THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENVENUTO CELLINI
BENVENUTO CELLINI was born in 1500 in Florence, where he spent the early years of his life training to be a goldsmith. His ties with the city remained close, and he returned there to work for Grand Duke Cosimo in the latter part of his life. But like many other Renaissance artists, he was attracted to Rome as a young and ambitious craftsman, and worked there for a variety of patrons including Popes Clement VII and Paul III. He also spent a period in France at the court of King Francis I.
Cellini was admired by his contemporaries as a goldsmith and sculptor, and his powerful talent can still be seen in such works as the bronze statue of Perseus (in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence) and the gold salt-cellar made for Francis I (in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). But he is chiefly remembered for his vivid and revealing autobiography.
In this book, which Cellini started to write in 1558, he describes in a highly emotional and subjective manner the events of a full and colourful life, including his escapades as a boy in Republican Florence, his amorous and artistic adventures in Rome and at Fontainebleau, his travels through Italy and France, his lively encounters with the great artists and rulers of the day, his mystical visions and his terms in prison. He left the last few years of his life unrecorded, and died in 1571.
GEORGE BULL is an author and journalist who has translated six volumes for the Penguin Classics: Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography (1956), The Book of the Courtier by Castiglione (1967), Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (two volumes, 1987), The Prince by Machiavelli (1961) and Pietro Aretino’s Selected Letters (1976). He was also consultant editor to the Penguin Business Library and abridged the Penguin edition of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles (1986). After reading History at Brasenose College, Oxford, George Bull worked for the Financial Times, McGraw-Hill World News, and for the Director magazine, of which he was Editor-in-Chief until 1984. He was appointed Director of the Anglo-Japanese Economic Institute in 1986. He is a director of Central Banking Publications and the founder and publisher of the quarterly publications Insight Japan and International Minds. His other books include Vatican Politics; Bid for Power (with Anthony Vice, 1958), a history of take-over bids; Renaissance Italy, a book for children; Venice: The Most Triumphant City (1980); Inside the Vatican (1982); a translation from the Italian of The Pilgrim: The Travels of Pietro della Valle (1989); and Michelangelo: A Biography (Penguin, 1995; St Martin’s Press N.Y., 1997). George Bull was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981 and a Vice-President of the British–Italian Society in 1994. He was awarded an OBE in the 1990 New Year’s Honours List.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENVENUTO CELLINI
Translated and with an Introduction by
GEORGE BULL
PENGUIN BOOKS
FOR
JEREMY MITCHELL
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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This translation published in 1956
Reprinted with a Bibliography 1996
Revised edition 1998
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 1
Copyright © George Bull, 1956, 1996, 1998
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
A CHRONOLOGY OF CELLINI
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Benvenuto Cellini was born in 1500, wrote his autobiography at intervals during the years 1558–66, and died in 1571. The first printed edition of the Life did not appear until 1728, and it did not become widely known outside Italy until the early nineteenth century. During the past hundred years it has taken its place as the most famous, or notorious, of all autobiographies.
Despite its egotism and bias, it gives us the most vivid and convincing account we have of the rulers of the sixteenth century and of the manners and morals of their subjects. Cellini’s friends and enemies were drawn from every level of society: we are introduced, in rapid succession, to inn-keepers and prostitutes, merchants and soldiers, musicians and writers, cardinals and dukes. Cellini is the protagonist of this world: he alone appears in the round, the men and women he describes are in half or low relief.
The reader can appreciate Cellini’s character and the adventures he recounts without knowing a great deal about the sixteenth century. The Life, after all, is itself a revealing historical document, shedding light on matters as diverse as prison conditions in Rome, the behaviour of Florentine exiles, or the relationship between Francis I and his mistress. Apart from his devotion to the House of Medici and from the occasional, rather intelligent comments that were forced out of him (as, for example, when Alessandro de’ Medici was murdered), Cellini was always anxious to dismiss politics as being no concern of his. And, although his pen often ran away with him, he was trying to write the story of his own life, not the history of his times.
Yet during his lifetime the republic of Florence was overthrown by a coup d’état, the Medici were restored to the government of Florence, and then driven out, and then restored again; Rome was sacked by the Imperial army; the Papacy diffidently initiated the Counter-Reformation; the Continent was rent by religious and dynastic wars.
Only six years before Cellini was born the peace of Italy had been shattered by the invasion of King Charles of France. Besides quickening the pace at which Italian art and ideas spread to the rest of Europe, the invasion was a prelude to the struggle between France and Spain for the mastery of Italy and, arising out of the Italian wars, to the prolonged conflict in every part of the Continent between the House of Habsburg and the House of Valois. Charles’s invasion was followed up with more vigour and intelligence by his successors, first Louis XII and then Francis I. But during the reign of Francis, when the rivalry between France and Spain became more embittered by the concentration of enormous territorial power in the hands of the Emperor, Charles V, Italy passed decisively into the orbit of Spain.
In 1500, Italy was a mosaic of states, each maintaining a precarious independence; Florence was experimenting with a republican form of government inaugurated under the guidance of Savonarola. When Cellini died, Italy was still composed of many great and small principalities. But national unity and independence were frustrated by the power of the Papal States and by the rule of Spanish viceroys in Naples and Milan. After several abortive attempts to found a lasting republic, Florence had succumbed to despotism in the person of Cosimo de’ Medici.
Elsewhere in Europe the rapid progress of the Reformation was halted by the wars of religion in France and by the harsh alliance of Spain with the Counter-Reformation. The way towards a Europe of self-contained sovereign states was confirmed by the strengthening of national monarchies. In France the wars and startling diplomatic intrigues pursued by Francis I did not prevent the consolidation
of royal power at home. The King continued the centralizing policy of his predecessors, gradually reducing the feudal nobility to impotence. By active patronage and by a policy which increased the prosperity of the smaller nobles and middle classes he ensured the assimilation of the ‘Renaissance’.
Cellini played a vigorous part in the wars and struggles of his age, acting as one of Pope Clement’s gunners during the sack of Rome, helping in the fortification of Paris or Florence. But more important to him than the campaigns of the French King was the shortage of money at the French court; more important than the Reformation was the knavery of the Lutheran friar whom he met in Castel Sant’Angelo. What to us are decisive dates of history – 1519, the election of Charles as Emperor; 1520, the excommunication of Luther; 1527, the sack of Rome – were to him insignificant in comparison with the details of his personal triumphs and tragedies.
The first nineteen and the last twenty-six years of Cellini’s life were spent in Florence. He went to Rome in 1519 and – except for occasional visits to Florence and elsewhere, and a disappointing trip to France – he remained in Rome, serving Clement VII and then Paul III, from 1523 until 1540. In that year he travelled to Ferrara and then to France, where he undertook several important works, including the renowned salt-cellar, for King Francis I, in whose service his thoughts turned eagerly towards the art of sculpture.
Cellini’s patriotism is attested in the Life itself; his closest friends were Florentines and he seems to have kept in close touch with the Florentine colony both at Rome and Paris. Long before the end of his life he was drawn back to Florence, and, even though he bitterly complained that he longed to return to the French court, it was mainly old age and frustration that caused him to look back to the time when he was serving Francis I as the golden period of his life. His love of Florence did not prevent his deserting the city when it was attacked by Imperial troops intent on restoring the Medici. (His desertion was matched by Michelangelo’s, who, in Vasari’s words, decided ‘to leave Florence secretly for Venice, to make sure of his personal safety’.)
And, to be sure, Cellini owed more to the Medici than to a republican government. Both his art and his character were moulded by the despotic court life of the period: the Papacy in Rome, the increasingly powerful Monarchy at Fontainebleau, the ruthless authority of Grand Duke Cosimo at Florence.
These rulers Cellini regarded as being above the laws by virtue of their authority, as he was above the laws by virtue of his genius. But his heroic stature was such that even they, at times, were dwarfed in his presence. Cellini’s heroic view of himself is successfully matched by the virile, heady style in which the Life is written. It is a great work of art, and it has been common criticism that he created his masterpiece unconsciously. But the idea that he merely rambled on without plan or polish fails to take account of the obvious care he took to discipline his material, to model his story on the humanist rules of classical reference and distinguished ancestry, and to correct its language, if possible under the eye of an expert. He was a fairly well-read and a reasonably cultured man, well aware of the exalted literary standards set by his friends and contemporaries.
Cellini himself encouraged the idea that the Life was a work of rapid spontaneity, mostly dictated to a boy of about fourteen while he himself was busy with the real, furiously intense work of the sculptor and goldsmith. Most writers on Cellini have accepted Benvenuto’s own version of the genesis and composition of the autobiography. But Cellini’s account is at least questionable and based rather on what he thought would be appropriate than on reality. The argument that the Life was in fact consciously planned and shaped, a calculated and complex literary production, is first prompted by appreciation of the scarcely possible nature of the task of dictating the nearly 900 pages of the surviving manuscript to yield what is a literary masterpiece sustained by specific themes and divided into two books with sharply different aims.
This reappraisal of critical aspects of the purpose and composition of the Life is strengthened by material evidence that Cellini produced a first draft of the Life which was lost or destroyed. This supports the conclusion that he wrote an early draft or even several drafts, and that in painstakingly preparing his text surely wished to present an idealized self-image, a coherent narrative, and a cast of characters relevant to his epic. As further evidence, Paolo Rossi notes that the autograph end passages of the text present a rambling, somewhat confused story.*
Cellini was a prolific writer producing, as well as the Life, important treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture, another treatise on architecture and the art of drawing, and a great deal of verse. Flexibly and brilliantly employed in the Life, his language was as idiosyncratic as his character. Carefully as he planned the unfolding of the story, often what he writes has all the repetitiveness and insistence of the spoken word. There are long passages where his sentences follow each other with the staccato of a legal document; others where there is no grammatical connexion between the end of a period and its beginning; sometimes the manuscript itself is defective. He is often inconsistent. His language is rich in slang, involved, occasionally almost incoherent.
But he was an adroit raconteur with a clever sense of plot and character. He knew how to move gracefully from comedy to tragedy. All the stories embedded in the Life – of Angelica and the demons, or the drama of his brother’s death, or the justice that overtook Luigi Pulci – show a neat, calculated use of suspense. The description of his meeting the Roman lady, Porzia, displays a surprising delicacy of character and language which makes itself apparent more than once in the book. His brief account of how Pope Clement, when on his death-bed, unable to see the medals brought him, fingered them and sighed deeply, tells us as much about the Renaissance Papacy as many a detailed history. Despite his egotism, he was interested enough in other people to be able to convey vividly if not impartially the essential qualities of those who moved across his life: his philoprogenitive father, his speech choked with biblical allusions, drawn as a young suitor, an ambitious, wrong-headed musician, a shrewd old gentleman; or the beautiful Spanish boy Diego, the wily courier Busbacca, the timid Tribolo, the schizophrenic castellan, to name some of the minor actors alone.
His powers of invective are enviable. And, as Tribolo complained on the return journey from Venice, he has an irrepressible sense of humour, sometimes turning to irony, more often to Rabelaisian explosions that subside into melancholy. He loves punning – on his own name, on Felice Guadagni’s, on Durante’s. The doctors and priests provoke his dry sarcasm. Like Pangloss who lost only an eye and an ear during treatment, Cellini was doctored ‘with everything they knew; and every day [I] grew worse’.
Intent on achieving literary excellence, Cellini, in 1559, sent what he had written to the renowned scholar Benedetto Varchi (to whose published debates on the rival merits of painting and sculpture he had contributed his own forthright views). Instead of revising it as his friend had asked, Varchi merely added some notes and made a few very minor revisions. Whether he felt the task was superfluous or beneath him, we do not know; at this time, artists and men of letters, the professional letterati, were jealously competing for intellectual and social status, not least at the court of the Medici.
The Life brings the story of Cellini’s adventures down to the year 1562. He stresses its devout purpose: he wrote to thank God. But he also wrote with an eye to his public: the book was his apologia, intended to show the world what kind of man and artist he was. The manuscript ends abruptly, with the words ‘and then I set off for Pisa’ written at the top of an otherwise blank page. Cellini was then aged sixty-two. His best work was done, and, frequently ill and none too well off, he had finally settled in Florence. Judging by the concluding pages of the Life and by what we know of his subsequent troubles, had he continued the story after 1562 it would have been an ill-tempered catalogue of bad treatment and undeserved misfortune.
In 1554 he had been officially recognized as a member of the Florentine nobility,
but two years later he was imprisoned for assaulting another goldsmith, and the following year occurred his condemnation and sentencing on the charge of practising unnatural vice with his apprentice.* In 1558, strongly reacting to the bitter challenge of his recent trials and tribulations, he decided to write the story of his life’s great struggles and triumphs and, in repentance, to take the minor orders of the Church. He received the tonsure, only to be released from the obligations this imposed and, a few years on, to marry a Piera di Salvadore Parigi. Soon after, he began writing the Trattati – the treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture – a technical work occasionally enlivened by references to his own achievements and experiences. In 1564 he had been elected, along with Bronzino, Vasari, and Ammannati, to attend the obsequies for Michelangelo’s funeral, but he was too ill to take part.
Not content with having fathered at least eight children, legitimate and illegitimate, of his own, in 1560 he had adopted the son of his model Dorotea and her husband, Domenico Parigi. None of his own sons had lived, and he intended to make the boy his heir. But Antonio proved worthless, his father began to interfere in the arrangements, and in 1569 Cellini disinherited him, though he was compelled to pay an allowance for his upkeep. In February 1571 Cellini died of pleurisy and was buried with honour in the church of the Annunziata.
The Florentines honoured him at his death, and they thought highly of him as a craftsman when he was alive, although their opinion was divided on his ability as a sculptor. The modern concept of the artist is, perhaps, too narrow to include Cellini, and it is limiting to categorize him as simply a dedicated artist. The Life makes abundantly clear that Cellini like many of his contemporaries, including Michelangelo’s biographer Ascanio Condivi, found astrology of absorbing interest and relevance to the story of a life in whose telling he constantly referred to experiences with magic and – as in the amazing religious revelation when he was imprisoned in Castel Sant’ Angelo – with mysticism. In his penetrating analyses of Cellini’s psychology, Paolo Rossi has linked the division of the Life into two texts – dramatically divided by a long poem – to Cellini’s conviction that an uncontrollable force had shaped his destiny. The message given to Cellini through his astrological chart was that after a period drenched in violence and vengeance, he would experience a dramatic conversion taking him to the redeeming processes of travel and spirituality. Cellini’s trial and condemnation for sodomy in 1557, his unpopularity at court, the fear that caused him to take minor orders after he had been fined, imprisoned and deprived of the right to hold public office, moved him to write the first book of his life as the account of an innocent man persecuted by the malignant stars who in the end triumphs over his adversaries and is reconciled to God. The second book, which he started to write in 1561, in contrast to the ordered astrologically determined structure of the first, presents Cellini in the simpler guise of an artist at court, successfully striving against great odds to create magnificent works.
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