Orpheus1.0018_Bandinelli

Insert Logo Here Orpheus1.0018_Bandinelli

Ovid Met. 10.1-105
Horace Ars Poetica 391-400
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Baccio Bandinelli (1493-1560, "Orpheus", marble sculpture, c. 1519, for the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence. Currently restored to placement in the Palazzo Medici-Reccardi, but it was located in the Palazzo Vecchio until 1916.

K. Langedijk (1976), "Baccio Bandinelli's Orpheus: a political message," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 20.1:33-52 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652391] — argues that Orpheus plays a political role in most of Medicean Florence, due largely to influence of Marsilio Ficino and others, who saw Orpheus as the classical paradigmatic unifier. Bronzino may be following this same political agenda in his 1539 portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici as Orpheus.

Marble statue of a nude male figure, possibly Apollo, standing on a decorated pedestal in an arched hallway

Langedijk imagines the message as this: 'See, I pacified the hound of hell, as I shall pacify even you, Florentines." (p. 43)

A. Lensi (1929), Palazzo Vecchio (Milano & Roma, Bestetti e Tumminelli), 356-58 w/ ill. p. 340: "A ornamento del ripiano dello scalone che conduce alla sala, s'è posta infine uns statua del Bandinelli, un Orfeo in piedi, in atto di cantare, con Cerbero placato accanto. La statua originalmente era stata collocata nel cortile del Palazzo di via Larga, per ordine del Cardinale Giulio de' Medici, sopra una grave base di marmo scolpita da Benedetto da Rovezzano. Dal Palazzo mediceo passò nel 'Casino' eretto da Bernardo Buontalenti per Francesco I, e di li in Palazzo Vecchio, dove rimase, dimenticata nel cortile della Dogana."

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
This resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.