Battista di Domenico Lorenzi (1527/28–1594), Alpheus and Arethusa, 1568–70, Marble garden sculpture, 148.9 × 82.9 × 59.7 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gallery 534
Commissioned for the villa at Bandino outside Florence, this marble group exemplifies the role of sculpture in Renaissance gardens as vehicles of both mythological storytelling and aristocratic self-display. The Bandini family, who acquired the villa in the fifteenth century, developed it into a seat of culture and patronage. Alamanno Bandini, a knight, is believed to have ordered the work directly from Battista Lorenzi.
The subject, drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book V), tells of Alpheus, a river god, who pursues the nymph Arethusa until Diana rescues her by transforming her into a spring. Lorenzi renders the tale with tightly interlocked figures whose twisting poses heighten the sense of pursuit and resistance. The anatomical definition and strongly modelled volumes reflect his training with Baccio Bandinelli, but here reinterpreted for the specific idiom of villa sculpture, where narrative clarity and visual animation counted as much as monumental weight.
Lorenzi’s career developed within a generation of sculptors reshaping Florentine art after Michelangelo. Unlike Giambologna, whose polished bronzes defined the late sixteenth-century taste for elongated grace, Lorenzi maintained closer ties to Bandinelli’s more robust, muscular language. In works such as Alpheus and Arethusa, however, he adopted a more fluid composition and an engagement with open space, anticipating later trends in garden statuary where movement and drama were prized.
Renaissance gardens functioned as outdoor theatres of learning, where myths from antiquity were re-enacted in stone among grottoes, fountains, and boschetti. The Medici pioneered this practice, but families such as the Bandini emulated their model, commissioning sculptures that fused erudition with spectacle. Lorenzi’s group would have stood in dialogue with water, foliage, and architecture, its subject linking the flowing element of springs with the garden’s natural setting.
The villa at Bandino was later remodelled by the Niccolini in the seventeenth century, when its grotto was altered and the sculpture relocated. War damage in the twentieth century left only fragments of the building. The group entered the Metropolitan Museum in 1940 through the Fletcher family, preserving one of the few major survivals of Lorenzi’s work and one of the clearest witnesses to the use of mythological statuary in Florentine villa gardens of the late sixteenth century.