Look at that grand arched porch off the corner of the square — the tall stone loggia crowded with statues, people wandering underneath, taking pictures. Your brain reads it instantly as an elegant open-air sculpture gallery, free, in the sun. Now notice what the statues are actually DOING. Every single one of the great ones is a killing. This beautiful porch is a gallery of murders, and it stands on a square where the city committed real ones.
It's called the Loggia dei Lanzi, named for the German mercenary guards, the lancers, who once lounged here protecting the Medici duke. It was built as a stage — a raised platform for the government to hold its ceremonies in front of the people. Then they filled it with the finest sculpture money could buy, and the finest sculpture money could buy, in this city, was almost always about somebody dying.
The bronze one, the nude young man holding a severed head high in the air, blood rendered in metal dripping from the neck and pouring down his ar
m — that's Perseus, holding the head of Medusa. It was made by Benvenuto Cellini, who is himself a one-man crime tour. Cellini was a goldsmith, a genius, a brawler, and by his own cheerful admission a killer — he confessed in his autobiography to stabbing men dead, and he wrote it like a man describing a good meal. Casting this Perseus in a single pour nearly destroyed him. He claimed the furnace
