“Renaissance man” has come to be shorthand for a
prodigiously talented individual who engages in multiple pursuits. But, aside from
Michelangelo, who wrote commendable poetry, and Giorgio Vasari, a pioneering
biographer, no other great craftsman of the period besides Cellini left a
literary record that could be mentioned in the same breath as his visual one.
Unlike Michelangelo (who wrote verses on an unnamed
love) and Vasari (who focused on other artists), Cellini was a born raconteur, holding
forth in characteristic hot-tempered, boastful, witty, and loyal fashion on himself
and, to a lesser extent, his views on the theory of art. He vented about his
adventures voluminously, over nearly a decade, in his La Vita di Benvenuto
di maestro Giovanni Cellini (“The Life of Benvenuto Cellini”)—and still
hadn’t completed the project at his death, as he interspersed this with more
than one hundred poems, two treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture, and
several discourses on art.
Ironically, while defending his visual primacy among his
peers (at a time when his contentious personality had sidelined him from new
commissions), Cellini furnished a strong counterargument: that his real talent
lay with the written word, rather than with his products as a goldsmith and
sculptor.
In one chapter of his autobiography, Cellini
catalogues his meticulous preparation for his bronze “Perseus” sculpture, followed
by a description of how he save his creation from destruction by fire and was congratulated by his assistants for helping them to have “learned and seen things done which
other masters judged impossible.”
But the artist can’t leave it at that: he must also write
how the two men he suspected of trying to sabotage his latest masterwork said “was
no man, but of a certainty some powerful devil, since I had accomplished what
no craft of the art could do; indeed they did not believe a mere ordinary fiend
could work such miracles as I in other ways had shown.”
At this late stage of the Renaissance, readers are
beholding a new kind of artistic consciousness: a man unapologetically basking
in his personal glory. Cellini has presented not just an advertisement for himself
in his own time, but for his undying fame in the eyes of posterity.
His autobiography offers up a new persona: a creator
passionately committed to his art, cynical in his fashion (“When the poor give
to the rich, the devil laughs,” he recalled the wife of a rich Roman banker
telling him), and defiant of conventional morality. He even surpassed
Caravaggio, whose aggressiveness (hitting waiters, slandering rivals) climaxed
in flight from Rome for killing a man in a street fight. Cellini openly
admitted to three killings: of his brother’s murderer, a rival goldsmith,
and an innkeeper. Only the protection of Popes Clement VII and Paul III saved
him from punishment.
(There were some limits to Cellini’s alarming
candor: contemporary mores meant that he could cop to vainglory and murder, but
not to bisexuality, even though several indictments and even convictions for
sodomy were path of his rap sheet in both Italy and France.)
Other Renaissance artists have inspired novels and/or
films (Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, Caravaggio in Derek
Jarman’s 1986 movie named for the painter). But how many such figures have become
the subject of operas?
Yet Cellini has—not once, but twice, in Camille
Saint-Saëns’s Ascanio and Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. The
dramatic, even over-the-top, elements of the artist’s personality lend themselves
to the genre. Nevertheless, it would have disappointed the ego-driven
Florentine that neither opera has entered the canon of musical theater (though
the overture of Berlioz’s work is frequently performed in concert halls by
orchestras, as seen in this YouTube clip).
For a fascinating overview of Cellini’s life, see Harold Sack’s November 2019 post from the blog SciHi (i.e., “Science, Technology
and Art in History”).
(The self-portrait of Cellini in the image accompanying
my post is a sketch now held in the Royal Library in Turin, believed to have
been drawn sometime between 1540 and 1543.)
