Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini (b. 1500–d. 1571) was a Florentine goldsmith, sculptor, and writer. His tempestuous and violent life, vividly narrated in his autobiography, La Vita di Benvenuto di maestro Giovanni Cellini fiorentino, scritta, per lui medesimo, in Firenze (c. 1558–1567), is characterized by a strenuous and fiercely competitive pursuit of excellence in art and by an often frustrated ambition to be recognized as the greatest artist of his times. These features appear to be constant throughout his long artistic career, which scholars have profitably divided into four salient phases: the wandering juvenile apprenticeship as a goldsmith, which found the professional coronation in the subsequent Roman-centered years within the papal Curia; the period at the French court of François I Valois, during which he completed his first sculptures; the Florentine maturity, which saw his triumph (with the unveiling, in 1554, of the Perseus and Medusa group, traditionally considered as his sculptural masterpiece); and his subsequent decline. Due to his irascible temper and marked egotism, he had numerous conflicts with contemporary fellow artists, while his firm belief in the exceptional value of his own art led him to engage with powerful patrons with an obstinate awareness of what he considered to be his rights and, frequently, an uncommon lack of courtly compliance. In his later Florentine years he found himself more and more marginalized as an artist at the court of Cosimo I and Francesco de’ Medici. In this situation, as he wrote in the twelfth chapter of the Trattato dell’oreficeria, in order to fill the void caused by the absence of relevant artistic commissions, he decided to become a writer. In the last two decades of his life, he composed a lengthy and unfinished autobiography, more than one hundred vernacular poems, two treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture, and several discourses on art. Indeed, for a long time Benvenuto Cellini’s fame rested on his accomplishments as a writer, rather than on the works he created as a goldsmith and sculptor. First published in 1730, the Vita enjoyed enormous popularity in the 19th century, when its author came to be seen as a proto-Romantic incarnation of the passions and intemperances of artistic genius: as such, the artist was the protagonist of historical novels like Alexandre Dumas père’s historical novel Benvenuto Cellini, as well as of operas like Camille Saint-Saëns’s Ascanio or Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. Mainly thanks to the enduring fortune of his autobiography, Cellini is still widely considered to be one of the most versatile talents, as well as one of the most extraordinary writers, of his age. Starting from the late 20th century, scholars have, however, finally begun to fully appreciate him also as a great Italian artist of the High Renaissance. Updates completed by Ilenia Viola.

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