V. BENVENUTO CELLINI: 1500–71
There was in this age at the court of Cosimo a man who united in his character all the violence and sensitivity, all the mad pursuit of beauty in life and art, all the exhilarating pride of health, skill, or power, that distinguished the Renaissance; who, moreover, possessed the spontaneous capacity to pour forth his thoughts and feelings, vicissitudes and accomplishments, in one of the most engaging and unforgettable of all autobiographies. Benvenuto was not—no one man could be—completely typical of the Renaissance genius; he lacked the piety of Angelico, the craft of Machiavelli, the modesty of Castiglione, the blithe suavity of Raphael; and surely not all Italian artists of the time took the law into their own hands as Benvenuto did. Yet, as we read his turbulent narrative, we feel that his book, more than any other, more even than Vasari’s Lives, takes us behind the scenes, and into the heart, of the Renaissance.
He begins disarmingly:
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; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed the age of forty. This duty occurs to my own mind, now that I am traveling beyond the term of fifty-eight years, and am in Florence, the city of my birth.
He is proud that he was “born humble” and made his family famous; at the same time he assures us that he was descended from a captain of Julius Caesar; “in a work like this,” he warns us, “there will always be found occasion for natural bragging.”35 He was called Benvenuto—welcome—because his parents expected a girl and were pleasantly surprised. His grand father (probably violating all of Cornaro’s precepts) lived a hundred years; Cellini, inheriting his vitality, crowded as many into seventy-one. His father was an engineer, a worker in ivory, and a devotee of the flute; his fond hope was that Benvenuto would become a professional flutist and play in the band at the Medici court; in later years he seems to have derived more pleasure from hearing that his son had become a flutist in Pope Clement’s private orchestra than from the goldsmithery by which the youth was earning florins and fame.
But Benvenuto was enamored of beautiful forms rather than of melodious sounds. He saw some of the work of Michelangelo, and caught the fever of art. He studied the cartoon for The Battle of Pisa, and was so impressed by it that even the Sistine Chapel ceiling seemed to him less marvelous. Against his father’s pleading he apprenticed himself to a goldsmith, but in filial compromise he continued to practise the hated flute. In Filippino Lippi’s house he found a book of drawings representing the art antiquities of Rome. He burned with desire to see those renowned exemplars with his own eyes, and often he talked with his friends about going to the capital. One day he and a young woodcarver, Giambattista Tasso, walking aimlessly and talking passionately, found themselves at the gate San Piero Gattolini; Benvenuto remarked that he felt himself already halfway from Florence to Rome; on a mutual dare they walked on, mile after mile, until they reached Siena, thirty-three miles away. There Gian’s feet rebelled. Cellini had money enough to hire a horse; the two youths rode the one animal, and, “singing and laughing, we traveled the whole way to Rome. I had just nineteen years then, and so had the century.”36
In Rome he found work as a goldsmith, studied the ancient remains, and earned enough to send his father consolatory sums. But the doting father pled so earnestly for his return that after two years Benvenuto went back to Florence. He had hardly domiciled himself there when he stabbed a youth in a quarrel. Thinking he had killed him, he fled again to Rome (1521). He pored over Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s in the Villa Chigi and the Vatican; he noted all interesting forms and lines in men and women, metals and foliage; soon he was the best goldsmith in Rome. Clement took to him first as a flutist, then discovered his excellence in design. Cellini made such handsome coins for him that the Pope appointed him “stamp master of the papal mint”—i.e., designer of currency for the Papal States. Each cardinal had a seal, sometimes “as large as the head of a twelve-year-old child,” which was used to impress the wax that sealed a letter; some such seals were worth a hundred crowns ($1250?). Cellini engraved seals and coins, cut and set gems, modeled medallions, enameled cameos, made a hundred varieties of objects in silver and gold. These “various departments of art,” he writes, “are very different from one another, so that a man who excels in one of them, if he undertakes another, hardly ever achieves the same success; whereas I strove with all my power to become equally versed in all of them; and in the proper place I shall demonstrate that I attained my object.”37
Benvenuto brags on almost every page, but with such consistency and ardor that at last we come to believe him. He speaks of his “fine physiognomy and bodily symmetry,” and we cannot deny it. “Nature bestowed on me a temperament so happy, and of such excellent parts, that I was freely able to accomplish whatever it pleased me to take in hand.” Among these pleasant objects was “a girl of great beauty and grace, whom I used as a model.… I used frequently to pass the night with her…. After indulgence in sexual pleasure my slumber is sometimes very deep.”38 From one such slumber he woke to find himself host to the “French disease.” In fifty days he was cured, and took another mistress.
We glimpse the lawlessness of Italian city life in the sixteenth century when we note with what easy conscience Cellini overrode the commandments of Church and state. Apparently the policing of Rome was lax and fragmentary; a man of strong instincts could be—sometimes had to be—a law unto himself. When provoked Benvenuto “felt a fever” which “would have been my death had I not resolved to give it vent”;39 when offended “I thought I ought to act as well as intone my misereres”40 He fell into a hundred quarrels, and, he assures us, was in the right in all but one. He stuck a dagger into the neck of one offender, and with such matador precision that the man fell dead.41 In another case “I stabbed him just beneath the ear. I gave him only two blows, for he fell stone dead at the second. I had not meant to kill him, but, as the saying goes, knocks are not dealt out by measure.”42
His theology was as independent as his morality. Since he was always right (but once), he felt that God must be on his side, giving more power to his arm; he prayed to God for aid in his murders, and gave Him due credit for his success. However, when God failed to answer his prayers to help him find his lost love Angelica, he turned to devils for supplementary aid. A Sicilian sorcerer took him to the deserted Colosseum at night, drew a magic circle in the ground, lit a fire, sprinkled perfumes on the flames, and with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin invocations summoned demons to appear. Benvenuto was sure that hundreds of phantoms rose before him, and that they predicted his early reunion with Angelica. He returned to his house, and spent the rest of the night seeing devils.43
When the imperial army sacked Rome Cellini fled to the Castel Sant’ Angelo, and served as a gunner; it was one of his shots, he avers, that killed the Duke of Bourbon; and it was his expert marksmanship that kept the besiegers at a distance from the Castle, so saving the Pope, the cardinals, and Benvenuto. We do not know how true this is; but we have it on the same authority that when Clement returned to Rome he made Cellini a mace-bearer with a salary of 200 crowns ($2500?) a year, and said: “Were I but a wealthy emperor, I would give Benvenuto as much land as my eyes could survey; yet, being now but a needy bankrupt, I will at any rate give him bread enough to satisfy his need.”44