Think about the base as a fragment, as what remains of antiquity, when pagan idols are knocked down (see as Fortini Brown note


 1 

 
 
 
Wright, A; (2011) '... con uno inbasamento et ornamento alto': The rhetoric of the pedestal c. 1430-
1550. Art History, 34 (1) pp. 8-53. 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00798.x. Downloaded from UCL 
Discovery: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1399808/.  
 
ARTICLE 

 

‘…con uno inbasamento et ornamento alto’: the rhetoric of the 
pedestal c. 1430-1550. 
 
Alison Wright 
School of Arts and Social Sciences, University College London 

 
When, in 1504, the Florentine painter Cosimo Rosselli gave his opinion on the best situation 
for Michelangelo’s colossal David, he suggested it be placed by the cathedral and raised up 
on a high pedestal (‘uno inbasamento et ornamento alto’).1 Rosselli imagined the marble 
statue dominating the corner of the entrance steps, just to the right of the façade. Sandro 
Botticelli lent his backing to Rosselli’s view with the argument that the sculpture would here 
be best visible to passers-by. Against both these painters, a goldsmith, Andrea Riccio - 
almost certainly a local Florentine and not the Paduan bronze sculptor - proposed a position 
in the courtyard of the town hall, the Palazzo della Signoria.2 Here, he claims, the sculpture 
would be better protected and passers-by would go to see it rather than, as he vividly puts it, 
‘the figure should come and see us.’3 Differences of opinion expressed in this unusually well 
documented debate centred above all around questions of visibility, concern for the statue’s 
material preservation as well as the representational and ritual needs of the Florentine 
government.4 Tangentially, the debate also highlighted the crucial role of the pedestal and its 
physical and ritual situation in mediating the encounter with sculpture. In this context it might 
seem curious that Riccio should apparently worry that a high, freestanding figure placed in 
the open should claim too much autonomy.5 But his anthropomorphic argument might 

                                                 
1 Gaetano Milanesi ed., Le lettere di Michelangelo Buonarroti, pubblicate cui ricordi ed i contratti 
artistici, Florence, 1875, 621: ‘Et aveo pensato di metterlo dalle schalee della chiesa dalla mano ritta 
chon uno inbasamento in sul chanto di dette schalee, con uno inbasamento et ornamento alto, et 
quivi le metterei, secondo me.’ Rosselli also, though, favoured the idea of putting it next to the town 
hall. 
 
2 For the probable identity of this Riccio see James D. Draper, ‘”Andrea vocato el Riccio Orafo”’, 
Burlington Magazine, 125, no. 966, Sept. 1983, 541-2. I should like to thank an anonymous reader of 
this article for drawing this to my attention. 
  
3  Milanesi ed., Le Lettere, 621 (Sandro Botticelli) ‘Cosimo à detto apunto dove a me pare esser 
veduto da’viandanti’…(Andrea vocato el Riccio orafo) ‘…et quivi stare bene coperta et essere quivi 
più stimata et più riguardata […] et stare meglio al coperto et e’viandanti andare a vedere, et non tal 
cosa andare incontro a’viandanti et che noi e’viandanti l’andiàno a vedere, et non che la figura venghi 
a vedere noi.’. 
 
4 The second government herald expressed the concern that David might block the Signoria’s access 
to their Loggia on ceremonial occasions. 
 
5 Saul Levine, (‘The Location of Michelangelo’s David: The Meeting of January 25, 1504’, Art Bulletin, 
56, 1974, 31-49 at 42) argued Riccio was concerned for the statue’s ‘apotropaic potency’, which 
would, in an exposed position, be potentially turned against the citizens rather than against the 
enemy. The first part of this interpretation is easier to support than the latter.  
 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00798.x
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1399808/


 2 

equally imply a concern with decorum of a kind more flattering to artists, namely, that a 
statue which a viewer comes to see is, like an actual person, granted greater respect  - ‘più 
stimata et più riguardata’ as he puts it - than one that ‘comes to see’ the viewer. In either 
case Riccio grants a striking agency to the object of the kind that the anthropologist Alfred 
Gell has argued can indeed be attributed to works of ‘high art’ status that were not explicitly 
intended to have ritual functions.6  
 
It is rare for such concern with the implications of the placement of a sculpture to be 
recorded, even in a republic in which sculpture procured with public money had to answer 
directly to the interests of the government and the citizenry. The present article, which aims 
to open up some of the artistic and conceptual implications of placing freestanding statues 
on substantial pedestals, has to draw on a variety of less direct sources, as well as on 
surviving visual evidence. Contemporary documents may refer to ceremonial or other 
codified actions in civic and private spaces that were ornamented by works on pedestals and 
indirectly inform our understanding of the formal, spatial and symbolic aspects of pedestals 
supporting statues at different moments in their public life. Analysing the semantic structure 
of a sculptural ensemble while acknowledging changing contingencies of site and 
sponsorship, illuminates the ways in which pedestals were conceived and indicate how they 
could be used to inform and attempt to stabilise the meaning of the figure they sustained. In 
some cases, such as the pedestals for small all’antica bronzes, or the base of the ancient 
‘Idolino’ statue discussed below, the production of a ceremonial or even cultic framework for 
the sculpture is less a matter of immediate ‘context’ than an active construction of the 
imagery of the base. Here ritual significance is conferred or invoked through an imaginative 
and mythologizing appeal to knowledgeable viewers. Beyond the work itself, one of the most 
direct ways in which such an expanded imaginative framework may be accessed is in 
relation to the representation of bases in graphic, relief or painted forms or in contemporary 
enactments for special occasions. This aspect can only be touched on within this article but 
has been, and will be, extended elsewhere.7  

 
Within such a wide field as sculpted bases, supports for freestanding statues are already a 
restricted category. As Weil-Garris Brandt has stressed, pedestals of the ‘classical type’ that 
presented a statua  - the stand-alone, predominantly male, figure – were relatively rare in the 
Renaissance compared to the great array of dependent statues and reliefs intended to be 
read against skylines, on finials, within niches or otherwise subordinate to buildings.8 The 
present study focuses in still further on bases for works in bronze, both ancient and modern. 
Modern bronzes, especially when designed on a life-size scale, were exceptionally costly 
and difficult to make and, as prize commissions for Renaissance sculptors, were arguably 
the most prestigious sculptural form of the period. Bronzes, which were already the most 
admired ancient works in the Middle Ages, were re-valued in the fifteenth century in light of 
changing conceptions of the forms and uses of statues in the ancient world. Unsurprisingly, it 

                                                 
6 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, An Anthropological Theory, Oxford, 1998, esp. 17-21 and, for 
examples, 52-53. 
 
7 ‘Fictive’ pedestals, especially those represented in altarpieces, form part of my wider research 
project. A recent analysis illuminating the function of pedestals in a number of fresco cycles is Philine 
Helas and Gerhard Wolf, ‘The Shadow of the Wolf: the Survival of an Ancient God in the Fresco of the 
Strozzi Chapel (S. Maria Novella, Florence), or Filippino Lippi’s Reflection on Image, Idol and Art’, in 
Michael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach eds., The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the 
Early Modern World, Farnham and Burlington VT, 2009, 133-157. 
 
8 Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, ‘The Relation of Sculpture and Architecture in the Renaissance’ in eds. 
Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to 
Michelangelo. The Representation of Architecture, London and Milan, 1994, 75-98 at 77. 
 



 3 

is above all in centres that promoted humanistic study that the most ambitious examples 
were produced or displayed. This is surely a major reason why plinths for bronzes, not least 
those of equestrian monuments, were, from the early Quattrocento onwards, the objects of 
special investment of time and money, and of artistic and literary invention.  

 
My initial observations relate broadly to pedestals of the period from the early Quattrocento 
to the mid Cinquecento in general; thereafter I address five principal case studies, 
chronologically ordered, that show how such issues may be applied specifically to bronze 
sculptures embedded in varying cultural contexts with their own more or less complex 
histories. While for reasons of economy I omit the category of the equestrian monument, I 
include one example of a liturgical work, the monumental Paschal candelabrum for the 
Santo in Padua. With this I wish to demonstrate how a work whose function was ostensibly 
quite distinct from the ‘Standbild’ was similarly informed by a rhetorical and civic framework 
that valued physical and intellectual elevation, elaboration and beauty, as a sign of honour. 
In this instance the eloquence of the pedestal was cultivated to present the paschal candle 
as a substitute for a sacred body, a productive slippage that alerts us to some of the wider 
implications of the plinth function in this period.   

 
Despite the aesthetic and historical importance of pedestals, art historical studies devoted to 
them remain rather rare.9 This is partly a result of such works’ vulnerability to removal and 
loss, or alienation from their original figural partners. But the problem runs deeper and 
relates, ultimately, to their subordinate function. Intended to draw attention to the work they 
support, they are destined both structurally and aesthetically to be overlooked. More 
recently, the photograph as an art historical tool has served pedestals, even more than 
picture frames, especially badly. The simplest way to bring a sculpted figure into an aesthetic 
(and legible) proximity to a reader is to crop the image and excise the base. The problem is 
further exacerbated in traditional monographic studies by issues concerning ‘originality’. 
Pedestals are easily sidelined through being defined as later additions and/or the work of a 
different sculptor. Such a distinction can produce an anachronistic and unhelpful division 
between sculpted figures and their historical supports as well as underplaying the 
implications of changing modes of display. Pedestals after all can usefully be considered as 
tributes to the works they sustain as well as a means of securing certain responses to them. 
This tribute may be directly in the hands of the sculptor of the statue, more often it is not, and 
thus the base constitutes a key ingredient in the reception history of the statue. 

 
In terms of the history of sculpture, the tracking of the typology of Renaissance bases and 
their development remains a pressing task, one recently broached within a broader historical 

                                                 
9 For the Renaissance see Wilhelm von Bode, ‘Die Ausbildung des Sockels bei den Büsten der 
italienischen Renaissance’, Amtliche Berichte aus dem preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 40, 1918-9, 
110-120; ibid. ‘Rahmen und Sockel zur Zeit der Renaissance’, Kunst und Künstler, 17, 1918-9, at 
385-381; Herbert Keutner, ‘Über die Entstehung und die Formen des Standbildes im Cinquecento’ 
Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, ser. 3, 1956, 136-68; Inga Gesche, Neuaufstellungen 
antiker Statuen und ihr Einfluβ auf die römische Renaissance-Architektur, (Ph.D. diss. Frankfurt 
1968), Mannheim, 1971; Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, ‘On Pedestals: Michelangelo’s David, 
Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus and the Sculpture of the Piazza della Signoria’, Römisches Jahrbuch 
fürKunstgeschichte, 20, 1983, 378-415. More recently see Alexandra Gerstein, ed, Display and 
Displacement: Sculpture and the Pedestal from Renaissance to Post-Modern, London, 2007, 
beginning from a slightly later period than that principally addressed here and the essays by Nicholas 
Penny (‘The Evolution of the Plinth, Pedestal and Socle’) and Ian Wardropper, (‘”Pied Destal ou 
Soubsbassement”: Displaying Sculpture in Renaissance France’) in Nicholas Penny and Eicke.D. 
Schmidt, eds., Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe, Studies in the History of Art, 47, 
(National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), New Haven and London, 2008, 461-81 and 145-157 
respectively. 
 



 4 

overview by Nicholas Penny.10 Some art historians have examined the relation of the 
pedestal to the sustained figure, or to other site-specific factors in discussing particular 
works of the Renaissance. The productiveness and significance of such research is best 
illustrated by Francesco Caglioti’s meticulous and illuminating reconstructions of the 
magnificent bases of Donatello’s David and Judith together with their lost inscriptions (figs. 
18 and 21).11 Beyond the monographic, an approach that similarly takes into account artistic 
practice, but is not restricted to it, permits the relationship of sculpted bases to exigencies of 
site, as well as political and cultural investment, to emerge with greater clarity. One of the 
chief studies to do this is Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt’s ‘On Pedestals’ devoted to the 
innovative sixteenth-century installation of statues in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, 
the greatest public forum for the display of modern freestanding sculpture in Renaissance 
Italy.12  

 
The current study, while much indebted to these researches, is directed rather towards a 
broader understanding of the act of placing statues on plinths in early modern Italy, and in 
Florence especially. The inspiration for this research is ultimately drawn not from art history 
but from the work of a social historian, Richard Trexler, whose Public Life in Renaissance 
Florence used the tools of anthropology to describe and interpret the actions of Quattrocento 
citizens.13 Emphasising Florentines’ changing ceremonial and ritual gestures and the central 
importance ascribed to sustaining personal and collective honour, Trexler was able to 
expose the performatory and ritualised aspects of the city’s major sites in a way that 
transformed the understanding of their social and political significance. Seen within this ritual 
framework, pedestals - whatever else they may do – quintessentially express the desire to 
do honour, and ‘produce’ honour, within public, sacred and, less frequently, private space. 
Controversially, Trexler saw this desire as born from anxiety as to the city’s legitimacy rather 
than from any self-confidence – a self-confidence that such structures frequently sought to 
project. For scholars concerned with the visual self-presentation of the city, such as Volker 
Breidecker and Marvin Trachtenberg, Florence has also lent itself to sustained analysis 
because of the ideologically driven eloquence of its urban fabric, and particularly its public 
monuments, over centuries of political upheaval.14 Similarly, my own study emphasises the 
rhetorical work of the pedestal, addressing how these supporting structures could articulate 
the interests of the different individuals and social groups who commissioned them, 
designed them and subsequently moved them about. The range of attitudes of those who 
looked at them, sometimes against the grain, is self-evidently more difficult to access in a 
milieu where public discourse, controlled by the cultural and political elite, was 
overwhelmingly encomiastic. 
 
Terminology 
Sources directly describing supports for sculpture and similar furnishings for works of art can 
tell us something about how their function was understood, even if they say relatively little 

                                                 
10 Penny, ‘Evolution’.  
 
11 Francesco Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici. Storia del David della Giuditta, Florence 2000, 2 vol., 
throughout but esp. 2-11, 81-100, 101-152. 
 
12 Weil-Garris Brandt, ‘On Pedestals’ As an example in a quite different genre, see the study of a 
‘triumphant’ reliquary base for a Cross, interpreted in a Carolingian theological and political context by 
Hans Belting  ‘Das Einhardsbogen’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 36, 1973, 93-121. 
  
13 Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, Ithaca, N.Y. and London, 1991. 
 
14 Volker Breidecker, Florenz oder 'Die Rede, die zum Auge spricht’: Kunst, Fest und Macht im 
Ambiente der Stadt, Munich, 1990; Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art and 
Power in Early Modern Florence, Cambridge, 1997. 
 



 5 

about their forms. It is significant indeed that, for Quattrocento and Cinquecento viewers, a 
generic term existed that could encompass all such features as pedestals and frames in 
works of painting and sculpture: that word, used in the discussion over the installation of the 
David, was ‘ornamento’. Tellingly ‘ornamento’ (‘ornato’, ‘fornamento’) drew together 
physically dissimilar types of furnishing that are separated in modern terminology, though 
distinctions of specific function were evidently recognised.15 The term ornamento, as it 
appears frequently in contracts with artists and other contemporary documents, refers to the 
auxiliary and beautifying function of the pedestal or frame; it did not, however, share the 
modern implication of the merely decorative.16 Ornamental furnishings, whether fixed or 
temporary, were taken as readily legible signs of worth and honour and therefore of 
considerable significance.17 An ornamento was not superficial, still less extraneous, to that 
which it ornamented, but intrinsic and even characterising. The theoretical position of 
ornament and framing in this light has increasingly become the subject of latterday critical 
analysis. Originating in Kant’s later, problematically absolute, distinction of ornament as 
parergon (‘outside the work’) in the 1790 Critique of Judgement - and thus as extrinsic to 
complete representation – the ‘supplementary’ status of ornament has been variously 
revised.18 In relation to later Renaissance art, Rebecca Zorach has emphasised both the 
abundant application of and restriction on, ornament to define place within social hierarchy 
and as sign of control, even domination.19 While the issues for earlier Renaissance art are 
not identical, the link between ornament and what one might term an aesthetic of the 
triumphal already emerges by the 1450s. Furthermore, historical sources indicate the key 
value for patrons of ornamenti. Contracts for altarpieces, for example, show that the carved 
frame or framing elements (usually referred to as the ornamento or ornamenti), were subject 
to detailed requirements and often accounted for a large proportion of the total price of the 
work. Acknowledged here is the conception of the altarpiece as a complete physical entity 
whose mode of presentation, its framing, was as significant for its reception as the choice 
and placement of figures. Equally the attributes of saints to be represented within the work – 
that which made them recognisable as individuals - might sometimes be called their 
ornamenti.20 By analogy, the pedestal is what served, and serves, to define the freestanding 

                                                 
15  For ‘fornamento’ used by Giovanni Bellini for describing a frame for one of his paintings see  
Jennifer Fletcher, ‘I Bellini’ in R. Casanelli, ed. La Bottega dell’artista tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, 
Milan, 1998, esp. 139-41.   
 
16 See for distinctions in its use and for examples, Michelle O’Malley, The Business of Art: Contracts 
and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy, New Haven and London, 2005, 28-31. 
 
17 The 1471 report of the Florentine ambassador on the quality of his room at the Ferrarese court is 
typical: ‘si ornata e parata che ame pare non si possa fare piu a uno gran Signore’ (Biblioteca 
Riccardiana, Moreni 242 f. 2-3). 
 
18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Berlin and Libau, 1790, transl. and ed. Oxford, 1952, f. 68, 
14-18. For the frame as external to the work and constitutive of it as a representation see Jacques 
Derrida, La Vérité en Peinture, Paris, 1978, 62- 78 esp. 67-73, (The Truth in Painting, transl. Geoff 
Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago, 1987, 53-67, esp. 59-61)  
 
19 Rebecca. Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold:Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance, 
Chicago and London, 2005, esp. 151-156 drawing on Kant and Derrida as well as on Oleg Grabar’s 
positing of ornament as an intermediary  (The Mediation of Ornament, Princeton N.J., 1992, esp. 42-
46) and on Angus Fletcher’s elaboration of ornament as a ‘universal order’  (Allegory: The Theory of  
a Symbolic Mode, Ithaca, 1964).  
 
20 O’Malley, Business, 30. 
 



 6 

statue as such. Seen in these terms a pedestal does not just support or furnish a sculpture in 
situ, it lends the work its proper place of signification in the cultural field.21   

 
There are a number of inflections to the range of Italian words used to describe the pedestal, 
defined broadly as an architectonic support for a figure or object, and there is some 
commonality, if no absolute consistency, in their usage. The word ‘piedistallo’, from ‘piede’ 
(foot, from the Latin ‘pede’) and ‘stallo’ (a stall or place, from the German), was intermittently 
applied to bases for sculpture but was in common use for a stand-alone furnishing that acted 
as a support, hence we find a ‘piedistallo di lib. 80’ in the main audience room of the Medici 
palace in Pisa in 1492, valued substantially at 15 florins.22 The ‘pedestal’ type was also used 
to characterise a form of luxury plate, namely a basin or bowl with an elevated stand (eg. 
‘uno bacino da piedistallo, d’ottone’).23 The more common description for any type of 
support, regardless of size, was simply ‘foot’: ‘piede’ or ‘piè’, (‘pede’ in latin inventories).24 
Reliquary bases and the stands made for ancient cups, vases and other precious vessels, 
are often described in this way. Both represent important sub-genres of the pedestal in the 
Renaissance and in their different ways represent invitations to honour, and signal 
ownership of, precious, magical or sacred objects. ‘Piedistallo’ as it was most often used, as 
an architectural term, was, and still is, applied to the raised support which sustains a 
column.25 The Greek word ‘plinth’ was also employed in architectural treatises for a low, 
square support beneath a column base, but the word could serve on occasion to describe a 
base for a statue.26 By the sixteenth century, the more generic ‘base’: ‘basamento’ or 
‘imbasamento’ deriving, again, from architectural terminology for the lowest part of a building 
or column support, was the term most frequently applied to the pedestal for a statue.27  

 
Other terms could be employed to characterise supports for objects of distinctive scale or 
function. Thus the eight metre high base for Donatello’s bronze equestrian monument to 
Gattamelata in Padua was referred to in contemporary records of the project as a ‘pilastro’ or 
pier, a word that acknowledged its architectural substance and distinctive elongated cross-

                                                 
21 For the cultural field see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and 
Literature,  Oxford, 1993, esp. 131-2 (from ‘Le marché des biens symboliques’, first published 1971). 
22 Marco Spallanzani and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Libro d’inventario dei beni di Lorenzo il Magnifico, 
Florence, 1992, 224 (f. 108). 
 
23 Spallanzani and Bertelà, Libro d’inventario, 182 (f. 88). 
 
24 See for example the records of goldsmiths’ workshops in Gabriella Cantini Guidotti, Orafi in 
Toscana tra XV e XVIII Secolo. Storie di uomini, di cose e di parole, I, Florence, 1994, 264-5.  
 
25 Daniele Barbaro’s edition of Vitruvius’ De architectura: I dieci libri dell’architettura, Venice, 1567, 
134, refers to the ‘little walls’ (‘muretti’ ) beneath columns thus: ‘altro non sono che i piedistali, che si 
doveriano dire piedistili, cioè piedi delle colonne, che sarebbe parola composta del Greco [stili] e del 
volgare [piedi]; ma parliamo secondo uso’.  
 
26 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di Architettura, Ingegneria e Arte Militare, ed. C.Maltese, I, III,  
384: ‘…senza il printo [plinto] overo quadro locato sotto la basa’, p. 385: ‘della basa o vero printo’. 
Francesco di Giorgio describes these plinths as cube-shaped and called ‘steriobata’ or stilobates in 
antiquity. For another ‘ancient’ term for the plinth see Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice, 1499, ed. 
Marco Ariani and Mino Gabriele, I, Milan, 1998, p. 33: ‘El Paegma, overo basamento meraveglioso 
era di solido marmoro…’ 
 
27 As in Vasari (Le Vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed Gaetano Milanesi, vol. 2, 
Florence, 1906, 406), à propos of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes: ‘…Similmente il basamento che 
è un balaustro di granito...’ 
 



 7 

section.28 From an early moment, and right into the sixteenth century, Donatello’s David and 
Judith monuments were referred to as ‘columns’, a term responding to the form of their 
pedestals.29 At the other end of the spectrum the silver base for a reliquary head of 
Sant’Attaviano made by Antonio del Pollaiuolo is described in a list of spoils from the 
cathedral sacristy at Volterra as a ‘ceppo’ meaning a block or stand.30 The word might have 
enjoyed a further resonance as the support for a head since ‘ceppo’ was also the term used 
for the executioner’s block.31 The point remains that such occasional nomenclature often 
depended on the available vocabulary of the writer, rather than representing an established 
terminology.32  

 
The rhetorical address of the Renaissance pedestal 
In the case of the pedestal, one of the main attractions for focussing on the early to high 
Renaissance is the relatively brief but significant triumph of ornamental, and occasionally 
extremely high and prominent bases, as furnishings for the revived type of freestanding 
sculpture pioneered in Florence. Representations of pedestals, some more imaginative than 
probable, also feature significantly in paintings, manuscript illustration and prints of this 
period, in ways that reveal the ubiquity of ornamental richness as a cultural signifier. It is 
noticeable that, in designing a wide range of objects whether candelabra, ‘feet’ for 
reliquaries, fountains, holy water stoups and other forms of functional vessel, craftsmen of 
this period, with the encouragement of patrons, often built taller and broader. Memorable 
examples are the silver and gilded reliquaries of the most powerful churches of Florence, 
Bologna and Padua.33 More interestingly, these designers also gave a new, or renewed, 
monumentality and iconographic richness to their works. Hence the aforementioned Paschal 
candlestick produced by Andrea Riccio for the Franciscan pilgrimage church of the Santo, 
Padua (fig. 11), has earned a place in more prestigious histories of bronze sculpture rather 
than that of liturgical metalwork. 

 
A new elaboration of ornament, unsurprising in itself in societies increasingly dominated by 
aristocratic ideals, was accompanied by a greater articulacy. Choices of form and decoration 
were never incidental even if their message could, in some cases, amount to little more than 
a general association of the object, its maker and its owner with the perceived achievements 
of ancient civilisation. It would be difficult to construct a history of the ‘freestanding’ pedestal 

                                                 
28 Andrea Gloria, Donatello fiorentino e le sue opere mirabili nel tempio di S. Antonio di Padova, 
Padua, 1895, 8; also referred to by Antonio Sartori, ‘Documenti riguardanti Donatello e il suo altare di 
Padova’, Il Santo, I, fasc. 1, January-April 1961, 21-83 at 32 and 35. 
 

29 Horst W. Janson, The Sculpture of Donatello, Princeton 1957, vol. 2, 157 and Caglioti, (Donatello, 
1,  89) also mention that it was referred to in 1453 as a ‘columpna’. The term was also used on one 
occasion to describe the base of the Gattamelata. 
 
30 Maurizio Cavallini, Luigi Pescetti and Giuseppe Pilastri, ‘Volterra e Francesco Ferrucci’, Biblioteca 
della ‘Rassegna Volterrana’ II, Volterra e Francesca Ferrucci, Volterra, 1930, 106.  
 
31 Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, 2, 760, no. IV and for a ‘ceppo’ as the stand for a cross 
see no. XI. 
 
32 Instead of ‘basamento’ the late sixteenth-century compiler of a description of Rome (Codex 
Barberini XXX, 89) uses ‘posamento’ (R. Lanciani, ‘Il Codice barberiniano XXX, 89, contenente 
frammenti di una descrizione di Roma del secolo XVI, pt.2’, Archivio della Società romana di storia 
patria, 6, 1883, 445-496 eg. at 446, 447). 
 
33 See for example Joseph Braun, Die Reliquiare des christlichen Kultes und ihre Entwicklung, 
Freiburg im Breisgau, 1940, figs. 348 and 357 (Florence), fig. 358 (Bologna), figs. 376, 378-81, 569 
(Padua). 
 



 8 

in this period, not least because pedestals did not answer directly to one another in time, as 
statues clearly did; pedestals answer, first and foremost, to the object they sustain. What 
one finds in this untidy category is rather a heterogeneous series of cross-fertilisations, often 
taking place between objects of different function – from statue base to fountain and water 
stoup, from candelabrum to column, with sculptors responding, in a spirit of emulation or 
assimilation, to the inventions of their peers ancient and modern.   
 
The appearance of ‘triumphal’ and ornamental bases coincides with a shift in the nature of 
élite culture and the exercise and representation of power. It is to this shift that the Florentine 
sculptor-architect Antonio Averlino, called Filarete, spoke when, in the early 1460s, he 
devised his architectural treatise as a fictional dialogue with his Sforza patron, the princely 
ruler of Milan.34 The treatise proposes the planning, ornamentation and festive life of an ideal 
city that is designed, both discursively and artistically, to imply the knowledge, magnificence 
and superiority of its ruler. In its tirelessly elaborated public buildings, monuments and 
squares we find a consistent fascination with ingenious ornaments, abundance and height, 
almost without regard for antique ‘correctness’, proportion or even civic decorum. Filarete 
was concerned above all with architectural and sculptural features - such as columnar 
fountains decorating urban courtyards and piazzas - that would impress by their exalted 
proportions and be understood as outpourings of educated princely munificence.35  
 
A similarly telling but more specific historical instance of the prevailing taste is granted by an 
episode retold by the humanist Antonio Bonfini. Praising the progress through Italy of 
Beatrice of Aragon to her consort King Matthias Corvinus in Hungary, Bonfini makes a point 
of describing in detail the preciousness and costly scale of the goldsmith ware that Beatrice 
laid out to impress her hosts en route.36 At the magnificent court of Urbino, this overtly 
competitive ritual involved the display of an inventive salt cellar-cum-jewel box crowned with 
a flowering tree and of a massive gold pitcher in the shape of a dragon with a mother of 
pearl body that ‘stood upon a very lofty tripod base’.37 Bonfini framed his account on the one 
side by noting the ‘wonder’ shown even by such a connoisseur as the Duke of Urbino and, 
on the other, by Beatrice’s subsequent (implicitly Neapolitan) reform of the dining 
arrangements and life-style of the Hungarian court. The reform produced what was a 
nuanced, hierarchical - and widely resented - distancing of the ruler from his courtiers. Thus 
the loftiness of the highly crafted, costly piece of tableware becomes symbolic of the 
imposition of a whole new protocol, if not exactly a new social order.  
 
The operative decorum here was not directly transferable to a republican context, yet 
oligarchic and territorial Florence, a republic until 1512, was increasingly subject to the 
control of a single family. The Quattrocento Medici belonged to a competitive, mercantile 
patrician class in which they stood out both for their wealth, and for the degree to which they 
progressively identified themselves with, and translated to their own interests, symbols and 
forms of behaviour borrowed from aristocratic regimes and from imperial Rome. 

                                                 
34 Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di Architettura, eds. Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi, 
Milan, 1972, 2 vols, with a discussion of the dating at p. XIII. 
 
35 Filarete, Trattato, Book VIII (1, 235) for the fountain at the centre of the main piazza of Sforzinda 
(60 v., ed. cit, 2, tav. 36) and Book IX (1, 262-3) for the fountain in the courtyard of a royal palace.  
 
36 Antonio Bonfini, Rerum Ungaricum decades, in Rózsa Feuer-Tóth, Art and Humanism in Hungary 
in the Age of Matthias Corvinus, ed. G. Jakobi, Budapest, 1990, 125-9. The relevant passage from 
Bonfini’s Ten Books on Hungarian Matters is translated in Peter Elmer, Nick Webb and Roberta Wood 
eds., The Renaissance in Europe: An Anthology, New Haven and London, 2000, 206-7.  
 
37 ‘supra editissimam basim tripedalis’ (not ‘three feet in height’ as in Elmer, Webb and Wood, 
Renaissance). 
 



 9 

Significantly, with their commission of works to Donatello, Cosimo de’ Medici and his son 
Piero introduced the first high, columnar, freestanding bronze sculptures into the space of 
their palazzo in a way that demonstrated their residence’s semi-public status. In the same 
early period of ascendancy, which ended with the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478, the streets of 
Florence were the stage for highly inventive allegorical triumphs (‘trionfi’) and other 
vertiginous ‘edifizi’. These floats, which were paraded for civic feasts enriched and 
transformed the ritual self-presentation of the city, as did extravagantly high ‘ceri’ or wax 
offerings dedicated by Florence’s subject towns and other institutions.38 In the surviving 
Italian republics, including what Philippe de Commynes referred to as ‘the most triumphal’ 
Venice, princely and imperial models that lent nobility and legitimacy to the state and its 
leading families were freely adopted. Indeed it is clear that in the majority of centres, 
regardless of their political structure, long traditions of family rivalry and the tensions 
produced by social mobility were major factors in sustaining an inflationary demand for 
elaborate signs of public honour. Not the least of these signs was the vertical elaboration 
afforded by the pedestal, a form that appears centre-stage in images of triumphs (fig.  1) and 
occasionally even in religious art and narrative scenes of the period. Rivalry at an 
institutional level was another major motivating force.39  

 
The transforming power of the pedestal 
Evidently the significance of the pedestal derives in great measure from its dependence on 
the worth of the figures, images and objects it sustained. But the relationship between 
support and supported is always a dialectical one in which power or legitimacy does not flow 
in just one direction. Renaissance pedestals were designed to have a constructive or 
constitutive role, elevating the image both literally and metaphorically. For it was always 
hoped that an honoured image or relic – in other words one given recognition by its 
magnificent display -- would remain or even become efficacious. Such was clearly the case 
for the carved fragment of the True Cross owned by the Florentine Baptistery: its great silver 
cross reliquary was ordered in 1457 on the basis that the relic was ‘not ornamented as it 
should be and in its present state is not obvious to many and no-one knows that it is wood of 
the Cross.’40 
 
The presentational function of the pedestal has a strong temporal and performative aspect to 
it, not least because, like a throne or a cloth of honour, the pedestal physically produces the 
effect of a moment held and preserved for contemplation against time. Indeed frames and 
pedestals, though they may include narrative scenes, are intrinsically anti-narrative features 
that both contain and immobilise. In this respect, they function in a similar way to furnishings 
used in the elaborately staged religious and diplomatic rituals of the period. They transform 
protagonists - even when shown at a culminating moment of action - into exempla, actors 
into icons and allow new meanings to be articulated or brought forth in ways that narrative 
might otherwise impede or obviate. A number of painters and sculptors of the Renaissance 
deliberately play either with or against this stabilising aspect of the base: Andrea Mantegna 
did so, for example, by arresting iconic figures as though they were statues (the St. 
Sebastian in Vienna, and especially that in the Louvre, (fig.  2) are prime examples). His 
contemporary Donatello generally worked in the opposite direction by allowing his figures 

                                                 
38 See for these especially, Vasari’s Life of il Cecca, Le vite, ed. Milanesi, III, 203. For a sketch of c. 
1500 including the stacked forms of ‘edifizi’ in the Piazza della Signoria see John Shearman, ‘Art or 
Politics in the Piazza?’ in Alessandro Nova and Anna Schreurs eds, Benvenuto Cellini: Kunst und 
Kunsttheorie im 16. Jahrhundert, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2003, 19-36, Abb. 2. 
 
39 As I have argued elsewhere in relation to the silver cross for the Florentine Baptistery (The 
Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome , New Haven and London, 2005, 35-46).  
40 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane, ser. II, 51, f.216 recto (f. 224 new style), ‘non è 
ornato come si richiede e stando in quella maniera non è manifesto a molti e nessuno sa che sia 
legno della Crocie…’ 
 



 10 

either to transgress or seemingly ignore its boundaries, as for example, in the lost Dovizia, 
where the nymph–like personification was captured in mid stride, as though at any moment 
she might walk off her column.41 

 
At the very beginning of the Quattrocento, Filippo Brunelleschi had demonstrated the 
potential liturgical resonance of the pedestal at the very centre of his bronze competition 
relief for the first set of Baptistery doors (fig. 3). Here an altar (shown as a kind of furnace) 
supports the naked boy Isaac who is held, statue-like, on the brink of sacrifice. The altar-as-
pedestal is further elaborated with a relief scene within the relief featuring rare, and 
potentially mystifying, iconography (fig. 4). It seems to show an Annunciation by Abraham to 
his seated wife Sarah with the ‘redeemed’ son rising half-length at the centre, as from the 
waters of Baptism.42 The tiny and terrible drama of the boy Isaac in Brunelleschi’s relief 
stands at the beginning of a much more prominent history of Florentine sculptures in which 
‘redemptive’ acts of violent death are performed on pedestals, pedestals which could thus 
also support connotations of an altar: Donatello’s Judith slaying Holofernes, Baccio 
Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus, Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus brandishing the Gorgon’s 
head.43 As Weil-Garris has pointed out, Leon Battista Alberti claimed in his treatise on 
architecture that in antiquity statues were set up on six-foot high altars and he frequently 
employed the term ‘ara’ or ‘arula’ (little altar) as an appropriate word to refer to a dado or 
pedestal either beneath a column or a statue.44 It is interesting in this light that Cesare 
Cesariano’s illustrated Vitruvius edition of 1521 employs a richly ornamented Roman 
funerary altar as the pedestal for a Doric column.45   

 
In practice, objects such as pedestals not only inflected what they supported but were 
themselves transformed over time. This might be intentional if, for example, they formed part 
of the paraphernalia of honour that surrounded actual figureheads, like the rostra supplied 
for ambassadorial visits, or when pedestals formed part of tableau for major feast days. But 
even when supporting permanent sculpture, the movements, removals or adaptations of 
pedestals are as telling of societal shifts as any ‘original’ function, especially when that 
function had been to stabilise or fix a place and a meaning (perhaps simply as work of art). It 

                                                 
41 David Wilkins, ‘Donatello’s Lost Dovizia for the Mercato Vecchio: Wealth and Charity as Florentine 
Civic Virtues’, Art Bulletin, 65, 1983, 401-423, at 407-8 for the visual evidence for the statue’s pose. 
 
42 This reading differs somewhat from Creighton Gilbert’s (‘The Smallest Problem in Florentine 
Iconography’, in eds. Sergio Bertelli and Gloria Ramakus, Essays presented to Myron P. Gilmore, I, 
Florence, 1978, 193-218), which draws on the stage directions of a later sacred play by Feo Belcari. 
Gilbert was surely correct, though, in his identification of the protagonists and of a subsequent 
moment in the story.  
 
43 See Weil-Garris Brandt, ‘On Pedestals’, 400-402 for the Hercules and Cacus as perhaps evoking 
the altar of Hercules Invictus at Rome, the site at which the Cacus myth culminates, and 409-10 for 
the Cellini base as altar-like. Both Weil-Garris and Cole (Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture, 
Cambridge, 2002, 68-9) have shown the significance of this association for the Perseus as work of art 
and as political sign.  
 
44 Weil-Garris Brandt, ‘On Pedestals’, 402 and note 127. See Leon Battista Alberti, L’Architettura [De 
Re Aedificatoria], eds. Giovanni Orlandi and Paolo Portoghesi, Milan,1966, 2, 627 for temple altars 
and 617 for the decoration of pediments with statues (Book VII, Chap. 11, f. 127r): ‘…imponentur 
arulae statuarum collocandarum gratia’. See also for supports for columns: Book VIII, Chap. 3, f. 141r, 
Chap. 6, f. 146, f. 147, f. 147v and Book IX, Chap. 4, f.163v, and for statues: Book VIII, Chap. 6, f. 
147v. 
 
45  Yves Pauwels, ‘Cesariano et Philibert de L’Orme:’le piédestal dorique’ du Premier tome de 
l’Architecture’, Revue de l’art, 91, 1991, 39-43. The pedestal is adapted from a funerary altar owned 
by Giovanni Ciampolini in early sixteenth-century Rome and now in the Uffizi. 
 



 11 

is clear that, in the case of sculpted pedestals, such changes are symptomatic of attempts to 
manipulate or reorientate the meaning of the potent symbols they sustained. Pedestals 
might be deliberately removed when a statue was transferred and put to a new purpose. 
Donatello’s bronze David, for example, became definitively detached from its base - and 
from any public significance - when it was eventually transferred to the Medici Granducal 
residence at Palazzo Pitti and installed as an overmantel feature.46 The despoiled pedestal 
as a relic signifying the overthrow of an overweening regime is a familiar and potent image, 
and already used by Renaissance painters.47  

 
But temporary changes could also be significant. We know, for example, that the same 
David, together with its base, was co-opted into an ephemeral staging (apparato) while still 
installed in the courtyard of the Medici palace on the via Larga. At the marriage celebrations 
of Lorenzo de’ Medici, recounted by Marco Parenti to Filippo Strozzi in 1469, the pedestal 
was the very centrepiece of the arrangement: ‘there was no sideboard [credenziera] for the 
silverware, only tall counters covered with tablecloths in the middle of the courtyard around 
that beautiful column on which is the bronze David, and in the four corners, four brass basins 
for cups, and behind these [central] counters stood people administering wine and water.’48 
Here the column and its statue constituted the high, fixed, axis of a symmetrical display 
designed to produce a decorative unity in the ritualised space of the courtyard. At the same 
time the structure became rhetorically associated with Medici magnanimity as a fount around 
which the activities of the guests revolved. The pedestal defined a place of circulation and 
beneficence. When, in 1495, the Florentine government wanted to re-direct the meaning of 
Donatello’s Judith sculpture, which had been removed from the Medici garden beyond that 
courtyard, they not only re-sited it but permanently changed the inscription on its base.49  

 
So potent could statuary be as a site of political and cultural debate that by the first years of 
the sixteenth century we even encounter the extraordinary phenomenon of the Pasquino, the 
fragmentary Roman sculpture on a simple base that was dressed up for the feast day of St. 
Mark, adopting each time a new mythological identity and a new voice.50 Here the verse 
‘pasquinades’, which were periodically attached around the group and its pedestal, made the 
statue the protean mouthpiece of the most varied and ‘occasional’ wit, satire and dissent, 
working strongly against the notion of triumphal permanence and commemoration.51  

                                                 
46  Anna Maria Massinelli ed., Bronzetti e anticaglie dalla Guardaroba di Cosimo I, Museo Nazionale 
del Bargello, Florence, 1991, 26; Caglioti, Donatello, I, 356 and II, 409. 
 
47  In Exodus 23 v. 24 the Israelites are forbidden to bow down to the gods of other peoples and 
instructed to ‘utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images.’ Vittore Carpaccio drew 
effectively on the imagery of overthrow when, in his Scuola canvas in the Louvre of c. 1514, he shows 
St. Stephen at Jerusalem preaching from an antique pedestal that is surrounded by fragments of 
broken marble, that point to its previous function. 
 
48  Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF)  II, IV, 324, f. 108r-v, published in Delle nozze di 
Lorenzo de’ Medici con Clarice Orsini nel 1469; informazione di Piero Parenti Fiorentino, Florence, 
1870.  
 
49 The base of the Judith now reads  'Exemplum sal[utis] pub[licae] cives pos[uerunt] MCCCCXCV’. 
 
50 For a multi-faceted reading of the Pasquino’s significance see Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the 
Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, New Haven and London, 
2002, 210-231. 
 
51 The engraving of the Pasquino of 1546 (see Christian Hülsen, ‘Das Speculum Romanae 
Magnificentiae des Antonio Lafréri’ in Collectanea variae doctrinae Leoni S. Olschki, Munich, 1921, 
157n71a) shows a single, long inscription on the pedestal, but a pasquinade of 1516 (Barkan, 
Unearthing, 230) certainly suggests that the base (though ‘al basso’ has a double sense) was also 
decked with temporary inscriptions. For the development of the pasquinades and the various attempts 



 12 

 
Although in the early period the sculpted base was rarely used as a site for the explicit 
inscription of artistic agency – the patron’s concerns took precedence  - specific sculptors 
and painters were highly influential in developing the communicative power of the base and 
in posing new questions to divert or alert an attentive viewer. The pedestal was intrinsically 
inviting as a site of artistic fantasia and invention for the very reason that its design was 
unlikely to be subject to detailed requirements from patronal bodies. Though the sculptor 
might be bound by the need to accommodate inscriptions, emblems or stories required by 
the terms of commission, a certain freedom in devising the embellishment of the base can 
be presumed and, with it, the possibility for a claim to artistic licence.  

 
 

Medici column monuments 
With regard to the taste for ornate bases all’antica, as in so many other respects, works by 
Donatello emerge repeatedly as formative. In particular Donatello’s renowned bronze 
sculptures for the Medici palace and garden provide exemplary material for addressing the 
potential of Renaissance pedestals as mediators and interpreters.52 Already in the sixteenth 
century it is largely à propos of Donatello’s work and, to a lesser extent, of other Medici 
sculpture, that Giorgio Vasari devotes any attention at all to the character of sculpted bases 
in the Vite. It is significant that not only were these works conceived of as freestanding 
statues, and therefore possessing great ethical as well as aesthetic force, but cast in 
bronze.53 It is above all ancient bronzes and their modern relatives that merited the most 
elevated and distinguished pedestals. Freestanding figures with supports that advertised 
their physical, if not visual, independence from architecture, and so elevated as to appear 
columnar were a novelty in the fifteenth century and, as such, the implications of this 
development merit special consideration in terms of the rhetoric of the pedestal. 

 
A detailed consideration of the appearance and placement of the lost pedestal of the David 
(fig. 5, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence), ascribed by Vasari to Desiderio da 
Settignano is a task both too complex and reiterative to be tackled in this article. 
Significantly, sources recording inscriptions on the pedestal of this sculpture while in the 
Medici palace courtyard and of the later Judith bronze in the Medici garden, analysed below, 
refer to them as ‘columns’ and therefore implicitly as objects with a monumental, even 
ceremonial, connotation. As Caglioti has elaborated, it was as column monuments that these 
statues, and not just their pedestals, were explicitly characterised in the Quattrocento.54 

                                                                                                                                                        
to identify the sculpture in the sixteenth century see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and 
the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven and London, 1981, no. 72, 291-
2. 
 
52 Francesco Caglioti, ‘Donatello, I Medici e Gentile de' Becchi: un po' d'ordine intorno alla 'Giuditta' (e al 
'David') di Via Larga’, Prospettiva, no. 75-6, 1994, 14-49;no. 78, 1995, 22-55 and no. 80, 1995, 15-58; 
Caglioti, Donatello, as at note 9. 
 
53 Marco Tonelli, ‘La più mirabil cosa’: Teoria della statua da Donatello a Rodin, Rome, 2006; For the 
David as anticipating Alberti’s theorisation of the statua see Marco Collareta, ‘Considerazioni in 
margine al ‘De statua’ ed alla sua fortuna’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di 
Lettere e Filosofia, ser. III, 12, 1982, 171-187. 
 
54 Caglioti, Donatello, I, 89-100, 139-143, 217-218. For the David as a column monument see Horst 
W. Janson, ‘La signification politique du David en bronze de Donatello’, Revue de l‘Art, 39, 1978, 33-
38 at  37-8; (though claiming that the David was first commissioned by the Florentine government as 
a fully public column monument). The thesis of the sculpture’s public function is rejected by Volker 
Herzner, (‘David Florentinus 2: Der Bronze-David Donatellos im Bargello’, Jahrbuch der Berliner 
Museen, 24, 1982, 105-6). For public statuary according to the typology of Säulenmonumenten and 
their changing evaluation (without reference to Donatello’s Medici bronzes) see Werner Haftmann, 



 13 

Removed after the ousting of the Medici in 1494, both works were famously re-installed at 
the Florentine town hall. One of several precise records of the event reads: ‘Antonio Manetti 
being Gonfaloniere, that column where Judith slays Holofernes was placed on the ringhiera. 
On the 29th of December was placed in the courtyard of the Palazzo della Signoria the 
column of David which was taken from the house of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici’.55 The 
transfer of these complete ensembles from the ‘casa’ to the ‘palazzo’ is highly eloquent: 
marking a transition from a family residence presented as a centre of power to the public 
place of renewed republican rule and of two centuries of civic representation.56 The 
sculptures, though newly dedicated to a pristine res publica resonated clearly as a display of 
spoils.57 The memory of their previous lives was further guaranteed by the retention of their 
Medici-commissioned pedestals. In view of this history, it may indeed have seemed ominous 
when the base of the David was struck by lightning in its new location in 1511.58  

 
While its date and earliest situation have been debated, we know that with its installation in 
the courtyard of the new Medici palace in the 1450s, the David gained a Latin titulus and a 
pedestal, encompassing what was probably itself a piece of spoliated ancient marble. The 
latter consisted of a variegated red marble column, set upon a more visually ‘open’ white 
marble element supported by corner ‘harpies’ - apparently variations of the Roman sphinx 
type - and further decorated with tendrils in bronze. The former, as is by now well known, 
read: ‘The victor is whoever defends the fatherland / God crushes the wrath of an enormous 
foe./ Behold! a boy overcame a great tyrant / Conquer, oh citizens!’. The inscription thus 
helped to justify the scale and elaboration of the pedestal.59 As Caglioti argues, the titulus 
surely postdated the 1454 arrival of the humanist Gentile de’ Becchi (c. 1425- 1497) as 
priest and tutor in Cosimo de’ Medici’s household, since the inscriptions beneath both 

                                                                                                                                                        
Das italienische Säulenmonument. Versuch zur Geschichte einer antiken Form des Denkmals und 
Kultmonumentes und ihrer Wirksamkeit für die Antikenvorstellung des Mittelalters und für die 
Ausbildung des öffentlichen Denkmals in der Frührenaissance, Leipzig and Berlin. 1939, reprinted 
Hildesheim 1972 
 
55 Ricordi of Lorenzo di Giovanni Ruspoli in Caglioti, Donatello, I, 106-7 and  299-303 for other 
versions taken from the ‘Prioristi’ or lists of government offices. 
 
56 Nonetheless Géraldine Johnson’s reading according to which the move transformed the Judith from 
‘Medicean idol into a Republican ideal’ implies, problematically, that the Judith was viewed as ‘pagan’ 
as opposed to republican while in Medici possession (‘Idol or Ideal? – the Power and Potency of 
Female Public sculpture’ in eds. Géraldine Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, Picturing Women 
in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, Cambridge, 1997, 222-245 at 231. See also on the signficance of 
this move Sarah Blake McHam, ‘Donatello’s Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in 
Florence’, Art Bulletin, 83, 2001, 32-47. 
 
57  Piero Parenti calls the Judith ‘spoglia di Piero de’ Medici’ in his Storia fiorentina, ed. Andrea 
Matucci, vol. I, 1994, 291, transcribed also in Caglioti, Donatello, I, 303-4. 
 
58 Ricordanze di Bartolommeo Masi calderaio fiorentino dal 1478 al 1526, ed. Giuseppe O. Corazzini, 
Florence, 1906, 82-83 and Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Manoscritti, 88, ‘Ricordi di Piero Masi dal 1452 
al 1513’, f. 15r, both quoted in extract in Caglioti, Donatello, I, 111. For the interest in the event as an 
omen ibid. I, 344. 
 

59 The Latin read ‘Victor est quisquis patriam tuetur. / Frangit immanis [or iniusti, Bodleian, Lat. Misc. 
e 81] Deus hostis iras / En puer grandem domuit tiranum. / Vincite, cives!’. The inscription was first 
published by Christine Sperling, ‘Donatello’s Bronze ‘David’ and the Demands of Medici Politics’, 
Burlington Magazine, 134, 1992, 218-224 at 218-20. Her recorded examples have been joined by 
many others brought together by Giovanni Agosti and Vincenzo Farinella in Paola Barocchi ed., Il 
giardino di San Marco. Maestri e compagni del giovane Michelangelo, exh. cat., Florence, Casa 
Buonarroti, 1992, 99 and notes 141-2 and, above all, by Caglioti, ‘Donatello, I Medici’ and Donatello, I, 
5-12 and 57-73.  



 14 

Donatello sculptures are recorded in a collection of Becchi’s Latin poems in a manuscript 
now in Oxford.60 Speaking to Medici political interests, the verse inscriptions allowed these 
works to enter into a tradition of ‘eloquent’ Florentine civic representations in the public 
sphere for which expository tituli had been composed, thus claiming for the new 
commissions a similarly broad audience.61 As elements that required reading front and back, 
if not necessarily around, the bases, the epigrams would also have reinforced the invitation 
provided by the columnar pedestals (and David’s laurel garland) to circulate about the 
figures and admire them from multiple angles.62 The pedestals, indeed, served as the visual 
equivalent to Gentile Becchi’s rhetorical injunctions to ‘Behold!’. In each case victories over 
Israelite enemies, described as taking place in the past, were held up as both visually 
striking and vital to contemporaries, whether those ‘citizens’ were already under Medici 
protection or were to be persuaded into the fold.  

 
The pedestals, tall and inscribed, strongly reinforced the celebratory evaluation of David and 
Judith as victors. In part this was a simple matter of elevation: the higher the column, the 
greater the honour to the victor. Columns were quite frequently set up in commemoration of 
Christian ‘victories’ in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but it was also well known that 
ancient victors had been honoured with columnar monuments like that of Trajan (from whose 
giant pedestal derives the garland on which the hero David stands), or like the Roman 
equestrian monument, a genre that Donatello reworked for the mercenary captain, 
‘Gattamelata’, at Padua (1447-53).63 When Alberti referred to freestanding columns in his 
contemporary architectural treatise it was as public monumenta in an appropriately rich 
idiom. Recommending that columns be raised on steps and use superimposed pedestals 
(arae), Alberti suggests a further intervening plinth ‘to make the work higher and more 
beautiful’. This could then be ornamented with celebratory allegories such as Victoria, Gloria 
or Fama and the pedestal be decorated above with gilded bronze.64 In a Florentine context, 
the pedestal of the gilded bronze David, apparently the first of its type, also looks 
symptomatic of a more general inflation in honorary forms and gestures found not just in 
humanist writing but in civic manifestations of the period.65 Already in 1429 one viewer of the 
great Epiphany procession remarked on the impressive altitude at which ‘David’ managed to 
remain standing on his triumphal car following the procession of the Magi.66 As Trexler 

                                                 
 
60 Bodleian MS, Lat. Misc. e 81. 
 
61 For example those composed for the Palazzo Vecchio by Franco Sacchetti and Coluccio Salutati in 
the 1380s, recorded in later manuscript collections. See Nicolai Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio 
1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic, 
Oxford, 1995, 49-54. 
 
62 Christine Rebene, ‘Die Entwicklung der Freifigur’, in eds. Lars O. Larrson and Götz. Pochat, 
Kunstgeschichtliche Studien zur Florentiner Renaissance, I, Stockholm, 1991, 69-77 points out, 
however, that the David has only four fully satisfactory viewpoints. 
 
63 Haftmann, Säulenmonument, esp. 115-6 for spoliated memorial columns at Venice, Pisa, Florence 
and elsewhere. 
 
64 Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria,VIII, chap. 3 (eds. Giovanni Orlandi and Paolo Portoghesi, 
685): ‘quo esset opus celsiori cum venustate’ and 687. See also Jonathan B. Reiss, ‘The Civic View 
of Sculpture in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria’, Renaissance Quarterly, 32, 1979, 1-17 focussing on 
Alberti’s encouragement of revived ancient sculptural forms, especially the triumphal arch and the 
column, as long as they were commissioned in the public good and not by private individuals.   
 
65 Trexler, Public Life, 223, 241-7, 258-263 who links this increased magnificence above all to the 
representational needs of Florentine government. 
 



 15 

observed, from the mid Trecento onwards, a number of Florence’s most important civic 
feasts were instituted as ‘memories of victories’ over both foreign enemies and, in the case 
of the feast of St. Anne for example, over internal tyranny.67 This celebratory, but also 
militant, patriotic and exhortatory rhetoric attaching to the David and to the later Judith group 
was a major aspect of their public, civic appeal both at the Medici palace and at the town hall 
after 1495 – even though, by then, the Medici themselves had been toppled from their 
pedestal and re-constructed as negative exemplars of internal tyranny.68  

 
Statues raised on columns were, as in Venice, Siena or Este-governed Ferrara, associated 
strongly with the presence of princely authority and the exercise of Justice - political and 
ethical ideals worthy of being ‘looked up’ to as well as feared.69 The David and Judith 
bronzes confronted viewers with either the spectacle or aftermath of execution, certainly not 
judicial, but presented as just. Such a construction is what enabled Niccolò Risorboli, in an 
encomiastic canzone identified by Randolph, to read the David as a kind of allegory of the 
overcoming of the Pitti-Neroni conspiracy (1466).70  This was, naturally, a later imposition 
upon Donatello’s statue of a kind designed to ingratiate Risorboli with Piero de’ Medici, but 
the reading responds to the highly communicative and rhetorical character of Donatello’s 
sculpture as a column monument. Column statues, as objects isolated within a larger urban 
scene, were designed to command attention and, when located in a space of circulation, 
they produced not just a compositional centre but a centre of power; they were sites from 
which passers-by or visitors might feel watched over but also over-seen.  

 
There is a further, less straightforwardly political, discourse of power pertaining to the 
sculpture on a high pedestal, in which the David, as a nude figure in a classicising pose and 
material was particularly implicated. Heckscher argued eloquently in the case of the ancient 
bronzes collected in the Middle Ages at the Lateran in Rome that the combination of the 
figure and column brought with it connotations not only of justice but also, unavoidably, of 
‘pagan idol’.71 While actual ancient statues were frequently preserved, even treasured in the 
Christian era, pagan idols on high pedestals - inviting the worship of the figure as if it were 
animate - asked to be toppled.72 Freestanding cast sculpture in precious materials such as 

                                                                                                                                                        
66 Paolo di Matteo di Pietrobuoni cited in Rab Hatfield, ‘The Compagnia dei Magi’, Journal of the 
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 33, 1970, 107-161 at 146. 
 
67 Trexler, Public Life, 222-23. 
 
68 For the significance of this rhetoric for Cosimo de’ Medici and his contemporaries, see especially 
Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance. The Patron’s Oeuvre, New Haven and 
London, 2000, 283-4. 
 
69 Haftmann, Säulenmonument, 118-120; Wolfgang Wolters, La scultura veneziana gotica (1300-
1460), Venice, 1976, I, 20; Charles M. Rosenberg, The Este Monuments and Urban Development in 
Este Ferrara, Cambridge and New York, 1997. 

 
70 Adrian W.B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century 
Florence, New Haven and London, 2002, Chap. 4, 139-40. In Risorboli’s canzone ‘Fiorenza’ declares 
‘On a column is an armed one, / Who appears to give grief to your enemies, / So that you fear and 
love / That which is done by him to overcome Goliath. / This was that unjust and ill-spirited faction, 
That wanted to take from me those who were born with me….and its great iniquity/ Fell to reason and 
justice’. For the Italian see Antonio Lanza, Lirici toscani del Quattrocento, Rome, 1975, 2, 379. 
 
71 William S. Heckscher, Sixtus IIII aeneas insignes statuas Romano populo restituendas censuit […], 
'S-Gravenhage, 1955, esp. 16. See also Janson, ‘Signification’, 38; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: 
Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art, Cambridge, 1989, Chap. 2; A. Chastel, ‘Les ‘idoles’ à la 
Renaissance’, in Silvia Danesi Squarzina ed., Roma centro ideale della cultura antico nei secoli XV e 
XVI, Milan 1989, 468-476. 
 



 16 

bronze or gold – of which the Golden Calf set up by Aaron for the Israelites and destroyed by 
Moses (Exodus 32) was the paradigmatic Judaeo-Christian example - were especially open 
to condemnation as the symbols of sacrifice to false gods.73 Pagan images could continue to 
provoke emotive responses when given exalted positions, however temporary. Thus in his 
description of the 1454 procession for the feast of San Giovanni (in the decade the David 
was mounted in the Medici palace courtyard), Matteo Palmieri tells us that a ‘German’ 
spectator was so incensed by one of the pagan tableaux that he climbed on to the 
representation of the Roman Temple of Peace, took down the ‘idolo’ and threw it into the 
piazza before doing the same to the emperor Octavian.74 It seems significant, though, that 
Palmieri singled out the iconoclast as a foreigner. The tableau was considered a perfectly 
acceptable fiction by the Florentine festaiuoli who designed the parade: the float was to be 
received as an episode within a Christian salvation history; it was also designed to entertain 
the crowd and be admired. A decade or so later, the draughtsman of the so-called Florentine 
Picture Chronicle, working in a similar vernacular idiom, depicted the statue of the Golden 
Calf upon a magnificent, isolated column with Donatellesque linguiform ornament (fig. 6). 
Both idol and column are raised upon a broad low vase with a victory garland, rather like that 
of Donatello’s David.75  What the draughtsman offers is aesthetic admiration for the ‘pagan’ 
pedestal. A similar instance of artistic enjoyment of the idol already in the 1450s has been 
pointed out by Patricia Fortini Brown who noted the visual interest firmly centred on the 
statue of Bacchus and his almost absurdly large, ornate pedestal at the expense of the 
figure of the saint in the St. Apollonia destroying a Pagan Idol, a panel attributed to Antonio 
Vivarini.76  

 
By the 1450s when the bronze and gold David gained its new pedestal, it seems the 
sculpture would benefit, rather than suffer, from comparison with ‘pagan’ practices of 
displaying statuary. The Desiderio pedestal helped to inscribe the ideal viewer as an 
admiring devotee of antiquity and its cultic images, images that were appreciable for their 
beauty and artifice.77 The idol-like quality of the David was evidently not dependent on its 

                                                                                                                                                        
72 For the rehabilitation of the ‘idol’ form in the Renaissance see Camille, Gothic Idol, 346 and Cole 
and Zorach eds, The Idol in the Age of Art, 3-4. For varied Christian attitudes and actions towards 
pagan sculpture in late antiquity and Byzantium see especially Liz James, ‘”Pray not to Fall into 
Temptation and Be on Your Guard”: Pagan Statues in Christian Constantinople’, Gesta, 35, no. 1, 
1996, 12-20 (critiquing the anachronism of Cyril Mango, ‘Antique Statuary and the Byzantine 
Beholder, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 17, 1963, pp. 53-75) and Helen Saradi-Mendelovici, ‘Christian 
Attitudes toward Pagan Monuments in Late Antiquity and Their Legacy in Later Byzantine Centuries’, 
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 44, 1990, 47-61.  
 
73 Werner Hofmann ed., Luther und die Folgen für die Kunst, Hamburg Kunsthalle exh. cat. 1983-4, 
132-5; Camille, Gothic Idol, 126, 233-4 for representations of saints on columns. For the later, 
seventeenth-century instrumentalisation of Jewish idolatry and the lessons of the Golden Calf by 
Calvinist reformers see J. Sheehan, ‘Sacred and Profane: Idolatry, Antiquarianism and the Polemics 
of Distinction in the Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present, 192, 2006, 35-66. 
 
74 Matteo Palmieri, Liber de temporibus,in Rerum italicarum scriptores,vol. 26, part 1, 172-4;  See 
Alessandro d’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, I, Turin, 1891, 228 ff. 
 
75  Sidney Colvin, A Florentine Picture Chronicle, London, 1898, plates  XX and XXI; Arthur E. 
Popham and Philip Pouncey, Italian Drawings in the British Museum, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 
Centuries, London, 1950, I, no. 274, II, pls. CCXXXVII-CCXLI. Colvin describes the fascination with 
the ‘pedestal’ of the calf in terms of a goldsmith’s taste for ornament and, less convincingly, with the 
description of the candlestick of the tabernacle of the Covenant in Exodus (25, 31-37). 
 
76 In the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Patricia Fortini Brown, ‘The Antiquarianism of Jacopo 
Bellini’, Artibus et Historiae, 13, no. 26, 1992, 65-84 at 77-78 and idem, Venice and Antiquity, 135. 
 

77 For the David bronze as ‘idol’ see also Camille, Gothic Idol, 344-5.  



 17 

explicit agency as an Old Testament exemplar but enabled it rather, alluringly, to command 
a space and draw the gaze in a manner not dissimilar from those elevated and 
perspectivally-centred pagan idols in Jacopo Bellini’s drawing books of this period.78 The 
David’s elevation, naturalism and other sensuous similarities to a work such as the Roman 
bronze Spinario, not only provoked admiration as ‘art’, they likewise helped to make the 
flattering case for Florence as the new Rome.79  

 
The figure’s dependence on the pedestal for its command over the viewer has been 
incontrovertibly demonstrated by the recent provision of a high columnar support to a new 
copy of the David bronze in the Bargello. In addition to the positive, heroic enhancement to 
the body offered by the view from below, the dialectical structure of the figure-pedestal 
relationship is also highlighted by the negative suggestion of the fearfulness and ‘baseness’ 
of the pedestal. The appropriately female-gendered harpy/sphinxes designed by Desiderio at 
the base of the pedestal could be read as a kind of ‘other’ to the holy and virile exemplar. 
This is no simple equation, however, since not only might the Old Testament hero’s actions 
themselves inspire both ‘love and fear’ but the harpy/sphinxes, as guardians of the 
monument, were not presented simply as fearful hybrids.80 If Caglioti’s persuasive 
identification of sculptural fragments in the Chigi-Saracini and Museo Horne is correct, the 
creatures from the lost base appeared not only beautiful and protective, but positively 
beatific.   
 
Desiderio showed himself here a masterly interpreter if not a simple amanuensis of 
Donatello. The oppositional relationships that are set up, yet also questioned, in the David 
bronze, operate both internally to the bronze itself and, in parallel, between the hero and his 
pedestal.  Such relationships are elaborated in less subtle terms in Donatello’s second 
freestanding bronze for the Medici. The Judith slaying Holofernes (fig. 7, Palazzo Vecchio, 
Florence) is a work that Vasari credited to Donatello in its entirety and though once 
dismissed as a later addition, its pedestal has been shown to have a good claim to be that 
designed by the sculptor himself.81 It takes the form of a simple but very large double-
baluster carved from grey granite sandwiched between two white marble drums. The 
absolutely novel baluster shape (only Castagno’s fictive version in the equestrian fresco of 
Niccolò da Tolentino pre-dates it) represents a radical simplification of a Roman 
candelabrum form – such that it hardly resembles one - and re-iterates, in more robust kind, 
the slender free-standing double balusters incorporated at each corner of the triangular cast 

                                                                                                                                                        
 
78 See the British Museum Drawings Nook, f. 97 with a nude figure on a columnar fountain especially 
the opening with soldiers looking up at a pagan idol, where the right hand page shows a statue (now 
barely legible) on a Corinthian column raised on a hexagonal base (Louvre Drawings Book , f. 47); 
also the folio of polygonal temple containing a pagan idol (Louvre Drawing Book, f. 53). 
 
79 The Spinario was arguably also a column figure even before its transfer to the Capitol, see Chiara 
Frugoni, ‘L’antichità: dai ‘Mirabilia’ alla propaganda politica’, in ed. Salvatore Settis, Memoria 
dell’Antico nell’arte italiana, I, L’uso dei classici, 1984, at 14 and fig. 2. 
 
80 In the later sixteenth-century Junius (Emblemata, 1565) interpreted the sphinx as a symbol of God: 
both virginal and fierce, to be loved and feared (Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation 
and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait, Cambridge, 1993, 86 and fig. 68). The inscription with the 
sphinx emblem reads ‘Mysteris addicta Memphis ade pro sacra / Sphingem biformeme dedicavit, 
symbolum Dei. Amato numen ceu piis mite, ac placabile: Rursus time, ut vindex inexorabile impii’.  
 
81 Caglioti, Donatello,  I, 89-100. 
 



 18 

base of the bronze group.82 Vasari wrote of it admiringly: ‘similarly the base, which is a 
granite baluster of a simple Order is full of grace and pleasing to the eye’.83 Contrary to 
claims that the pedestal is a palimpsest, technical evidence has shown that the baluster and 
the lower marble drum were carved to fit one another and must both, therefore, have been 
made either in 1495, which does not accord with the sources, or before Donatello’s death in 
1466.84  

 
The strigilated motif of the base, originating in works by Brunelleschi and deriving principally 
from Roman funerary art, is common in Medicean works of the 1440s to 1460s such as the 
altar of the tabernacle at SS. Annunziata (1449) and tomb pier of Cosimo de’Medici in the 
crypt of Saan Lorenzo. It seems likely, indeed, that Donatello’s more knowledgeable viewers 
could have recognised the S-fluting of the lower drum as connected with funerary altars or 
sarcophagi and thus appropriate to the imagery of death and salvation represented by the 
Judith. Some further external weight to Caglioti’s case for a 1460s date for the base may be 
brought by the pedestal form used to support the burning figure of Febilla, in an early 
Florentine print of a legend of Virgil the sorcerer.85 The combination of baluster form and 
fluted drum in the engraving probably recalls the slightly earlier Judith. With the 
contemporaneousness of the base to the statue established, an argument for a distinct 
formal and thematic continuity between the pedestal and the bronze it supports is 
strengthened.  

 
The sculpture is most often referred to as ‘Judith’ in contemporary sources, and simply as ‘a 
woman’ in the dedicatory inscription originally appended to one side of the pedestal by its 
commissioner: ‘Public health. Piero de’ Medici son of Cosimo, has dedicated this statue of a 
woman to the union of fortitude and liberty, so that the citizens should be brought back with 
an unvanquished and constant spirit to the defence of the Republic’.86  Though this 
nomination implies that Holofernes is effectively an attribute, Donatello devoted half of 
Judith’s standing height to the dying body of the assassinated general and the dialectic 
which operates between them as victor and vanquished is, I would argue, formally and 
symbolically played out in the pedestal. Vasari’s evaluation of the base in terms of ‘grazia’ 
alerts us to the potentially ‘womanly’ quality of the double-baluster form, whose sinuous 
profile is ingeniously extended into the ornament of the lower drum.87  

 
There is also a clear sense in which the double-baluster refers to two distinct and opposed 
bodies. Judith rises above her enemy, strong and austere, columnar even, the very image of 

                                                 
82 For the derivation of the double baluster from antique decorative forms see Paul Davies and David 
Hemsoll, ‘Renaissance Balusters and the Antique’, Architectural History. Journal of the Society of 
Architectural Historians of Great Britain, 25, 1983, 1-23; Cagliotii, Donatello, I, 100, note 78. 
 
83 ‘Similmente il basamento, ch’è un balaustro di granito con semplice ordine, si dimostra ripieno di 
grazia et a gli occhi grato in aspetto’, Vasari, Le Vite, ed. Milanesi, III, 210. 
 
84 Anna Maria Giusti, Roberto. Manni and Roberto Nesti, ‘Il restauro del sostegno lapideo’ in 
Donatello e il restauro della Giuditta, Florence, 1988, 118-20; Caglioti, Donatello, I, 93 ff. 
 
85  Arthur M. Hind. Early Italian Engraving, London, 1948, A.I.46 vol. I, cat. no. 46 and II, Plate 45. The 
badly damaged print, which also exists in a second version, probably dates to the 1460s. 
 
86  ‘Salus Publica. Petrus Medices Cos. fi. libertati simul / et fortitudini hanc mulieris statuam, /quo 
cives invicto constantique animo ad / rem publicam redderentur, dedicavit’. 
 
87  For the alignment of  ‘grace’ as a quality of art and female beauty see Philip Sohm,‘Gendered Style 
in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia’, Renaissance Quarterly, 48, no. 4, 1995, 759-
808 at 765-8 and 770. 

 



 19 

Fortitude. On the ornamental panel on her left arm she wears, in emblematic fashion, the 
image of an upright vessel, a vase of poppies.88 Holofernes by contrast is a vessel emptied 
of life. Artificially supported above a sagging cushion, his frozen limbs are, to borrow Vasari’s 
expressive description, ‘falling’. Already in the triangular bronze support that underpins and 
controls the dominant viewpoints for the group, reference is made to Holofernes’ ‘base’ 
nature, that drunken luxuria that brought his downfall. The enebriated putti who disport 
themselves on the lower reliefs serve, as Charles Dempsey aptly puts it, as ‘ornament in 
action that comments upon and enlarges the main theme’.89 Similarly, in the double-baluster 
form of the monumental base, the counterpoint of upright and decadent bodies is reiterated 
in the abstract by an upright vase form standing above an upturned one. Even the fluid 
channels of the lower drum might be read as issuing from the upturned vessel, itself a 
recognisable symbol of drunkenness.  
 
To a greater extent than the David, another example of humility triumphant, the base 
refigures both the thematic and formal division of the bronze sculpture and the rhetorical 
‘contrapposto’ of the inscription. On the opposite side from the dedication to the patron, a 
second inscription, read: ‘Kingdoms fall through luxury, cities rise through virtues. Behold the 
neck of pride severed by the hand of humility’.90 Thus the rise of cities is counterweighted to 
the fall of kingdoms, humility overturns pride with the slice of a sword. Holofernes is clearly 
produced as the moral inversion of the upright Judith. 
 
The dialectical quality of the pedestals for the early Medici bronzes accords with the 
extended imagery of triumph in this period, especially in the case of the Judith since it 
implicitly figures the base as the place of domination over vice.91 Where the statue conquers, 
Gross has argued that the base itself is mythically construed as a victim.92  While such a 
distinction is crude, certainly Donatello’s Judith and, in direct emulation of it, Cellini’s later 
Perseus bronze (fig. 18), both offer an emotive overspill onto the pedestal from the 
conquered and broken body of the freshly dead or dying enemy. The conquering Judith also 
binds Holofernes as she slays him, an operation that could have evoked for Florentine 
viewers the famous Quattrocento imagery of the Petrarchan triumph. In panels representing 
the Trionfo di Amore of the 1460s onwards, (workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, Pinacoteca 
Nazionale, Siena, Jacopo del Sellaiuolo, Museo Bandini, for example) Love’s victims are 

                                                 
88 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 268 note 1, refers to later examples of the vase of flowers signifying virtues 
implanted in the soul, notably in Paolo Giovio’s, Dialogo dell’imprese militari et amorose and the 
‘Fame’ relief of the Gerolamo Della Torre tomb by Riccio where a vase holding plants is inscribed 
VIRTUS. 
 
89 Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, Chapel Hill and London, 2001, 55-58. Patricia 
Rubin (‘Signposts of Invention: Artists’ Signatures in Italian Renaissance Art’, Art History, 29, no. 4, 
2006, 563-599 at  581-3) argues that the putti, appearing below Donatello’s signature on the cushion 
also act as a ‘signature gesture’ in relation to Donatello’s earlier work, being associated with his poetic 
creative powers.  
 
90 In the Latin, the word ‘cesa’ (sever) cuts the distich in two: ‘Regna cadunt luxu, surgunt virtutibus 
urbes:/ Cesa vides humili colla superba manu’. The version cited is from Passerini’s codex in the 
Biblioteca Nazionale 140bis f. 153v  (see Caglioti, Donatello, I,.9). Caglioti (100, note 80) argues that 
there may have been a now missing element to the pedestal that contained the old Medici 
inscriptions. The lozenge of darker marble standing proud as a stop marking the end/beginning of the 
later inscription could conceivably coincide with the original level of an inscription.  
 
91 In Vasari’s posthumous portrait of Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ de’ Medici as enlightened ruler all’antica an 
ancient vessel inscribed VIRTUTUM OMNIA VAS (the vessel of all virtue) appears next to him while 
the socle supporting it reads VITIA VIRTUTI SUBIACENT. This represents an ideological position 
typical of Medici absolutist power of the sixteenth century. 
 
92 Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, Ithaca, N.Y., 1992, 178. 



 20 

bound around the base of his high, gilded, fountain-like pedestal while in the subsequent 
Trionfo di Pudicizia the naked Cupid is himself tied to the base of Chastity’s pedestal.93  
Within the self-celebratory mode of Quattrocento public sculpture actual bases rarely include 
explicit representations of restrained enemies or ‘vices’. Nonetheless, the pathetic, 
‘ornamental’ and violent possibilities of subjugation did begin to be worked out in graphic 
inventions of the period that remain close to the festival culture of Trionfi. A niello design and 
a related Florentine print of the 1460s represents a triumphant all’antica woman, in the act of 
beheading a naked, bearded man (Hind A. II, 11) who is chained, seated, to a basin-shaped 
pedestal (fig.  8).94  The victim adopts the pose of an antique seated Marsyas, the exemplum 
of defeated pride.95 But the pedestal also extends its scope through a series of rings for 
tethering further ‘captives’, slaves perhaps to vice and ‘baseness’.  

 
The pedestal as an explicit site of moral and even sexual subjugation or subjection, already 
rendered ambivalent in this print, was markedly more problematic in monumental works. 
Famously, concern was voiced by the Florentine herald Francesco Filarete that Donatello’s 
image of Judith beheading Holofernes was unfitting as an exemplar of a woman killing a 
man: as a  ‘segnio mortifero’ she had brought bad luck on the city since her ill-starred 
installation at the town hall.96 It is not until Medici rule became absolute that emasculated 
captives or prigioni, albeit in highly abstract form, first featured in Florence on the pedestal 
base of Baccio Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus, erected in 1534.97 In an decorative context 
this motif had begun to appear more frequently from the earlier sixteenth-century already, 
especially in Venice and the Veneto. In a sculptural ensemble like that by Riccio discussed 
below, such bound figures bring an emotive pathos to the realm of the base. While troubling 
to modern viewers, to contemporaries prisoners were construed as hierarchically appropriate 
and even imaginatively diverting ornaments.98  

 
Statues in miniature 
Pedestals produced in Florence, Siena and Venice, especially in the wake of Donatello’s 
models were highly inventive, drawing above all on a rich range of antique monumental 

                                                 
 

93  See for these examples and others Alexandra Ortner, Petrarcas ‘Trionfi’ in Malerei, Dichtung und 
Festkultur: Untersuchung zur Entstehung und Verbreitung einer florentinischeen Bildmotivs auf  
cassoni und deschi da parto des 15. Jahrhunderts, Weimar, 1998, esp. Anhang I, no. 6, 338-42 and 
no. 7, 343-5.  
 
94  Hind, Engraving, I,, p. 67-8, cat. no. A.II.11, referring also to a niello print in the library of Parma. 
For a detailed reading of the print and the problem of its moral coding see Randolph, Engaging, 271-
4. 
 
95 See especially Francesco Caglioti and Davide Gasparotto, ‘Lorenzo Ghiberti, il ‘sigillo di Nerone’ e 
le origini della placchetta ‘antiquaria’’, Prospettiva, 85, 1997, 2-38 at CH CH 
 
96 A new transcription of the whole of the herald’s judgement (given in the context of deliberations 
over the location of Michelangelo’s David) is provided by Caglioti (Donatello, I, 305, note 54 for further 
literature). See also H. Bredekamp, Repräsentation und Bildmagie der Renaissance als 
Formproblem, Munich, 1995, 10-29; Randolph, Engaging, 280-1; Johnson, ‘Idol or Ideal?’, 231-2.  
 
97 Weil-Garris Brandt (‘On Pedestals, 396-7 and note 82) suggestively connects these figures to the 
monumental ‘prisoners’ and herms designed for the colossal pedestal-like structure of Michelangelo’s 
early design for the tomb of Julius II. 
 
98 See for example the pair of bronze candelabra for San Marco, Venice, commissioned in 1527 from 
Maffeo Olivieri (Danizio Cattoi in eds. Bacchi and Giacomelli,  Rinascimento e passione per l’antico. 
cat. no. 82,  410-415). Satyrs appear bound near the foot while, high above, a ring of nude figures 
dance in triumph and hold up the inscription declaring the commission and authorship of the 
candelabrum. 



 21 

features mined from objects such as funerary altars and marble candelabra. It may not have 
been the case that the original function of these spolia was always understood but, even 
when they were, an appreciation of artistic inventio meant this presented no bar to their 
imaginative re-application as pedestals. Equally the development of the formal vocabulary, if 
not the semantics, of the pedestal in the early modern period owed relatively little to antique 
literary descriptions of statues such as those of Pliny the Elder or Pausanius, not least 
perhaps because these writers were not concerned with the precise appearance of any of 
the statue bases they admired.99 

 
Among contemporary sculptors directly inspired by antique ornament and the recent models 
of Donatello and Desiderio, the goldsmith Antonio del Pollaiuolo emerges as preeminent in 
the development of the pedestal. In addition to designing battle reliefs as a fitting ornament 
for the base of the equestrian monument, he pioneered integrally designed and cast bases 
for the revived genre of the bronze statuette).100 Pollaiuolo’s surviving bronze figures - which 
might be seen as smaller substitutes, or even calling cards,, for monumental commissions - 
are cast on a larger scale than surviving ancient statuettes and invited substantial pedestals 
(eg. figs. 9  and 10). These he designed, I would argue, both to condition the viewing of the 
small-scale figure along the heroic lines of the freestanding statua, which they evoke, and to 
produce the work as an object of the possessive gaze. With a more obvious derivation from 
ancient candelabrum tripods than Donatello’s Judith, Pollaiuolo’s triangular bases - actually 
truncated, three-sided pyramids – are adapted in terms of their height and breadth to the 
proportions of the figure they support. The corners and sides of the pedestal also effectively 
direct the beholder towards the ideal views onto the figure in the round and dramatise the 
subject, whose limbs often overhang the base. Such devices are indebted to Donatello but, 
by their application to the small scale, are turned to new effects. Ultimately the bases of 
Pollaiuolo’s statuettes served to inscribe a new type of viewer: a collector and connoisseur of 
such intimate objects and of ancient art who could handle, contemplate and strategically 
place the work within their study to ‘magnificent effect’.101  

 
While the integral bases implicitly serve to highlight Pollaiuolo’s own powers as a sculptor, 
the pedestals of two surviving single figures of Hercules Victor, also explicitly allude to the 
pedestal as a site of temporary tributes. That in Berlin (fig.  9) bears an empty ansate tablet, 
whereas that in the Frick Collection, New York, apparently a later cast from a model of 
Hercules with his foot on an ox’s skull, introduces trophies.102 Like the carved garlands on 

                                                 
99 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, completed AD 70s;  Pausanius, Description of Greece, 2nd century 
AD. 
 
100 The exemplary combination of contemporary equestrian warrior with an historiated base displaying 
battle reliefs is one we know of only from Vasari’s description of the artist’s drawing for a monument to 
Francesco Sforza. The drawing (now in Munich) has since had the base ‘pieno di battaglie’ carefully 
cut off it, see Wright, Pollaiuolo, . 137-142 and List of Works no. 17 and for Pollaiuolo’s statuettes and 
their ideal viewers see Chap. 11. 
 
101  The quote is from Cellini’s account of his display of the statuettes for the base of the Perseus 
(somewhat above eye level) to impress Cosimo I and Eleonora of Toledo (The Life of Benvenuto 
Cellini, (transl. J.A.  Symonds), ed. Charles Hope and Alessandro Nova, Oxford, 1983, 191-192).  
 
102 This sculpture has been recently re-attributed to Giovanfrancesco Rustici as a work of c. 1515 and 
a possible model for a larger Medici commission, see Tommaso Mozzati, ‘Il fuoco e l’alchimista. 
Giovanfrancesco Rusticie la practica del bronzo’, Proporzioni, n.s. 6, 2005 (2007), 142-175 at 154-
156, 174-5; idem. Giovanfrancesco Rustici. Le Compagnie del Paiuolo e della Cazzuola. Arte, 
letteratura, festa nell’età della Maniera, Florence, 2008, 126-7 and especially ‘Una proposta per 
Giovanfrancesco Rustici. L’Ercole giovane della Frick Collection’ CH CH locate via Denise?: . Stylistic 
comparison with the early sixteenth-century David ‘Pulszky’ in the Louvre, attributed to Rustici by 
Caglioti, seems rather to confirm the much more stable, less mannered ponderation of the Frick 
figure.  



 22 

Roman funerary arae, these ornaments are shown as suspended, rather than permanently 
attached to the base and seem to imply an act of dedication. The viewer is called to imagine 
a ritual context in which these signs of honour were appended and, perhaps, to question why 
the prominent Berlin tablet bears no inscription. Does the sculptor invite the viewer’s tribute 
to Hercules alone, or equally to himself, as a rival to the artists of antiquity?103 The type of 
the ‘trophy’ base, adapted for the Frick figure was also adopted before 1490 on the 
pedestals of the, now lost, bronze statues of nude warriors, in the forecourt of Matthias 
Corvinus’ royal palace at Buda.104 In both the freestanding statue and its more affordable 
relative, the bronze statuette, the trophy ornament allowed the work to extend the inevitable 
imaginative dialogue both with surviving ancient bronzes and with ancient literary evocations 
of the ritual uses and belligerent themes of sculpture.105  

 
The early Cinquecento 
It is in the field of the small bronze that some of the most ingenious adaptations of ancient 
furniture supports, including tripods, continued to be employed well into the sixteenth 
century, even if inconsistently.106 Yet already in the early 1500s the gap between the 
ornamentation of bases for small domestic bronze furnishings, especially tableware, and that 
for freestanding figures opened wider. With the obvious exception of fountain sculpture, a 
more sober, architectural, rather than sculptural, aesthetic became the norm for bases for 
freestanding statues.107 One spur to this may have been a fuller antiquarian knowledge of 
Roman practice - though it should be remembered that ancient statues were quite happily 
accommodated on funerary altars in the sixteenth century.108 In the case of Michelangelo’s 
David, which was influentially installed on an architectonic - and architect designed - plinth in 
1504, the need to integrate the ‘gigante’ with the Prior’s rostrum, to which it formed a high 
termination, would also have been a crucial factor. While still talismanic in its presence, the 
great eloquence, difficulty and classicising appearance of Michelangelo’s statue was 
achieved at the expense of the ornamental and thematic charge of many Quattrocento 
ensembles - not least the columnar Judith which it replaced, or the inventive four double-
baluster pedestal for the Florentine lion (Marzocco), with which it continued to share the 
ringhiera.109  

 
Tellingly it is Baccio Bandinelli, who aspired to Donatello and Michelangelo’s honours, who 
chose to provide more ornate, encomiastic bases all’antica for several of his public 
sculptures. One of these, the ara-like pedestal carved by Benedetto da Rovezzano for the 

                                                 
 
103 The ansate tablet was at this time beginning to be used as a place of authorial inscription in prints, 
probably following Pollaiuolo’s own precedent in the Battle of Nude Men engraving.  
 
104  See Bonfini, (Feuer-Tóth, ed. 1990, 127, transl., Elmer, Webb and Wood, 209).  
  
105  Wright, Pollaiuolo,, 349 for trophy ornament, 337 for probable inspiration from Greek ‘iconic’ 
epigrams.  
 
106 For many late fifteenth and sixteenth-century examples see eg, Herbert Beck and Dieter Blume 
eds., Natur und Antike in der Renaissance, exhib. cat. Liebighaus, Frankfurt am Main, 1985. 
 
107 For the architectural plinth in the sixteenth century see esp. Keutner, ‘Über die Entstehung’. 
 
108 See for example the colossal bronze statue of Hercules ‘Victor’ unearthed in the Forum Boarium 
under pope Sixtus IV and which was later installed on a cylindrical altar, adorned with Herculean 
clubs and garlands suspended from ribbons. 
  
109 For the Marzocco base see Alessandro Cecchi, ‘Giuliano e Benedetto da Maiano ai servigi della 
Signoria fiorentina’, in Daniele Lamberini et al., eds, Giuliano e la bottega da Maiano, Atti del 
convegno internazionale, Fiesole 1991, Florence, 1994, 148-157.  



 23 

base of the Medici Orpheus, was designed c. 1516 to replace the decorative colonna of the 
bronze David removed in 1495. The Orpheus pedestal was a politically eloquent elaboration 
that seems, with its abundance of Medici devices, animal forms and ancient ornaments to 
flaunt that imaginative licence which Horace’s Ars Poetica – a primary source for Orpheus 
itself - associated with both poetry and painting.110 As already noted, Bandinelli also used a 
partially figured base for the Hercules and Cacus, a marble group designed to stand beside, 
and stand up to Michelangelo’s David. It is perhaps significant for Bandinelli’s embrace of 
eloquent ornament that his father had been a goldsmith. Amongst other activities 
Michelangelo di Viviano had mounted jewels and hardstones in Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’s 
antiquities collection, evaluating them for dispersal in 1495 and collaborated with Antonio di 
Salvi, Pollaiuolo’s pupil, on a silver cross for the Florentine Duomo.111  

 
The liturgical pedestal: Riccio’s candelabrum  
At the risk of irritating the purist, I wish briefly to trace the sustained early Cinquecento 
appreciation of the rhetoric of height and decorative richness as signs of honour in relation to 
another ecclesiastical work, one that, in function and imagery, can be read as a kind of 
super-base (fig. 11). The giant bronze Paschal candelabrum made by Andrea Briosco ‘Il 
Riccio’ for the Santo in Padua in some respects extends the legacy of Donatello’s bronze 
sculpture in the city, but it also presents an extraordinary renewal of the pedestal as a ‘cultic’ 
form in direct dialogue with beliefs about ancient ritual practice. Designed to support the 
great Easter candle, Riccio’s bronze is unusual for a candelabrum in that, reaching nearly 
four metres in height, it does not have integral feet but rests on its own, four-sided marble 
pedestal. This distinction effectively presents the candlestick itself as an honourable 
monument; yet it is one that is figured at every level as a support. The stacked structure and 
material richness of the candelabrum immediately recall the ornamental aesthetic of 
Filarete’s 1460s architectural designs for Sforzinda, referred to above, not least his 
description of a gilded bronze paschal candle for the cathedral which he describes as, like 
the ancient Temple of Solomon, ‘tanto ricco e con tanto ornamento’.112  
 
The commission to Riccio from the Santo’s administrative élite, the Massari dell’Arca, in 
June 1507 specified the candelabrum’s height, materials (bronze, like those sculptures 
already decorating the choir of the Santo by Donatello, Bertoldo and Riccio himself) and that 
it was to be covered with stories, with freestanding figures at the corners and ‘honorevole’.113 
The Paduan humanist who took immediate responsibility for the project, Giovanni Battista de 

                                                 
 
110 Karla Langedijk, ‘Baccio Bandinelli’s Orpheus: A Political Message’, Mitteilungen des 
Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 20, 1976, 33-52; for changing applications of H 
orace’s view of poets and painters as possessing equal powers of inventive imagination see Norman 
E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art, University Park, Pennsylvannia, 
1994, 110-111. 
 
111  See recently Laurie S. Fusco and Gino Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici: Collector and Antiquarian, 
Cambridge University Press, 2006, 21, 136-7, 165-9, 346, 356-7, 369; Louis A. Waldman, Baccio 
Bandinelli and Art at the Medici Court. A Corpus of Early Modern Sources, Philadelphia, 2004, doc. 
nos. 17, 19, 25, 28-31 and  87, 96, 97 for the Duomo Cross.  
 
112 The candelabrum is placed before the high altar between twelve marble candelabra (Filarete, ed. 
1972, I p. 252). 
 
113 Antonio Sartori, Documenti per la storia dell’arte a Padova, Vicenza, 1976, 199. The specifications 
for ornament were based on Riccio’s drawing: ‘secondo che ne ha demonstrato per uno disegno in 
carta, el quale starà apresso di me [Leone]...’. It was to cost a princely 600 ducats. The design was 
immediately approved by the Abbot of the Santo.  
 



 24 

Leone, almost certainly supplied the work’s complex iconographic programme.114 The 
beautiful architectonic base, provided by Francesco di Cola and dated 1515, is itself nearly 
1.5 metres high and is carved not with latin letters but what Alberti would have seen as the 
‘universal’ language of images, in this instance antique vases and symbolic emblems in low 
relief.115 On the front facing the nave (fig. 11), a vas virtutum bears the Cross of salvation 
that is itself crowned with a vase of fire signifying, in a theological context, the immortal soul 
and the love of God that secures the soul’s redemption.116 The larger vessel is surrounded 
by arma christi appropriate to the liturgy of the Passion. Commenting in 1590 (Le religiose 
memorie) on the emblems on the base, which also include pagan sacrificial instruments, 
Valerio Polidori noted that they had much in common with hieroglyphs and were ‘very similar 
to the mysteries of the Egyptians’.117 Indeed, interpreted as allegories of the Church and of 
Christ’s Passion and victory, the marble reliefs underpinned the learned, synchretic 
representation of Christianity within the candelabrum as whole. The lost inscription beneath 
the base emphasised that the monumental candlestick could be seen as a pyramid (‘hanc 
pyramidem’), a form that was usually associated with a tomb function in the Renaissance.118  

 
The ‘pyramid’ is hierarchically subdivided and the bronze part alone can be read as a series 
of honorary forms of diminishing scale piled one above the other. Within this cumulative 
rhetoric, each register serves as a pedestal for the next, and accordingly the majority have 
subjugated figures bound at each corner. These creatures may be read as the earth-bound 
‘other’ to the transcendent imagery of liberation and victory found elsewhere on the 
monument. The lowest and largest tier with its four sphinxes and horned masks, unites 
features of the Roman funerary altar and the ancient candelabrum base with coped sides.119 

                                                 
114  See Blume, ‘Antike un Christentum’ at 100; Davide Banzato ‘Riccio’s Humanist Circle and the 
Paschal Candelabrum’ in Denise Allen and Peta Motture eds, Andrea Riccio. Renaissance Master of 
Bronze, exh. cat. Frick Collection New York, October 2008-January 2009, New York 2008, 39-63 and  
idem, ‘Il candelabro pasquale di Andrea Briosco: Note sulla storia, la committenza, la lettura, le 
derivazioni dall’Antico e da altre fonti figurative’ in eds. Bacchi and Giacomelli, Rinascimento e 
Passione per L’Antico, 97-119 esp. 105-6. 
 
115 Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, Book VIII, Chapter 4, f. 143r. ed. Orlandi and Portoghesi, II, 697. 
 
116  The vase as vessel of virtue was familiar in relation to Marian liturgy, notably the Marian Antiphon 
Gaude virgo mater christi describing  the Virgin as ‘splendens vas virtutum’. St. Anthony of Padua 
was also given this appellation in a ‘prose’ to be recited after the Gloria: ‘Vas virtutum, via morum / 
Victor fuit viciorum / Armis penitencie’ (Vase of virtue, way of good life / with the arms of penitence he 
conquered vice), see Jacques Cambell, ‘Le cult liturgique de Saint Antoine de Padoue’, Il Santo, 11, 
1971, 3-70 at 37. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 148 note 26  points out that the ‘vaso igneo’ in the late 
fifteenth-century Hypnerotomachia Poliphili signified ‘una participatione d’amore’. See also Guy de 
Tervarent, Attributs et symboles dans l’art profane, 1450-1600, Geneva, II, 1959, coll. 396ff for the 
vase as signifying the soul. For Polidoro’s early interpretation of the symbols of the marble base see 
Le religiose memorie, Venice, 1590, 13-14v.  
 
117 Leo Planiscig, Andrea Riccio, Vienna, 1927, 246.  
 
118  ‘Joannes Baptista  de Leone philosophus hanc pyramidem faciendam curavit ex thesauro divi 
Antonii Andrea Crispo patavo sculptore primario anno Christi 1507 et Ludovicus ejus frater J.C. posuit 
anno 1515. Erat opus annorum 3 nisi Maximiliani atrocissimum bellum cum partibus venetis 
impedimento fuisset’ (Planiscig, Andrea Riccio,  244). For the understanding of the pyramid (often 
conflated with the obelisk) in the Renaissance see Brian Curran, The Egyptian Egyptian Renaissance: 
the Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy, Chicago and London, 2007, 67-72.  
 

119 For the relation of the work as a whole to antique candelabra and for an analysis of its physical 
structure see Shelley Sturman, Simona Cristanetti, Debra Pincus, Karen Serres and Dylan Smith, 
‘’Beautiful in form and execution’: the design and construction of Andrea Ricccio’s Paschal 
candlestick’, Burlington  Magazine, 151, October 2009, pp. 666-672. 



 25 

The next sub-section, with bound satyrs surmounted by griffins, is also architectonic and 
altar-like, but from this point onwards the bronze becomes round in section, culminating in a 
baluster standing on a drum. According a similar centrality to cultic paraphernalia, the 
complex and learned iconography of the superimposed bronze reliefs also extends upwards 
the themes of the marble base: virtue, sacrifice, spiritual wisdom and victory in the Christian 
era sub gratia,120 The largest figures, to whom the satyrs are subordinate, are Cardinal 
Virtues, but they appear in the guise of Roman matrons raised for admiration like statues on 
small, ornamented bases. Physically similar to reliefs of Victories surrounded by trophies as 
they appeared on Roman triumphal arches, they also carried a similar message.121 The 
largest fields, closest to the viewer include the Christ Child recognised by Gentile kings 
(Adoration of the Magi), the burial of Christ’s body, and his liberation of Adam and the worthy 
sub legis from Hell. In each of these readily recognisable narratives the protagonists are 
dressed all’antica, but it is with the fourth and last scene (fig. 12), without precedent in 
Christian iconography, that Christian liturgy is audaciously embedded in pagan religion.122 
Instead of depicting the Resurrection, Christ appears with his wounds in the form of a 
freestanding statue in blessing: a triumphant bronze god on a tiered pedestal, at the centre 
of an ancient ritual of sacrifice. In front of the under life-size image, figures are gathered for 
the slaughter of a lamb at a small altar.123 The ritual setting is animated by musicians playing 
pipes, singers, torch bearers, a priest and a laurel-crowned figure with a patera. The scene 
thus comments on the sacrifice of Christ as agnus dei, reenacted in the Mass, and on his 
saving resurrection, without actually representing them. As both Saxl and Blume have noted, 
the triumphant figure of Christ as Saviour is instead paralleled with the greatest god of 
Olympus in the relief frieze immediately below, where Jupiter is shown driving away bestial 
beings in his chariot of war.124 In fact the precariously ‘pagan’ statue would have had an 
added claim to antiquity and authenticity for contemporaries since Riccio’s cult object refers 
in both scale and pose to a large bronze figure of the Resurrected Christ made in the Veneto 
around 1490. This, as Nagel and Wood have shown, was understood to recreate or, as they 
would have it, substitute for an ancient bronze figure of Christ referred to most influentially in 
the Golden Legend.125 

                                                 
 
120 See Banzato, ‘Riccio’s Humanist Circle’, 48 ff. and Bernardo Gonzati, La Basilica di S. Antonio di 
Padova, Padua, 1852, I, 142-3 for the relationship of the base to the bronze. 
 
121 For similar Victory reliefs on pedestals, themselves imitating earlier roman examples and re-used 
in the Early Modern period as pedestals for sculpture see Richard Brilliant, ‘I piedistalli del giardino di 
Boboli: spolia in se, spolia in re’, Prospettiva, 31, 1982, pp. 2-17. 
 
122 For the earlier, twelfth century, typological linking of Christ and the Old Testament tradition of 
sacrifice see A. Krueger and G. Runger, ‘Lifting the Veil: Two Typological diagrams in the Hortus 
Deliciarum’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 60, 1997, 1-22. 
 
123 The relief effects, composition and costume of the scene is directly comparable to the marble of 
Marcus Aurelius sacrificing to Capitoline Jove, kept at the Palazzo dei Conservatori from 1515 (see H. 
Stuart Jones, A Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures preserved in the Municipal Collection of Rome, 
Sculpture of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, 1926, (II),  22, Scala II, no. 4. 

 
124 For Christ’s alignment with Jupiter see Fritz Saxl, ‘Pagan Sacrifice in the Renaissance’, Journal of 
the Warburg and Courtauld Intitutes, 2, 1938, 346- 367 at 353; Dieter Blume, ‘Antike und 
Christentum’, in Beck and Blume, Natur und Antike, 84-129 at 105; for the frieze see F. Ragna 
Enking, ‘Andrea Riccio und seine Quelle’, Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstammlungen, 62, no. 3, 
1941, 11-107 at 94; Banzato, ‘Il candelabro’, 110. 

 
125 See Alexander Nagel and Christopher T. Wood, ‘Toward a New Model of Renaissance 
Anachronism’, The Art Bulletin, 87, no.3, 2005, 403-415 at 403-7.  
 

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The axially placed statue of the resurrected Christ on a layered pedestal acts, I would argue, 
as a kind of mise-en-abyme within the work as a whole, providing a gloss on its symbolic 
meaning and on the ritual and votive character of the work. The candelabrum too was 
originally placed, not to one side as now, but at the centre of the choir and was animated, 
like the sacrifice scene, as part of a ceremony of light within the basilica. To appreciate the 
efficacy of the bronze’s pedestal function and its imagery one must re-imagine its role in the 
liturgy of the Easter Vigil. In this still active ritual, light from the ‘new fire’ representing the 
Lumen Christi of the Resurrected Christ was brought into the church, darkened after Good 
Friday, and hailed by the congregation as it is was processed to the east end. There the 
Paschal candle (at Padua already standing on the candlestick and reachable by temporary 
steps) was blessed and the deacon began the proclamation known as the Exultet, an 
injunction to rejoice at Christ’s victory over death. In the middle of the proclamation the 
deacon paused to stick five grains of incense, representing Christ’s wounds, into the wax. 
The Exultet represents this act as a sacrifice to God and the action turns the Paschal candle 
itself into a surrogate for the resurrected body of Christ.126 The twelfth-century theologian 
Honorius of Autun, indeed, explained the allegorical meaning of the candle in just these 
terms: its wax signifying Christ’s humanity, its wick his immortality and its flame his 
divinity.127 Finally, at the statement ‘Now also we know the praises of this pillar, which the 
shining fire enkindles to the honour of God’, the candle was lit and, in a powerful gesture of 
expanding radiance from the sanctuary, other candles around the church would be lit from 
the Paschal flame. 

 
Until its displacement to the Gospel side in 1593, the Paduan candlestick, set axially in 
relation to the high altar, reinforced the relationship between the candle, the body of Christ 
and the sacrifice of the Mass.128 Viewed simultaneously as an ornamento of the high altar, 
as well as of the Santo and even the city, its success at its installation (long delayed by war) 
was resounding and immediate, with praise offered for the beauty and honour it brought to 
Padua.129 The fact that it was the tallest work of its kind in northern Italy, even when 
compared with that of San Marco in Venice, is indicative of the monumental and implicitly 
competitive rôle it was designed to perform. 
 
Patriotism was served by the medium as well as by the exceptional fusion of pagan forms 
and practices and Christian content in the Paschal candelabrum, a fusion extremely 
suggestive of humanist interests in the Veneto-Paduan milieu of the later fifteenth and early 
sixteenth century. The special part played there by bronzes in evaluating and 
instrumentalising the legacy of antiquity is well known.130 But the extravagant ambition of 

                                                 
126 The liturgy for the Easter Vigil, in its early twentieth century form is described in Adrian Fortescue 
and J.B. Connell, The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described, fourth ed. London 1932, 336-345. 
See also for its slightly changing forms and origins Archdale A. King, Liturgy of the Roman Church, 
London, New York and Toronto, 1957, 194-6 and 414-419 and La semaine Sainte dans la Chapelle 
Pontificale, Rome, 1834, 61-64 for this ceremony in its particular form in the Sistine chapel. 
 
127 Diane Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze/ Orsanmichele Florence,,Florence 1996, I, 116, note 129, 
Honorius of Autun, De divinis officiis, PL, 172, col. 649, an exegesis also found in Johannes Belethus. 
 
128 Gonzati, La Basilica, I, 143 for the moving of the candlestick and its changed relationship to the 
marble base. 
 
129 The original installation of 1516 took place on the eve of Epiphany, enabling the candelabrum to 
register as an offering of thanks to God in a time of renewed peace. Sartori, Documenti, 200 for the 
Santo records documenting this and praising the work.  
 

130 Sandra Faccini, (‘Ecchi e traggressioni dell’antico nella scultura padovano in rapporto all 
mediazione veneziana. Un ipotesi di ricerca per un capitolo di storia dell’arte veneta’ in Venezia e 



 27 

Riccio’s bronze as a type of pedestal all’antica is, I think, also paralleled in relation to a 
different monument of humanist culture, a work of literary fiction. As Planiscig first 
recognised, the pyramidal form of Riccio’s candelabrum was anticipated in the golden 
Obelisk of the Triune God described and illustrated in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a 
vernacular romance published in Venice 1499 and attributed to the Venetian Dominican 
humanist Francesco Colonna (1433-1527).131 This highly original, not to say peculiar, 
composition, devotes large part of its ekphrastic display to detailed descriptions of imaginary 
ancient monuments and objects that, made to perform in various ways, overwhelm the 
perceptions of the dreamer, Poliphilo.132 The Hypnerotomachia offers insight into the more 
arcane aspects of enthusiasm for an imaginary antiquity in the Veneto, of which the 
candlestick is a superlative product. It also suggests the way such a richly crafted work as 
the candelabrum could be embedded in a number of ritual frameworks, real, but also 
rhetorical and imagined, such that it could be appreciated as at once functional, 
monumental, ancient, didactic, symbolic, curious and sensually stimulating. 

  
Antiquity on a pedestal: the ‘Idolino’ 
The ability to re-interpret the legacy of antique art and re-animate it is, as we have seen, a 
key component in the presentation of sculpture already much earlier in the fifteenth century. 
Genuine ancient marbles and bronzes, including non-figural works, were increasingly also 
restored and given supports by modern craftsmen for aristocratic or patrician collectors. 
Such re-orderings of the ancient fragment, sometimes accompanied by general restoration 
work, collectively known as ‘acconciatura’, was frequently the preserve of those credited with 
expertise in things antique - sculptors and goldsmiths such as Andrea del Verrocchio or 
‘Antico’.133 Thus the presentation of objects made by a different hand, while implicitly an act 
of completion and tribute, was no humble undertaking but a work of interpretation, often 
helping to fix a specific meaning.134  

 
One of the most impressive examples of this function vis-à-vis an ancient sculpture in the 
Renaissance is another north Italian work, the very large bronze pedestal commissioned to 
support the nude youth that came later to be known as the ‘Idolino’ (now Museo 
Archeologico Nazionale, Florence, inv. no. 1637) (fig. 13).135  The circumstances affecting 

                                                                                                                                                        
l’archeologia. Atti del convegno internazionale, Venice 1988, Rome, 1990, 184-7) argues for a greater 
freedom and expressiveness relative to Venice in Paduan interpretations of the repertory of the 
antique. For the tradition of bronze art in Padua see Davide Banzato, ‘Da Donatello a Tiziano Aspetti. 
Centocinquant’anni di scultura in bronzo a Padova’ in Donatello e il suo tempo. Il bronzetto a Padova 
nel Quattrocento e Cinquecento, exh, cat. Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, 2001, Milan, 2001, 17-37. 
 
131 Planiscig, Andrea Riccio, 247. For the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the identity of Colonna see 
Maria T. Casella and Giovanni. Pozzi, Francesco Colonna. Biografia e opere, 2 vols. Padua 1959; 
Giovanni Pozzi and G. Gianella, ‘Scienza antiquaria e letteratura. Il Feliciano. Il Colonna’, Storia della 
cultura veneta,3, 1, Vicenza, 1980, 459-477; Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity, 207-222; Curran, 
Egyptian Renaissance, 133-158. 
 
132 Colonna’s description of the ancient objects encountered by Poliphilo in his dream start from the 
base and work up so that the accumulation of superlatives, use of terms from the Greek and 
neologisms become a verbal equivalent not only to the all’antica forms described, but to the pervasive 
visual and material excess they represent. 
  

133  Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy, London, 2001, 126-
128; Arnold Nesselrath, ‘Antico and Monte Cavallo’, Burlington Magasine, 124, no. 951, 1982, 353-
357. 

134 Barkan, Unearthing, 176-187 
 
135 Reinhard Kekulé, Über die Bronzestatue die sogennanten Idolino, Berlin, 1889; Haskell and 
Penny, Taste and the Antique, no. 50, 240-41 for an account of its collection history and changing 



 28 

the appearance of this pedestal, with its extensive animal ornaments and leaf-framed relief 
fields are not widely known and require some setting up. The life-size bronze boy it was 
made for was unearthed in Pesaro in October 1530. Generally now considered Augustan, it 
may initially have functioned as a lamp holder, but the work had a more prestigious 
Renaissance incarnation.136  Immediately presented to Francesco Maria I della Rovere, 
Duke of Urbino it was restored for display shortly before his death (1537-8) as an ideal 
example of an ancient Greek statua and ultimately installed at the Duke’s nearby locus 
amoenus, the magnificent extension to the Villa Imperiale.137 This site, an imaginative 
rethinking of the villa models of both Bramante’s Belvedere and Raphael’s Villa Madama in 
Rome, was designed by Girolamo Genga largely, it seems, at the behest of Eleonora 
Gonzaga (1494-1570) who wanted it as a ‘gift’ for her husband.138 According to a 
fragmentary biography of Francesco Maria I della Rovere, the bronze youth was placed in 
the ‘Sala scoverta’ or ‘uncovered room’. This was, in fact, the large sunken courtyard of the 
villa extension.139 Completed about 1538, this impressive space was constructed, according 
to its frieze inscription, as a place of repose between the Duke’s military labours.140 This is 
surely a significant interpretative context in which one can resituate the sculpture and its 
Renaissance base. Dominated by an architectural façade to the north with a central grotto 
and fountains, behind which hidden steps lead up to two garden terraces, the arrangement 
of the ‘sala’ is so theatrical as to have suggested to some a place of performance, though it 

                                                                                                                                                        
identity; Mario Iozzo ed. ‘…Qual era tutto rotto’. L’enigma  dell’idolino di Pesaro. Indagini per un 
restauro, Florence, Museo Archeologico Nazionale 15 Dec. 1998 – 14 February 1999, esp. Mario 
Iozzo, ‘La base dell’Idolino’ 29-31, Luigi Beschi, ‘L’idolino: storia, critica, fortuna’, 7-19 which follows 
and slightly enlarges on his catalogue entry ‘L’Idolino di Pesaro’, in Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal 
Poggetto and Paolo Dal Poggetto, Urbino e le Marche prima e dopo Raffaello, exhib. cat. Palazzo 
Ducale, Urbino, Florence, 1983, 398-405; Mauro Cristofani, ‘Per una storia del collezionismo 
archeologico nella Toscana granducale, I, I grandi bronzi’, Prospettiva, 17, 1979, 4-15 at 4-5 for the 
sculpture’s history in the Medici Granducal collection. 
 
136 Andreas Rumpf, ‘Der Idolino’, Critica d’Arte, 19-20, 1939, 17-27.  
 
137 The restoration was undertaken by Genga’s brother-in-law Giovan Battista Belluzzi called ‘Il 
Sammarino’ and his son Bartolommeo. The former’s diary (Diari, (1535-41) ed. cons. 1907, 78) says it 
was commissioned in 1537 and would therefore have been completed after Francesco Maria I’s 
death. 
 
138 For the villa and its novel programme see Antonio Pinelli and Orietta Rossi, Genga architetto: 
aspetti della cultura urbinate del primo 500, Rome,1971, 137-155; Luciana Finelli, ‘Villa Imperiale a 
Pesaro. Spazi inaccessibili attorno al giardino’, 2/Venti complessi edilizi italiani, Turn, 1985, 215-232; 
Sabine Eiche, ‘I Della Rovere mecenati dell’architettura’, in Pesaro nell’età dei Della Rovere, III, 1, 
Venice, 1998, 231-264 at 235-242; Luciana Miotto, ‘Rapporto fra villa e teatro nell’Imperiale di 
Girolamo Genga’ in I Della Rovere nell’italia dell corti, II, Luoghi e opere d’arte, Urbino, 2002, 27-47; 
Catherine King, ‘Architecture, Gender and Politics: the Villa Imperiale at Pesaro’, Art History, 29, no. 
5, 2006, 796-826. Vasari (Le vite, ed. Milanesi,VI, 319) refers to the painted decoration of the villa as 
well as to its courtyards, loggias, fountains and gardens, which attracted many illustrious visitors; he 
does not refer to the statue.  
 

139 Eiche, ‘I Della Rovere’, 244. ‘…e il piedistallo sopra il quale al Palagio Imperiale nella sala scoverta 
pose di Baccho il getto antiquo e amirando, può testificare ancho il piacer che egli haveva della 
scultura, intaglio e del getto’ [Biblioteca Vaticana, Ms. Vat. Urb. Lat. 1037, f. 217] cited by Georg 
Gronau (Documenti artistici urbinati, Florence 1936, at  17-18 ). See also Cristina Frulli, in Ciardi 
Dupré Dal Poggetto and Dal Poggetto, Urbino e le Marche, 408. 
 
140 For the frieze inscription by Pietro Bembo see King, ‘Architecture’ 798. 
 



 29 

not clear that it was ever actually used in this way.141 The ‘Idolino’, with his demonstrative 
gesture and speaking pedestal, was certainly a prime actor there and one who might have 
obstructed any temporary staging, given his axial placement facing towards the deep 
colonnaded atrium to the south. The figure appears there, seen from behind, in Francisco de 
Hollanda’s view of the Villa from the north.142 (fig. 14) Hollanda’s drawing seems to show a 
high cyclindrical base with swags, perhaps an antique funerary urn, on a low, square socle 
or step, and it may be that this early view was taken before the provision of the bronze 
pedestal, though it may simply be an inaccurate rendering of the latter. What the drawing 
certainly clarifies is one motivation for the bronze base’s monumentality at 146 cm high by c. 
84 cm square; only on such a scale could it establish the small statue’s visual significance 
within a courtyard some 15 metres deep and 30 metres wide.  

 
There is no record of who designed and cast the pedestal, nor any modern consensus as to 
its date or attribution. On stylistic grounds, a Venetian workshop seems likely, and 
Middeldorf’s attribution to the Venetian-trained Recanati firm of bronze casters Girolamo, 
Aurelio and Lodovico Lombardo, has recommended itself to a number of scholars on 
grounds of locality and on stylistic comparisons. These can be drawn, above all, with the 
vine-clad sacrament tabernacle bearing all’antica reliefs in Milan cathedral (1559-60), though 
an earlier date for the pedestal - closer to that of the statue’s restoration and perhaps not 
many years after Francesco Maria I’s death in 1538 - is preferable.143  

 
Mancini, reporting in 1531on the excavation of the figure, mentions the earlier discovery 
on the same property of a granite panther, a beast associated with bacchic triumph. 
Together with the two bronze vine branches that accompanied the statue (and that are 
apparently held by the figure in Hollanda’s drawing), these provided the archaeological 
‘evidence’ for the identification of the god. The pedestal was clearly commissioned not 

                                                 
141 For the fragmentary evidence of ‘theatrical’ events sponsored by Francesco Maria I Della Rovere 
at Pesaro see Guido Arbizzoni, ‘La ‘Magnificentia’ del principe, la festa e la città’, in Pesaro nell’età 
dei Della Rovere, Venice, 2001 (Historica Pisaurensia.. Collana di Studi diretta da Scevola Mariotti, 
Vol. III,.2), 403-427 at 406-8. For the use of a similar courtyard at Rome for secular events see John 
Shearman, ‘A Functional Interpretation of Villa Madama, Römisches Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte, 
20, 1983, 315-327; for the possibility of theatrical performances see Eiche, ‘I Della Rovere’, 244 and 
Miotto, ‘Rapporto’. For the gardens see Franco Panzini in ‘Giardini rovereschi nella Pesaro del 
Cinquecento’, in Pesaro nell’età dei Della Rovere, III, 1, at 269-272).  
 
142 Hollanda’s sketchbook now in the Monastery library of the Escorial is reproduced in Jorge 
Segurado, Francisco d’Ollanda. Da sua vida e obras. Arquitecto da Renascença ao Serviço de D. 
João III, Pintor, Desenhador. Escritor, Humanista, ‘Fac-simile’ da carta a Miguel Ãngel – 1553 e dos 
seusTratados sobre Lisboa e Desnho – 1571, Lisbon, 1970, 61, fig, 20. 
 
143 In a letter of Francesco Maria II della Rovere donating both statue and pedestal to the Granduke of 
Tuscany, the pedestal is described as having been made for the former’s father (Guidobaldo della 
Rovere), see Gronau, Documenti artistici, 18, but the letter, that mistakenly also says the statue was 
found under Guidobaldo, may be unreliable. For the attribution to the joint Lombardi workshop see 
Ulrich Middeldorf, ‘Notes on Italian Bronzes (III), Girolamo, Aurelio and Lodovico Lombardo and the 
Base of the ‘Idolino’’, Burlington Magazine, 73, no. 429, 1938, 251-7. Francis Haskell and Nicholas 
Penny, (Taste and the Antique, 240) accept Middeldorf’s attribution, as does Jeremy Warren 
(‘Bronzes in the Werner Collection’, Apollo, 155, May 2002, 25 and note 30) and the attribution to 
Girolamo Lombardo is proposed by Cristina Frulli, (‘Girolamo Lombardo (attr.). La base dell’Idolino’, 
cat. no. 114 in Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto and Dal Poggetto, Urbino e le Marche, 406-8) citing 
Girolamo’s connection with Jacopo Sansovino in Venice in the late 30s and early 40s. She prefers a 
date in the 1540s. An engraving after the reliefs is in F. Gregori and Thomas Patch, La porta 
principale del Battistero di Firenze, Florence, 1773 (as by Ghiberti). The pedestal and its provenance 
is first discussed at length in G. Bencivenni Pelli, Saggio historico della R. Galleria di Firenze, II, 
Florence, 1779, 177. 
 



 30 

only to present the freestanding figure as a major work of Greek sculpture, appropriate to 
a grandiose, classicising setting, but, like the sala scoverta itself, but to show-case the 
wealth, learning and culture of its latter-day owners. Through words and images, the 
pedestal stabilised the prestigious identification of the bronze more precisely as an early 
cult object, an idol, through association with the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. On the front 
of the pedestal are symmetrically inscribed the words: ‘ut potui huc/ veni / delphis et 
/fratre re/licto‘ ‘As [soon as] I was able I came here having left behind Delphi and my 
brother [Phoebus]’ 

 
The pedestal form is basically architectonic but with a smaller transitional socle area beneath 
the statue itself and with decorative paraphernalia inventively adapted from that of funerary 
altars. These include goat’s head protomes, here supporting (bacchic) ivy garlands, double-
headed vessels issuing entwined snakes and what appear to be aquatic ‘panthers’ at the 
lower corners. This ornamental vocabulary thus stongly reinforces the cultic quality of the 
pedestal as an ‘alta ara’ (altar). The whole is raised on a deep socle bearing a prominent 
wave pattern echoing the panthers’ tails, a feature that, together with the borders of vines 
and ivy leaves, further supports the idea that the pedestal was designed in the knowledge of 
the sculpture’s rhetorical placement as well as its general setting, before a garden and water 
feature.  
 
The very prominent inscription, like that of the courtyard and façade of the villa, was 
composed by no less than Pietro Bembo, the unrivalled scholar of Greek and antiquarian 
(friend of de Leone), who like many humanists learned his epigraphic skill from studying, 
among other things, ancient funerary urns.144 In a letter of 28 July 1533 to the Venetian 
ambassador, Conte Giovan Jacopo Leonardi, Bembo suggested the pedestal should read: 
“Ut potui huc veni Phebo Delphisque relictis” (‘As [soon as] I was able I came here having 
left behind Phoebus and Delphi’) with the further explanation that ‘Bacchus was worshipped 
in antiquity in Delphi, together with Apollo’.145. As Iozzo has argued, the inscription, slightly 
adjusted on the pedestal, refers to the cult of Dionysos at the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi – 
a sanctuary which Plutarch (De E apud Delphos, 9, E 388) claimed also belonged to 
Phoebus’ half brother Dionysus, to whom it was entrusted in the winter months.146 Thus, for 
the initiated, the inscription spoke to the function of the new part of the Pesaro villa as a 
summer residence symbolically associated with bucolic retreat.147  

 
The lack of any inscription on the back face is probably due to its position, since the 
courtyard’s mise-en-scene privileged the frontal view with the triumphal architecture forming 
an appropriate backdrop. Rather than dionysiac revels, the side panels contain two elegantly 
composed scenes (30 x 44 cm) from which the god himself is absent. These beautifully 
chased works, modulating between very low and high relief, can be understood as 

                                                 
144  For Bembo as a collector as well as composer of epigraphic inscriptions, see esp. Guilio Bodon, 
Veneranda Antiquitas: Studi sull’eredità dell’antico nella Rinascenza veneta, Bern et al 2005, 49-67. 
He was more directly involved in restoring another bronze work, brought from Rhodes, in the Venetian 
Martini collection. This was the so-called ‘Berlin Adorante’, see Giulio Bordon, Enea Vico fra memoria 
e miraggio della classicità, Rome,1997, 118 and 168; Irene Favaretto, Arte antica e cultura antiquaria 
nelle collezioni venete al tempo della Serenissima, Rome, 1990, 105 and 125-6. 
 
145  Frulli, ‘Girolamo Lombardo’, 406. 
 
146 Iozzo,’Il base’. 
 
147 For the villa as summer residence: Pinelli and Rossi, Genga architetto, 138. Miotto (‘Rapporto’, 28 
– 30) argues that the Villa Imperiale was built specifically as the summer wing of a double residence, 
of which the old Villa Sforza was the winter residence. 
 



 31 

completed by the ‘triumphant’ figure of the bronze statua above.148 That to the left (fig. 15) 
constitutes an highly unusual ‘Triumph of Ariadne’.149 Bacchus’s mortal bride, holding a staff, 
is borne in a panther-drawn biga accompanied by beautifully muscled satyrs, and crowned 
with the bacchic vine by a nymph, much as a victor in a Roman triumph.150 The pose of the 
victrix, and the nearest panther are especially close to a grisaille fresco in the Sala della 
Calunnia of the adjacent old wing of the villa showing the ‘Triumph of a goddess’ in a lion-
drawn chariot.151 The episode, associated both with Bacchus’s nuptials and his victorious 
return from Indian conquests was appropriate both to Della Rovere’s role as a military 
captain and the inscription of the Villa as his wife’s gift.  

 
The second, equally dynamic, side panel shows a nymph or priestess pouring a libation over 
a burning tripod altar to which a reluctant sacrificial goat is dragged by a man in phrygian 
dress (fig. 16). Those familiar with Greek literature might have known that it was from the 
phrygians that Bacchus adopted his religious rites.152 Certainly it this scene - whose imagery 
may derive from a Latin source, Virgil’s Georgics in which the sacrifice of the he-goat to 
Bacchus is described – that constructs the bronze statua as a cult image of Dionysus.153 The 
relief thus affirms the implication of Bembo’s inscription that the god has issued directly from 
his temple at Delphi. He appears during those summer months when Phoebus/Apollo, 
according to legend, had returned to Delphi from Hyperborea.  

 
In both scenes, unusual prominence is given to the female protagonist. Though at one level 
she is evidently subordinate, an explanatory support to the main actor, it is conceivable that 
the active role of Ariadne in the Triumph was intended as an oblique tribute to Eleonora 
Gonzaga, who resided at Pesaro during the summer, often in her husband’s absence. The 
highly cultivated daughter of Isabella d’Este, Eleonora was a major protagonist in the 

                                                 
148 The pedestals is assembled from four large sections of hollow, four-sided mouldings, divided by 
the four side panels, with just the triumph relief let in separately. 
 
149  My thanks to Jeremy Warren for discussing the pedestal’s attribution with me and for pointing out 
the version of the relief in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (see Nicholas Penny, Catalogue of 
European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum. 1540 to the Present Day, I, Italian, Oxford, 1992, cat. 
no. 55, 73-4, also detailing later copies in other media).  
  
150 A panel in the Pinacoteca of Gubbio attributed to Matteo Balducci (first half of the sixteenth 
century) and adapted from a sarcophagus relief apparently also shows Ariadne without Bacchus on 
the chariot, though the figure is androgynous. Since Gubbio was a Della Rovere possession it could 
conceivably bear some patronal relation to the Pesaro bronze. See Paul Schubring, Cassoni: Truhen 
und Truhenbilder der italienischen Frührenaissance: ein Beitrag zur Profanmalerei im Quattrocento, 
Leipzig, 1915-1923, no. 518, Vol.1, 344 and pl. CXX, incorrectly identifying Silenus as Bacchus. 
 
151 It may derive either from it or a common source. Paolo Dal Poggetto, ‘La diffusione del verbo 
raffaellesco: la Villa Imperiale; l’attività di Raffaellino del Colle’, Pesaro nell’età dei Della Rovere, III, 2, 
Venice, 2001 203-245 at 215-6, draws the comparison, incorrectly referring to the pedestal scene as 
the Triumph of Diana. Angela Scilimati, (‘Valore, virtù, amore. Storia di una corte rinascimentale nella 
Villa Imperiale di Pesaro’, in Paolo Dal Poggetto ed.,  I Della Rovere, Piero della Francesca, Raffaello, 
Tiziano, exh. cat..,Milan, 2004, 143-148) argues that the grisaille scene shows the goddess Isis in 
triumph.  
 
 
152 For a summary of some of the Latin and above all Greek sources on the triumphs and cult of 
Dionysos known in the earlier Renaissance see Phyllis P. Bober, ‘Appropriation Contexts: Décor, 
Furor Bacchicus, Convivium’, in eds.Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, Rebekah Smick eds, Antiquity and its 
Interpreters, Cambridge, 2000, 229-243 at 231-232.  
 
153 Virgil, Georgics, Book II, 393-395 ‘ergo rite suum Baccho dicemus honorem….et ductus cornu 
stabit sacer hircus ad aram’. 



 32 

extension and re-modelling of the villa while Francesco Maria was on campaign.154 Though 
clearly not acting in isolation, Eleonora was rhetorically given credit for the Villa Nuova in 
Bembo’s inscription over the south façade of the villa and, as Scilimati has argued, she was 
implicitly accorded a parallel tribute to her husband in the mythological cycle of grisailles 
adorning the aforementioned Sala della Calunnia.155  

 
The tailor-made base of the ‘Idolino’, which remained with the sculpture when it was given to 
Ferdinand II de’ Medici by Francesco Maria II della Rovere in 1630, is not only richly 
classicising, it is exceptional for its magnificent material and adaptation to its physical and 
rhetorical setting. Rather than referring directly to its Renaissance owners, however, the 
pedestal produces an eloquent cultic significance for an ancient bronze, and, being made of 
bronze itself and inscribed in Latin, effectively substituted as an antique itself. The 
inscription, written as speech, gives direct agency to the god as one who has arrived post 
haste from his Grecian temple. Though released from duty he is still, like the Della Rovere 
rulers, triumphant, and ‘peace-bringing’.156 Indeed, Bacchus could have been seen here as 
an appropriate figure for the off-duty military leader following the construction of the god in 
just these terms in the historical writing of Diodorus Siculus.157 The imagery of the base 
must, therefore, have been devised with the help of someone familiar with the scenography 
of the Villa Imperiale and with the Della Rovere agenda. While the bacchic subject and 
pagan imagery of transformation and sacrifice addressed to an élite audience are perfectly 
attuned to the ethos of a villa all’antica, its propriety is striking: the bacchantes’ snake 
ornament is, for example, discreetly absorbed into the image of a cult vessel.158 In the 
learned address of the base we are reminded of the cultural milieu evoked by Castiglione’s 
Calandria, performed for Francesco Maria I Della Rovere at Urbino in 1513, to which Miotto 
and others have alluded, but also of Jacopo Sadoleto’s platonic dialogue Phaedrus. 159 This, 
elegant dispute between the values of philosophy and rhetoric was fictively located in the 
convivial surroundings of Jacopo Galli’s suburban villa, home of Michelangelo’s drunken 
Bacchus.160  

 
Here the resemblance in setting ends however, for as we know from Heemskerck’s drawings 
of the early 1530s, the Galli garden was, like Michelangelo’s drunken god, a far less ordered 
affair. In addition to the Bacchus placed on cylindrical socle, perhaps a reused column 
section, a motley collection of ancient works included a reclining nymph on a platform raised, 
idol-like, on a small column (fig.   17). While some collectors were keen to order and mark 

                                                 
 

154 ‘Francischo Mariae Duci Metaurensium a bellis redeunti Leonora uxor animi eius causa villa 
exaedificavit (Gronau, Documenti artistici,  9). 
 
155 Scilimati, ‘Valore, virtù, amore’. 
 
156 Bober (‘Appropriation’, 233) refers to Horace’s second Epistle for these aspects of Bacchus in his 
manifestation as Liber Pater.   
 
157 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, III, 64, 65, 72. See Michaela Marek’s argument for the 
relevance of Diodorus’ writings for the conception of Bacchus as a god of military triumph and peace-
bringer in relation to the themes of Alfonso D’Este’s camerino (Ekphrasis und Herrscherallegorie. 
Antike Bildbeschreibung bei Tiziano und Leonardo, Worms, 1985, 63-9). 
 
158  In Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (9, 257-260) the bacchante Ino, who brought Dionysos’ rites to Delphi who, 
takes, in desperation, the snake coiled around the tripod there and wreathed it into her hair. 
 
159 Miotto, ‘Rapporto’, 35-7. 
 

160 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, Chapter XII, esp. 183-4. See also Bober, ‘Appropriation’ for the figure of 
Bacchus in humanist discourse and the antiquarian culture of collecting. 



 33 

their sculptural trophies, clearly standards for the display of ancient statuary, even in the mid 
sixteenth century, were still in the making. This allowed the unruly, puzzling fragment to 
retain something of the incongruous allure that Roman objects described in the Mirabilia 
literature had done already in the Middle Ages.161 The Pesaro Bacchus by contrast is 
imaginatively brought to order and visibly given an illustrious past. 

 
The inhabited pedestal 
Literary descriptions of ancient works by Pliny the Elder or Pausanius communicated the 
votive function of ancient bases but rarely offered more specific testimony. In one case we 
are told, for example, that the pedestal of Phidias’ famous cryselephantine statue of Pallas at 
Athens was enriched with a story showing twenty ‘figures of newborn gods’ called the ‘Birth 
of Pandora’162 Pausanius (II, 27.2) describes an ivory and gold statue by Asklepios on 
whose supporting throne were carved heroic battles against the fearful and monstrous, 
amongst them Bellerophon fighting the Chimera and Perseus carrying off Medusa’s head.163 
It is an iconic version of this latter encounter that is represented in Benvenuto Cellini’s great 
bronze for Cosimo I de’ Medici (18) and it may be no coincidence that Perseus’s pedestal, 
produced from about 1547 to 1554, also offers for it a myth of origin. With his father Zeus to 
the fore, the child Perseus beside his mother Danäe to the left (19), his protectress Pallas to 
the right and Mercury behind, a series of bronze figures in niches ornament the base in 
poses that are variants on the impressive theme of the principal figure. Below, and 
somewhat apart from the altar-like pedestal proper, carved in marble, is a further bronze 
element, the narrative relief showing a subsequent moment to the slaying of the Gorgon, the 
hero’s rescue of the chained Andromeda. As Cole has pointed out, it was, according to Ovid, 
as a postscript to this victory that Perseus built three altars and sacrificed to the gods 
Mercury, Jupiter and Pallas.164 A place of origin for the statue it supports, the pedestal, for 
those familiar with the Perseus legend from Ovid, also folds back into the Perseus’ myth as a 
site of dedication to the gods, whom Cellini shows as still invigorate in bronze, both 
objects/idols and beings.  

 
Evoking in a stylish all’antica visual language the original cultic function of bronze statuary, 
Cellini’s approach to the pedestal is also characteristically that of a goldsmith ‘setting’ a 
prized piece. As, arguably, the most ambitious pedestal of the entire sixteenth-century it 
embraces sculptural qualities at the expense of architectural ones and revives, if it in no way 
imitates, the kind of inventive design associated with Florentine Quattrocento goldsmiths, 

                                                 
 

161 For perceptions of antiquity from the Middle Ages see esp. Frugoni, ‘L’antichità’, 5-72. For the 
display of collections of antiquities in the Renaissance see, for example, Gesche, 1971; Claudio 
Franzoni, ‘’Rimembranze d’infinite cose’’. Le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità’, in ed. Settis cit., 
299-360; Matthias Winner, Bernard Andreae and Carlo Pietrangeli eds., Il Cortile delle Statue. Der 
Statuenhof des Belvedere im Vatikan, Akten des internationalen Kongresses 1992, Mainz am Rhein 
1998; Henning Wrede, ‘Antikenstudium und Antikenaufstellung in der Renaissance’, Kölner Jahrbuch, 
26, 1993, 11-25; Kathleen Wren Christian, ‘The De’ Rossi Collection of Ancient Sculptures, Leo X and 
Raphael’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 65, 2002, 132-200; eadem, ‘From 
Ancestral Cults to Art:.The Santacroce Collection of Antiquities’, Annali della Scuola Normale 
Superiore di Pisa, ser. IV, 14, 2002, 255-272; eadem, ‘Instauratio and Pietas: The della Valle 
Collections of Ancient Sculpture’, in eds. Penny and Schmidt, Collecting, 33-65.    

162 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Chap. XXXVI, Bk. 4, 18 (eds. John Bostock, and Henry T. Riley). 

163  Pausanius, Description of Greece, I, xxiv. 7, (tranl, W.H.S. Jones, London and Cambridge Mass,  
Vol. I, 1918) 
 
164 Cole, Cellini, 68-9. 
 



 34 

bronze casters and marble carvers such as Donatello, Antonio del Pollaiuolo or the Da 
Maiano brothers. By entering into a deliberate dialogue with the earlier sculptures of the 
piazza, the Perseus particularly invited comparison with another Medici bronze work, the 
Judith and Holofernes column, by then also situated under the Loggia de’ Lanzi. Though the 
pedestal itself is not as high as that of the Judith, it ingeniously integrates into, and borrows 
from, the height of the parapet in order to produce more elevated proportions. The marble 
panel framing the relief is superimposed over the Loggia wall and serves as a kind of 
historiated predella. Optically the relief registers as connected to the pedestal and gives the 
whole the appearance of a column.  

 
It has been convincingly argued that the reversal of the relations of vanquished to victor 
relative to the Judith effectively reinstated the patriarchal order; it has also been said that 
Perseus, holding aloft the head of the slain Gorgon, acted as a reminder of the power of the 
state to execute its enemies.165 Since Cosimo I had intended at the outset only a figure of 
Perseus, such a provocative implication cannot have been deliberate, but in the statue’s final 
form it was hard to avoid.166 Certainly the work was not, as its bronze ancestors were, being 
held up as an example to Florentine citizens. Instead it was intimately associated with the 
individual figure of the autocratic prince, Cosimo I, whose astrological sign of Capricorn was 
referred to in the protome ornaments of the pedestal. Cosimo too was official head of the 
Accademia Fiorentina, of which the composer of the elegant latin epigrams that give voice to 
the statuettes, Benedetto Varchi, was a leading light. The raising up of this embodiment of 
masculine potency reflected, for better or worse, directly onto Cosimo’s rule. 

 
While the pedestal seems, like the figure of Medusa, to represent another bid by Cellini to 
squeeze more out the commission than it had immediately afforded, his own identity is not 
directly alluded to on the base, rather his name appears prominently on the strap crossing 
the hero’s naked torso, imitating Michelangelo’s inscription on his only signed work, the 
Vatican Pietà, but making Cellini’s own agency explicitly heroic. In truth it is not as common 
as one might imagine even in this later period for the pedestal itself to advertise the name of 
the sculptor, as opposed to the donor. Among Cellini’s Florentine contemporaries it was 
above all Baccio Bandinelli, always anxious to present his work in competitive terms and 
adopt a socially elevated persona, who regularly appended his name to the socles of his 
monumental marbles including the Hercules and Cacus that looked disapprovingly across at 
the Perseus from the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio.167 Only considerably later, in Venice, did 
Alessandro Vittoria begin consistently and insistently to inscribe his name on the low integral 
socles of his sculptures both large and small.168 The immediate spur to this practice may well 
have come in Vittoria’s case from the example of Jacopo Sansovino but more broadly it is 
indebted to suppositions about antique practice, not least the misleading late antique 
inscriptions OPUS FIDIAE and OPUS PRAXITELIS on the structures supporting the marble 
Horse Tamers on the Quirinal in Rome.  

 

                                                 
165 Yael Even, ‘The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation’, Women’s Art Journal, 12, 
1991, 10-14. For the Perseus bronze as a despotic sign in the framework actual, political and 
rhetorical, of the ducal city see especially Breidecker, Florenz, 25-33. 
 
166 Shearman (‚Art or Politics’) has argued rather for the Perseus’deliberate continuity with the 
republican ‚salus publica’ theme, yet knowledge of the forces now responsible for  Florentine ‚public 
health’ must, as Shearman would have recognised, have radically effected the work’s reception. 
 
167 Weil-Garris Brandt, ‘On Pedestals’, 405 for the significance of the inscription on the Hercules and 
Cacus, acutely noting that Bandinell’s name on the base ‘made Bandinelli a Medici surrogate’. 
 
168 See Victoria Avery, ‘Alessandro Vittoria’s Socles: Shaping and Naming’, in ed. Gerstein, Display,  
16-32 at 18 and 20-24. 
 



 35 

Although Cellini gave the working of the marble over to two professional carvers, his 
agency is everywhere displayed in the pedestal by an overflow of visual wit. The inventions 
of grotesque ornaments especially invite interpretation as the product of Cellini’s own visual 
and verbal fantasia. Purposefully delighting and afrighting the viewer, night creatures, deeply 
undercut, frame the inscribed cartouches. Sunken-eyed death masks beltching hellish or 
sacrificial smoke crown the niches. Punning ‘pedes’ detached from their caryatid owners 
(whose Ephesian breast-plates are another kind of mask) emerge as a second base below 
the lower moulding. These motifs show a concern to vary but also elaborate the themes of 
the main group, not least those of horror, dismemberment, and excess. Employing the 
lurking imagery of death or mortification they also frame the superior ‘life’ both of the statue 
and the pedestal’s own sculpture gallery of bronzes, cast by Cellini himself.169 While 
Medusa’s contorted, scarcely-dead limbs spill over from the group above, Mercury, in fact, is 
poised to defy entirely the containment of his marble niche. The flight of Cellini’s fantasy, 
manifest as a knowing restaging of antique motifs, ornament and the inventive traditions of 
Florentine sculptors and goldsmiths, pushes beyond the boundaries of the pedestal. Here 
the sculptor’s own astrological deity is self- evidently Mercury.170  
 
To move from Donatello’s Medici bronzes to Cellini’s Perseus of a century later is to trace a 
familiar arc in the history of freestanding statuary. In this article I have sought to bring into 
focus what such a Renaissance revival of bronze statuary, ‘rests on’, focussing on pedestals 
as characterising features that, because of their  physical and ontological separateness from 
the main sculptural content, could gain a particular purchase on it. As ornamenti the 
substantial pedestals designed for bronzes almost always come ‘after’, both as furnishing 
and as elaboration. As such, they often escape the viewer’s conscious attention altogether. 
But high pedestals impacted enormously on the command of the statue over the viewer and 
closer attention to them highlights the increasingly eloquent ways that they enter into a 
dialogue with the objects they sustain. While occasionally at the centre of ritual practices, 
broadly defined, it is rather the pedestal’s appeal to an imaginative ritual setting that 
emerges as distinctive from the later fifteenth century, sometimes going as far as to provide 
an imagined before- and after-life for the principal figure. By evoking antique practice or even 
specifying a sacral context, the pedestal added value to the sculpture by enriching, or even 
forging, its status both as a presence and as a work of art. Nor does this staging as art in 
any way diminish the political functions or implications of freestanding statues, indeed the 
reverse. It is precisely in the honorific and ordering work given to the high pedestal that the 
triumphalist ideology of Italian Renaissance states appears at its most blatant and the 
related social anxiety to distinguish the privileged spectator is most clearly revealed.  
 
Word count: 14,657 

                                                 
169 In one of Agnolo Bronzino’s encomiastic poems, he addresses the statuettes of the base in terms 
that parallel the  ‘burning love’ and sweet pain that generated the child Perseus to Cellini’s own pains 
of labour, see Cole, Cellini, 56-8.  
 
170  The astrological tradition according to which inventors of all kinds, including goldsmiths and 
sculptors, were ‘children’ of Mercury is represented most famously in the fifteenth-century Mercury 
engraving from the series of the Planets attributed to Baccio Baldini.