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"Thus spoke Pope Paul III on learning that Cellini had murdered a fellow artist, so great was Cellini's reputation in Renaissance Italy. A renowned sculptor and goldsmith, whose works include the famous salt-cellar made for the King of France, and the statue of Perseus with the head of the Medusa, Cellini's life was as vivid and enthralling as his creations.
Celebrated goldsmith and sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) fits the conventional image of a Renaissance man: a skillful virtuoso and courtier; an artist who worked in marble, bronze, and gold; and a writer and poet. Using the methodologies of New Historicism, social history, and gender and sexuality studies, this book places Cellini and his cultural production in the context of contemporary discourses about sexuality, law, magic, masculinity, and honor. In his life and literary oeuvre, the notorious artist, rogue, and sodomite aligned himself with the transgressive and oppositional voices of his day.
Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.
Benvenuto Cellini is an incomparable source on the nature of artmaking in sixteenth century Italy. A practicing artist who worked in gold, bronze, marble, as well as on paper, he was also the author of treatises, discourses, poems and letters about his own work and the works of contemporaries. By examining how Cellini and those around him viewed the act of sculpture in the late Renaissance, Michael Cole demonstrates his continuing relevance to the broader study of artistic theory and practice in his time.
Here is the most important autobiography from Renaissance Italy and one of the most spirited and colorful from any time or place, in a translation widely recognized as the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original. Benvenuto Cellini was both a beloved artist in sixteenth-century Florence and a passionate and temperamental man of action who was capable of brawling, theft, and murder. He counted popes, cardinals, kings, and dukes among his patrons and was the adoring friend of—as he described them—the “divine” Michelangelo and the “marvelous” Titian, but was as well known for his violent feuds. At age twenty-seven he helped defend the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, and his account of his imprisonment there (under a mad castellan who thought he was a bat), his escape, recapture, and confinement in “a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms” is an adventure equal to any other in fact or fiction. But it is only one in a long life lived on a grand scale. Cellini’s autobiography is not merely the record of an extraordinary life but also a dramatic and evocative account of daily life in Renaissance Italy, from its lowest taverns to its highest royal courts.