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—­Giotto, Orcagna, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael—­did not confine himself to one art, but practised 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.  That statue cost him dear enough, as he tells you in his Memoirs, but, as Gautier said, it is worth all it cost.

On the pedestal you may see the deliverance of Andromeda; but the finest of these reliefs has been taken to the Bargello.  The only other bronze here is the work of Donatello—­a Judith and Holofernes, under the arch towards the Uffizi.  It is Donatello’s only large bronze group, and was probably designed for the centre piece of a fountain, the mattress on which Holofernes has fallen having little spouts for water.  Judith stands over her victim, who is already dead, her sword lifted to strike again; and you may see by her face that she will strike if it be necessary.  Beneath you read—­“Exemplum salut. publ. cives posuere, MCCCCXV.”  Poor as the statue appears in its present position, the three bronze reliefs of the base gain here what they must lose in the midst of a fountain, yet even they too are unfortunate.  Indeed, very few statues of this sort were made by the sculptors of the Renaissance; for the most part they confined themselves to single figures and to groups in relief:  even Michelangelo but rarely attempted the “freestanding group.”  It is, however, to such a work we come in the splendidly composed Rape of the Sabines by Giovanni da Bologna in the Loggia itself.  Spoiled a little by its too laboured detail, its chief fault lies in the fact that it is top-heavy, the sculptor having placed the mass of the group so high that the base seems unsubstantial and unbalanced.  Bologna’s other group here, Hercules and Nessus, which once stood at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, is dramatic and well composed, but the forms are feeble and even insignificant.  The antique group of Ajax dragging the body of Patrocles, is not a very important copy of some great work, and it is much restored:  it was found in a vineyard near Rome.