Benvenuto Cellini

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Benvenuto Cellini was born in Florence on the 3rd of November 1500, and by the time he died there on the 13th of February 1571, he had killed at least four men, escaped from prison, survived two poisoning attempts, and produced some of the most celebrated objects in the history of European art. His autobiography has been described as "one of the most important documents of the 16th century" - a verdict that says as much about the man as it does about the manuscript. What kind of person crafts golden medallions for popes in the morning and carries out blood feuds at night? How did a goldsmith's apprentice from Florence become court sculptor to two of the most powerful rulers in Europe? And what happened to the greatest gold salt cellar in the world on a May morning in 2003?

• 2. A Florentine Upbringing

  ›

  Giovanni Cellini and Maria Lisabetta Granacci had waited eighteen years for their first child before Benvenuto arrived as their second. Giovanni was a musician and builder of musical instruments, and he pushed his son hard toward that same path. The boy showed promise, but when Benvenuto was fifteen, his father reluctantly agreed to apprentice him to a goldsmith named Antonio di Sandro, known as Marcone.

  At sixteen, Cellini was already drawing attention in Florence - not for his craft, but for brawling with companions in the street. That affray earned him a six-month banishment from the city. He spent it in Siena, working for a goldsmith named Fracastoro, then moved to Bologna, where he sharpened his skills on two fronts: he became a more accomplished player of the cornett and the flute, and he made real progress as a goldsmith.

  After visits to Pisa and two stints back in Florence - one of which brought him a visit from the sculptor Torrigiano - Cellini set off for Rome at the age of nineteen. The sculptor who came to call was already famous; the teenager who received him was barely known outside the back streets of Florence.

• 3. Rome and the Pope's Favor

  ›

  A silver casket, silver candlesticks, and a vase for the bishop of Salamanca were Cellini's first Roman commissions, and they won him the approval of Pope Clement VII. That early endorsement unlocked greater work: a gold medallion of "Leda and the Swan" for the Gonfaloniere Gabbriello Cesarino, now held in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence. Clement also appointed him one of the papal court musicians, drawing again on the musical education his father had forced on him.

  When the forces of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, attacked Rome under the command of Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, Cellini's role shifted from artist to soldier. By his own account, he shot and injured Philibert of Chalon, the prince of Orange, and he also claimed to have shot and killed Charles III himself, an act he said provoked the full Sack of Rome. Whether or not those claims are accurate, his bravery during the siege earned him a reconciliation with the Florentine magistrates.

  Back in Florence, Cellini turned to making medals. Two became particularly celebrated: "Hercules and the Nemean Lion", worked in gold repoussé, and "Atlas supporting the Sphere", in chased gold. The latter eventually came into the possession of Francis I of France.

• 4. Violence and Consequence

  ›

  In 1529, Cellini's brother Cecchino killed a Corporal of the Roman Watch and was himself wounded by an arquebusier, dying of that wound shortly after. Benvenuto killed his brother's killer in revenge, and then admitted in his own autobiography that the killing was not justice: the man had acted in self-defense. He fled to Naples to escape the fallout from a separate wounding of a notary named Ser Benedetto. Through the influence of several cardinals, he obtained a pardon.

  Favor with the new pope, Paul III, followed - even though Cellini had committed another killing during the three-day interregnum immediately after Clement VII's death in September 1534. The fourth victim was a rival goldsmith from Milan named Pompeo.

  The plots of Pier Luigi Farnese then pushed Cellini out of Rome to Florence and Venice. At thirty-seven, returning from the French court, he was arrested on what he believed to be false charges: embezzling gems from the papal tiara during the war. He was locked in the Castel Sant'Angelo, managed to escape, was recaptured, and lived in daily expectation of execution. While imprisoned in 1539, someone attempted to murder him by feeding him diamond dust; the attempt failed because the substance used was not actually diamond. The Cardinal d'Este of Ferrara helped secure his release, and Cellini expressed his gratitude with a splendid cup.

• 5. France and the Salt Cellar

  ›

  At the court of Francis I in Fontainebleau and Paris, Cellini produced work on a scale and in materials he had not attempted before. One of the central achievements of this French period was a gold salt cellar - known today as the Saliera - commissioned by Francis I himself. Standing 26 centimeters high and worked in gold, enamel, and ivory, it depicts a naked sea god and a woman sitting opposite each other with their legs entwined, representing the symbolic union of sea and earth. Its value has been conservatively estimated at 58,000,000 schilling.

  Cellini also began work on a Golden Gate for the Palace of Fontainebleau, though the project was never completed. What survives is the bronze tympanum representing the Nymph of Fontainebleau, now in the Louvre in Paris. The complete design is knowable only through preparatory drawings, archive records, and reduced casts.

  Life in France was not peaceful. Cellini fathered an illegitimate daughter in 1544 with one of his models - a girl he named Costanza. He also considered the Duchesse d'Etampes to be working against him at court, and unlike in Rome, he could not simply silence his enemies with a blade.

  The Saliera's story did not end with Cellini's death. On the 11th of May 2003, a thief climbed scaffolding outside the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, smashed a window to get inside, and carried it away. Alarms sounded, but were dismissed as false. The theft was not discovered until 8:20 in the morning. Austrian police recovered the Saliera on the 21st of January 2006, and it is now back on display in the museum's Kunstkammer.

• 6. Perseus and the Florentine Court

  ›

  Duke Cosimo I de' Medici received Cellini back in Florence with warmth, appointing him court sculptor, providing him with an elegant house in Via del Rosario where Cellini built his own foundry, and setting his annual salary at two hundred scudi. The duke commissioned two major bronze sculptures: a bust of himself and Perseus with the Head of Medusa, destined for the Lanzi loggia at the center of the city.

  Cellini cast a bronze bust of Cosimo upon his return in 1545, working three anthropomorphic heads into the armour of the duke. On Cosimo's right shoulder he placed a grotesque head composed of the features of a satyr, a lion, and a man. Two smaller heads, nearly identical to each other, appear beneath the collarbones on the bust's front.

  Perseus with the Head of Medusa was a more demanding challenge. The casting caused Cellini enormous anxiety, and he described the ordeal at length in his autobiography. But when it was done, the work was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Cellini's own stated aim was to surpass Michelangelo's David and Donatello's Judith and Holofernes. The sculpture stands today in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, though the original relief from the foot of its pedestal - Perseus and Andromeda - is now in the Bargello, replaced at the base by a cast.

  By 1996, centuries of pollution had streaked and banded the bronze. In December of that year it was removed from the Loggia and taken to the Uffizi for restoration. The work was slow, and Perseus did not return to its home until June 2000.

• 7. The Autobiography

  ›

  Cellini began writing his autobiography in 1558, at the age of fifty-eight. He set it down in what one critic called an "energetic, direct, and racy style," and he broke off writing around 1563, when he was approximately sixty-three, just before a final trip to Pisa. That same critic wrote: "Other goldsmiths have done finer work, but Benvenuto Cellini is the author of the most delightful autobiography ever written."

  The self-portrait it paints is startling. Cellini writes in complacent tones about how he thought through his killings before carrying them out. In one passage about his time in Paris, he describes attacking a man who had sued him, wounding him severely in the legs and arms while deliberately stopping short of killing him, then going after the other plaintiff until the lawsuit was dropped. The account is cool, almost satisfied.

  Elsewhere the book veers into the supernatural. Cellini describes conjuring a legion of devils in the Colosseum after a mistress was taken from him by her mother. He writes of a miraculous halo of light that he noticed around his own head at dawn and twilight following his imprisonment in Rome. He records being poisoned on two separate occasions.

  A manuscript copy was discovered by Antonio Cocchi and first printed in Cologne, Germany, in 1728. The first English translation, by Thomas Nugent, appeared in 1771. Subsequent translations came from Thomas Roscoe in 1822, John Addington Symonds in 1887, and others through to Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella in 2002. Mark Twain returned to Cellini's autobiography more than once: in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer cites it as an inspiration while freeing Jim. Herman Melville compared Captain Ahab, at his first appearance in Moby-Dick, to Cellini's Perseus in bronze.

• 8. Legacy in Art and Culture

  ›

  On the 13th of January 1563, Cellini was named a member of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, founded by Duke Cosimo I de' Medici under the influence of the architect Giorgio Vasari. He died in Florence on the 13th of February 1571 and was buried with ceremony in the church of the Santissima Annunziata.

  In 1562, a few years before his death, he married a servant named Piera Parigi. He claimed they had five children together, though only a son and two daughters outlived him. His illegitimate daughter Costanza, born in France in 1544, had come before.

  Hector Berlioz made Cellini the subject of an opera in 1838, revised in 1852. Franz Lachner composed another opera of the same name in 1849. Alexandre Dumas' 1843 novel L'Orfèvre du roi, ou Ascanio drew on Cellini's French years, and that novel became the source for Paul Meurice's 1852 play, which in turn gave Louis Gallet his libretto for Camille Saint-Saens' opera Ascanio in 1890. Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill wrote a Broadway musical, The Firebrand of Florence, in 1945, derived from Edwin Justus Mayer's play about Cellini's life.

  In the James Bond novel Live and Let Die, the villain Mr. Big expresses the ambition that his crimes should bear his signature as clearly as the creations of Benvenuto Cellini. Rolex named their line of precious metal dress watches after him, with the Cellini Collection beginning in 1928. A life-sized marble crucifix Cellini made late in his career, originally intended for his own tomb, was sold to the Medici family and given to Spain. It is now at the Escorial Monastery near Madrid, displayed in an altered form: the monastery added a loincloth and a crown of thorns.