The good fellow reported all that I had said to the Duke. His Excellency told him that it was a joke, and that he wanted me for himself. The upshot was that several times I was strongly tempted to clear off. The Queen dropped the matter, for fear of offending the Duke, and so I stayed on, feeling very miserable.
At that time the Duke left Florence with all his court and all his sons, save for the Prince who was in Spain:368 they travelled through the marshes of Siena, and by that route to Pisa.369 The Cardinal breathed in the poison of that evil air first of all; and as a result after a few days he was attacked by a pestilential fever which shortly after killed him.370
He was the Duke’s right eye; a handsome and a good man, whose death meant a very great loss. I let a few days go by, till I thought their tears must be dried; and then I set off for Pisa.371
NOTES
Among English translations of the Life, that of Robert Cust using the text of Orazio Bacci provides the fullest set of sometimes illuminating notes to the historical background of Cellini’s autobiography. The more recent Italian edition of the Life edited by E. Camesasca is also well annotated.
1. Here and below, Cellini uses the words virtuosa and virtù, thus beginning the explosive story of his life with one of the challenging themes of Renaissance achievement and genius: the human need, in order to succeed, to be endowed with the special quality of virtù, as well as to be favoured by fortune. Virtù, from the Latin virtus with its signification of both manliness and virtuousness, was a key word and concept for many Renaissance writers, notably for Machiavelli (1469–1527) who said that his hero Cesare Borgia was successful through his tanta ferocia e tanta virtù (The Prince, Chapter 7) but defeated because the life of his father, Pope Alexander VI, was cut short and he himself fell ill at a critical juncture. For Machiavelli virtù had come to embrace ideas of exceptional ability and achievement. Cellini’s resonant opening phrases with their echoes of both Michelangelo and Machiavelli are: Tutti gli uomini d’ogni sorte, che hanno fatto qualche cosa che sia virtuosa o si veramente che le virtù somigli, doverieno… descrivere la loro vita… Con tutto che quegli uomini, che si sono affaticati con qualche poco di sentore di virtù…
Michelangelo hardly ever used the word virtù himself but once sarcastically told the notorious Pietro Aretino that he, Aretino, his signore and brother, was unico di virtù al mondo… (Il Carteggio di Michelangelo Vol. IV, Letter CMLV).
2. Villani (c. 1276–1348) merchant and traveller whose chronicle (Cronica) of Florence in twelve books, inspired by the example of the history of Rome, begins with biblical and mythological material and extends – thanks to his brother and nephew – very informatively to 1363. The colony Julia Augusta Florentia was founded by the Romans in the first century BC. Cellini’s genealogical comments are inventive but his grandfather and father were indeed Florentine citizens.
3. Roman engineer and architect of the first century BC whose treatise on architecture (in ten books) De Architectura, based largely on Greek precedents, was highly influential in the Renaissance, notably through the works and writings of Alberti, Bramante, Antonio da San Gallo the Younger and Palladio.
4. Piero de’ Medici (1471–1503), first son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, fled from Florence in 1494, after the invasion of Italy by King Charles VIII of France. After the death of Savonarola, Piero Soderini (1452–1533) was elected Florence’s Gonfalonier for life in 1502; he was deposed and banished in 1512.
5. The Medici family were forcibly restored to power in Florence in September 1512 by the chiefly Spanish forces of the Holy League. Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici (1475–1521), the future Pope Leo X (1513–21), was the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
6. Giuliano della Rovere, born 1443, reigned as Julius II 1503–13. Patron of Michelangelo, Bramante and Raphael, he was also the fierce defender of the papacy’s territorial interests. He is immortalized in Raphael’s portrait (National Gallery, London).
7. Gonfalonier in January and February 1514, he was married to Lucrezia, the eldest daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
8. Baccio Bandinelli (1488–1560) changed the family name of Brandini to make it that of a noble Sienese house. His father was a respected goldsmith in Florence. Knighted by both Pope and Emperor (hence the Cavaliere) Baccio Bandinelli, invariably referred to contemptuously by Cellini, constantly and hopelessly tried to rival Michelangelo. His sculptures include reliefs in the cathedral and the Hercules and Cacus in Florence.
9. A famous condottiere best known as Giovanni dalle Bande Nere (1498–1526) from the black ensigns carried by his soldiers, this descendant of the Medici and the Sforzas was to die bravely from wounds received in battle; his son by Maria Salviati became Cosimo I, Duke of Tuscany.
10. A board of magistrates responsible for keeping law and order inside Florence.
11. Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534) the illegitimate cousin of Giovanni de’ Medici who made him Archbishop of Florence in 1513. As Pope Clement VII (1523–34) he proved himself a great patron of the arts, a grim failure as pontiff.
12. Piero or Pietro Torrigiano (1472–1528) a neglected and underrated artist who studied under the Florentine master Bertoldo and is remembered for having broken the nose of Michelangelo, not without provocation, when they were both young. He worked in England in Westminster Abbey on the too little appreciated tombs of Margaret Beaufort and of Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth of York. A forceful, entrepreneurial artist, according to Vasari’s doubtful account of his end, he starved himself to death in Spain after being charged with heresy and thrown into prison.
13. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) after learning the elements of fresco painting in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, started to work as a sculptor under Medici patronage and carved his first important works (the Bacchus and the St Peter’s Pietà) in Rome. He then worked in Florence from 1501 to 1505, carving the giant David after whose completion in 1504 he began the enormously influential cartoon for a great fresco in the Council Hall of the Florentine Republic, showing a dramatic incident in the Pisan war. This Battle of Cascina was left unfinished when Michelangelo was recalled to Rome by Pope Julius II.
14. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) in 1500 returned from Milan, after its occupation by the French, to Florence where he worked on three important projects: the wall-painting to commemorate the Florentine victory of the battle of Anghiari; several versions of the Madonna and Child (sometimes with St Anne); and the technically brilliant portrait in oils known as the Mona Lisa or La Gioconda.
15. The Sistine Chapel was built as a ceremonial papal chapel and sanctuary for Pope Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere, 1414–84), decorated by painters from Umbria and Florence, including Ghirlandaio, and magnificently transformed by Michelangelo through his stupendous frescos on the vault, of the history of mankind awaiting salvation from the time of creation and the fall (1508–12), and of the Last Judgement over the high altar (1536–41).
16. One of the greatest innovatory masters of the fifteenth century, Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Monte Cassai (1401 to circa 1428) – nicknamed Sloppy Tom or Masaccio – with Masolino (Tommaso di Christofano Fini) (circa 1383 to after 1435) decorated the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine with scenes from the Life of St Peter, later completed by Filippino Lippi, which long served as a school for artists for their vitality, grandeur and realism.
17. Filippino Lippi (1457–1504), son of the Carmelite painter, Fra Filippo, had three sons, of whom the goldsmith Giovanni Francesco was born on 15 May 1501.
18. Battista di Marco del Tasso (1500–1555) was a skilled woodcarver, and a lifelong friend of Cellini. He was encouraged by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici to turn himself into a (not very good) architect, as noted by Vasari in his Life of Tribolo.
19. This Lombard craftsman, Giovanni de’ Giorgio, shared a shop with two other goldsmiths, Giovanni da Caravaggio and Giannotto Giannotti (see below) and later served for the year 1528 as consul of the guild in Rome.
20. This was the b
rother of the scholar and political writer Donato Giannotti who became one of Michelangelo’s close friends in Rome.
21. The monument della Rotonda, the Pantheon (AD 118–25) was converted into a Christian church by Pope Boniface IV (608–15). The porphyry sarcophagus copied by Cellini survives in the Lateran on the tomb of Pope Clement XII.
22. A member of the Goldsmiths’ Guild, Arsago (died by 1563) kept his shop in Rome by the beautiful sixteenth-century church of Sant’ Eligio, patron of goldsmiths.
23. Cellini’s Treatises contains succinct praise for Salvadore Guasconti as a versatile craftsman, who had done praiseworthy work in niello and enamel.
24. This ‘Fatty’ was a priest, Giovan Battista, whose brother Benedetto Varchi (1503–65) was a famous scholar and writer, closely involved with the foundation of the Florentine Academy in 1540, painted by Titian and an important correspondent with Michelangelo. Varchi was a follower of the Strozzi family in exile till recalled to Florence in 1543 by Duke Cosimo who commissioned him to write an account of Florence’s recent history.
25. For his first assault on Gherardo Guasconti, Cellini was fined not four but twelve bushels of flour, and both sides had to promise to keep the peace. At the second sitting of the Otto di guardia e balia after Cellini’s second assault on Gherardo with a stiletto he was condemned to death by hanging (Cellini’s phrase is literally that he was to be marched out into the country i.e. to the place of execution outside the city). The records show that Cellini severely wounded both Gherardo and one of his helpers.
Also in 1523 Cellini had been charged with sodomy before the Otto and as an adult first offender fined twelve bushels of flour. This ‘first Cellini conviction is not unusual… it is typical of the kind of association and practice one finds at this time’. (Cf. ‘The writer and the man… il caso Cellini’, Paolo Rossi in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, 1994.)
26. This Bishop of Salamanca, Don Francesco de Bobadilla, arrived in Rome in 1522 to attend the Lateran Council and died in Spain in 1529. During the sack of Rome and the siege in 1527 he had been immured with Pope Clement VII in Castel Sant’Angelo.
Gianfrancesco Penni (1496 to after 1528) – called il Fattore – was Raphael’s pupil, friend and co-heir with Giulio Romano. Vasari included him in his Lives of the artists, praising him as a good colourist and a great help to Raphael.
27. Chigi (c. 1466–1520), an immensely wealthy and ostentatious banker who had a controlling interest in the distribution of papal alum, was a special patron and friend of Raphael, and of many other artists and men of letters. His splendid villa in the Trastevere (Villa Farnesina) was planned by Baldassare Peruzzi. Of Chigi the story is told that at a banquet he held in a loggia by the Tiber, the silver was thrown into the river after each course (but with a hidden net in position for its recovery).
28. The wife of Sigismondo Chigi was Sulpicia (Petrucci) of Siena, whose younger sister was Porzia, or Portia.
29. The Italian phrases are quelle bordellerie and sue coglionerie.
30. The wife and cousin of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–80) notorious for her lust and beauty.
31. The Italian phrase is il ferragosto; surely the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, held on 15 August, though the word may derive from the Roman Feriae Augusti of I August.
32. The Belvedere was planned as a loggia and garden by Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92) and grew into a splendid summer villa with fine views of the countryside. Julius II employed Bramante to build elaborate corridors from the Apostolic Palace to the pavilion, forming the spectacular Belvedere courtyard, around which developed the ever-growing complex of Vatican gardens and piazzas, galleries and museums.
33. Cellini’s word was Marrani, abusively used to describe Moors and Jews forced to convert to Christianity.
34. This was Innocenzo Cibo (d. 1550), son of Maddalena, the sister of Giovanni de’ Medici (Leo X) who elevated him to the purple in 1513. A generous patron of writers and artists, he was much involved in the politics of the period.
35. The nephew of the renowned Queen of Cyprus, Caterina, Marco Cornaro was made a cardinal in 1500 and died in Venice in 1524. Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi was Bishop of Florence and nephew of Giovanni de’ Medici, Leo X; he died in 1550. Giovanni di Jacopo Salviati was another nephew of Giovanni de’ Medici, created cardinal in 1517 along with Ridolfi and twenty-nine others, chosen to pack the Sacred College with supporters following a failed conspiracy against the Pope’s life.
36. On 24 June Florentines celebrate the feast day of their patron saint. Their ‘national’ church in Rome – San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini – was begun by Jacopo Sansovino after a competition ordered by Leo X.
37. Rosso – for his red hair – was the handsome, talented, charming Florentine Giovanbattista di Jacopo (1494–1540) whom Cellini was to meet later in Paris. He was strongly influenced by Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina cartoon and by the nudes of the Sistine ceiling, and in turn influenced mid-sixteenth-century French painters. His surviving works include the painting of the Dead Christ in the Louvre.
38. Lorenzo da Ceri served the Venetians, the Pope, and then the French as a condottiere against the Imperialists. Not very successful, he died in 1528.
39. Lautizio, a respected Perugian goldsmith, the son of Bartolomeo Rotelli, was also mentioned by Cellini in his Treatise on goldsmithing (and later in the Life) as a specialist in making cardinals’ seals. With Cesare Rossetti (Cesarino) he was appointed superintendent of the Mint at Perugia in 1516, and he died in 1527.
40. Cristoforo Foppa originally from Pavia (c. 1452–1526/7) who, Cellini wrote in his Treatises, was a splendid goldsmith, especially good at enamelling, and who served several popes.
41. Minerva, the Roman goddess identified with the Greek Athena, represented Wisdom and War and protected mankind’s arts and crafts, including those of the potters and the goldsmiths. Renaissance artists used her image frequently using classical prototypes. Hercules, the most acclaimed of the gods of ancient Greece, adventurous, often imperilled, was the mortal hero who won immortality through his famous twelve labours and stood for the virtue of Hope. His penultimate labour was to bring Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog of Hades, into this world from the Underworld.
42. Iacomo Berengario da Carpi, professor at Pavia and then Bologna, famous doctor and pioneering anatomist with an eye for the main chance. He wrote about syphilis which was spreading fast in Europe at this time. He was the third husband of Lucrezia Borgia.
43. Alfonso I d’Este (d. 1534) ruler of Ferrara who is remembered as a patron of artists including Bellini and Titian and of Ludovico Ariosto, creator of the heroic epic, Orlando Furioso.
44. Domenico di Cristofano Iacobacci, Roman nobleman and lawyer, made a cardinal by Leo X in 1517 and died in 1528.
45. Cerveteri is a village near Bracciano. The count was probably Averso di Flaminio of Anguillara whose daughter married Giordano di Valerio Orsini, a general of the Venetian Republic.
46. Michelagnolo di Bernardino di Michele (d. 1540) a pupil of Giacomo Cozzarelli, he executed the tomb of Pope Adrian VI in Santa Maria dell’Anima dei Tedeschi in Rome, following the designs of the influential painter and architect, Baldassare Peruzzi.
47. Giulio Romano (1499–1546) son of Piero Pippi, painter and architect, pupil and one of the heirs of Raphael, who also taught him architecture. Giulio worked in the Vatican and then in Mantua for Duke Federico II Gonzaga; his drawings of different modes of copulation were used for the engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi which inspired the notorious sonnets by Pietro Aretino.
48. Francesco Ubertini (1494–1557) who trained with Perugino but was also influenced by Northern prints and by his Florentine contemporaries such as del Sarto and Bronzino. He later worked for Duke Cosimo I.
49. The handsome Bithynian youth who was loved by the Emperor Hadrian (reigned AD 117–38), and who after drowning in the Nile in AD 130 inspired several romantic legends. By at least 1520, a Roman statu
e of a nude youth whose Greek pose appealed to many Renaissance artists was known in Rome.
50. Probably Eurialo Morani from Ascoli, well known at the court of Leo X as a wit and versifier.
51. The Flemish Adrian VI was pope for a short while (1522–3) between the Medici pontiffs Leo X and Clement VII. He was a devout canon lawyer intent on reform of the Church.
52. Federico II Gonzaga (1500–1540) for whom Giulio Romano worked especially on decorating the Palazzo del Tè.
53. Luigi Pulci was also grandson of the talented Florentine poet Luigi Pulci (1432–84) who wrote notably the burlesque, chivalrous and influential poem Morgante.
54. A rare reference to any concern with music on the part of Michelangelo.
55. Giovanni di Baldassarre (d. 1536) who was also a sculptor, a friend of the painter Perino del Vaga and collaborator of Michelangelo, criticized by Giorgio Vasari in his Life of Bastiano da San Gallo for keeping bad company and for slanderous talk that led to his murder.
56. Girolamo Balbo, Bishop of Gurck in Carinthia (d. 1555), a poet, Latin orator and envoy.
57. Benvegnato Narducci of Perugia, at one time papal governor of Ostia.
58. ‘Era di già tutto il mondo in arme’ Cellini wrote, referring to the war between the Emperor Charles V and the French king, Francis I, from 1521 to 1529 which ended in the uneasy peace of Cambrai and with the humiliation of the Pope and the French, the final restoration of the Medici to Florence, and the assertion of Imperial power over most of Italy.
59. Salviati from a patrician Florentine family was related by marriage to Pope Clement but ‘Savonarolan’ – against the tight control of the Medici government
– in political sympathies. His son-in-law, the dashing Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, died in December 1526 after being wounded in a skirmish against the Imperialist soldiers, as movingly described in one of the memorably glowing letters of Pietro Aretino.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini Page 51
