Benvenuto Cellini was one of the enigmatic, larger-than-life figures of the Italian Renaissance: a celebrated sculptor, goldsmith, author and soldier, but also a hooligan and even avenging killer.
An artist of genius who had a terrible character, which was often to lead him into trouble with the law. He wrote a treatise on sculpture and the art of goldsmithery (Florence 1568) and a picturesque autobiography (1558-66) published in Naples in 1728, which is an excellent description of the artistic climate of his times and has inspired both the theatre and the cinema.
Born in Florence, son of Giovanni, a musician and builder of musical instruments, and Elisabetta Granacci, Benvenuto received his early artistic training from the Florentine goldsmith Marcone (Antonio di Sandro). From the age of fourteen, Cellini began to frequent numerous workshops. According to Florentine custom, drawing had to be practised above all, as it was considered the instrument for passing on decorative invention, technical solutions, and moreover, the fundamental means for planning the work in all its details before its execution.
Cellini's first major brush with the law came when he was 16 - his fiery temper and continual dueling and brawling caused him to be exiled to Siena. Nere he received his artistic training from Francesco Castoro, a goldsmith of Siena. After further visits to Bologna and Pisa, Cellini was allowed to return to Florence and continue his work there.
In 1519 after being involved in another brawl he fled to Rome. Here he was Michelangelo 's pupil for a short while, remaining there until the city's fall to the Spanish Emperor in 1527. Among Cellini's surviving works dating to this early period in his career is a gold medallion with carved stone inset, Leda and the Swan, created for Gonfaloniere Gabbrello Cesarino and now in the collection of the museum at Vienna. Another of his patrons in the period was Cardinal Patriarch Marco Cornaro, of the powerful Cornaro della Regina family of Venice.
If his own later account is to be believed, Cellini played a remarkable role in the ultimately unsuccessful defense of Rome in 1527, slaying the Constable of Bourbon in one attack and later killing Philibert, Prince of Orange, as well. After a brief stay in Florence, where he concentrated on producing medals (including Hercules and the Numean Lion in gold repousse and Atlas Supporting the Sphere in chased gold), Cellini returned again to Rome. Among his notable works for Pope Clement VII during this period were a peace commemorative medallion depicting the Pope, 1530, a chalice (not completed), and a magnificent morse (= button) for the Pope's cope.
He then stayed in Florence and Mantova, returning to Rome to open his own goldsmith's workshop in 1529 under the protection of Pope Clement VII: he carried out works inspired by the drawings of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raffaello and Filippino Lippi. Then his work was interrupted again by one of the recurrent storm clouds that characterized his career: In 1529 he killed a man who had early killed Cellini's brother and, in another incident, wounded a notary of the city. Celini fled briefly to Naples but, upon the accession of Pope Paul III, returned to Rome. His stay this time was brief, however, culminating in a dispute with Pietro Alvise Farnese, the Pope's natural son, and flight to Florence and Venice.
While at Florence he executed, 1535, a 40-soldi coin for Alessandro de Medici, depicting the Duke on one side and Saints Cosmo and Damian on the obverse. Fences were mended in Rome, however, and soon Cellini was back in Rome and back in favor. There he continued to produce coins and medals for the new Pope as he had for his predecessor. He also executed a gold prayerbook cover for Pope Paul III to give to Emperor Charles V.
The next storm cloud was imprisonment on a charge (perhaps false) of stealing gems from the papal treasury during the Sack of Rome. He was arrested on October 16, 1538 and imprisoned in Castel sant'Angelo. He attempted an adventurous escape by making a rope of cut-up sheets tied together and climbing down from the keep, but he was confined again and subjected to a harsh regime.
During this period, the artist reflected deeply on his life and underwent religious conversion, which culminated with a vision of Christ crucified and the Virgin in the luminous circle of the sun, an image which he started to model in wax. The intercession of Cardinal d'Este of Ferrara (for whom he had created a silver cup) and of the King of France, Francis I, meant that he was freed at the beginning of November 1539. Cellini left Rome for the last time. His destination this time was the court of King Francis I of France, who invitend him to Paris in 1540. Here he modeled the bronze reliefs of the Nymph of Fontainebleau (Louvre, Paris). He also executed an elaborate gold saltcellar for Francis (1539-43, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).
In his Vita, he described the marvellous Salt Cellar, which had originally been intended for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este but was finally created for Francis I. At the beginning of the present century, a Viennese historian, Julius Schlosser, recognized it in the collection of the Austrian imperial crown, thanks to Cellini's words:
"It was oval in form, and was about two thirds of an arm's length. The whole work was crafted with the chisel. I portrayed Mars and the Earth, seated opposite each other and with the legs intertwined. The waves of the water were beautifully enamelled with their natural colour. The Earth was represented by the figure of a beautiful woman who held the cornucopia in her hand. She was completely naked, as was Mars. I placed the finished on an ebony base, which I decorated with four gold figures in half relief. These four figures represented Night, Day, Dusk and Dawn." (Vita, II, XXXVI).
Compelled to leave in 1545 because of his quarrels with the king's mistress and his eccentricities, Cellini returned to Florence, where he remained until his death in 1571. At Florence Cellini created one of the most celebrated works of his long career and one of the notable monuments of the Italian Renaissance, the bronze figure Perseus holding the Head of Medusa.
Cellini was careful to keep this fairly close to the body and, after several attempts, which can be read about in his memoires, he managed to complete the epic cast by throwing all his pots and pans into the furnace and feeding the flames with his household furniture. He carried out the four statuettes in the niches of the pedestal (Jove, Mercury, Minerva and Danae) and the bas-relief with Perseus freeing Andromeda later, in 1552. Nine years after being commissioned, in 1554, the Perseus was exhibited under the Loggia and was immediately acclaimed by the whole city. Other acclaimed statuary of the period include Ganymede on the Eagle and a bust of Cosimo I de Medici, both now in the Bargello Museum in Florence.
Cellini was a member of the ruling class of the city who had been co-opted into the official cultural body of the State, in the form of the Florentine Academy, for which he also planned some models of seals, as is shown in the project contained in this drawing. But il 1557 Cellini was sentenced to four years imprisonment for sodomy. The Grand.Duke commuted the dsentence to four years of house arrestduring which Cellini sculpted a Crucifiction and began writing his Autobiography.
However, in the last few years of his life, the reasons for his dissent with the Duke's choices in style and cultural policies increase. For example, when the tender for the commissioning of the fountain of Neptune was announced, the young sculptor Bartolomeo Ammannati, who was under Vasari's protection, was chosen instead of Cellini. A few years later when the arrangements for Michelangelo's funeral were being made, Cellini clashed with Vasari and Vincenzo Borghini over who was to be assigned the task of executing the sculptures and paintings that would eulogize the life and merits of the great artist. Cellini, who favoured the preeminence of sculpture, found himself in a minority and spurned.
The artist's last years in Florence were bitter and lonely, he was a man that belonged to a time that had by now come to an end. Because of the arguments he had been involved in the previous year, he was not called upon to participate in the preparations of the marriage of Cosimo I's son, Francis I, in 1565. The artist tried to take on a new rôle as a writer of treatises on the goldsmith's art and sculpture and in 1568, the year of the second edition of the Vite of Vasari, he was able to publish his Trattati (Treatises), under the patronage of the Cardinal de'Medici. When he died in Florence, the artist bequeathed all the sculptures to be found in his studio to Francis I.
Much of Cellini's notoriety, and perhaps even fame, derives from his memoirs, begun in 1558 and abandoned in 1562, which were published posthumously under the title The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. As noted by one biographer, "His amours and hatreds, his passions and delights, his love of the sumptuous and the exquisite in art, his self-applause and self-assertion, make this one of the most singular and fascinating books in existence."
Cellini was accused of sodomy on three occasions: in 1523 he received a fine for sodomizing a boy; in 1548 a certain margherita denounced Cellini for relations with her son Vincenzo; in 1557 he was convicted for having sodomized Fernando di Giovanni di Montepulciano "many times". In his autobiography he speaks of having frequented a youth named Kuigi Pulci, a friend of Michelangelo in Rome, describing him as handsome.. but when the youth rejected his attentions in favour of a Givanni barbo, Cellini calls him a common hustler.
