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Benvenuto Cellini’s 1545 bronze sculpture of Perseus and Medusa on a square base with bronze relief panels is located in the Loggia dei Lanzi of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, Italy. The second Florentine duke, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, commissioned the work with specific political connections to the other sculptural works in the piazza. When the piece was revealed to the public on 27 April 1545, Michaelangelo’s David, Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus, and Donatello’s Judith were already erected in the piazza. The subject matter of the work is the mythological story of Perseus beheading Medusa. Medusa was a beautiful woman whose hair was turned to snakes and any man that looked at her was turned to stone. Perseus stands naked except for a sash and winged sandals, triumphant on top of the body of Medusa with her snakey head in his raised hand. The body of Medusa spews blood from her severed neck. According to the story, the blood of Medusa was given by Athena to Asclepius who was able to use it to either heal or kill people. It was said that the blood from the right side of Medusa's body could be used to save lives while the blood from the left side could be used to kill. Back in renaissance Florence, that image can be a symbolic since left is evil and right is good. Medusa’s gaze turned men to stone, and the bronze sculpture is surrounded by three huge marble statues of men, Hercules, David and later Neptune. Moreover, every sculpture within the piazza responds politically or artistically to each other and the Medici. Perseus added to the cast of Olympian gods protecting the Medici. Also, below the main sculptural group the story of Perseus and Medusa is depicted in relief on the statue pedestal, similar to a predella on an altarpiece. Cellini was the first to integrate narrative relief into the sculpture of the piazza. So what is the symbolic meaning of the sculpture? The Piazza della Signoria is the focal point of the origin and of the history of the Florentine Republic and still maintains its reputation as the political hub of the city. The pedestal relief speaks to the politics of the piazza. However, it may not have been Cellini’s original intent, as the relief was still being worked on and installed when the bronze sculpture above had already been revealed. As the Perseus was installed in the Loggia, it dominated the dimensions of later pedestals of other sculptural works within the Loggia, like Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine. Another theory of the symbolic meaning of Cellini’s 1545 sculpture of Perseus and Medusa from Christine Corretti’s dissertation: In one respect Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa (Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy) legitimized the patriarchal power of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici's Tuscany. The bronze statue symbolizes the body of the male ruler as the state overcoming an adversary personified as female, but the sculpture's androgynous appearance (the heads of Perseus and Medusa are remarkably similar) emphasizes the fact that Perseus, Cosimo's surrogate, rose to power through a female agency--the Gorgon. Though not a surrogate for the powerful women of the Medici family, Cellini's Medusa may have reminded viewers of the fact that Cosimo's power stemmed in various ways from maternal influence. The statue suggests that female power was palpable in the Medicean state. Under the Loggia dei Lanzi maternal power assumes, specifically, the form of Medusa as Mother Goddess. In the preceding context it is telling that additional works of art celebrating the duke's political greatness align Cosimo's image with maternal agency. The Perseus' androgynous nature problematizes the Greek subject's role as an epitome of virtù (virility). Thus, the statue points up the contingent nature of patriarchal power, which in Cellini's day was synonymous with virtù.