Subjects of Sculpture

This was taken inside the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence without a flash. Can you make out the subject of the closest sculpture? By Vincenzo de’ Rossi it shows a man about to bring a club down upon a woman with quite a large amount of force, and it shows her crouching there just about to plunge a knife into his abdomen.

Second in line is Michaelangelo’s Victory. This is a beautiful statue – Michelangelo was a genius. The subject on closer inspection is a young man with his knee on the back of an older man who has his arms tied behind his back; subjugation and domination.

To be fair to the artists, the sculptures were commissioned by various members of the Medici family. The Medici family had a lot of power and wealth in Florence over a few centuries and it is because of their behaviour that we use the term patsy to refer to a sitting duck or a marked man. When a member of the Patzie family killed the most handsom Medici (that’s actually not saying much) in the prime of his youth, the Medici family retaliated by killing all members of the Patzie family and their friends – over eighty people in total.

Later in my holiday in France I spent quite a bit of time in the sculpture room at the museum in Provin. I was transfixed by the following sculptures all crafted by the same person, a woman from a later period: Louis-Elisabeth Munaut (1889-1963).

As a qualifying note, I know it really isn’t fair to be comparing sculpture in this way from different historical eras. I didn’t find any sculpture from the renaissance by women (probably goes without saying). And these pieces of art are not necessarily expressions of the artist’s self or psyche. But just in case they are, we may want to consider letting women run things in future.