The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

"Yes, that was not uncommon. Lorenzo Ghiberti and Brunelleschi started as goldsmiths as well because you work with shapes and a design. Cellini was also the son of a musician, who wanted to train him as a musician and instrument-maker. So he was a musician his entire life. He too has the ability to work in almost every genre, but, when we think of his work, it’s really his sculpture that stands out. There’s the Perseus that’s in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, or the Salt Cellar he made for Francis I that is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. These are the perfect and ideal works of Cellini. “The book is wrong. It is a series of untruths. He didn’t shoot the constable of Bourbon as he was coming over the wall in May 1527” He invented the idea of the artist—not like Vasari as a bureaucrat and the client of a patron who had to fulfil the patron’s desire—but as in the 19th century as the genius not restricted by law, morality, common practice, or anything. If you murder somebody, well, ‘I’m a genius and I murdered somebody. So what are you going to do? You’re going to kill a genius just because he murdered some useless person? Of course you’re going to sleep with me while I have four or five other mistresses because you have a chance to sleep with a genius. If you have a child, that child will be the child of a genius. So, of course you will. Of course, I’m going to try and seduce you. Why? Because I’m a genius and I have earned this by my superhuman ability.’ The book is wrong. It is a series of untruths. He didn’t shoot the constable of Bourbon as he was coming over the wall in May 1527. He didn’t save the papal court by scurrying along the passetto to Castel Sant’Angelo. He didn’t do most of the things he said he did. However, he created the image of the artist as a larger than life figure, the creator. He who creates cannot be restricted by law or morality or principle of any kind because, then, you restrict a genius. You won’t get the full advantage of his ability. So leave me alone. Let me seduce your sister, let me steal from the pope by stealing gems from his tiara as he was accused of. Why? Because I’m a genius. You have to let me do this. You have to understand who I am. Yes. He was working for Clement VII and he was part of a group that ran from the Apostolic Palace along the passetto in order to escape the imperials. For sure. But did he do all the things that he said he did? Of course he didn’t. But it makes a good story. There’s an Italian saying that you may have heard: se non è vero, è ben trovato . It doesn’t matter if something’s true as long as it makes a good story. That’s true in Italian politics and it’s true in Cellini’s autobiography. “He invented the idea of the artist…as the genius not restricted by law, morality, common practice, or anything.” What’s more, it covers a relatively short period of time. It talks about his past but mostly it’s from 1558 to 1563 or so. It’s highly focussed on, to some extent, his most interesting time at the court of France and his work for the Pope. Yes, there is this social mobility. This really begins, especially with Raphael and Michelangelo, because their genius was recognised as an element of social mobility. They were then not restrained by the social order. These people were the companions of popes and kings because they were geniuses. This is very different from the 15th century model when artists were craftsmen. If you look at Vasari’s Lives of the Artists , the model he is using is collections of saints’ lives. They are all exemplars, the way that saints’ lives’ collections—the Legenda Aurea —are exemplars, of genius operating within a context. When you look at Cellini, there’s no sanctity at all. It’s the idea, almost like the golden ass of Apuleius or any other late classical or rollicking stories that allow the hero to reach fulfilment. And through his freedom—yes, people get killed along the way—he is able to create things of lasting importance and beauty. Like Caravaggio, he is effectively saying, through the example of his life, that, ‘As a person I may be a jerk but as an artist I am ideal. Don’t define me by your rules because if I had to obey your rules, I would not produce the works of the imagination that I do.’ It was incredibly popular because it reads like a novel. All autobiographies are a subgenre of fiction—this is just on another level. You have to be pretty naïve to believe everything that he says he did. But you also understand, by sympathising with Cellini himself, that he was capable of doing that. This is the difference between normal people who say what they are going to do it and then do it, under the restrictions of law and convention, and those people who say, ‘This is what I did and even the things I didn’t do, I was capable of doing.’ And there it is. I think the modern parallel would be with a rock star—Mick Jagger, maybe, or someone like that. Did Mick Jagger do all the things that they said he was supposed to have done? Maybe, maybe not. But he would be capable of it. And we cut him a lot of slack. We don’t really care when he throws the furniture out of a hotel window onto the street. Or if he engages in drugs or has innumerable wives or mistresses. Why? Because he is different from us. He is a genius and genius knows no bounds. And, of course, absolutely untrue. Do I contradict myself or do I want to entertain multitudes? It’s lovely to be able to talk about these books and to make the statement as clearly as I can that Italian Renaissance books have a message for us today. The message that I try to bring up in my book is that if you’re going to look at the past, you have to understand the people who were living there and to see the world through their eyes. And all of these books provide us with an insight into how Italians, at a time of crisis, saw their world. They help us understand the movement and the progress of history from one moment to another, and the kind of decisions that people made, and also the values that they held and the values that they chose not to accept."

"First of all, Benvenuto’s Cellini’s autobiography is the only autobiography by a major Italian Renaissance artist. We don’t have Leonardo ’s, or Michelangelo’s, or anybody else’s memoirs. But we do have Cellini’s, and they are absolutely astonishing. They were first discovered in the 18th century. Even the story of the manuscript is fairly incredible. It belonged to a family for several hundred years, I suppose friends of Cellini’s. Then it disappeared until somebody bought it in a bookshop in about 1770. When it was first published in France, and later in England, it was thought that he must be exaggerating, it simply can’t be true. He murders the murderer of his brother. He murders somebody else, a bit later on. He leads the defence of the Castel Sant’ Angelo; he’s on the battlements with the Pope. Then he escapes from the Castel Sant’ Angelo… He describes drinking with Michelangelo—he always refers to Michelangelo as ‘the divine Michelangelo’. His is an incredible rollercoaster career in Florence and Rome at the very height of the Renaissance. There’s a wonderful description of him making his great statue, Perseus with the Head of Medusa , which stands in the Loggia in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. The fire that is heating the bronze keeps going out, and he ends up burning all the furniture in his studio to keep the fire going. It’s so real. Yet he was writing nearly 500 years ago. It’s a completely thrilling book, and anybody who loves Italy and Italian art has to read it. I more often than not take it with me when I’m in Florence or Rome, to read passages of it. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book. And surprisingly little known. And, might I add, quite one of Everyman’s slowest sellers! If a few hundred readers discover this book because of this interview then we will have done something very, very worthwhile. We’ll have enriched their lives."