Hanging Cages

Until the end of the eighteenth century, European urban and suburban panoramas abounded in iron and wooden cages attached to the outsides of town halls and ducal palaces, to halls of justice and cathedrals and to city walls, and swaying from tall iron gibbets set up outside the walls near a main crossroad; often there were several cages in a row. A good many examples survive today (e.g., on the ducal palace of Mantua, on the apse of the cathedral of Moutier/Münster in Germany, and many more still, in every country). In Florence, presumed city of origin of the present two-legged specimen, there were two sites for cages: one the corner of the Bargello at Via Anguillara and Piazza San Firenze, the other a gibbet on San Gaggio Hill, beyond the Porta Romana, on the Siena highroad. In Venice, homeland of the rectangular box specimen, the cages hung from the Bridge of Sighs and from the walls of the Arsenal.

 

 

The naked or nearly naked victims were locked into the cages and hung up. They perished of hunger and thirst, a fate seconded in winter by storm and cold, in summer by heatstroke and sunburn; often they had been tortured and mutilated, to make more edifying examples. The putrefying cadavers were generally left in place until the bones fell apart.

No more than a plausible family tradition associates the present iron cage with the Florentine Bargello. Although there are no supporting documents, the story told in the family for generations recounts how it was taken down in 1750-52, the years in which the second Lorenese grand duke of Tuscany, Pietro Leopoldo, had all the instruments of torture and execution destroyed, and that it has been conserved in the family palace ever since.

Information and photographs in this virtual exhibition proceed from the book Torture instruments; a bilingual guide to the exhibition Torture Instruments form the Middle Ages to the Industrial Era presented in various cities in the world in 1983-2000.