Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini was a Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, maker of the salt cellar for Francis I and the bronze Perseus in the Piazza della Signoria, who killed at least two men, was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo and escaped over the walls, and dictated his Autobiography to a boy in his workshop in his late fifties. It is the most boastful, violent and alive of Renaissance self-portraits, in which popes, kings, rivals and demons are all met with the same self-regard, and it lay unpublished until 1728. Goethe translated it, and Berlioz made it an opera.