GIAMBOLOGNA

Giambologna, on a design by the Sicilian architect Tommaso Laurenti, cast the great bronze statue of the sea god: one of his masterpieces. The modello, also in bronze, is preserved in the Museo civico of that city. He then executed another Neptune, inferior to the Bolognese one, for the Giardino di Boboli, and a supremely agile flying Mercury (1572) for the fountain of Villa Medici in Rome, now in the Museo nazionale in Florence. In 1581 he produced the group of the Rape of the Sabine Women for the Loggia dei Lanzi, repeating the scene in a marvellous low relief on the base. Many other works remain in Florence: the St Luke in Orsanmichele, the Hercules slaying the Centaur in the Loggia dei Lanzi, the statues of Cosimo I (completed in 1594) in Piazza della Signoria and of Ferdinando de’ Medici in Piazza S. Anna. Numerous too are his sacred works, among which of special importance are the bas-reliefs with scenes of the Passion in the Palazzo dell’Università in Genoa, the two panels, the Pietà and the Deposition (1588), executed for the antependium of the altar of the Cross in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a bronze Crucifix in the chapel of the Soccorso at the Annunziata, where his tomb was placed, and two other Crucifixes, one in the Museo di Palazzo Pitti and another in the Collegiata of Impruneta. Giambologna, among the greatest sculptors of his time, may be considered one of the last mannerists, but in some of his works a certain anticipation of the baroque taste is already evident. – See pl. XXX.