Florence: Loggia de' Lanzi

Edward Hutton regarded the Loggia de' Lanzi as a gay and charming spot among the imposing Palazzo of the Signoria, and the stern statues like Cellini's Perseus that brought back memories of the past

 

As you enter the Loggia de’ Lanzi, gay with children now, once the lounge of the Swiss guard, whose barracks were not far away, you wonder who can have built so gay, so happy a place beside the fortress of the Signoria. …Even now, in spite of forgotten greatness, it is still a garden of statues. Looking over the Piazza stands the Perseus of Cellini, with the head of Medusa held up to the multitude, the sword still gripped in his hand. It is the masterpiece of one who, like all the greatest artists of the Renaissance… did not confine himself to one art, but practiced many. And though it would be unjust to compare such a man as Cellini with the greatest of all, yet he was great not only as a sculptor and a goldsmith, but as a man of letters and as a man of the world. His Perseus, a little less than a demigod, is indeed not so lovely as the wax model he made for it, which is now in the Bargello; but in the gesture with which he holds out the severed head from him, in the look of secret delight that is already half remorseful for all that dead beauty, in the heroic grace with which he stands there after the murder, the dead body marvellously fallen at his feet, Cellini has proved himself the greatest sculptor of his time. (165-6)…

 

The great fountain which plays beside the Palazzo, where of old the houses of the Uberti stood, is rich and grandiose perhaps, but in some unaccountable way adds much to the beauty of the Piazza. How gay and full of life it is even yet, that splendid and bitter place, that in its beauty and various, everlasting life seems to stand as the symbol of the city, so scornful even in the midst of the overwhelming foreigner who has turned her into a museum, a vast cemetery of art….

 

It was past midnight when once more I came out of the narrow ways, almost empty at that hour,  when every footfall resounds between the old houses, into the old Piazza to learn this secret. Far away in the sky the moon swung like a censer, filling the place with a fragile and lovely light…. 

 

In the Loggia de’ Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable 

prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna’s Sabine woman, was she not Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini’s Perseus with Medusa’s head, has it not in truth turned the city to stone?

The silence was broken; something had awakened in the Piazza: perhaps a bird fluttered from the battlements of the Palazzo, perhaps it was the city that turned in her sleep. No, there it was again. It was a human voice close beside me: it seemed to be weeping.

 

I looked around: all was quiet. I saw nothing, only there at the corner a little light flickered before a shrine; and yes, something was moving there, someone who was weeping. Softly, softly over the stones I made my way to that little shrine of Madonna at the street corner, and I found, ah! no proud and scornful noble mourning over dead Florence, but an old woman, ragged and alone, prostrate under some unimaginable sorrow, some unappeasable regret.

 

Did she hear as of old—that Virgin with half-open eyes and the sidelong look? God, I know not if she heard or no. Perhaps I alone have heard in all the world.

 

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