The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Summary

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is the life story of a Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, dictated in his late fifties and carried from his birth on All Saints' night in 1500 to 1562. It opens with Cellini's claim that anyone who has done excellent work and is honest should write his own life after forty, and with his ancestry and childhood: his father Giovanni, a musician and maker of instruments, wants him to be a flute-player, and once boxes his ears so that he will remember the salamander they have seen in the fire. Apprenticed to goldsmiths, the boy studies the cartoons of Michelangelo, whom he reveres all his life, and refuses to go to England with the sculptor Torrigiani after hearing him boast of breaking Michelangelo's nose. Book I follows him to Rome, where he makes jewels, medals and vessels for cardinals and for Pope Clement VII, survives the plague of 1523-24, and makes vases for the surgeon Giacomo da Carpi. In the Sack of Rome in 1527 he fights from the walls and from Castel Sant'Angelo, and claims to have shot the Constable of Bourbon and wounded the Prince of Orange. Quarrels, duels and killings follow, including the death of the Milanese jeweller Pompeo, and Cellini is pardoned more than once by Paul III. He joins a priest's necromantic conjuring in the Colosseum, catches and cures himself of the French disease with guaiac wood, and in 1538 is imprisoned in Castel Sant'Angelo on a charge of stealing papal jewels. He escapes down a rope of sheets, breaks his leg, is recaptured, reads the Bible in a dark dungeon, despairs to the point of trying to take his life, and receives a vision of the sun, Christ and the Madonna before an attempt to poison him with powdered diamond fails. Released through the Cardinal of Ferrara for the service of Francis I, he goes to France in Book II, works at Paris and Fontainebleau on the great gold salt-cellar and a colossal Jupiter, and quarrels with the king's mistress Madame d'Étampes. Returning to Florence in 1545, he takes service with Duke Cosimo I and undertakes the bronze Perseus. The casting, which he narrates in a celebrated chapter, is saved during a fever when he throws his household pewter into the furnace; the statue is unveiled in the Loggia in 1554 to public praise. The later chapters record his rivalry with the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, disputes over pay, a farm bought from a man he accuses of poisoning him, the marble crucifix, and a break-off in 1562. Cellini dictated much of the work to a boy assistant, the manuscript circulated privately, and it was first printed in 1728; Goethe translated it into German, and the library text is John Addington Symonds's English translation of 1888.

Top Lessons

• The discipline behind a masterpiece

  The casting of the Perseus in Book II shows years of modelling, a furnace built to Cellini's design, the failure of the metal to flow, and his decision to throw two hundred pewter dishes into the channels. Great art here depends on technical knowledge, risk and stubborn labour as much as on genius.

• Pride, honour and the price of anger

  Cellini measures himself by honour and answers insults with the dagger, and he narrates his killings and quarrels without shame. The book also shows what this costs him: exile, flight, papal displeasure and the long imprisonment of 1538. Readers watch a gifted man repeatedly undone by his own temper.

• Conversion in the dungeon

  In the dark cell of Castel Sant'Angelo Cellini reads the Bible from the beginning, sings psalms, despairs, is held back from self-destruction, and sees a vision of Christ and the Madonna in the sun. He interprets his deliverance as grace, and the prison chapters are the most explicitly religious in the book.

• Patrons and artists

  Popes, a king and a duke compete for Cellini's work, yet he must flatter, plead for payment and guard against courtiers and rivals. The book is a close record of how Renaissance art was commissioned, paid for and judged, and of how dependent the artist was on powerful favour.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Cellini's book is a lay patient's record of sixteenth-century Italian medicine. He lives through plague in Rome and Florence, describes his dealings with the surgeon and anatomist Giacomo Berengario da Carpi, whose treatment of the French disease made his fortune, and reports his own syphilis: rose-coloured blisters appearing months after infection, physicians who would not name it, and his cure by the decoction of guaiac wood, the New World remedy then in fashion, with strict diet, against the advice of leading Roman doctors. The castellan of Castel Sant'Angelo suffers yearly fits in which he believes himself an oil-jar, a frog, a dead man or a bat; Cellini calls these hypochondriac notions in the older sense and records the doctors' use of distraction, a period example of what would later be called periodic psychosis, though any modern label is a reading. In prison Cellini despairs and tries to end his life before an invisible force throws him back, then sees visions of the sun, Christ and the Madonna; readers have interpreted these as religious experience, as effects of darkness and deprivation, or both. He describes the setting of his broken leg after the escape, an attempted poisoning with powdered diamond (which he believes was ground too coarsely, a period belief about diamond dust), a later suspected poisoning by sublimate, fever during the Perseus casting, and the malarial fever of the Maremma that kills Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici at the close.

• Book I, Chapters XXVII-XXX

  Plague in Rome and Cellini's work for the surgeon Giacomo da Carpi, famous for treating the French disease.

• Book I, Chapter LIX

  Cellini's own case of the French disease and his fifty-day cure by guaiac wood and abstinence.

• Book I, Chapter LXIV

  The necromantic conjuring in the Colosseum and the terror of the participants.

• Book I, Chapter CVII

  The castellan's yearly delusions that he is an oil-jar, a frog, dead, or a bat, and the doctors' attempts to distract him.

• Book I, Chapters CVIII-CIX

  The escape down a rope of sheets, the broken leg and its treatment.

• Book I, Chapters CXVIII-CXXII

  Despair in the dark dungeon, an attempt at self-destruction stopped by an unseen force, and the vision of the sun.

• Book I, Chapters CXXV-CXXVI

  The plot to kill him with pounded diamond in his food and his examination of the powder.

• Book II, Chapters LXXV-LXXVII

  Fever and expectation of death during the casting of the Perseus, followed by sudden recovery.

• Book II, Chapter CXIII

  The bad air of the Sienese Maremma and the fatal fever of Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici.