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related, had built the great Etruscan stone wall of Fiesole, and many stories were told in Florence of beautiful maidens being turned into pure white marble statues.
    More than any other piazza in Italy, the Piazza della Signoria evokes the antique world, not only in the colossal deified statues, the ‘David’, the ‘Neptune’ (of which Michelangelo said, ‘Ammannato, Ammannato, che bel marmo hai rovinato’ thinking, that is, of the damage to the marble wrought by the inept sculptor), the hideous ‘Hercules and Cacus’, but in the sober Loggia dei Lanzi, with its three lovely full arches and its serried statuary groups in bronze and marble. Some are antique Greek and Roman; some are Renaissance; some belong to the Mannerist epoch; one to the nineteenth century. Yet there is no disharmony among them; they seem all of a piece, one continuous experience, a coin periodically reminted. It is a sanguinary world they evoke. Nearly all these groups are fighting. The helmeted bronze Perseus, by Cellini, is holding up the dripping head of Medusa, while her revolting trunk lies at his feet; Hercules, by Giambologna, is battling with Nessus the Centaur; Ajax (after a Greek original of the fourth century B.C.) is supporting the corpse of Patroclus. There are also the Rape of the Sabine Women, by Giambologna, the Rape of Polixena, by Pio Fedi (1866), and ‘Germany Conquered’, a Roman female statue, one of a long line of Roman matronly figures that stand against the rear wall, like a chorus of mourners. Two lions—one Greek, one a sixteenth-century copy—flank these statuary groups, which are writhing, twisting, stabbing, falling, dying, on their stately pedestals. Nearby, at the entrance to Palazzo Vecchio, Judith, by Donatello, displays the head of Holofernes, and in the courtyard, Samson struggles with a Philistine. Down the square, Cosimo I rides a bronze horse.
    This square, dominated by Palazzo Vecchio, which was the seat of government, has an austere virile beauty, from which the grossness of some of the large marble groups does not at all detract. The cruel tower of Palazzo Vecchio pierces the sky like a stone hypodermic needle; in the statuary below, the passions are represented in their extremity, as if strife and discord could be brought to no further pitch. In any other piazza, in any other city, the line-up of murderous scenes in the Loggia dei Lanzi (named for Cosimo I’s Swiss lancers, who stood on guard there, to frighten the citizenry) would create an effect of terribilità or of voluptuous horror, but the Florentine classical spirit has ranged them under a porch of pure and refined arches (1376–81), which appear to set a ceiling or limit on woe.
    This was the civic centre, distinct from the religious centre in the Piazza of the Duomo and the Baptistery and from the two market places. Donatello’s ‘Judith and Holofernes’ was brought here from Palazzo Medici, where it had been part of a fountain, and set up on the aringhiera or balustraded low terrace of Palazzo Vecchio as an emblem of public safety; an inscription on the base declares that this was done by the people in 1495—when the Medici had just been chased out and their treasures dispersed. The aringhiera was the platform from which political orations were delivered and decrees read by the signory to the people (this is the derivation of the word ‘harangue’), and the statue of Judith cutting off the tyrant’s head was intended to symbolize, more succinctly than words, popular liberty triumphing over despotism. The Medici were repeatedly chased out of Florence and always returned. When Cosimo I installed himself as dictator, he ordered from Cellini the ‘Perseus and Medusa’, to commemorate the triumph of a restored despotism over democracy. Meanwhile, Michelangelo’s ‘Brutus’ (now in the Bargello) had been commissioned, it is thought, by a private citizen, to honour the deed of Lorenzino de’ Medici, who had earned the name Brutus by