“I’ve seen that painting,” another girl piped up, “the one by Rembrandt,” and the guide nodded encouragingly.
“Yes, you are right,” she said. “And this son, he was named Perseus. He grew up with his mother, on a far-off island, where the king fell in love with Dana?, too, and wanted to marry her. But he did not want to keep her son around.”
“I know what that’s like,” one student joshed, and a couple of them snickered.
“And so he said to Perseus, ‘I want you to make me a special marriage present,’ and Perseus, who was very brave but also foolhardy, said, ‘I will give you anything you ask.’ And the king said, ‘Then you will get me the thing I want most—and that is the head of the Medusa.’ ”
This turn of events seemed to interest the students even more.
“But no one could kill the Medusa,” the guide went on, her voice rising, as if she wanted to make sure that even David could hear. “If you looked into the eyes of the Medusa, you would turn to stone.” The Notre Dame kid turned around and gave David a curious look. “The Gorgons were immortal, and the waters from their secret pool, if you could collect it without being killed, offered eternal life.”
David suddenly felt as if this woman with the iris in her lapel—a woman he had never even seen before—knew why he’d come to Florence and what he was looking for. He’d been in the city no more than a few hours, but he felt as if he’d already been exposed.
“I guess he did the job,” the Notre Damer said, “or this statue wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, but how?” the guide said. “Do you know how he killed the Medusa without even looking at her?”
When there was no reply, she said, “He called upon his friends, the gods.”
“That would help,” another student said.
“Yes, it did. Do you know who is Hermes?”
“The guy on the FTD commercials,” Notre Dame said, but the reference seemed to baffle the guide.
“The messenger of the gods,” a girl put in. “He could fly, I think.”
“Sì, sì,” the guide said, clapping her hands encouragingly, “and he gave a magic sword to Perseus, a sword that could cut off the head of the Gorgon. Another friend to Perseus was called Athena—”
“The goddess of wisdom,” the same girl volunteered, and the guide beamed at her.
“Yes, Athena, she gave him a shield, a very …” she searched for the word, then said, “reflecting shield, like a mirror, so he would not have to look at her. Also, he had a hat, a helmet, that made him … invisible.”
And so, according to the myth, the heroic Perseus had journeyed to the distant isle where the three Gorgons lived and, using these strange gifts, had slain the one named Medusa. And, for allegorical reasons that art historians still liked to debate, the Duke de’Medici had commissioned this monument, this retelling of the ancient story, to be erected in the central square of Florence. Originally planned to stand only a couple of braccia high, Cellini had increased its proportions in the process of composition, and raised it on a tall marble base adorned with four niches, holding beautifully modeled figures of Zeus, Athena, Hermes, and the young Perseus with his mother. These figures were so stunning, in fact, that when Eleonora de Toledo, the duke’s wife, first saw them as freestanding sculptures, she insisted that they were too exquisitely wrought to be wasted on a pedestal, and announced that they would be better suited to her own apartments in the palace. Cellini, though grateful for the praise, was not about to shortchange his masterwork, so before she had time to claim them, he raced back and soldered them into their assigned niches, where they stood between the sculpture above and the four bronze plaques below, illustrating scenes from Perseus’s later adventures.