Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- “This is much more dangerous than painting watercolors,” New York artist Greg Wyatt frets as the predawn convoy of safety vehicles and trucks carrying his 11-ton “Two Rivers” bronze statue rumbles across the Arno River.

The sculpture is about to be installed on Piazza della Signoria, the fabled Florentine square where the Medici banking family first laid the foundation for corporate arts patronage.

“Twenty-two thousand pounds of bronze can do a lot of damage if it collapses on people,” the 59-year-old Wyatt warns. He’s watching the rising sun sparkle off Giambologna’s colossal 16th- century bronze of Cosimo de Medici surveying “Rape of the Sabine Women” and the other treasures that annually lure some 9.5 million foreign visitors to the center of Renaissance art.

Bronze is big in these parts -- very big -- and Wyatt, artist-in-residence at St. John the Divine Cathedral in Manhattan, has reason to worry. He’s about to do something that Florence Vice-Mayor Dario Nardella says hasn’t been done since the days of Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini.

“Wyatt is the first artist to have a monumental work displayed on Piazza della Signoria in perhaps five centuries,” the 33-year-old Nardella says. “This is an historic experiment and it will create a huge debate, an argument that we want to foster. In 1505, the city erupted in protest when we installed Michelangelo’s ‘David.’ It will be the same with ‘Two Rivers’ and this is good; it shows that Florence is more than a shopping mall for tourists.”

Florentine Bureaucracy

Wyatt’s statue -- an 18-foot tall flowing, crusty bronze behemoth designed to represent the cultural bond between the people who live along the Arno and Hudson Rivers -- was mostly underwritten by a $350,000 grant from the city of Florence. The project took two years and, says exhibition curator Michelangiolo Bastiani, more than 50 official permissions and hours of arguments to complete.

For the people of Florence, “Two Rivers” flows deeper than history. “Piazza Signoria is the soul of the world of sculpture,” the 30-year-old Bastiani explains as two cranes ease the Wyatt into its plinth in the shadow of Ammannati’s towering 16th-century bronze Neptune in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. “Wyatt is the first American artist to be displayed on this square.”

Crowds gather. The police erect barricades. Cameras snap. Tourists Tweet and everyone has an opinion as cappuccino is served in the piazza. “Marvelous,” says one local. “Monstrous,” counters another.

Renaissance Bonfires

Everyone in this open-air museum is a critic and they’re deadly serious about their art. Back in the winter of 1497, for instance, the monk Girolamo Savonarola set ablaze the work of artists he considered immoral in the center of Piazza Signoria. A few months later, the crowd conducted their own Bonfire of the Vanities and roasted Savonarola in front of the square’s Loggia dei Lanzi outdoor art gallery.

Wyatt mulls the possibilities. His first corporate client, American Bureau of Shipping, in 1975 paid him $2,000 for the 3,000-pound eagle on display at 65 Broadway in New York. A few years later, hedge-fund guru Jim Rogers purchased an 800-pound naked woman titled “Bathsheba,” a 600-pound statue of Adam and Eve called “Novation” and a 150-pound bust of his own head, he said in an interview.

“I decided to become an artist who embraced the Renaissance on this piazza back in 1974 and realize my work is heavy and not welcome at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,” Wyatt says. “But I think I’m safe,” he laughs. “Unless ‘Two Rivers’ causes the piazza to cave in.”

Mussolini’s Tanks

Architect Pierpaolo Rapana, whose five-man team from Arx Studios spent months calculating stress and weight ratios on Signoria’s slabbed stones, assures Wyatt that he won’t be burned at the stake. “We know Signoria can handle the bronze,” Rapana says. “Our research shows that Mussolini parked Italian army tanks on this very spot during World War II without any buckling of the foundation.”

As for the professional critics, Amanda Luyster, a professor of medieval and early modern European art history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, says let the praise and the venom flow.

“Wyatt on Piazza della Signoria is a big deal,” Luyster says. “This is the place where art about humanity began. The Wyatt will re-energize the dialog of the art past with art present and signal a debate that we haven’t heard for years.”

In a town that likes its art big, busty and bronze, Vice- Mayor Nardella says he’s expecting a robust clash between the arrogance of contemporary art and the intransigence of Renaissance art. “There’s a reason why we don’t have a museum of contemporary and modern art,” Nardella says. “When Florentines find genius, we put it on Piazza della Signoria.”

Resale Hurdle

Artnet AG, a Frankfurt-based company that analyzes the art trade, puts the value of the global industry at about $20 billion annually. As the art critic Anthony Haden-Guest views the modern marketplace, a tricky balance exists between what investors perceive as good or bad art. “Valuable art must be steeped in art history,” Haden-Guest says. “But the test of any art is resale”

“Two Rivers,” which remains on Piazza della Signoria through Oct. 24, won’t be resold. The statue’s ultimate home is a nearby park, a donation to the people of Florence.

“What I do is not designed for hyped-up art auctions,” Wyatt says. “The few of us left who create this sort of work are not art-market visionaries. It would be as if Hollywood went back to making films noirs.”

To contact the writer on the story: A. Craig Copetas in Paris at ccopetas@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 13, 2009 19:00 EDT