Prudence

The Loggia dei Lanzi, begun in 1373/74 and standing at a right angle to the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, served both to frame important public civic events and to define one side of a heroically scaled piazza then still being carved out of the heart of the city. Seven seated figures in star-studded hexafoils decorate the spandrels between the arches. Originally painted and set on a coloured ground, these reliefs were designed by Agnolo Gaddi and were carved in 1386-87 by Giovanni d'Ambrogio and Jacopo di Piero Guidi, each of whom later became a capomaestro of the Cathedral workshop.

Prudence sits in a three-quarter pose, giving her heightened three-dimensionality against the flat patterned surface and within the niche's complex triangular-lobed frame. Andrea Pisano's Virtues for the south door of the Baptistry found their successors in these figures for the Loggia dei Lanzi. The ease of their presentation is a clear sign that the principles of form introduced nearly a century earlier by artists working in Rome, Padua, and Florence had now been fully assimilated.