The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

by Cellini, Benvenuto; Fenton, James

• ISBN13: 9780307592743
• ISBN10: 030759274X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-06
• Publisher: Everyman's Library

Summary

Here is the most important autobiography from Renaissance Italy and one of the most spirited and colorful from any time or place, in a translation widely recognized as the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original. Benvenuto Cellini was both a beloved artist in sixteenth-century Florence and a passionate and temperamental man of action who was capable of brawling, theft, and murder. He counted popes, cardinals, kings, and dukes among his patrons and was the adoring friend ofas he described themthe "divine" Michelangelo and the "marvelous" Titian, but was as well known for his violent feuds. At age twenty-seven he helped defend the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, and his account of his imprisonment there (under a mad castellan who thought he was a bat), his escape, recapture, and confinement in "a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms" is an adventure equal to any other in fact or fiction. But it is only one in a long life lived on a grand scale. Cellini's autobiography is not merely the record of an extraordinary life but also a dramatic and evocative account of daily life in Renaissance Italy, from its lowest taverns to its highest royal courts.

Author Biography

Benvenuto Cellini was born in Florence in 1500 and died in 1571.

James Fenton is a prizewinning poet, former professor of poetry at Oxford, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Excerpts

FROM THE INTRODUCTION
By James Fenton
--

Cellini’s autobiography is a work without precedent, in its frankness, its detail, its glamour and excitement. The author is a goldsmith, and not just any goldsmith but one who from an early age has been recognized as uniquely skillful. For a long time he operates in that area where metalcraft shades into sculpture. He makes medals and coins, objects of a particular interest and veneration in the Renaissance. He makes elaborate sewers and basins, and the famous salt-cellar now in Vienna. In due course he will become a sculptor proper, and will cast the bronzePerseusthat has become one of the symbols of Florence and of the Renaissance itself.

Because he is a man of such except ional gifts he deals directly with popes and monarchs and other heads of state. And in these dealings he is often frustrated, by the capriciousness of rulers and by the petty enmities of courtiers. His hot blood and fierce sense of honour continually land him in trouble. He kills three men. He is several times imprisoned. He defends the Vatican during the Sack of Rome. He escapes from the Castel Sant’Angelo. He, if anyone does, lives life to the full.
And yet the story he tells is not always taken seriously. It seems too good to be true, as when, during one of many stand-offs with his enemies, he points his arquebus in the air, the gun goes off accidentally, the bullet hits an arch above his head, ricochets and strikes his enemy in the throat. Surely the narrator here is something of a Baron Munchausen. Surely this all has to be taken with a grain of salt.

The fact was that Cellini’s excellence as a storyteller worked against him, particularly since his unfinished autobiography was not published until the eighteenth century, by which time the majority of his work had been dispersed. If nobody reading the book could easily check on the works of art he was talking about (with the except ion, of course, of thePeruses, which still stood in its intended place, in the Piazza della Signori in Florence), it was easy to think that the artist was a little deluded as to his own merits.

Of course it makes a big difference if one reads theLifein such a way. Indeed it makes it pointless to pay any attention to the detailed descript ions of works of art that it contains. Sir John Pope-Hennessy made this point forcefully when he said that the first premise of his biography of the artist was that Cellini was, ‘in the full sense, a great artist’, and the second that ‘almost every direct statement in theLife. . . is correct’, and that one should read it ‘as a factual record punctuated by passages of fantasy, not as a work of the imagination which intermittently adheres to fact’.

Our understanding and knowledge of Cellini’s oeuvre has grown over the years since the first publication of theLife. In the nature of things, many of the objects in precious metal – the ewers and basins – will have been melted down, but the famous salt-cellar survived, unidentified, in Schloss Ambrass in Austria, and was recognized on the basis of Cellini’s description. In due course it suffered the fate of many super-famous works of world art. It was stolen from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and remained missing for months. Pope-Hennessy himself was involved in two Cellini discoveries. A bronze preparatory model for the head of Medusa, part of the Perseus group, was brought into the Victoria and Albert Museum one day during his directorship, by a ceramics dealer from Brighton. And it was Pope-Hennessy who in 1982 published the bronze figure of a satyr, which had come to light three years earlier in a Swiss collection. It had been found at a gallery in Munich, in use as a doorstop. The discovery of this satyr, which must have been part of a presentation model for the King of France, part of the p