Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini – Translated by John Addington Symonds, 1558-63 ★★

Portrait of an Artist as a Raging Bull

Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini is a book drenched in war, sex, intrigue, and murder. Its writer was one of the leading artists of his time, a figure steeped in controversy and mystery. He also had a fierce temper and an appetite for killing when his blood was up, which it often was.

Given all that, why do I find his book a chore to read?

Maybe it was the period: Sixteenth-century Italy was a very different time and place, hard to relate to in its byzantine ways. Maybe it was the translation, a venerable 19^th-century one, which sacrifices flow for clunky detail and averages a ponderous footnote on every page.

I think it was the author himself. Benvenuto Cellini’s rampant narcissism and smug tone would be a weight in a document of any length, let alone a memoir running over 500 pages. His episodic narrative spins off into different directions constantly. Supporting players come and go; he only cares about those who anger him.

And oh, does he care!

In one episode, Cellini recounts his murder of a soldier who shot his brother during a street brawl. Never mind Cellini understood the shooting was justified; it was the principle that mattered. Even while building up his burgeoning reputation fashioning coin dies, “I also took to watching the arquebusier who shot my brother, as though he had been a girl I was in love with.”

After days of going without food or sleep, he catches the man in an unguarded moment, sneaks up from behind, and stabs him to death:

He who robs me of my property and labour may take my life too, and welcome.

Another time, Cellini settled an argument with a postmaster about overriding a borrowed horse by shooting the guy dead; an accident, he claims in his Autobiography, but you wonder. As Cellini put it after another of his killings, “knocks are not dealt by measure.”

Benvenuto Cellini was a true Renaissance man. A product of High Renaissance Italy, he was pushed into music by his father but gave it up to be a goldsmith. When Rome came under siege in 1527, Cellini helped direct the Pope’s artillery, and claimed the shot that killed the enemy commander, Duke Charles of Bourbon. After being sentenced to prison by another pope for theft, he maintained his sanity by writing devotional poetry, then was freed to craft his most famous works: a golden salt cellar for the King of France; and a sculpture, Perseus With The Head Of Medusa, which is one of Florence’s signature attractions to this day.

Perseus With The Head Of Medusa, as it stands today at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy. Image by dirk huijssoon from https://www.flickr.com/photos/dicknella/3606944186.

And he also wrote this autobiography, a rarity for his time: All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand…

What went into Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini? A lot of bitterness, apparently. Cellini had to fight to get what he wanted in life, and while he enjoyed the struggle, he collected many scars. That stands out as a key takeaway of the book:

The first man I attacked was the plaintiff who had sued me; and one evening I wounded him in the legs and arms so severely, taking care, however, not to kill him, that I deprived him of the use of both his legs. Then I sought out the other fellow who had brought the suit, and used him also such wise that he dropped it.

Cellini’s bumptious nature was a matter of inheritance. When he was a boy, a friend urged his father to let Benvenuto follow his interest in metal, rather than force music on him. “Your Benvenuto will get much more honour and profit if he devotes himself to the goldsmith’s trade than to this piping,” the man said.

Benvenuto records this as “truth,” but then proudly notes how his father denounced his friend and the friend’s children and predicted mortal disaster in their future. This indeed came to pass. Benvenuto’s satisfaction with that outcome is chilling:

…let none ever laugh at the prognostications of any worthy man whom he has wrongfully insulted, because it is not he who speaks, nay, but the very voice of God through him.

That sets a pattern for Autobiography. Benvenuto is wronged, or takes something wrong, and discerns in his warped sense of justice some evidence of God’s plan. Cellini boasts about beating his models, using them for sex, and picking fights, yet his religious faith is very real. Completely self-serving, but real.

A self-portrait of Benvenuto Cellini at early middle age, right about the time he began his Autobiography. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benvenuto_Cellini

One of Autobiography’s most memorable passages comes when Cellini is imprisoned by the pope. The crime is not something anyone seriously seems to believe Cellini guilty of, but it eventually becomes clear that the pope wants Cellini in prison regardless. “Indeed he is too truculent, by far too confident in his own powers,” is how a noble described as the pope’s son puts the case against Cellini.

Matters quickly deteriorate as the warden slips into insanity, thinking himself a bat. Cellini suspects he is to be poisoned. Eventually he has celestial visions of Madonna and Child, visions he speaks of recreating in his art. “All these things I beheld, actual, clear, and vivid, and kept returning thanks to the glory of God as loud as I was able,” he writes.

And then, after a desperate, failed escape attempt, Cellini’s imprisonment is abruptly over. Cellini is riding off to France and the next phase of his artistic career, leaving Italy in his rear-view for the next hundred pages. Very soon he’s back to his old killing ways.

Not liking an author shouldn’t make a book unreadable, but Cellini’s ugly personality is hard to get past. If it’s not his bullying, it’s his toadying that annoys.

This was a necessity of his period, to some degree. In order to be a successful artist, one needed a sponsor, a noble with the power to not only finance large pieces of sculpture, but place them. At the center of much of Autobiography are Cellini’s struggles with various noble sponsors, and their wives.

One duchess tells Cellini to overpraise a string of pearls she wants her duke to buy, warning Cellini of dire consequences if he refuses. The mistress to the King of France takes a strong dislike to Cellini, never missing a chance to rail at him in the royal presence.

Cellini had to put up with these and other insults if he wanted to ply his art. His only defense was to dish out unctuous complements whenever he could, which he relates in the Autobiography at length.

Sometimes his artistry proved too much for his purse:

I contracted close friendship with Signor Gabriello Ceserino, at that time Gonfalonier of Rome, and executed many pieces for him. One, among the rest, is worthy of mention. It was a large golden medal to wear in the hat. I engraved upon it Leda with her swan; and being very well pleased with the workmanship, he said he should like to have it valued, in order that I might be properly paid. Now, since the medal was executed with consummate skill, the valuers of the trade set a far higher price on it than he had thought of. I therefore kept the medal, and got nothing for my pains.

Originally designed to be worn on the hat of the Gonfalonier of Rome, Cellini's medallion depicting the classic ravishing of a woman by a god disguised as a bird can be found today at the Bargello Museum in Florence, Italy. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benvenuto_Cellini.

Cellini’s struggles with his patrons offer interest; Alexandre Dumas even used them for the basis of one of his historical novels. But the constant cycle of disappointment gets wearying, especially once you begin to understand this is but one side of the story.

Was Cellini as put upon as he alleges? Or was he prone to expensive delays that stretched his patrons’ patience past the breaking point? For all the talk in Autobiography of great artworks our author has planned, it is notable how few of them saw realization. The salt cellar he made for King Francis I was to have been but an appetizer for greater pieces of art, specifically a majestic gate for the Palace of Fontainebleau near Paris. But this was never realized, as Cellini fell out with Francis and fled back to Florence under a cloud.

“Why do not you finish your work?” one of his handlers would ask. “One thinks that you will never get it done.”

Cellini had one arrow left in his quiver, and a mighty one. Perseus With The Head Of Medusa was the crowning glory of Cellini’s life, and forms the capstone of the Autobiography. Its final creation is a book highlight, as Cellini finds the pouring of the metal disastrously miscalculated by his assistants and rushes to save his creation by throwing in any spare metal he has in his house, including his silverware:

Now the mouths of the mould were placed above the head of Perseus and behind his shoulders; and I found that all the bronze my furnace contained had been exhausted in the head of this figure. It was a miracle to observe that not one fragment remained in the orifice of the channel, and that nothing was wanting to the statute. In my great astonishment I seemed to see in this the hand of God arranging and controlling all.

Among Cellini’s uncompleted works was the Autobiography itself, which he discontinued more than seven years prior to his death. By then in his sixties, Cellini was running out of energy even if he still had time. His lack of murders in the book’s final third, his preference for lawsuits over daggers, suggests the emergence of an older if not wiser Cellini.

He’s not particularly likeable, and too often monotonous, but Autobiography offers a rare personal glimpse at a distant time and what it was like to have been a figure of great importance in what were, for better and for worse, very interesting times.