It would seem as if this story were originally intended to imply that the sculptor, unable to give a higher conception of vivacity or motion, represented the mobile god as in the moment of descending on earth, still preserving the attitude of flight. This conception was probably too subtle for the narrator, who describes the image as having been a kind of marionette, or dancing Jack. “Whate’er it be, it is a curious tale.”
The connection of Mercury with moving water is also remarkable. He bears serpents on his caduceus or wand; and among other ancient myth-fancies, a rushing river, from its shape or windings and its apparent life, was a symbol of a serpent.
It is hardly worth while to note that Giovanni di Bologna was really a Frenchman—Jean de Boulogne. The bronze Mercury by him described in this story, and now in the Bargello Museum, is supposed to have suggested the allusion to the god as
“just alighted
On a heaven-kissing hill,”
and the probability is indeed of the strongest. Many judges good and true are of the opinion that, as regards motive or conception, this is the best statue ever made by any save a Greek, as there is assuredly none in which the lightness of motion is so perfectly expressed in matter. I believe, however, that Giovanni di Bologna was indebted for this figure to some earlier type or motive. There is something not unlike it among the old Etruscan small bronze figurini.
THE DOUBLE-FACED STATUE, OR HOW VIRGILIO CONJURED JANUS.
“Now by two-headed Janus!
Nature hath formed strange fellows in her time!”Shakespeare.
“There were in Rome many temples of Janus, some unto him as bifrons, or double-faced. Caylus has published pictures of Greek vases on which are seen two heads thus united, the one of an elderly man, the other of a young woman.”—Dizionario Mitologico.
There was once in Florence, in the Tower della Zeccha, a statue of great antiquity, and it had only one body, or bust, but two heads; and one of these was of a man and the other of a woman, a thing marvellous to behold.
And Virgil, seeing this when it was first found in digging amid old ruins, had it placed upright and said:
“Behold two beings who form but a single person! I will conjure the image; it shall be a charm to do good; it shall teach a lesson to all.”