Abduction of a Sabine Woman

Giambologna's Abduction of a Sabine Woman (Ratto delle Sabine) is a 4.1-meter marble group carved between 1579 and 1583 and set up in the Loggia dei Lanzi on Florence's Piazza della Signoria, where it still stands. It was cut from a single block of white marble, said to be the largest ever brought to Florence.

What you are looking at

Three nude figures spiral upward in one continuous movement. At the bottom an older man crouches, one arm raised in a gesture of shock or defense, his face twisted toward the figures above. Over him strides a powerful young man who has seized a woman and hoists her high against his shoulder. She twists away from him, her body arching, one arm flung up toward the sky and her mouth open in a cry.

There is no single main view. As you walk around the group, the figures turn and their relationships change: the woman's raised hand, the young man's straining back and the old man's upturned face appear and disappear in sequence. This upward corkscrew composition, the figura serpentinata, was the ideal of late Renaissance sculpture, and Giambologna pushed it further than anyone before him.

A title added later

Giambologna, a Flemish-born sculptor who spent his career in Florence, did not make the work for a particular story. He conceived it as a display of skill, three ages and two sexes intertwined, to show the Medici what he could do with marble. Only after it was finished was a subject attached; according to contemporary accounts, the scholar Vincenzo Borghini suggested the Roman legend of the Sabine women, carried off by Romulus's men to populate the new city. A bronze relief on the base illustrates that story, and the base carries the sculptor's signature and the date 1582.

Context

The group was placed in the Loggia in 1582–83, next to Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus, under the patronage of Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici. Giambologna's full-size plaster model is in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, and a smaller bronze of an earlier two-figure version is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bernini's Rape of Proserpina in Rome, carved about forty years later, takes up the same theme of struggle and turning movement.

Where to see it

The marble stands outdoors, free to view, under the arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Giambologna's other monumental work, the Apennine Colossus, is near Florence at Pratolino. See also Giambologna and famous sculptures.