Because the City of Florence began as a city built by Ancient Romans, Florentia, the choice of a subject from Livy's early history of Rome seemed appropriate. And directly in front of the statue today, in layers way below the surface of the pavement, Roman dye vats were found in recent excavations of Piazza Signoria. These vats were evidence of the Roman city on which the Renaissance city was built, and evidence that even in Roman times Florentia was a place for the dyeing of cloth, something for which the city was equally famous in the Renaissance period. So a tribute to a story from the ancient culture of Rome was apt for a city that grew out of a Roman past, even if no cloth is worn by the people in the sculpture.
The Rape of the Sabine Women was the title applied to Giambologna's statue to make the piece into an illustration of the Roman origins of Florence. It was installed in the right arch of the Loggia, where it still stands today. It may someday be moved inside the Uffizi Gallery in order to preserve it from the elements, but for now it takes its place to the right of Cellini's earlier bronze statue of Perseus (1545) under the left arch, and in the same piazza with a copy of Michelangelo's David and Ammanati's Neptune fountain and Hercules and Cacus statues.
The story of the Rape of the Sabines is a story about the human need to procreate. Rome was a city
that was initially founded by and built by men, and the men under their leader, Romulus, knew that
in order to make the city grow and prosper that they would need women to create families. Since few women lived in the early city, they sought out women from the surrounding city-states, especially
those closest, in the communities of the Sabines. The fathers of the Sabine girls objected to having
their daughters marry Roman men because they feared the ascendency of Rome as a city-state and
did not want to give it more power. The Roman men tried other neighboring groups, but none of
them were willing to part with their daughters. So Romulus decided to invite all the tribes from
around Rome to a large festival in Rome, with games and entertainments, and during the games at an appointed signal, the Roman men abducted the women of the Sabine tribe, carrying them away
from their fathers and back to their own houses. The fathers and mothers of the girls went into
mourning and swore vengeance on Rome, but after several fierce battles won by Roman men on
other tribes, the Sabine daughters decided to intervene, and they managed to reconcile their fathers
and husbands so that the Sabines and Romans in the end were united by common interest in their children and grandchildren, and ended their animosity. The word for the title of this story in Italian is Il Ratto delle Sabine, the Abduction of the Sabines, and rape is not necessarily implied in the story. The husbands tried to convince the Sabine women to be their wives by telling them of their passion for them, a ploy which was successful. Romulus gave them Roman citizenship to sweeten the ploy even further.
Giambologna (1529-1608), whose real name was Jean de Boulogne since he was from Flanders, was able to translate his sculptural group into a visualization of this early story. The Sabine father is on the bottom of the group. He is the older man who is pinned down by the young Roman in the middle and who watches helplessly while his precious daughter is lifted up by the younger, stronger man:
The father puts his left arm up as if to shield himself from the cries of his child and the sight of her being taken away. The young man looks intently at the young woman as he uses all his body strength to pin her father down and lift her up into the air:
Giambologna has made this carved statue of three people so appealing visually from every side
that he makes the viewer walk entirely around it to understand the whole of it. He has turned into statuary the phrase known in his period for beautiful painted figures, "LA FIGURA SERPENTINATA." (THE SERPENTINE FIGURE) A "figura serpentinata" is a figure that spirals upwards into space, one of the characteristics associated with the art historical period known as
Mannerism. A painted example is the twisting figure of the St. Francis in Andrea del Sarto's Madonna of the Harpies (1527.) A "figura serpentinata usually has the feet set in a different direction from the head and torso; in Francis' case, the feet face forward slightly toward the viewer and the torso spirals up toward the Madonna.
Giambologna has made the spiral extend to three different figures, a rare feat in itself, and that he has accomplished it in a sculpted marble group is even more remarkable.
The energy thrusts upward and out, from the crushed legs of the father to the springing legs of the young Roman, to the extended arms and head of the young Sabine girl. Giambologna's ability to carve three different bodies moving in three different directions pre"figures" the Baroque interest in movement but is a wonderful presentation of his own masterful Mannerist ingenuity at full spate. And he demonstrates his skill at rendering different ages as well: the full beard and hair of the father, the goatee and light mustache of the young man:
The young man's desperate need to procreate wins out in the end and his desire for the woman eventually wins over the father, too. The sexual energy, always a feature of the young, is on display here as well in the two younger figures: the muscular power driving the young man and the sensual breasts and hips of the young woman pushed out into space for the viewer to admire. We see what has moved the younger man to override the father's wishes, but we don't see the woman's acquiescence. We see only her resistance and not her ability later to reconcile her father and husband. For Giambologna the story is about the need for action now, a taking of the moment to ensure a future
generation that includes the Florentines who would have viewed it in the 16th-century.
That this three-person wrestling match should still have resonance in the 21st-century is
a tribute to the power of the sculptor to carve emotions as well physically attractive bodies. It is possible to call this statue the first conscious "art-for-art's sake" work. The woman's face is worried and frightened, as are most women when experiencing sex for the first time, the young man has his mouth open with hope of calming her fears but he also is answering to his own sexual needs to seize her and penetrate her for children. The father looks with awareness that the young man is only repeating what he himself had done in his youth but now that it is his daughter's sexuality that is awakening, he has fears of losing her as his own little girl as well.
Giambologna was aided in his search for passion in this grouping by looking at Michelangelo's
two-person group, called Victory, now in Palazzo Vecchio but originally made as a niche figure
for Pope Julius II's tomb in 1532-34.
originally Michelangelo had intended it to have a generic meaning of the victory of youth over
old age and a personal meaning for himself. The old man pinned at the bottom in this case is a self-portrait of Michelangelo and the youth who triumphs over him was probably Tommaso dei Cavalieri, a young man to whom he wrote sonnets. The grouping spirals upwards here as well, with the right knee facing a different direction to the young man's torso. This "figura serpentinata" contains the same sexual passion implied in Giambologna's statue group with the thrust of the male body on the older man's neck pushing downwards in space, even as his arm gesture draws the energy upward and out.
Giambologna seems to have taken the notion of a young man pinning an older man from this
statue group and applied it to the bottom third of his composition.
the young man faces in his grouping, towards the woman and away from the father. But that he intended it to represent male desire for procreation is clear in the placement of his own signature directly below the genitals of the Sabine father at the bottom:
OPVS IOANNIS BOLONII FLANDRI
MDLXXXII ("The work of Johannes of Boulogne of Flanders,
1582")
The power of the man or men and the power of the sculptor become one and the same. The creative force that reaches upward makes us to confront our own human desire to be replicated and the desperate creative energy sometimes required to ensure that it happens.
Easier to see in a drawing because
