Benvenuto Cellini
The goldsmith and adventurer.
Benvenuto Cellini was a goldsmith, sculptor and autobiographer. His bronze Perseus stands on the Piazza della Signoria in Florence.
Benvenuto Cellini was born in Florence on 3 November 1500. His father was a musician who wanted his son to become a flautist, but Benvenuto wanted to be a goldsmith and was apprenticed as a teenager. He had a fiery temper, and even as a young man he became involved in brawls and had to leave the city.
He worked in Rome as a goldsmith and medallist for the popes and for wealthy collectors. During the Sack of Rome in 1527 he took part in the defence of Castel Sant’Angelo, and he himself claimed to have killed the enemy commander, which cannot be verified. In 1534 he killed a rival in Rome but was pardoned by the pope. In 1538 he was imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo, accused of stealing papal jewels. He managed to escape but was caught again and released only after his patrons intervened.
From 1540 to 1545 he worked for the French king Francis I. There he made the famous salt cellar in gold and enamel, with the sea god Neptune and the earth goddess seated opposite each other. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The salt cellar was stolen in 2003 and found buried three years later. Back in Florence he worked for Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. His best-known work is the bronze statue Perseus with the Head of Medusa, made in 1545–54 and placed in the Loggia dei Lanzi on the Piazza della Signoria. The casting was extremely difficult, and in his autobiography he describes dramatically how he threw in his pewter plates to make the metal flow.
Cellini was a virtuoso. He combined the goldsmith’s precision with the sculptor’s feeling for movement, and his figures are elegant and rich in detail. In later life he wrote treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture and an autobiography. He was also convicted of sexual offences and held under house arrest for a time. He married late and had children. He died in Florence in 1571.
The autobiography, first published in 1728, has made him one of the most vivid figures of the Renaissance. It is full of boasting, adventure and exaggeration but gives a unique picture of an artist’s life in 16th-century Italy. Goethe translated it into German.