Model for the Rape of the Sabine Women
Giambologna (Jean de Boulogne) (1529 to 1608) · about 1579 to 1582
Three figures spiral upward in the middle of the first room: an old man crouching in defeat, a young warrior stepping over him, and a woman lifted high in the warrior's arms, her hand flung out in protest. This is the full-size working model for one of the most famous sculptures in Florence, the marble group that stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi on the Piazza della Signoria. Giambologna made it in the years around fifteen eighty, and the finished marble was unveiled in fifteen eighty three to instant acclaim.
Walk round it, because that is the point. Giambologna set himself the challenge of composing a group with no principal view, a continuous spiral of bodies that rewards every angle and never resolves into a flat picture. The technique is as remarkable as the design. The model is built of unfired clay mixed with straw and other organic material over a wooden and iron armature, exactly the method Vasari recommends, and it is one of the very few sixteenth-century models of this size to survive at all. A restoration completed in twenty eighteen removed layers of old plaster repairs and revealed the original modelled surface, with the marks of the sculptor's fingers and tools.
The subject came afterwards. Giambologna said he made the group simply to show that he could carve three figures from a single block, and only when it was finished did scholars at the Medici court give it the title of the Sabine women, the legendary abduction that founded Rome. The model came to the Academy as a teaching object and has watched generations of students draw from it. Compare it with the marble outside if you can: the model is looser, more urgent, and shows the ideas being formed.
Did You Know? Giambologna had no subject in mind when he made the group; the story of the Sabine women was chosen only after the marble was finished.
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