Every ancient masterpiece is the result of a story of time and care. The public will have the opportunity to observe one of these stories up close at the Bargello National Museum in Florence: the restoration of the base of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus, one of the indisputable masterpieces of 16th-century Florentine sculpture. From May to September, a live restoration project will take place in the Bargello's ground-floor exhibition hall, allowing visitors to see every stage of the restoration during the museum's regular hours of operation. The marble base, commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici and created between 1549 and 1553 to accompany the famous bronze statue for the Loggia dei Lanzi, is a refined masterpiece of sculptural carving, conceived as a richly decorated altar imbued with symbolic meaning. It is now housed in the Hall of Michelangelo and 16th-Century Sculpture at the Bargello National Museum. The four corners feature goat protomes, alluding to the astrological sign Capricorn, which is connected with the duke, while an intricate decorative system of torches and masks alludes to the triumph of truth over deception. Lower down, female herms portraying Diana of Hephaestus inspire nature and prosperity, while the niches include four bronze statuettes of Jupiter, Minerva, Mercury, and Danae with the young Perseus. Nearly thirty years after the last repair, carried out between 1995 and 2000, a fresh conservation intervention is required to stabilize the deterioration processes and improve the aesthetic and material readability of the work, which is hampered by chromatic irregularities and formal discontinuities.