Moses and the Brazen Serpent

A lively modelling, continually varied, responding more to the dictates of sensibility than to the rigour of rational logic, reveals a surprising aspect of the artistic personality of the Perugian sculptor, who appears almost cautiously polemical towards the Mannerist codification of a certain strand of Michelangelo's poetics; Danti, to tell the truth, does not avoid reference to such weighty precedents: indeed the relief echoes a segment of the Sistine ceiling; but its plastic demands, through the nervous alternation between projections heavy with matter and fadings into pure graffito, and through the rejection of the typically Mannerist taste for cerebrally elegant silhouettes in favour of modelling in lumps, with strong breaks, place this work in a rather exceptional cultural area, which we might call Michelangelesque dissent. But the relief appears to us a rather unusual stylistic event in the Florentine milieu, and an exceptional result even within Danti's creative career.