PERSEO ed Andromeda -- CELLINI, Firenze

Speranza



The scene represents Perseo rescuing Andromeda. The scene is portrayed as narrative, but in which the figure of Andromeda can be read by the sycophantically minded as an image of FIRENZE rescued from democratic disasters by the aristocratic heroism of Cosimo de' Medici.

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From a narrative standpoint, the 'rilievo' is a puzzling work.

In the centre, ANROMEDA, chained to a rock, is approached by PERSEO.

On the left, PERSEO is seen slaying MEDUSA.

On the right are Andromeda's PARENTS and the members of their court.

Whereas the left half of the relief has a neutral ground, the background to the right is filled with receding figures and with a building at the rear.

To the LEFT of the building, along the top edge of the relief, on a far smaller scale but once more against a neutral ground, is a riding figure confronted by two galloping horsemen, one of whom is evidently PERSEO.

There is no explanation of this scene in the METAMORPHOSES, and it has no equivalent in the elaborate frescoed treatment of the PERSEO legend by PERINO DEL VAGA in the Castel Sant'Angelo.

Of its stylistic contenxt we can be reasonably confident.

Two of the exceptional features of the "FREEING OF ANDROMEDA" -- the employment of a neutral ground and the unsupported horsemen on the top -- seem to derive from the Donatello relief -- "The Lamentation over the Dead Christ".

The most striking of the foreground figures on the right hand side, the mother of ANDROMEDA (shown with bowed head in profile to the left), is indeed a mannerist transcription of the mourning Virgin in Donatello's scene.

COMPOSITIONALLY, the scheme, with its contrast between an underpopulated section on the left and an overpopulated section opposite, is not an altogether happy one, but its shortcomings are redressed by the preternatural energy with which the tale is told.

ANDROMEDA is chained by one arm to the rock, her hair blowing in the breeze.

She would have hidden her face modestly with her hands, writes Ovid, but that her hands were bound.

In the relief, ANDROMEDA is depicted with one arm fettered and the other lifted, so that her hand conceals her face.

No wonder that she is alarmed by the violence with hich PERSEO accosts her.

Here Cellini's mind seems to have turned to the only effective painting of violent action that was known to him, the Battle of Anghiari, of Leonardo da Vinci.

There is no means of telling whether Cellini depended on a memory image of the unfinished fresco, on part of the cartoon, or on preliminary drawings Cellini may have seen in France.

But there can be little doubt that the HEAD of PERSEO, his mouth opened in a rectangle, as he shouts an injunctdion to Andromeda, was inspired by LEONARDO, the less so in that the head of a bald-headed shouting man in left profile on the right and two of the galloping figures at the top also depend on drawings from the fresco.

But there is nothing eclectic in the main figures of the relief.

The FLYING PERSEO bearing down on the sea monster, and the ANDROMEDA, whose body is given a sharp vertical torsion and whose left arm marks the exact centre of the field.

In the guild-ridden figures of Andromeda's parents on the right, Cellini reveals himself for the first time as a narrative artist of true expressive range.