The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Overview

About four hundred and fifty pages, dictated by Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, beginning around 1558 when he was fifty-eight, to a young apprentice in his workshop who took down his words, a process that continued across several years until the manuscript breaks off, unfinished, in 1562, two years before Cellini’s death. It was not published until 1728, more than a century and a half after it was written, when it appeared in print and quickly became recognized as one of the most vivid and entertaining first-person accounts of Renaissance life to survive from any source, artist or otherwise.

Cellini was a genuinely accomplished artist, trained as a goldsmith and later working as a sculptor, whose surviving works, including the bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa still standing in Florence’s Loggia dei Lanzi, place him among the significant sculptors of the Italian Renaissance, though not, by most modern art-historical assessment, at the very top rank occupied by Michelangelo or Donatello. What makes his autobiography extraordinary is not primarily the art itself, though the book contains genuinely valuable firsthand accounts of Renaissance artistic practice and patronage, but the voice: Cellini narrates his own life, including violent crimes, professional triumphs, imprisonments, escapes and a lifetime of quarrels with popes, cardinals, and the King of France, with an unwavering, almost comic self-confidence in his own genius, honesty and essential rightness that never once falters, regardless of what he is describing.

What happens

Training and early career. Cellini describes his apprenticeship as a goldsmith in Florence and his early professional development, moving between Florentine and Roman patrons, establishing a reputation for exceptional technical skill in metalwork, and, characteristically, recounting a series of quarrels, several of them ending in actual violence and, by his own admission, in killings, which he narrates with the same brisk, unapologetic confidence he brings to describing his artistic commissions, treating personal vengeance and professional achievement as part of the same continuous story of a man of exceptional talent asserting his rightful place.

The sack of Rome, and the Constable of Bourbon. During the catastrophic sack of Rome by Imperial forces in 1527, Cellini claims to have personally fired the shot from the walls of the Castel Sant’Angelo that killed Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, the commander of the besieging Imperial army, a claim modern historians regard with considerable skepticism given the number of defenders firing from the same walls and the general unreliability of individual battlefield claims of this kind, but which Cellini narrates with total, unhesitating confidence as simple fact.

Imprisonment and escape. Cellini was later imprisoned in that same fortress, the Castel Sant’Angelo, on charges relating to alleged theft of papal jewels during the earlier chaos, a charge he denies, and he recounts, in one of the book’s most vivid episodes, his escape from the fortress by climbing down knotted bedsheets, sustaining a serious injury in the fall and evading recapture through a combination of nerve, luck and the same unshakeable self-confidence that characterizes every other episode in the book.

The French court. Cellini spent a significant period working at the court of King Francis I of France, producing important commissions for the king, including the celebrated gold salt cellar now in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, and the book gives a genuinely valuable, if characteristically self-serving, firsthand account of the practical realities of court patronage, the rivalries with other artists and courtiers, and the constant negotiation between an artist’s own sense of his worth and a patron’s power to reward or withhold support.

Return to Florence and the Perseus. Cellini’s return to Florence and his work for Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici occupies much of the book’s later sections, culminating in its most celebrated set piece: the casting of the bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa, a technically demanding and genuinely risky undertaking in Renaissance bronze casting. Cellini narrates the casting in extraordinary, tense detail, describing how, in the midst of the pour, with the furnace threatening to run short of sufficiently fluid metal and the entire, months-long project at risk of catastrophic failure, he began throwing his own household pewter plates, bowls and cooking vessels into the furnace to supplement the bronze and keep it flowing, a genuinely desperate improvisation that, in his telling, saved the casting and produced the masterwork that still stands in Florence today. The episode is among the most vivid firsthand accounts of an artist’s technical crisis and resourcefulness to survive from any period.

Later life, and the unfinished ending. The book’s final sections cover Cellini’s later career, continuing quarrels and legal difficulties, and further artistic commissions, before breaking off abruptly in 1562, apparently simply where the dictation stopped rather than at any deliberate narrative conclusion, leaving the final two years of Cellini’s actual life undocumented in his own account.

How to read it

Read the book as a performance of self-fashioning as much as a reliable historical record, and hold Cellini’s most dramatic claims, particularly the killing of the Constable of Bourbon, with appropriate skepticism, while still appreciating what the confidence of the telling itself reveals about how a Renaissance artist wanted to be remembered.

Read the casting of the Perseus as the book’s genuine centerpiece and its most historically valuable single episode, a firsthand, technically detailed account of Renaissance bronze casting practice and of the real, physical risk and improvisation involved in producing a major sculptural commission, offering a level of practical, on-the-ground detail about artistic production that few other period sources provide.

Notice how consistently Cellini narrates violence, professional achievement and personal grievance within the same unbroken register of confident self-justification, never distinguishing, in tone, between an account of a masterful casting and an account of a killing he regards as entirely justified. This consistency is itself revealing about how personal honor, artistic reputation and violence were genuinely intertwined in the world Cellini actually inhabited.

Read the book’s account of court patronage, particularly the sections on Francis I, as a genuinely useful primary source for understanding the practical, often fraught relationship between Renaissance artists and the powerful patrons whose favor determined their livelihoods and reputations, even while recognizing that Cellini’s own account is shaped throughout by his need to present himself as consistently in the right in every dispute.

Read this alongside Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, a roughly contemporary but more consciously art-historical account of many of the same figures and milieu, to see the same period and many of the same personalities from a different, less self-interested angle, and consider what Cellini’s first-person, self-justifying voice adds that a third-person account like Vasari’s cannot provide.

Questions it raises

• How should a reader weigh Cellini’s most dramatic claims, like killing the Constable of Bourbon, against the book’s evident tendency toward self-glorification? Does the unreliability of specific claims undermine the book’s value as a historical source, or is that value located elsewhere?
• What does Cellini’s unwavering self-confidence, applied equally to his artistic triumphs and his violent crimes, suggest about how personal honor and artistic reputation were understood to relate to each other in his world?
• Is the Perseus casting episode more valuable as technical documentation of Renaissance bronze casting practice, as psychological portrait of an artist under extreme pressure, or as a piece of dramatic self-mythologizing? Can it be read as all three simultaneously?
• How does Cellini’s own account of his relationships with popes, cardinals and kings complicate or confirm what other historical sources suggest about the practical realities of Renaissance artistic patronage?
• Why might an autobiography this self-serving nonetheless remain genuinely valuable as historical evidence, and what does careful reading require to extract that value from material shaped so thoroughly by its author’s own self-interest?
• What does it mean that the book simply breaks off in 1562 rather than reaching any deliberate conclusion? Does this abrupt, unfinished quality change how the whole preceding narrative should be read?