Also on the ground floor, to the left, are two rooms full of statuary.
The first contains nothing important, save perhaps the Madonna and
Child with St. Peter and St. Paul, formerly above the Porta Romana. In
the second room, a series of bas-reliefs by Benedetto da Rovezzano,
begun in 1511 and terribly mutilated by the imperial soldiery during
the siege, represent scenes connected with the life and miracles of
St. Giovanni Gualberto, including the famous trial of Peter Igneus,
who, in order to convict the Bishop of Florence of simony, passed
unharmed through the ordeal of fire. Here is the unfinished bust of
Brutus (111) by Michelangelo, one of his latest works, and a
significant expression of the state of the man's heart, when he was
forced to rear sumptuous monuments for the new tyrants who had
overthrown his beloved Republic. Then a chimney-piece by Benedetto da
Rovezzano from the Casa Borgherini, one of the most sumptuous pieces
of domestic furniture of the Renaissance; a very beautiful tondo of
the Madonna and Child with the little St. John (123) by Michelangelo,
made for Bartolommeo Pitti early in the Cinquecento; the mask of a
grinning faun with gap-teeth, traditionally shown as the head struck
out by the boy Michelangelo in his first visit to the Medici Gardens,
when he attracted the attention of Lorenzo the Magnificent--but
probably a comparatively modern work suggested by Vasari's story; a
sketch in marble for the martyrdom of St. Andrew, supposed to be a
juvenile work of Michelangelo's, but also doubtful. Here too is
Michelangelo's drunken Bacchus (128), an exquisitely-modelled
intoxicated vine-crowned youth, behind whom a sly little satyr lurks,
nibbling grapes. It is one of the master's earliest works, very
carefully and delicately finished, executed during his first visit to
Rome, for Messer Jacopo Galli, probably about 1497. Of this statue
Ruskin wrote, while it was still in the Uffizi: "The white lassitude
of joyous limbs, panther-like, yet passive, fainting with their own
delight, that gleam among the Pagan formalisms of the Uffizi, far
away, separating themselves in their lustrous lightness as the waves
of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing from the dead stones, though
the stones be as white as they." Shelley, on the contrary, found it
"most revolting," "the idea of the deity of Bacchus in the conception
of a Catholic." Near it is a tondo of the Virgin and Child with the
Baptist, by Andrea Ferrucci.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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