The Brooklyn Rail

Benvenuto Cellini led an extraordinarily sensational life in sixteenth-century Europe. A man of the Italian Renaissance, he produced the exquisite bronze figures of Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545–54), and the outstanding Saliera (1540–43), an enameled gold and ivory tableware that showcases his admirable ability with materials, among other works. Cellini earned praise and sponsorships from some of the most influential patrons of his time, including Popes Clement VII and Paul III, Duke of Florence, cardinals, and aristocrats, and their vitriol too, for delayed or incomplete commissioned works and the most brazen actions. His crimes include three murders, violence against women, outlawed homosexual encounters, and violent physical fights—just to name a few. His defiance to established institutions and relentlessness in expanding his professional portfolio is evident in his surviving autobiography, La Vita di Benvenuto di maestro Giovanni Cellini fiorentino [The Life of Benvenuto of Maestro Giovanni Cellini of Florence], completed in 1562.

Art history professor Andreas Beyer reinterprets Cellini’s Vita (John Addington Symonds’s translation) as an authentic chronicle in his recent book Benvenuto Cellini and the Embodiment of the Modern Artist. At times Beyer romanticizes Cellini’s cocky behavior as a marker of modern artistic individuality. However, Cellini’s pursuit of liberty, writing as record for posterity, and interdisciplinary mastery—hallmarks of sixteenth-century humanism—resist neat categorizations, and situate him more appropriately in the transition that lies between the Renaissance and the modern era.

While the Vita is one long chronological tale, Beyer’s book is divided into four accessible chapters, each of which highlights the beginnings of Cellini’s career, personal traits that form his reputation in Italy, work in France, and the final years of his life, respectively. Against his father’s wishes, Cellini enrolled in a goldsmith’s workshop at fifteen. Embroiled in regular brawls and disputes, he worked in Florence and Mantua, witnessed the sack of Rome in 1527, then returned to Florence to work for the Medici. At fifty-eight, he narrated his life to a fourteen-year-old boy who wrote it down as the Vita, as Cellini continued to sculpt. Beyer notes, “Every linguistic turn corresponds to a physical movement, every chisel stroke to a word,” illustrating that his artmaking and life accounts were one incessant act.

Cellini exercised strict decorum in his workshop and avoided preparatory sketches, choosing instead to work directly with his materials. Beyer aligns these qualities to modern artistic attitudes and notes how Cellini sought to control spectatorship for his works. When Duchess d’Étampes, King Francis I of France’s mistress, criticized the torchlight showing of his wax model of Jupiter (1545–54), Cellini tore off the veil covering its genitals to everyone’s shock, asserting his authority over how the work should be seen. Readers of Beyer’s book also learn that the sculpture was never finished in bronze, evidence of the artist’s unpredictable temperament.

Reading the Vita in light of Beyer’s book, I am reminded of biographies of other modern artists, such as Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol. Kahlo’s personal diaries of text and drawings record emotional responses to the physical pain she suffered throughout her life. Warhol was also in touch with his psyche; he details his fear of disease and anxieties surrounding his physiognomy. Cellini may not have expressed his existential dread in his Vita like a modern artist, but he too, accounts for his illnesses including catching the Bubonic Plague, sexually transmitted diseases, temporary blindness, and fevers due to imprisonment. He mentions anxiety, fear of death, and lack of mental clarity; however, not keeping with modern artistic tendencies, his little emotional awareness is overshadowed by a frequently pompous personhood throughout his narrative, a point that Beyer misses.

The qualities of individualism and belief in personal artistic style also render Cellini as a quintessential Renaissance artist. As a musician, poet, artist, and writer who was knowledgeable about history, he embodies the interdisciplinary values championed by sixteenth-century humanism. Although Giorgio Vasari did not heavily feature Cellini in his epic biography of Renaissance artists, he did recognize him by painting him in his fresco Cosimo I de Medici Surrounded by His Architects, Engineers and Sculptors (1555). Cellini’s rivalry with fellow artists Baccio Bandinelli and Pompeo de Capitaneis—he murdered the latter in 1534—reveal his vengeful and competitive sides. Beyer shows how Cellini was highly opinionated: Michelangelo was an inspiration of truthfulness in art whereas Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer were flawed because they resisted individual styles.

Beyer makes Cellini’s colorful accounts enjoyable for readers. His analytical assessment is a substantial contribution to understanding the lives and surviving writings of historical artists; simultaneously, the book would benefit from contextualizing Cellini in his time and resisting labels. If Cellini is a personification of modernity, then he also exemplifies the Renaissance—contradictions and tensions that make his art so enduring.