wiss 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. Yet, in truth, it was for the Priori themselves that loggia
was built, though not by Orcagna as it is said, to provide, perhaps, a
lounge in summer for the fathers of the city, and for a place of
proclamation that all Florence might hear the laws they had made. Yes,
and to-day, too, do they not proclaim the tombola where once they
announced a victory? Even now, in spite of forgotten greatness, it is
still a garden of statues. Looking ever 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, y