sandals, with his eyes still averted from the deadly visage of his prize, and his feet planted on her corpse. In an especially grim touch, the Gorgon’s blood spurted over the lip of the marble pedestal on which the entire statue was raised. As David approached, he saw a tour guide with a purple iris, the official flower of Florence, stuck in the lapel of her overcoat, leading a group of lackadaisical college students to the base of the Perseus. Several of them were carrying notebooks, and one held out a tiny recorder as she spoke.
“Can anyone tell me,” the guide prompted them, in heavily accented English, “who was this Perseus?” While the students all suddenly dropped their heads and waited, pens poised, David loitered on the fringe of the group. The guide-a slender young woman with black hair pulled back from her face and hastily tied in a ponytail with a thick blue rubber band-took note of him, but she didn’t seem to mind his listening in. Maybe she was glad to have someone who looked interested.
“A king?” one of the girls hazarded.
“That is close,” she said, “that is close. He was the grandson of a king.”
“So that makes him a prince, right?” the girl said, proudly, twirling her pen.
The guide made a wavering motion in the air with one hand. “It is not so simple,” she said. “I will explain.”
And as David hovered in the rear, the guide told the story of Danae, the most beautiful maiden in all of Greece, who was impregnated by Zeus, the king of the gods. “She lived in a palace, all of bronze, and Zeus came down to her as a shower of gold.”
“I’ve seen that painting,” another girl piped up, “the one by Rembrandt,” and the guide nodded encouragingly.
“Yes, you are right,” she said. “And this son, he was named Perseus. He grew up with his mother, on a far-off island, where the king fell in love with Danae, too, and wanted to marry her. But he did not want to keep her son around.”
“I know what that’s like,” one student joshed, and a couple of them snickered.
“And so he said to Perseus, ‘I want you to make me a special marriage present,’ and Perseus, who was very brave but also foolhardy, said, ‘I will give you anything you ask.’ And the king said, ‘Then you will get me the thing I want most-and that is the head of the Medusa.’”
This turn of events seemed to interest the students even more.
“But no one could kill the Medusa,” the guide went on, her voice rising, as if she wanted to make sure that even David could hear. “If you looked into the eyes of the Medusa, you would turn to stone.” The Notre Dame kid turned around and gave David a curious look. “The Gorgons were immortal, and the waters from their secret pool, if you could collect it without being killed, offered eternal life.”
David suddenly felt as if this woman with the iris in her lapel-a woman he had never even seen before-knew why he’d come to Florence and what he was looking for. He’d been in the city no more than a few hours, but he felt as if he’d already been exposed.
“I guess he did the job,” the Notre Damer said, “or this statue wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, but how?” the guide said. “Do you know how he killed the Medusa without even looking at her?”
When there was no reply, she said, “He called upon his friends, the gods.”
“That would help,” another student said.
“Yes, it did. Do you know who is Hermes?”
“The guy on the FTD commercials,” Notre Dame said, but the reference seemed to baffle the guide.
“The messenger of the gods,” a girl put in. “He could fly, I think.”
“ Si, si,” the guide said, clapping her hands encouragingly, “and he gave a magic sword to Perseus, a sword that could cut off the head of the Gorgon. Another friend to Perseus was called Athena-”
“The goddess of wisdom,” the same girl volunteered, and the guide beamed at her.
“Yes, Athena, she gave him a shield, a very…” she searched for the word, then said, “ reflecting shield, like a mirror, so he would not have to look at her. Also, he had a hat, a helmet, that made him… invisible.”
And so, according to the myth, the heroic Perseus had journeyed to the distant isle where the three Gorgons lived and, using these strange gifts, had slain the one named Medusa. And, for allegorical reasons that art historians still liked to debate, the Duke de’Medici had commissioned this monument, this retelling of the ancient story, to be erected in the central square of Florence. Originally planned to stand only a couple of braccia high, Cellini had increased its proportions in the process of composition, and raised it on a tall marble base adorned with four niches, holding beautifully modeled figures of Zeus, Athena, Hermes, and the young Perseus with his mother. These figures were so stunning, in fact, that when Eleonora de Toledo, the duke’s wife, first saw them as freestanding sculptures, she insisted that they were too exquisitely wrought to be wasted on a pedestal, and announced that they would be better suited to her own apartments in the palace. Cellini, though grateful for the praise, was not about to shortchange his masterwork, so before she had time to claim them, he raced back and soldered them into their assigned niches, where they stood between the sculpture above and the four bronze plaques below, illustrating scenes from Perseus’s later adventures.
It was just such maneuvers, David reflected, that had made Cellini, in his own life, one of the most infuriating men in Europe. In the service of his art-and his ego-he was forever crossing swords with princes, popes, and noblemen. And when he wasn’t being celebrated for his achievements, he was being hauled into court, or hauled off to jail, on charges of everything from murder (he confessed to several, though claiming self-defense every time), to sodomy (not so uncommon a practice in those days), to failing to pay child support. (The Florentine courts were very progressive for their time.) Perhaps it was this selfsame transgressive nature-the willingness to act boldly, even in plain defiance of secular law and holy authority-that had first endeared him to David. As someone who lived his own life strictly by the rules-working hard, avoiding trouble, winning every academic prize within reach-David had been irresistibly drawn to this figure who took life by the reins and rode it anywhere he chose. Whose art, and writings (he had also authored treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture), revealed a mind that was always in quest of new knowledge, new techniques, new frontiers.
Judging from the Key to Life Eternal, he had even searched for a way to cross the line between life and death… and claimed to have found it. That was one aspect of his career which the Van Owen papers had revealed in a way that neither David, nor any other scholar, had ever known.
“And who can see the miracolo in the back?” the guide was now saying, crooking one finger at the students to draw them around to the rear of the statue. David, tagging along, knew what she was going to point out.
Nodding at David as if to give him permission to join the group, she was calling attention to the fantastically ornate helmet on Perseus’s head. Wings sprouted from either side of the visor, along with a crouching gargoyle on the top, but it was in back that Cellini had created his optical illusion. Hidden among the folds and curlicues of the helmet was a stern human face, with a long Roman nose, a lush moustache, and piercing eyes under arching brows. You could look at the back of the helmet and never see it there, but once it had been pointed out, you could never again miss it.
“There’s a face, looking out,” the girl with the twirling pen announced.
The guide clapped her hands together again. “That’s good. Very good. This, I think, is the face of Cellini himself.”
And David agreed. Not only was it just like Cellini to bring off such a stunt, the visage also bore a resemblance to the only known depiction of the artist, rendered by Vasari in later life. It was one further proof of his ingenuity, or, in the academic lingo that David had so come to detest, his “reverse iconography and intratextual complexity.”
Several of the students dutifully scribbled in their notebooks, and the guide, checking her watch, said, “Come, we must now look at the Palazzo Vecchio,” waving her hand at the massive and forbidding wall of the Medici palace that brooded over the square. With the students trudging after her, the guide, whose own enthusiasm never seemed to flag, cast a look back at David, who smiled and raised a hand in farewell. David mouthed the words, “ Grazie mille,” and the guide tilted her pretty head and said, “ Prego.”
An hour later, after completing his own tour of the piazza, David was sitting inside a nearby cafe, nursing a cup of cappuccino to stave off the jet lag and making some notes for the next day. The Biblioteca Laurenziana would open its doors at ten, and he planned to be the first one through them. There was a lot of work he wished to do in their archives, and he was drawing up a list of his priorities when, out of nowhere, a cyclone hit his table.
