203. Alessandro Farnese (elected as Paul III in 1534) was imprisoned by Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), not by Pope Alexander as Cellini states. His offence apparently had been to imprison his mother.
204. The cardinal was Guido Ascanio Sforza (d. 1564), son of Bosio, Count of Santa Fiore, and Costanza Farnese, Paul III’s daughter. He had been made a cardinal in 1534, at the age of sixteen.
205. Alessandro Monaldo commanded the Florentine troops during the siege of Florence and was imprisoned in 1530 for opposing the Medici.
206. Fra Benedetto Tiezzi da Foiana in Valdichiana, a Dominican from Florence’s Convent of Santa Maria Novella, and a follower of Savonarola, he was imprisoned by Clement VII for having preached against the Medici during the siege of Florence.
207. In fact, in 1539.
208. Leone Leoni (died c. 1590) was an outstanding medallist and goldsmith and also a bronze sculptor, who succeeded Tommaso of Perugia as engraver to the Roman Mint in 1537 and was sent to the galleys for an act of violence against the papal jeweller in 1540. He later entered the service of the Emperor Charles V who made him a knight. Giorgio Vasari, a fellow Aretine, included his biography in his Lives. He honoured Michelangelo with a medal showing his profile and an image of him as a blind pilgrim with a staff, led by a dog. This was copied in great numbers.
209. Giovan Girolamo de’ Rossi (d. 1564) was made Bishop of Pavia by Clement VII in 1530 and imprisoned on suspicion of conspiracy to murder from 1538 to 1540 when he went into exile. In 1550 Pope Julius III restored this friend of Cellini to his bishopric and made him Governor of Rome.
210. Alessandro Farnese (1520–89) son of Pier Luigi, was appointed Cardinal Archbishop of Parma by his grandfather Pope Paul III in 1534 when aged fourteen and in 1539 appointed legate to oversee the meeting of King Francis I and the Emperor Charles V in that year. Balked of the succession to the papacy through Medici opposition, he was influential in the Catholic reform movement. He was a busy patron of the arts, an activity which his numerous benefices helped to finance.
211. On 5 December 1539 Annibale Caro wrote telling Benedetto Varchi that Cellini was living with the Cardinal of Ferrara, (Ippolito d’Este) to whom, wrote Luigi Alamanni in a letter to Varchi of the same date, Cellini owed his life. (Quoted Cust: The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol II, p. 79.) Ferrara – for whom Cellini made inter alia four silver candlesticks and a chalice at this time – was in turn the guest of Cardinal Gonzaga, while waiting to take possession of his own palace.
212. Capitoli was the name given to verses, usually in terza rima, of a burlesque, and often as not, obscene in kind, which originated in Florence. (Cf. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature, Part II.) Cellini’s Capitolo is a curious but revealing rigmarole which I have translated very freely. He alludes to the death of the castellan (‘the Castle bell must crack’) and to the murder of Pier Luigi (‘a dark bier near the stone’). His references to lilies are explained by their presence in the Farnese arms, as well as in the arms of France and Florence, and in paintings of the Annunciation.
213. Gabriello Maria da Cesano (1490–1568) was a lawyer and scholar who served the Papacy as an envoy and was made Bishop of Saluzzo in 1556 by Pope Paul IV.
214. See also Cellini’s description of the completed salt-cellar and his description of the technique of enamelling in the Treatise on goldsmithing, Chapter XII and Chapter III respectively.
In his Cellini (pp. 107–16) Pope-Hennessy lists the discrepancies between Cellini’s three descriptions of the salt-cellar (two in his autobiography and one in the Treatise) and comments that advice on the project may have come from Luigi Alamanni whose poetry’s ‘imaginative world’ was closely akin to that of the salt-cellar.
Pope-Hennessy notes the influence on Cellini’s figures of the times of day of Michelangelo’s statues in the Medici Chapel and, on the four reliefs of Winds (depending on Ovid’s imagery in the Metamorphoses), of the tondi of Pontormo and Bronzini in the Capponi Chapel, Santa Felicità, ‘which Cellini must have known’.
After lauding Cellini’s liberal experimentation in colourful enamelling, Pope-Hennessy explores the salt-cellar’s upper surface division into Earth and Ocean supported by a large oval plate of gold made in one piece, and its ‘miracles of workmanship’ as in the modelling and engraving of the sea horses. Life study, one of the procedures of classical sculpture, was central to Cellini’s art, Pope-Hennessy decides.
‘Capricious the salt-cellar may be, but in it Cellini successfully assembles poetic detail into a richly poetic whole.’
This fine criticism illuminates the centrality of Cellini’s most ambitious work at this stage to the developing post High Renaissance art of Florence and Rome.
215. François de Tournon (1489–1562), French Minister of State, made a cardinal in 1530, was a wealthy patron of art and literature.
216. Cherubino Sforzani from Reggio Emilia, a cleric and master watchmaker for both the Pope and the Este family.
217. Alfonso Piccolomini, Duke of Amalfi, at this time governed Siena for the Emperor Charles V from 1529 till 1541 when he was dismissed for failure to sustain order.
218. In 1539 a treaty was concluded between Duke Ercole II d’Este and Pope Paul III under which the former for a hundred and eighty thousand gold ducats was reinvested with certain territories that had been granted to his family by Pope Alexander VI.
219. An original cast of the obverse of the lost wax model for this double-sided medal is in the Goethe Museum in Weimar. (Cf. Pope-Hennessy, Cellini, p. 302n. 40.)
220. A minister of Duke Alfonso I d’Este.
221. Cellini recalled the wrong place and the wrong date: he was still in Ferrara in September 1540; nor was the French court in Dauphiné in 1540 or the immediately following years. (Cf. Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 122, n. 2.)
222. Leonardo had been in France (at the invitation of Francis I) lodging in the castle of Cloux, near Amboise, from 1516 till his death in 1519.
223. Of these twelve statues, only one, the Jupiter, had been finished when Cellini left France in 1545, after five years. The idea apparently came from King Francis himself, who presented what he thought was a dreadfully ugly statue of Hercules (made by French craftsmen to the design of Rosso) to the Emperor Charles V in Paris in January 1540, and who wanted the statues to be of his own height, and so nearly two metres each.
For Cellini’s technique see Chapter XXV of the Treatise on goldsmithing and Pope-Hennessy’s comment on its empiricism (Cellini, p. 104). Pope-Hennessy also gives (pp. 104–5) a general reconstruction of the probable appearance of the Jupiter and the mechanism for moving it, and of its counterpart the Juno (based on a chalk drawing in the Louvre and a small bronze model in the Stavros Niarchos collection in Paris).
224. Le Petit Nesle was part of the Chaâteau de Nesle on the left bank of the Seine and had been granted to an office bearer associated with the University of Paris, then administered by the Grand Prévoôt of Justice, at this time the very grand Jean d’Estouteville, Seigneur de Villebon, later Chevalier de S. Michel, Conseiller du Roi, and Royal Lieutenant in Normandy and Picardy.
225. Nicolas de Neufville (d. 1598), financial secretary to the King in succession to his father.
226. Jean Lallemant, Seigneur de Marmaignes, another royal secretary in 1551.
227. Cellini received seventy-four gold scudi for gilding a basin and oval ewer in chased silver, adorned with figures, made for the cardinal to be presented to the King, on 12 December 1540. (See Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 134, n.1.)
228. Beautiful and clever, Anne de Pisseleu (1508 to circa 1580), maid of honour to Louise of Savoy and soon mistress to Louise’s son, Francis I. In 1536 she married Jean de Brosse, who was made Duc d’É tampes. She later converted to Calvinism and died disgraced.
229. Jean de Lorraine (d. 1550), son of Renée II, Duke of Lorraine, an intelligent patron, had been created a cardinal by Leo X in 1518.
230. Henri II d’
Albret (1503–55), King of Navarre and Sovereign Count of Béarn and Foix, spent most of his life at the court of Francis I whom he followed to Italy; he managed to escape after being taken at the battle of Pavia. His daughter married Antoine de Bourbon and became the mother of King Henri IV.
231. Marguerite de Valois (1492–1549) widowed through the death of her first husband, the Duke of Alençon, had married Henri II (the King of Navarre) in 1527; she was erudite and beautiful and acclaimed as the Fourth Grace and the Tenth Muse.
232. Francis I’s second son, Henri (1519–59) became Dauphin when his elder brother Francis died, and was crowned King of France as Henri II, to reign from 1547 to 1559. In 1533 he married Catherine, the daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino. He drove the English finally out of France when he took Calais in 1558; he died in a tournament the following year and left France to a disastrous succession of young or weak kings and to decades of civil war.
233. On 16 March 1541, the Cardinal of Ferrara, Ippolito d’Este, presented King Francis at Fontainebleau with the gilded basin and ewer made by Cellini. In Paris, the King visited Cellini’s workshop in the Nesle, then over dinner said he wished for Cellini’s design for a matching salt-cellar, Cellini showed him the model he had made in Rome. The salt-cellar, completed in 1543 and presented in 1570 by the wretched French king, Charles IX, to the Archduke Ferdinand of the Tyrol, is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
234. Described by the Ferrarese ambassador as ‘a silver vase in the style of the antique with two handles all worked in relief, a work judged universally to be exceptional and singular’ (Pope-Hennessy, Cellini, p. 115). This is now lost.
235. No trace exists of either work.
236. Caterina, later used as the model for the Nymph of Fontainebleau.
237. Piero (d. 1558), the son of Filippo Strozzi, was a Florentine exile who gained honours through his service in the army of Francis I. He was also a writer using the pseudonym of Sciarra Fiorentino.
238. Antoine le Maçon, author of a romance and first translator of Boccaccio’s Decameron into French, pubished 1545 at the suggestion of Queen Marguerite of Navarre whom he served as secretary.
239. So he did, till he died when they were listed in Lodovico Gennari’s Inventory of Cellini’s belongings as Two privileges from the King of France conceded to Benvenuto. Now in the Biblioteca Nazionale the two documents, the Letters of Naturalization and the Confirmation of the Gift of Petit Nesle (i.e. the second deed which Cellini mentions further on), bear the dates July 1542 and 15 July 1544 respectively.
240. These included Flaminio Anguillara di Stabbia, perhaps then a soldier in France under the command of the Strozzi; Giovan Francesco Orsini or his son Niccolò, also soldiering for France with the Strozzi and at odds with his own extended Orsini family whose fiefs included Anguillara and Pitigliano; Galeotto Pico, son of Luigi Pico della Mirandola, who had fled after a murderous family feud to France where he died in 1550 after loyal service to the King.
241. Fighting between the parties to the Treaty of Nice (signed in 1538 and meant to last ten years) started in July 1542 and was ended in 1544 by the short-lived Peace of Crépy between the King and the Emperor.
242. The imagery of the door designed by Cellini for the Porte Dorée of Fontainebleau, built by Gilles Le Breton in 1538, was linked to that of a fresco by Rosso in the Gallery of Francis I (known through an engraving) which recounts the legend of Fontainebleau, where the spring and its presiding goddess were discovered by a hunting dog called Bleu or Bliaud. (Cf. Pope-Hennessy, Cellini, p. 137.)
In his Treatise on sculpture, Cellini again describes the doorway (Chapters I and IV) and the technique of casting in bronze. He cast the Nymph (which measures 205 x 409 cm), but apparently nothing else, before he left France in 1545. Removed from the Château of Diane de Poitiers at Anet during the French Revolution to Paris, it has been repatinated and is now in the Louvre, near Michelangelo’s statues of the so-called Dying Captive and Struggling Captive which arrived in France in 1546. The statues of Victories disappeared a few years after the sack of the Château of Neuilly in 1848, but casts of them remain in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. (Cf. Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 158, n. 2, and especially Pope-Hennessy, Cellini, pp. 133–46, where the relevant chapter notes that after finishing the salt-cellar, Cellini ‘veered decisively’ towards sculpture and also proved himself ‘the finest animal sculptor of the sixteenth century’.)
243. Unique in value, the history of this flattering statue of King Francis/the god, Mars, introduced by Cellini’s priceless verbal flattery, is uncertain, but the project may have been the statue referred to in 1545 as part of a planned fountain for Fontainebleau and as being ‘larger than any made by the Romans as far as is known…’ (Pope-Hennessy, Cellini, p. 142).
244. This Florentine doctor, grandson, through his mother, of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, served Francis I from 1542 to 1548 and then Duke Cosimo. In holy orders, he held several church benefices in Italy and France, and was appointed to the chair of Medicine and Philosophy in Pisa where he died in 1569.
245. Guido Guidi’s book printed by Pierre Gauthier in 1544 was a translation of works on surgery by Hippocrates, Galen and Oribasio, and was dedicated to King Francis.
246. Primaticcio (1504/5–70) was trained by, among others, Giulio Romano: this versatile artist was best at painted and high relief stucco decoration which he developed at Fontainebleau where he served Francis from 1532, making sorties to Rome to buy and secure casts of famous works including the Laocoön and Michelangelo’s Pietà. In his life of Primaticcio, Vasari praised his generosity towards other artists and said he lived more like a nobleman than a craftsman.
247. Cellini refers here to the opening line of Canto VII of the Inferno, the words of Plutus when he first perceives Dante and Vergil coming towards the Fourth Circle: ‘Papè; Satan, papè Satan aleppe.’ There is only conjecture as to their meaning. The French that Cellini heard would correspond to: ‘Paix paix, Satan, paix paix, Satan, allez, paix.’
248. Perhaps so, but works in France (Avignon) attributed by Vasari to Giotto have been variously attributed to Simone Martini and his assistants or Matteo Giovanetti.
249. From Verona, a shoemaker’s son, Mattio or Matteo del Nassaro as Vasari called him was both designer and musician. Paid a salary from 1515 by King Francis who esteemed him especially for his lute playing and skill in engraving medals, gems and pieces of crystal, and in executing cartoons for tapestries. He died c. 1547 soon after King Francis’s death.
250. The reference here is to The Decameron, the second story of the second day, in which Rinaldo d’Asti attributes his success in love to his habit of saying an Our Father and Hail Mary for the souls of the father and mother of St Julian, after each night’s lodging.
251. Jacques, Monseigneur de la Fa, was charged by King Francis with settling the accounts for Cellini’s work in the Nesle, from 1541 to 1545 when he died and was succeeded by his son, Pierre.
252. In the end, Primaticcio, this painter Bologna, did finish this fountain, for work on which payments to him were recorded for 1540–50.
253. The statue of Mars for the proposed fountain at Fontainebleau.
254. No more is known about this work. However, probably on his first visit to France, Cellini did make for Francis a medal of which several examples in bronze and lead are extant e.g. in the Museo Nazionale, Florence, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge respectively. They show the bust of Francis I crowned with laurel with the inscription FRANCISCUS. I FRANCORUM (.) REX and on the reverse a mounted knight trampling on Fortune with the words ‘DEVICIT FORTUNAM VIRTUTE’. The signature is given as BENVEN. F.
255. Leone Strozzi (1515–54) who after having valiantly served France, joined his brother Piero in the ferocious fighting between Duke Cosimo’s Florence and Siena in which he died after being wounded by an arquebus shot.
256. ‘Little serpent.’
257. The girl probably died in
infancy while Cellini was still in Paris. Her baptism is recorded in the Register of the Parish of S.-André-des-Arcs (now des-Arts). (Cf. Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 202, n. 1.)
258. In 1544 Charles V’s army took the Duchy of Luxemburg and was threatening to march on Paris from Champagne. He was let down by his ally, the English king, Henry VIII, who halted after the siege of Boulogne (which he kept till 1550) and was forced into the Peace of Crépy which secured Milan for France’s royal family.
259. Claude d’Annebaut, noble friend and servant of Francis I who created him Marshal in 1538 and Admiral of France in 1543. He died in 1552.
260. Jean Grolier (b. 1479), of Lyons, held the office of Superintendent of Finance till his death in 1565. He left a famous collection of books and medals.
261. Cellini’s bel Giove, ‘fine silver statue of Jupiter’ or Jove, which disappeared without trace, is described in the Treatise on goldsmithing (Chapter XXV) as having been soldered with the help of four of his young men, cleaned and polished and given a bronze base, succeeding beautifully as a figure holding the lightning bolt in its right hand and in the left a ball to symbolize the world.
262. The castings were done at Fontainebleau by Laurent Renaudin, Francisque Ribon, Pierre Beauchesne, Benoit Leboucher, Guillame Durant and others. (Cf. Cox-Rearick, The Collections of Francis I, Royal Treasures, p. 326).
263. Henri II succeeded Francis in 1547 and died on 14 July 1559.
264. Marguerite of Navarre (1523–74) married Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy, in 1559, making a very popular and gracious queen. She was a patron of writers and used her influence and intelligence to attract some of the best minds to the University of Turin.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini Page 54