Florence Triumphant over Pisa

In the last decades of the sixteenth century, the category of sculptural labour that emerged most prominently was that of modeling the figures in wax and clay. There exists dozens of these works by Giambologna who put a certain amount of stock in fragile, ephemeral objects, and he regarded them as things worth preserving.

This model forms the second stage in the preparation of the design for Giambologna’s colossal marble group. The marble is 2.6 metres high and is now in the Bargello museum in Florence. It represents the city of Florence, who is personified as a powerful but elegant female, triumphing over the crushed figure of the elderly male figure of Pisa. This nearby rival city was then under Florentine rule.