The Appennine Colossus

Villa Demidoff is the current name of the ancient Medicean Villa of Pratolino. Located on the Florentine hills along the Via Bolognese heading into the Mugello valley, the estate in Pratolino was bought by Francesco I de' Medici in 1568.[7]
Legend has it that Francesco bought it as a gift for his second wife Bianca Cappello with the idea of turning it into a fairy-tale property. The architect chosen to build the villa and turn this wild area into a dreamy place was Bernardo Buontalenti. He built a splendid Renaissance villa, which unfortunately is no longer in existence, surrounded by a wonderland park with water fountains and grottoes, beautiful gardens filled with exquisite plants and flowers.
Most of this marvelous garden was destroyed in 1819 to make an easy to maintain "English garden". Only a few elements, including the gigantic statue of Appenine, survive from what was once the most celebrated garden in Europe. But Cupid's Grotto, a chapel, a series of crayfish pools and Giambologna's Appennine Colossus remain, brooding still, in the woods of what is now the Parco Demidoff.

As can be seen from the rough workmanship, the model is one of the first designs for the famous colossal sculpture, Apennine, monumental personification of the mountain chain or rather, of a great river; a giant represented as kneeling on a pond in the Medici villa of Pratolino. The head, which is steeped in water and mud, is bent down, following the vigorous movement of the shoulders. This seems to allude to a superhuman being, released from the rocks and the ground and about to get up and enter into action above something.

Flying Mercury andother famous bronzes by Giambologna

Giambologna became well known for a fine sense of action and movement, and a refined, differentiated surface finish. Among his most famous works are the Mercury (of which he did four versions), poised on one foot, supported by a zephyr. The god raises one arm to point heavenwards, in a gesture borrowed from the repertory of classical rhetoric[2] that is characteristic of Giambologna's maniera.

'The Mercury shows a life-sized figure of a sleek youth, created as he takes flight, a young god with his right arm pointing upwards: a lively, superhuman action, a stupefying surge that commences with the blowing wind, Zephyr, and finishes in the elegant movement of the index finger, pointing up to the sky, a place of true wisdom and also of divine protection.
This Mercury dates back to 1580 and until 1780, it decorated the Villa Medici Roma, where Ferdinando de' Medici had wanted it to crown a fountain in breccia stone at the centre of a stairway between the sumptuous gardens and the entrance loggia to the main building. However, the creation itself dates back to 1563, when Bishop Pier Donato Cesi, papal delegate, requested Giambologna to create a Mercury coming down from the heavens for the Archiginnasio in Bologna. This commission did not come to fruition but it was followed by Duke Cosimo, who sent sculptures by Giambologna as gifts to Maximilian II, father of his daughter-in-law Joanna of Austria. These included a Mercury in flight to please the Emperor. On this subject, a medallion cast in 1551 by Leone Leoni for the Hapsburg Emperor, provided an initial idea for Giambologna, together with more general references to the style of Cellini. With technical daring, Jean Boulogne translated this perfect idea for a relief design into three-dimensional versions of different sizes.'[5]

Giambologna's several depictions of Venus established a canon of proportions and set models for the goddess's representation that were influential for two generations of sculptors, in Italy and in the North. He created allegories strongly promoting Medicean political propaganda, such as Florence defeating Pisa and, less overtly, Samson Slaying a Philistine, for Francesco de' Medici (1562).[3]
He delighted in solving the complex spatial problems of three intertwined figures in his famous Rape of the Sabine Women (1574–82). The subject was not finally determined until after it had been set up in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence's Piazza della Signoria. Heracles beating the Centaur Nessus (1599) is also a conscious tour de force.[4] It is also in the Loggia dei Lanzi.

The Rape of the Sabine Women is an episode in the legendary history of Rome, traditionally said to have taken place in 750 BC,[1] in which the first generation of Roman men acquired wives for themselves from the neighboring Sabine families.[6] The right arch in the Loggia della Signoria is dominated by the so-called Rape of the Sabine Women, a technical masterpiece by Giambologna. The artist did not originally intend to sculpt the legendary episode from early Roman history with the rape of the Sabine women by Romulo's companions; his intention was to create just three interacting figures in movement: a mature man, a youth and a beautiful woman, taken by the younger man from the weaker, older one.
Originally intended as nothing more than a demonstration of the artist's ability to create a complex sculptural group, its subject matter, the legendary rape of the Sabines, had to be invented after Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, decreed that it be put on public display in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Piazza della Signoria, Florence. True to mannerist densely-packed, intertwined figural compositions and ambitious overinclusive efforts, the statue renders a dynamic panoply of emotions, in poses that offer multiple viewpoints. When contrasted with the serene single-viewpoint pose of the nearby Michelangelo's David, finished nearly 80 years before, this statue is infused with the dynamics that lead towards Baroque, but the tight, uncomfortable, verticality— self-imposed by the author's virtuosic restriction to a composition that could be carved from a single block of marble— lacks the diagonal thrusts that Bernini would achieve forty years later with his Rape of Proserpina and Apollo and Daphne, both at the Galleria Borghese, Rome.

The proposed site for the sculpture, opposite Benvenuto Cellini's statue of Perseus, prompted suggestions that the group should illustrate a theme related to the former work, such as the rape of Andromeda by Phineus. The respective rapes of Proserpina and Helen were also mooted as possible themes. It was eventually decided that the sculpture was to be identified as one of the Sabine virgins.

The work is signed OPVS IOANNIS BOLONII FLANDRI MDLXXXII ("The work of Johannes of Boulogne of Flanders, 1582"). An early preparatory bronze featuring only two figures is in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples. Giambologna then revised the scheme, this time with a third figure, in two wax models now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The artist's full-scale gesso for the finished sculpture, executed in 1582, is on display at the Accademia Gallery in Florence.

Bronze reductions of the sculpture, produced in Giambologna's own studio and imitated by others, were a staple of connoisseurs' collections into the 19th century.

The Loggia della Signoria also houses the Hercules Fighting the Centaur Nessus, commissioned to Giambologna by Grand Duke Ferdinand I around 1594. In Greek mythology, Nessus was a famous centaur who was killed by Heracles, and whose tainted blood in turn killed Heracles. He was the son of Centauros. He fought in the battle with the Lapiths. He became a ferryman on the river Euenos.
Compared to the Rape of the Sabine Women, this group is constructed from a less dynamic stance. The front viewpoint conditions the onlooker; in fact, only from this view is it possible to appreciate the contrast between Hercules' face and the wild, savage face of the centaur, Nessus; the movement of the hero's body is contrasted by the emphatic movement of the monster's trunk, which bends back diagonally. In actual fact, the group was originally designed to be placed on a pedestal at the crossroads in Canto dei Carnesecchi and it was placed under the Loggia in the mid-19th century.

Giambologna also became extremely famous for his small bronze statues of Venus. The spread of the bronze statue in Florence is largely due to the successful collaboration between Giambologna and his assistant, Antonio Susini, as is the fashion for refined items that were small but which had a strong visual impact: Venus, Hercules, and wild beasts.

Jean de Boulogne also developed a controlled style in the difficult and delicate field of holy art, which fell into line with the new dictats of Catholic Reform.
His religious masterpiece was the Grimaldi Chapel in the now destroyed church of San Francesco di Castelletto in Genoa.
Latter works by Giambologna include the Equestrian Monument to Cosimo I from 1594, a work that changed the whole appearance of Piazza Signoria, giving an unusual dignified air to the city of Florence.[5]
The equestrian statue of Cosimo I de' Medici also in Florence, was completed by his studio assistant Pietro Tacca.
Giambologna provided as well as many sculptures for garden grottos and fountains in the Boboli Gardens of Florence and at Pratolino, and the bronze doors of the cathedral of Pisa. For the grotto of the Villa Medicea of Castello he sculpted a series of studies of individual animals, from life, which may now be viewed at the Bargello. Small bronze reductions of many of his sculptures were prized by connoisseurs at the time and ever since, for Giambologna's reputation has never suffered eclipse.
Giambologna was an important influence on later sculptors through his pupils Adriaen de Vries and Pietro Francavilla who left his atelier for Paris in 1601, as well as Pierre Puget who spread Giambologna's influence throughout Northern Europe, and in Italy on Pietro Tacca, who assumed Giambologna's workshop in Florence, and in Rome on Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Alessandro Algardi.

In 1601, Ferdinando I commissioned an exhausted Jean to make a public monument for the piazza in front of the shrine to the Virgin of the Annunziata.

Giambologna, Equestrian Monument of Cosimo I, 1587-94, Piazza della Signoria, Florence