. He wasn't sick anymore!

When you have the statue in front of you, you'll see his signature, right on Perseus' stripe but if you go around the statue in the back you'll be able to see also the self-portrait of the artist. Perseus' hair and his winged hat forming the face of a man with the beard, the genius that was able to create this statue

in just one piece!