Giambologna's Appennine Colossus

"As great as Father Appennine himself, when he roars with all his oaks and raises his snowy head to heaven" - Virgil.

Giambologna built his Colossus as guardian over the blood-decked mountainside where Aeneas violently quested for utopia. Most surprising about his stalagmitic bastion, crouched like the hermit gods of Blake's paintings, is that it is filled with a series of internal chambers and pools. It is as if Giambologna continued Aeneas quest to terraform an empire and testified its actual glory. We assume that we are reducing the earth by gutting it and interrupting our own numinous return to the soil, but perhaps we are instead rebirthing it around us, making out of our planet a new gnarled solar shape and constructing new mountains to love and war in the heart of.