Paul III continued Clement’s patronage. Probably exaggerating to his heart’s delight, Cellini quotes Paul as saying, to one who protested his lenience with the artist: “Know then that men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, stand above the law; and how far more, then, he who received the provocation I have heard of.”45 But Paul’s son Pierluigi, as reckless a rascal as Benvenuto himself, turned the Pope against the artist. Even Cellini’s arts proved inadequate to overcome such influence, and in 1537 he abandoned his shop in Rome and made for France. On the way he was handsomely entertained by Bembo at Padua, made a small portrait of him, and was in return presented with horses for himself and his two companions. They mounted and descended the Grisons, and rode through Zurich, Lausanne, Geneva, and Lyons to Paris. There too Benvenuto found enemies. Giovanni de’ Rossi, Florentine painter, wanted no more rivals for the King’s money; he put difficulties in the way of the newcomer; and when at last Cellini got to Francis he found him inextricably tangled in war. III and homesick, he climbed back over the Alps, made a pilgrimage to Loreto, and crossed the Apennines to Rome. To his dismay he found himself accused by Pierluigi of having embezzled papal jewelry. He was flung into the same Castello that he had helped to save, and suffered months of imprisonment. He escaped, but broke a leg in the process; captured, he was confined in an underground dungeon for two years. He was released at the request of Francis I, who now urgently solicited his services in France. Once more he clambered over the Alps (1540).
He found King and court at Fontana Belio—i.e., Fontainebleau; was warmly welcomed, and was assigned a castle in Paris for his workshop and home. When its occupants refused to leave he expelled them by force. The French did not like his manners or his language, and Mme d’Étampes, the King’s mistress, resented Cellini’s lack of courtesy to her high estate. When she heard how he had thrown out of the castle windows the furniture of the tenants whom he had dispossessed, she warned Francis that “that devil will sack Paris one of these days.”46 The merry monarch enjoyed the story, forgave Cellini’s violence for his artistry, and paid him 700 crowns a year ($8750?), 500 more for the expenses of his trip from Rome, and promised an additional sum for each work of art that Cellini should produce for him. Benvenuto was proud to learn that these were the same terms that had been given to Leonardo twenty-four years before.47
One of the dispossessed tenants sued him in court on a charge of stealing some effects. The court decided against Cellini. He reversed the judgment in his own striking way:
When I perceived that my cause had been unjustly lost, I had recourse for my defense to a great dagger which I carried; for I have always taken pleasure in keeping fine weapons. The first man I attacked was the plaintiff who had sued me; and one evening I wounded him in the legs and arms so severely, taking care, however, not to kill him, that I deprived him of the use of both his legs.48
Apparently the plaintiff dared not press the matter further, and Cellini could turn his energies to other outlets. He had in his Paris studio “a poor young girl, Caterina; I keep her principally for my art’s sake, since I cannot do without a model; but being a man also, I have used her for my pleasure.”49 However Caterina, with yielding largesse, slept also with his helper, Pagolo Micceri. Benvenuto, learning of it, beat her till he was exhausted. His servant Roberta reproved him for punishing so violently so ordinary an incident; did he not know that “there’s not a husband in France without horns”? The next day he modeled from Caterina again, “during which occurred some amorous diversions; and at last, on the same hour as on the previous day, she irritated me to such a pitch that I gave her the same drubbing. So we went on for several days, repeating the same round…. Meanwhile I completed my work in a style which did me the greatest credit.”50 Another model, Jeanne, presented him with a daughter; he settled a dowry on the mother, “and from that time I had nothing more to do with her.”51 The child was later smothered by its nurse.
Francis bore patiently with all this lawlessness; but finally Benvenuto had so many enemies in Paris that he begged the King’s permission to visit Italy. Consent was not given, but Cellini took French leave, and, after an arduous trip, found himself in his native Florence (1545). There he showed a better side of his nature, contributing materially to the support of his sister and her six daughters. He found Cosimo less openhanded than Francis. He made the usual enemies, but he cast a good portrait bust of the Duke (in the Bargello), and produced for him his most celebrated work—the Perseus that still stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi. He tells a vivid story of the casting. His anxieties, toil, and exposure to heat and cold culminated in a severe fever that compelled him to take to his bed just when the furnace that he had designed especially for this work was melting the metal, and this proved insufficient to fill the gigantic mold. The labor of months was about to be spoiled when Cellini rose from his bed and threw into the furnace a block of tin and two hundred pewter vessels. These proved enough; the casting was a complete success; and when the work was exposed to public view (1554) it was praised as highly as any statue made in Florence since Michelangelo’s David; even Bandinelli said a good word for it.
From this climax the story descends to prosaic pages of haggling with the Duke about the fee for the Perseus. Benvenuto was long on expectations, Cosimo was short of funds. The narrative abruptly ends at 1562. It does not mention the fact, otherwise fairly well established, that in 1556 Benvenuto was twice imprisoned, apparently on charges of criminal immorality.52 In these late years Cellini composed a treatise on the goldsmith’s art—Trattato… dell’ Orificeria. Having sown wild oats for half a century, he married in 1564, and had two legitimate children to add to one illegitimate child begotten in France and five generated in Florence after his return.
Of his works—usually small enough to be readily movable—only a few can now be located and identified. The Treasury of St. Peter’s has an ornate silver candelabrum attributed to Cellini; the Bargello preserves his Narcissus and his Ganymede, both in marble, and both excellent; the Pitti has a salver and a pitcher in silver; the Louvre has his fine medallion of Bembo, and a lovely bronze relief called The Nymph of Fontainebleau; Vienna claims the saltcellar made for Francis I; the Gardner Collection in Boston has his bust of Altoviti; his large Crucifixion is in the Escorial. These scattered specimens hardly equip us to judge Cellini as an artist; they seem too slight for his fame, and even the Perseus, violent and overwrought, inclines to the baroque. Yet Clement VII (we have it on Benvenuto’s word) rated him as “the greatest artist in his craft who was ever born”;53 and an extant letter of Michelangelo to Cellini reads: “I have known you all these years as the greatest goldsmith of whom the world has ever heard.”54 We may conclude that Cellini was a genius and a ruffian, a master craftsman and a murderer, whose spirited Autobiography outshines his silver and gold and cameos, and reconciles us to the morals of our time.
VI. LESSER LIGHTS
This age of decline for Italy was a resurrection for Savoy. As a lad of eight Emmanuel Philibert might have seen the French invade and conquer the duchy (1536). At twenty-five he inherited its crown but not its soil; at twenty-nine he played a leading part in the victory of the Spanish and the English over the French at St. Quentin (1557); and two years later France surrendered to him his ruined country and bankrupt throne. His regeneration of Savoy and Piedmont was a masterpiece of statesmanship. The Alpine slopes of his duchy were the haunts of Vaudois heretics, who were progressively transforming Catholic churches into whitewashed conventicles of Calvinist worship. Pope Pius IV offered him a year’s ecclesiastical revenues to suppress the sect; Emmanuel took some drastic measures; but when these resulted in large-scale emigration he turned to a policy of tolerance, checked the ardor of the Inquisition, and gave asylum to Huguenot refugees. He founded a new university at Turin, and financed the compilation of an encyclopedia—Teatro universale di tutte le scienze. He was always courteous, and repeatedly unfaithful, to his wife, Margaret of Valois, who gave him wise counsel and diplomatic aid, and who presided over the bright social and intellectual life of Turin. When Emmanuel died (1580) his duchy was one of the best-governed lands in Europe. From his line in the nineteenth century would come the kings of united Italy.