The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
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265. It has been suggested that this is either a corruption of Le démon Bourreau (the demon Executioner) or that Cellini meant Le moine bourru, the ghost of a monk dressed in a coarse cloth called bourre. The castle of Petit Nesle had been the site for the outrages by Queen Jeanne, wife of Philip V (1316–22).
266. Bellarmati (1493–1555) taught mathematics and military architecture in his native Siena, then, after banishment, became Francis I’s chief engineer and a cultivated correspondent and author.
267. Anne, the King’s mistress, the beautiful Madame d’Étampes, allegedly from spite towards Diane de Poitiers apparently betrayed the French to the forces of the Emperor as they advanced in 1544 towards Épernay where the bridge was not cut in time. The Dauphin (the lover of de Poitiers) was then defeated in battle and Parisians began to flee to Orleans.
268. François de Bourbon (b. 1491), Comte de SaintPauland Duc d’Estouteville, was close to the King, fighting with him at the battle of Marignano in 1515, captured with him by the Spanish at Pavia in 1525. He died in 1545.
269. In Italian: questi diavoli; in an earlier reference (p. 37) to the English (concerning Torrigiano’s work in England) Cellini called them quelle bestie.
270. In July 1545 Piero Strozzi (brother of Leone, p. 289) embarked at Le Havre where the French fleet under Admiral d’Annebaut set off with Italian galleys to engage in naval skirmishes off the Isle of Wight on which Strozzi made a landing. He died in 1558.
271. Little is known about Cellini’s companions on this journey from Paris. Ippolito Gonzaga was Governor of Mirandola from 1537 to 1538. Galeotto della Mirandola was married to Ippolita Gonzaga. Tedaldi, from an originally Polish family that came to be well known in Florence, may have been the father of Bartolo di Leonardo, an anti-Medicean Florentine mentioned in contemporary letters.
272. Writing to Bartolomeo Concino, secretary to Cosimo I, on 22 April 1561, Cellini mentioned that the French king had given him three hundred pounds of silver from which he was to make a statue of Jupiter and that after he had done this ‘of the remainder I made four big Vases alike very richly ornamented…’ (feci quattro gran Vasi simili ricchissimamente lavorati…). These presumably refer to the large vase (see note for p. 264) and others now lost (see Cox-Rearick, The Collections of Francis I, Royal Treasures, pp. 396–7). Cf. Vita, Ricordi, prose e poesie di Cellini, ed. Tassi, p. 335 and Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 236, n. 1, which also discusses the romance and melodrama about Ascanio written by Dumas and Giovanni Peruzzini respectively.
273. Cosimo de’ Medici (1519–74) became Duke of Florence in 1537 and Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1570. The magnificent villa at Poggio a Caiano was designed for Lorenzo il Magnifico (1449–92) by Giuliano da San Gallo (work beginning in 1485), and its Great Hall decorated at the behest of Pope Leo X by artists including Andrea del Sarto, Jacopo Pontormo and Franciabigio, but only completed by Allori in 1582.
274. Eleonora di Toledo (1522–62) married Cosimo de’ Medici in 1539. She was the daughter of Don Pedro Alvarez, the Spanish Viceroy of Naples and was both very rich and politically well connected, to Cosimo’s great advantage.
275. Cellini called the Academy of Design questa mirabile Iscuola. It was founded on the prompting of Giorgio Vasari by Cosimo in January 1563 to enhance the standing and skills of the fine arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, and to assist artists elected for their excellence to encourage each other, and ensure that religious devotions such as their obsequies were well observed.
276. Reporting his conversation with the Duke, Cellini said that Cosimo asked for ‘solo un Perseo…’ (a Perseus only), doubtless a reflection of how the Duke saw himself triumphant in Florence over his republican enemies. Pope-Hennessy notes that, wanting a Perseus for the Loggia dei Lanzi for reasons springing from ‘the interaction of symbolism and symmetry’, the Duke commissioned a statue ‘simpler and smaller than the statue Cellini eventually produced’. Cellini’s aim was to rival the Judith of Donatello, shown with her left hand in the hair of the slaughtered Holofernes.
The wax model in the Museo Nazionale in Florence – not necessarily the first seen by Cosimo – is the earliest extant model of the Perseus, already showing the body of Medusa under the feet of Perseus. A cast model of the two figures also survives, in the Museo Nazionale. The creative process of producing the Perseus itself (by which the statue must be as perfect as possible from every point of view) was magisterially described by Cellini in a letter of 28 January 1547 to Benedetto Varchi, responding to the questions Varchi had asked Florentine artists including Michelangelo and Bronzino about the rival merits of painting and sculpture. (Cf. Pope-Hennessy, Cellini, pp. 168–70.)
277. Donatello’s Judith is still on the Piazza della Signoria but Michelangelo’s David was removed to the Accademia in 1873 and a marble replica erected on the piazza in 1910. The Piazza della Signoria was called at this time the Piazza del Granduca.
278. The petition (supplica) and the deed or rescript (rescritto) are preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence. The access to Cellini’s house is now at 59 Via della Pergola. The site was Via del Rosaio, now Via della Colonna.
279. Riccio (1490–1564) was born in Prato. He became provost of the collegiate church of Prato as well as majordomo to Duke Cosimo and won praise as a generous benefactor and scholar from Benedetto Varchi among others. In his life of Fra Giovanni Montorsoli, Vasari said perhaps too vehemently that Riccio – no friend of Montorsoli – died after being mad for several years. (Cf. Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 250, n. 1.)
280. This agent and supplier to government (pagatore was Cellini’s description) who was purveyor to the Otto di Practica (Florence’s magistracy for foreign policy) from 1543 to 1545, may have been related to the friar Alessandro Gorini who fancied he must be a de’ Medici rather than a de’ Gorini, he looked so like Pope Clement VII.
281. This Sala del Oriolo in the Palazzo della Signoria was so named for containing the famous cosmographic or astronomical clock made in 1484 by Lorenzo della Volpaia for Lorenzo de’ Medici; it marked the risings and conjunctions of planets.
282. The translation could be ‘just plain mister’, ser being the courteous mode of address for a plebeian with modest position, messer for someone of lesser gentility and signore for a man of princely rank.
283. Gambetta was a Margherita di Maria di Jacopo da Bologna who later, as Cellini reports (below p. 326) made against him an unsubstantiated accusation of having sodomized her son.
284. The Opera del Duomo, or Office of Works, was established to maintain the fabric of the cathedral at Florence.
285. Raffaello Tassi died in 1545.
286. About Mannellini Cellini wrote in a letter of 22 April 1561 to Bartolomeo Concino, secretary to Duke Cosimo, that when he saw the fine bodily proportions (bella proporzione di corpo) of this eighteen-year-old country lad (villanello), ‘I started to draw him, partly for my own study (studio), and partly for the work on (le opere del) Perseus, whereby I drew (the) Mercury that is in the base at the back of the Perseus.’ (Cf. Ricordi, prose e poesie, ed. Tassi, p. 337 and Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 261, n. 3, where details are given of Mannellini’s outburst of violence.)
287. The Poggini brothers were sons of the Florentine Michele Poggini, a craftsman excelling in cutting cameos. Giampaolo (1518–80) specialized in making coins, medals and engraving on gems and later worked for Philip II of Spain; Domenico (1520–90) was a versatile goldsmith, sculptor and medallist, Master of the Dies of the Pontifical Mint (serving Sixtus V), highly praised by Vasari and Varchi.
288. Both are lost. The drinking vessel for which Cellini made designs and models was chiselled in half relief with two small figures in full relief; the girdle was decorated with jewels and masks in half-relief. A bas-relief metal dog made at this time to test the clays for Cellini’s Perseus survives in the Museo Nazionale in Florence. (Cf. Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 263, nn. 1 and 2.)
290. Referred to by Cellini disparagingly as alternatively Bernardone or Bernardaccio, Antonio di Vittorio Landin was a Florentine merchant and man of letters whose works included a comedy called Il Commodo. (Cf. Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 268n.)
291. Antonio Ubertini, brother of the painter Bachiacca.
292. Titian, the supreme colourist in oils, born Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1485/90–1576) had broken magnificently through the conventions of Venetian painting with his huge altarpiece of the Assumption and turned to portrait painting of chiefly secular leaders, notably the Emperor Charles V. He was by then the most sought-after painter in Europe, living sumptuously and still vigorously developing his rich and powerful style, moving on a few years after Cellini’s visit to self-sufficient erotic compositions featuring mythological scenes.
293. In his Treatise on sculpture (Chapter II), Cellini describes where best to find and prepare the clay for casting and reveals his trade secret of letting the mixture of cloth and clay decompose for several months so that it becomes like an unguent. (Cf. C. R. Ashbee, The Treatises, p. 113.)
294. Of the Portigiani of Fiesole, a family of craftsmen, chiefly founders.
295. Medusa (meaning ‘Queen’) was in Greek mythology the mortal monster among the three Gorgons, daughters of the sea-deities Ceto and her brother Phorcys who sprang from the Sea and the Earth (Pontus and Gaia). Her terrifying gaze under a head of serpents could turn men into stone; when decapitated by Perseus she instantly gave birth from her shed blood to Pegasus and Chrysaor, the winged horse and the golden sword. The son of Zeus and Danaë, Perseus was favoured by the gods, who to secure his triumph over Medusa gave him a helmet for invisibility (from Pluto), wings for his feet (from Hermes), a looking-glass to see Medusa at a slant (from Athena) and a wallet for Medusa’s head (from the nymphs). He fulfilled the prophecy that he would kill his grandfather Acrisius (though accidentally) and his story is one of miraculous power and brave achievement.
296. Cosimo had mines worked for silver and other metals at Pietrasanta and Campiglia chiefly for his own domestic purposes.
297. Now lost.
298. In his Life of Baccio Bandinelli, Vasari comments that he was especially anxious to become rich and buy property and had a very beautiful farm, Lo Spinello, on the heights of Fiesole and another, with a fine house, called Il Cantone, on the plain above San Salvi, and a big house in the Via de’ Ginori. Bandinelli, Vasari records, was jealous of the favours shown to Cellini when he arrived from France and perplexed that this rival had changed ‘in a moment’ from a goldsmith into a sculptor.
299. This son, Jacopo Giovanni, was born on 27 November to Cellini’s model Dorotea, legitimized in April 1554, and died in infancy. Cellini later adopted Dorotea’s legitimate son Antonio by Domenico Parigi (renaming him Benvenutino). In 1562 Cellini secretly married his maid Piera di Salvatore Parigi. The son, Giovanni, he had already had by Piera was legitimized in November 1561 and died fifteen months later. Piera then had three daughters, two of them lived, and then another son, Andrea Simone, after Cellini and Piera married officially in March 1567.
300. Sforza Almeni of Perugia, Chamberlain to Duke Cosimo, was killed by him on the night of 22 May 1566, in the Palazzo Vecchio, as punishment for his having revealed to the Prince Regent, Don Francesco, that Cosimo was sexually involved with and contemplating marriage to Eleonora degli Albizzi.
301. Philip II (1527–98) son of the Emperor Charles became King of Naples and Sicily in 1554 and King of Spain in 1556. Through marriage to Mary, daughter of Henry VIII, he became King Consort of England, 1554–8.
302. Stefano Colonna (d. 1548), from one of the famous families providing condottieri to successive rulers. After a hectic career in the service of several powers, Colonna was appointed Lieutenant-General by Duke Cosimo in 1542.
303. Bandinelli was given the commission to match Michelangelo’s statue of David on the Piazza della Signoria with a free-standing group of Hercules slaying Cacus, which he finished in 1534. He won several important commissions from Cosimo, including the tomb for Cosimo’s father, Giovanni dalle Bande Nere. Some of the critics of the clumsy Hercules and Cacus wrote so vituperatively that Duke Alessandro had them imprisoned as a caution. In his Life of Bandinelli, Vasari damned the group with faint praise, lauding Bandinelli for effort rather than elegance.
304. The new sacristy built by Michelangelo for Pope Clement VII during 1519–34 to correspond with the old sacristy designed by Brunelleschi at the church of San Lorenzo and to make the stupendous Medici tombs.
305. This group, 191 cm in height, shows the god Apollo caressing the hair of Hyacinth kneeling at his side, son of the high priest of Apollo, Oebalus, who in the myth was accidently killed by Apollo’s discus. The damaged and much repaired statue is in the Museo Nazionale, Florence.
306. The Ganymede finished by late March 1550 for the Piazza della Signoria to a height of 105.5 cm shows the young, beautiful Ganymede side by side with the eagle (mythically the god Jove [Jupiter], who had fallen in love with him) and was modelled on a statue of Bacchus by Sansovino. Pope-Hennessy emphasizes the poetic purpose of the Ganymede in contrast to the prosaic spirit of Bandinelli’s sculptures. ‘The carving of the figure, and especially that of the eagle’s wings, is of consummate delicacy’ (Pope-Hennessy, Cellini, p. 229).
307. Now in the Museo Nazionale, the marble Narcissus (height 149 cm) so painstakingly carved by Cellini is ‘among the greatest mannerist marble statues of the sixteenth century’ (Pope-Hennessy, Cellini, p. 232). The story as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes the son of a river god and a nymph whom the goddess Aphrodite punished for rejecting the love of the nymph Echo by causing his deadly despair from hopeless infatuation with his own pining image. This inspired Cellini to produce, with further inspiration from Bronzino’s Saint Michael painting on the ceiling of the chapel of Eleonora of Toledo, a lithe serpentine figure displayed in one graceful movement gazing vacuously at his own languid image in the imaginary pool. It is of weathered Greek marble with insertions of Carrara marble.
308. One of the most serious floods of the Arno occurred in August 1557 when the Florentine historian Bernardo Segni wrote that the sudden inundation of the Arno was greater than had been heard of for this river for a quarter of a century. The whole quarter of Santa Croce had been submerged. (Cf. Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. II, p. 307, n. 1 citing Segni Lib. XII, p. 470.)
309. Lucy of Syracuse died in 304 and her feast day in the Roman Martyrology is 13 December. Her aid was invoked, especially in the Middle Ages, against fire and sore throats as well as blindness.
310. Cellini’s description of his method of building furnaces for casting bronzes in Chapter IV of his Treatise on sculpture notes that they must be built by each master according to the special needs of the piece he is making.
311. Cellini’s technical terms in his description of the casting of the Perseus with translations used here include: Tonaca di terra, clay tunic; sfiatatio, air vents; manica (a kind of) funnel-shaped furnace; mandriani, iron hooks (or bent pieces of iron with long handles); spine, plugs (iron cones to close the furnace’s opening for the molten metal).
312. The Italian is dal cielo del fuoco i.e. ‘from the sphere of flame’, which, according to the P
tolemaic system, existed between the earth and the moon.
313. Sculptor and founder who with his previously mentioned brother Zanobi helped Cellini prepare the furnace and cast the head of Medusa. He directed the preparations for the obsequies of Michelangelo in 1564, contributing a marble statue of Fame.
314. Described by the historian Benedetto Varchi as grasping and ill-educated but amiable, eloquent and loyal, Serristori was Duke Cosimo’s ambassador to Emperor Charles V in 1537, and till 1564 Florence’s ambassador in Rome.
315. Giovanni Maria Ciocchi of Monte Sansovino became pope on 22 February 1550, taking the name of Julius III. He was a generous and devoted patron of Michelangelo and he strove for the reform of the Church and the peace of Christendom but his energies and resources petered out well before his death in 1555.
A page in the manuscript of Cellini’s Life, struck out at this point in the narrative, anticipates by several years the death of Bindo Altoviti and Cellini’s subsequent journey to Rome and describes the financial negotiations he conducted to secure the payments Altoviti had been contracted to make to him. (See Cust, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol.II, p. 329, n. 1.)
316. Bindo Altoviti (1491–1557) was an anti-Medicean merchant and banker from a prominent Florentine family, who in Rome helped and lavishly financed the exiles opposed to the regime in Florence and was portrayed by Raphael in paint (Washington, National Gallery of Art) as well as by Cellini in bronze.
The extant letter of c. 1552 from Michelangelo to Cellini (whose authenticity has been doubted) as Cellini reports, says that Michelangelo had known Benvenuto for years as the greatest goldsmith ever and now would acknowledge him as likewise a sculptor. ‘Know that messer Bindo Altoviti took me to see the portrait of his head in bronze… it gave me such pleasure but it seemed to me a great shame (molto male) that it was put in a bad light; for, if it had its rightful (ragionevol) light, it would be seen for the beautiful work it is.’ (Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, Vol. IV, p. 387 MCLXXXI.) The bronze is now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.