This Day in Art History (Death of Benvenuto Cellini, Celebrated, Scandalous Renaissance Man)

Feb. 13, 1571— Benvenuto Cellini, an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, draftsman, soldier, and musician who chronicled his multiple creative interests and tumultuous escapades in a frank and celebrated autobiography, died at age 70 of pleurisy in his native Florence.

“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.)

Quote of the Day (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, on ‘Lives of Great Men’)

“Lives of great men all remind us

        We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

        Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

        Sailing o'er life's solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

        Seeing, shall take heart again.”—American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), “A Psalm of Life,” in Voices in the Night (1839)

These lines at least part of the reason why I’ve always been such an avid reader of biographies.

 

Quote of the Day (Philip Roth, on Fiction and Autobiography)

"I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t." ―Philip Roth, Deception: A Novel (1990)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Actors’ Memoirs)

“Good books of reminiscence by actors are uncommon: Alec Guinness wrote an excellent one, but Olivier didn’t; Gielgud covers his tracks in every line; Robert Morley simply gives a performance as himself. They can’t write for beans and you are a very good writer.”—Robertson Davies, Sept. 20, 1995, to English actor-director Tony Van Bridge, in For Your Eye Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies, edited by Judith Skelton Grant (1999)

(Years ago, I was lucky enough both to be introduced to the work of the Canadian man of letters Davies and to hear him in person, at Fairleigh Dickinson University, before his death in 1995. I enjoyed one of his best-known novels, Fifth Business, as well as his amusing collection of ghost stories, High Spirits.

Davies was also a man of the theater, serving on the board of governors of Canada’s great Stratford Theatre Festival in its early years. In that context, I wonder what he would make of another alum of that festival, Christopher Plummer, who has recently issued his own autobiography, In Spite of Myself.

Plummer’s memoir has gotten excellent reviews, including one on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. I imagine that Davies would scrutinize it most carefully for Plummer’s views on Stratford before looking at it from the prism by which he judged Guinness, Olivier, Gielgud, and Morley.

I think Davies’ basic point is inarguable. I enjoyed John Houseman’s memoir, Front and Center, but offhand can think of few other memoirs by actors that really measured up. Yet those books keep getting published.

Part of the problem, of course, is that actors are trained to say words rather than write them—so, when it comes to penning the stories of their lives, a ghostwriter is invariably employed. But there’s another, less-noticed problem: the actor’s ego. The droll title of Joseph Cotton’s autobiography, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, encapsulates thespians’ narcissism pretty succinctly, I think. That tendency, evidenced in their usual 9-to-5 preoccupations--"How was I? How did I look?"--leaves them little room to reflect on either their environment or the larger meaning of their world or times.

Then, once you get past the gossip that publishers are shelling out big books for anyway, there's rather thin gruel left over.)