by Michael Hone
In 1548 Cellini cast the figure of Medusa and in 1549 work on the rest of the statue began. It was around this time that he hired another handsome youth, Ferrando di Giovanni da Montepulciao, who would cause him much grievance later one. Just before the actual casting he fell sick with fever, brought on, certainly, by the incredible stress related to his work. Luckily Bernardino Mannellini was there to see that things went along correctly.
Perseus comes through as a real living youth, his brow knitted as is Michelangelo’s David, his look grave. The body of the Medusa is just as living, just as wondrously human.
A marble block had been brought to the workshop in 1549 to serve as a base for Perseus and in 1552 Cellini cast two figures which would go into the block, Mercury modeled by Cencio and Danaë modeled by a new girl Dorotea. When Cosimo’s wife saw the two figures she wanted them for her own rooms but not only did Cellini refuse, he also sealed the figures into the marble base with such firmness that they could not be removed. Cencio, as Mercury, is totally naked and eminently desirable. He had shared Cellini’s bed since the age of 12. Dorotea also shared his bed and gave him a son he legitimized. She also accommodated Cencio. All told, Cellini was living and creating, creating and living, in the most beautiful city in the world, under skies warmed by the unstinting generosity of Helios, his Perseus complete, his Immortality guaranteed.
Cellini went off on vacation for a few weeks with a new boy, Cesare. On his return he opened the head of a fellow goldsmith, Lorenzo Papi, for reasons unknown, and was sent to the terrible prison of Stinche from whence Cosimo had him released. And then an apprentice, Ferrando di Giovanni da Montepulciao, accused him of ‘’sexual intercourse on many occasions,’’ treating the boy ‘’as though he were a wife.’’ Cellini seemed to have loved the lad, one he had put in his will before some unknown disagreement separated them. ‘’I take back everything I’ve done for him,’’ Cellini wrote, ‘’He’ll receive nothing. His name will vanish from my will.’’ Here Cellini was forced to plead guilty because Ferrando produced witnesses who had actually seen them at it. He tried to flee but the authorities guessed that that was exactly what he’d do and stopped him. He was sentenced to four years in jail but again Cosimo, despite the fact that he was aging and ill and therefore more and more religiously zealous, nevertheless intervened. Cellini received a year of house arrest instead. He entered a religious order, perhaps through his own will, perhaps to please Cosimo, but he left after two years. He then begot another child, a boy, from an unnamed servant, and then still more children by a model, Piera de’ Salvatore Parigi, one of which, a boy, he had at age 69. Piera and he married.
The last years of his life seem to have been marked by increasingly ill health and unattainable projects. From Paris the immensely original Catherine de’ Medici requested that he return to his Parisian palace to build a tomb for her beloved husband, Henry II and for herself, two kneeling figures. Health and insufficient willpower prevented him, but he was tempted. He was part of a committee that arranged the burial of Michelangelo whose reputation--in death at least--now placed him, in the eyes of mere mortals, among the gods. He made some trinkets, jewelry, seals and buckles as he had as a very young man. He left his fortune to the de’ Medici, asking only that they care for the boys in his workshop.
He went to work on his book which, next to Perseus, was his greatest triumph. He was aided by a boy, age 14, and seemed to have liked the experience of talking about himself while the lad noted all. Part of his memoirs had been a tell-all outing of the true nature of Cosimo, but he burned the papers, following the French adage: Toutes les véritées ne sont pas à dire. In that respect his relationship with the truth was always hesitant, as was his love for women. He never admitted loving boys or anally contenting himself (as well as, certainly, some of his lovers), yet when he loved a boy he was as frank--or even franker--than the times permitted:
‘’We are never apart, day or night.’’
‘’We loved each other more than if we had been brothers.’’
‘’My passionate love for the boy.’’
‘’’The prettiest face of anyone I have ever met in my whole life.’’
‘’He’s amazingly beautiful, and the great love he’s shown me made me love him in return--almost more than I could bear.’’
‘’His beautiful smile would have driven the gods themselves mad.’’
‘’Extreme personal beauty.’’
‘’The most handsome young fellow in Rome.’’
He weakened. He died, accompanied to his resting place by hoards of admirers--I can’t say last resting place because, for this man who had never stopped moving, it was, in reality, his first. When I entered the Peace Corps, a very young boy, I received a huge box of books, as do all volunteers. One was The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. I read it with great pleasure, totally unaware of the volcano who had produced it, only vaguely aware of my own sexuality, never dreaming that I would eventually, like countless other boys, fall in love with this incredible creature, proof that God truly does work in entirely mysterious ways.
PERSIUS
THE ASSASSINATIONS OF
HENRI III and HENRI IV
1551 - 1610
Catherine de’ Medici ruled France from the time of her husband’s death. She was the éminence grise behind her sons François II and Charles IX, and she ruled during Henri III’s years. Henri III fell to his knees before his mother and kissed her hands, and well he should, for although he was, by far, the most intelligent of his brothers, he hadn’t Catherine’s knowledge of state and worldly affairs. And God on high knows that, for Catherine, knowledge did not come without years of learning. Already, as a new bride, she knew there was something wrong with her physical relationship with Henri II who would daily run off into the arms of his much older and deeply loved mistress Diane de Poitiers, this despite the fact that François I had been present during the wedding-night penetration, a necessity to ensure that the marriage had been consumed.
Diane had taken Henri and his manhood in hand when he was but a boy, taught him to perform with her and with the girls she readied for him. He couldn’t live without her, the proof being the intertwining of their initials on every surface where it could be sculpted or wrought in iron. We don’t know if he was as ‘’endowed’’ as his father François I was universally known to have been, but he had suffered years of imprisonment when he’d taken the place of his father, Charles V’s captive in Spain, years that stunted him psychologically. Diane extracted him from himself, giving emotional life to that part of him that could well have otherwise perished.
Catherine, wishing to know what hold Diane had over him, had a hole drilled into the floor that gave onto Diane’s rooms. Alas, we don’t know what she saw, but it wasn’t what she and Henri had been doing. She changed her ways, the result being the birth of child after child after child. Her love for Henri II was limitless.
Henri II and his and Diane’s initials entwined.
She loved Henri III at least as much. He had his crise d'adolescence, adolescent ups and downs, when he turned to Protestantism, calling himself the Little Huguenot. He forced his sister Margot to give up Catholic prayers and prayer books. Later, he would turn against Protestants and, later still, he would lead a siege against them at La Rochelle, a Protestant holdout. He would also be instrumental in their destruction during the Saint Bartholomew Massacre in 1572, during which the Protestants were not only slaughtered, but denuded, their privates cut off, their anuses violated, the worst desecration on French soil until the Revolution. The catalyst for his change of heart had been his mother, the Catholic Catherine, who reined him in when she felt his anti-Catholicism had gone far enough.
In France Huguenots numbered around two million during the time of Henri III and were inspired by the writings of Jean Calvin. Those forced to flee the country at one period or another went mostly to the Netherlands, England, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland and, for total independence, America, w
here they founded New Rochelle. A ship made it to Cape Town and two others, carrying 500 souls, to an island off today’s Rio de Janeiro where they built Fort Coligny as a defense against natives and the Portuguese. When overpowered by the latter they were obliged to either convert or face death--most preferring to die for their faith. Expulsed by Louis XIV, they gained equality after the French Revolution, thanks to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789.
Diane de Poitier
Religious unrest in France began under François I. Ideas from Luther and from Calvin were spilling over into France and François at first tried to be tolerant. But when the Protestants began to placard Paris with anti-Catholic heresy, he ordered the first burnings at the stake in 1535 and in 1545 François ordered the massacre of Mérindol where thousands were killed by his troops. Before the end of the wars in 1598, 3 million Frenchmen would be dead.
By 1562, during the reign of Henri II, there were 2 million Calvinists, one of whom was the mother of Henri de Navarre, himself a Protestant until he became the King of France, Henri IV, converting to Catholicism by proclaiming that Paris was well worth a mass.
Henri de Navarre, future Henri IV, young and old. After deciding that After taking Paris, Henri IV set out to win over other regions, Catholics who suspected he was still a Protestant, Protestants who would not accept his conversion to Catholicism. He bribed town governments, offering an incredible 250,000 crowns to Claude de la Châtre for giving him Orléans and Bourges. He paid a city’s debts or remitted a town’s taxes. Nobles received unheard of sums. When his minister Sully complained that he had thrown away 30 million livres, he replied that wars would have cost him 10 times that amount, and he was right.
Henri II was accidentally killed during a joust and his son François II, age 15, was made king under his capable mother Catherine de’ Medici. When he died (of an ear infection, although naturally some suspected Protestant poisoning), Catherine took over. She had three alternatives: she could fight the Huguenots, but this seemed to only make them more determined; she could allow them free rein in France, causing revolts from the people and assuring her beheading; or she could attempt negotiations, which she chose. An agreement was signed. Catholicism was designated as the nation’s religion, but Huguenots had the right to freely pray, although outside the walls of towns.
But unrest continued in the provinces and in 1562 the Duc de Guise, a Catholic who hated the heretic Huguenots, arrived outside the town of Vassy where he insulted Protestants in the midst of prayer. Words turned to drawn swords and the Protestants were massacred by the Duc and his troops. This inspired the Duc de Condé, a Huguenot, to seize the town of Orléans, after which other towns in other parts of France were overrun by Protestants. Furious, Catholics rose up in places like Toulouse and slaughtered the heretics.
Catherine de’ Medici
Catherine was able to bring peace through the Edict of Amboise which united Huguenots and Catholics against the English who held Le Havre. This worked until Le Havre was finally taken by the French. Charles IX came of age and both the Protestant Condé and the Catholic Guise went back to raising troops and taking towns for their respective religions. The Protestant Queen Elizabeth of England entered the dance, as the French say, by sending money to the Huguenots. Charles IX was a Catholic but he greatly admired Admiral Coligny, a Protestant. Coligny came to Paris for the wedding of Margot, Charles’s sister, under the protection of Charles, but was assassinated to Charles’s shocked horror, an assassination orchestrated by Charles’s mother Catherine. Coligny had been wounded in the face earlier during the day and was in his town residence when Guise’s men entered and killed him. His body was thrown from a window, he was stripped naked and his privates were cut off and stuffed in his mouth (after which most Protestants would be stripped and castrated in the same way). He was cut up by the mob who hanged part of him, threw a part into the Seine, and burned the rest. Thus began the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, with the slaughter of 3,000 Huguenots in Paris alone.
Cologny thrown from the window.
Pope Gregory XIII commissioned Giorgio Vasari to do this fresco for the Sala Regia ‘’to celebrate an act of divine retribution’’, and on 11 September 1582 a commemoration of the massacre of the Huguenots was organized.
Thinking that Henri would perhaps never become King of France, Catherine had paid a fortune to have him elected King of Poland (an elective monarchy). When Charles IX died, she sent secret word to him in Cracow, telling him to return to Paris, detailing each move he was to make, nearly down to the hour. Henri, who so hated freezing Poland and its rustic setting that he hid himself away in his apartments, suddenly became the life of the party, issuing forth with his mignons--his boy lovers totally loyal to him. Originally mignon meant everything from a servant to a buddy, but due to Henri’s use of them, mignon became synonymous with catamite, a designation purportedly invented by Calvinists. He gave banquets and balls, dressed to kill with his earrings and pearl-studded doublets, literally dancing the night away. The ruse worked. He was able to flee while the castle slept, his baggage and his pockets--and the pockets of his mignons--stuffed with Polish diamonds and gems. Horses had been put aside at relays, and he crossed the border of Austria in sight of Polish troops sent to haul him back manu militari. There Emperor Maximilian welcomed him like a son. Then came Venice, the city of vice, where it is believed that excessive sex led directly to his physical decline, a decline so severe that in later life it would take him days in bed to recuperate after an orgasm. Some sources maintain this and, also, that he suffered from syphilis. His mother met him at Lyon. He knelt before her, she the vital force of his kingship. Catherine had already tried to marry him off to Queen Elizabeth but Henri wanted nothing of her ‘’stale virginity’’. So she tried to interest Elizabeth in Henri’s younger brother, the fifteen-year-old hunchback François Duc d’Alençon, who would have perhaps won the queen over had France been part of the boy’s dowry, but it wasn’t.
François duc d’Alençon was given the name Heracles at birth. Scarred by smallpox, his spine deformed, he was heir to the throne, after his brother Henri. Rejected by all except his sister Margot, he escaped from court and joined the Protestant forces of Louis de Condé. In order to get him back, Henri III and Catherine signed the Edict de Beaulieu that provided Protestant leaders with land and titles, François himself taking Henri’s former title of duc d’Anjou. It was suggested that he marry Elizabeth, Queen of England, and he duly went to London to meet his future bride, he age 24, Elizabeth 46. She actually took a liking to him, calling the deformed lad her ‘’frog’’, the slang word for the French to this day. The wedding didn’t go through although, quite incredibly, Elizabeth’s chief advisor, William Cecil, Lord Bughley, was wholly behind the union. The French too saw the possibilities, because at the death of Elizabeth François would become King of England. Those against the marriage, like Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham, told her that as a Catholic François would be responsible for a renewal of religious violence throughout England. As incredible was the fact that François remained by Elizabeth’s side from 1578 to 1581, when she bid her frog farewell. At the head of troops François went to Antwerp, prepared to seize the city as a first step to conquering Flanders. He told the townspeople that he was there on a visit, and wished to do a little sightseeing, accompanied by his troops. The citizens agreed, and once inside the walls they massacred the lot, François escaping by the skin of his teeth. His mother Catherine wrote him this loving note: ‘’Would to God that you had died young. You would never have been the cause of the deaths of so many brave gentlemen.’’ Ill with malaria, his mother’s wish came true in 1584, when François was 29.
Back in Paris, Henri found that nothing had changed since his departure for Cracow. Servants circulated with utensils men pissed in while continuing their conversations with both sexes, and as there was no indoor plumbing, messes in corners and niches had to be cleaned away in the early morning. One could copul
ate in nooks and recesses, but so clothed were both sexes that only the not-so-subtle movements betrayed what was going on. The leaders in debauch were Margot who collected lovers like Henri collected pearls, and her husband Henri de Navarre did the same with lads and lasses. François, his baby brother, had his share of both sexes, his lust fulfilled by those who wished advancement, which meant everyone. For girls whose virginity was vital to the advancement of their families, their mouths were a second sex. Some boys endured being taken and other did the taking. Henri’s reign was in every way a cesspool, while outside the War of Religion went on uncontrolled, with towns sacked and emptied of their wealth and food by soldiers who backed the pope or Calvin. Disease, misery, famine, heartbreak and death where everywhere other than in court where Henri, his mignons, his hangers-on, ate, drank, danced and fucked.
Henri was so reviled by those who wished for a real king, who were jealous of the ascendance of his mignons, and those of true noble blood who couldn’t stomach a king who danced rather than lead his army in battlefield conquests, that stories of every sort were invented--meaning that historians are in constant quicksand when dealing with, especially, Henri’s sexual pastimes.
One wag had his mignon François d’Espinay de Saint Luc so jealous of two new boys the king passed the night with that he told his wife that Henri was having an adventure with a certain woman, knowing his wife would tell the queen who would make Henri’s life miserable.