Mythological sculptures

While he was still working on the fountain for the Salone del Cinquecento, Ammannati received further commissions from Cosimo I. They included the bronze statue group with Hercules wrestling with the giant Antaeus (1559-60), which was intended for the fountain in the garden of the Villa Medici in Castello. Ammannati’s interpretation of the theme was presumably based on a design of Niccolò Tribolo, who was working on the layout of the garden from 1538 to his death in 1550 and had intended that the fountain should have a central position opposite the garden façade. The statue of the forward-striding Mars was created at much the same time; it is known to have stood before the loggia of the Villa Medici in Rome around the middle of the seventeenth century. Cited in the inventory of Cardinal de‘ Medici as a “naked Gladiator”, it was identified as a sixteenth-century work by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who attributed it to Giambologna. Only in the early twentieth century did Friedrich Kriegbaum re-assign it to the oeuvre of Ammannati on the basis of stylistic and archival evidence. The statue of Leda and the Swan, on the other hand, is to be reckoned an early work of the sculptor (ca. 1536). Its close stylistic and iconographic dependency on Michelangelo is clear: Michelangelo had drawn on this mythological theme in a now lost but much copied picture for Alfonso d’Este between 1529 and 1530. With Ammannati’s Leda an aspect of paragon, or competition, between the arts is also addressed, for the sculpture is conceived in such a way that it can be viewed from all sides, something that the observer of a painting is clearly prevented from doing.