Few names in the history of Italian art are more renowned than that of Benvenuto Cellini.  This can hardly be attributed to the value of his extant works; for though, while he lived, he was the greatest goldsmith of his time, a skilled medallist and an admirable statuary, few of his many masterpieces now survive.  The plate and armour that bear his name, are only in some rare instances genuine; and the bronze “Perseus” in the Loggia de’ Lanzi at Florence remains almost alone to show how high he ranked among the later Tuscan sculptors.  If, therefore, Cellini had been judged merely by the authentic productions of his art, he would not have acquired a celebrity unique among his fellow-workers of the sixteenth century.  That fame he owes to the circumstance that he left behind him at his death a full and graphic narrative of his stormy life.  The vivid style of this autobiography dictated by Cellini while still engaged in the labour of his craft, its animated picture of a powerful character, the variety of its incidents, and the amount of information it contains, place it high both as a life-romance and also as a record of contemporary history.  After studying the laboured periods of Varchi, we turn to these memoirs, and view the same events from the standpoint of an artisan conveying his impressions with plebeian raciness of phrase.  The sack of Rome, the plague and siege of Florence, the humiliation of Clement VII., the pomp of Charles V. at Rome, the behaviour of the Florentine exiles at Ferrara, the intimacy between Alessandro de’ Medici and his murderer, Lorenzino, the policy of Paul III., and the method pursued by Cosimo at Florence, are briefly but significantly touched upon-no longer by the historian seeking causes and setting forth the sequence of events, but by a shrewd observer interested in depicting his own part in the great game of life.  Cellini haunted the private rooms of popes and princes; he knew the chief actors of his day, just as the valet knows the hero; and the picturesque glimpses into their life we gain from him, add the charm of colour and reality to history.

At the same time this book presents an admirable picture of an artist’s life at Rome, Paris, and Florence.  Cellini was essentially an Italian of the Cinque-cento.  His passions were the passions of his countrymen; his vices were the vices of his time; his eccentricity and energy and vital force were what the age idealised as virtu.  Combining rare artistic gifts with a most violent temper and a most obstinate will, he paints himself at one time as a conscientious craftsman, at another as a desperate bravo.  He obeys his instincts and indulges his appetites with the irreflective simplicity of an animal.  In the pursuit of vengeance and the commission of murder he is self-reliant, coolly calculating, fierce and fatal as a tiger.  Yet his religious fervour is sincere; his impulses are generous; and his heart on the whole is good.  His vanity is inordinate; and his unmistakable courage is impaired, to Northern apprehension, by swaggering bravado.

The mixture of these qualities in a personality so natural and so clearly limned renders Cellini a most precious subject for the student of Renaissance life and character.  Even supposing him to have been exceptionally passionate, he was made of the same stuff as his contemporaries.  We are justified in concluding this not only from collateral evidence and from what he tells us, but also from the meed of honour he received.  In Europe of the present day he could hardly fail to be regarded as a ruffian, a dangerous disturber of morality and order.  In his own age he was held in high esteem and buried by his fellow-citizens with public ceremonies.  A funeral oration was pronounced over his grave “in praise both of his life and works, and also of his excellent disposition of mind and body." He dictated the memoirs that paint him as bloodthirsty, sensual, and revengeful, in the leisure of his old age, and left them with complacency to serve as witness of his manly virtues to posterity.  Even Vasari, whom he hated, and who reciprocated his ill-will, records that “he always showed himself a man of great spirit and veracity, bold, active, enterprising, and formidable to his enemies; a man, in short, who knew as well how to speak to princes as to exert himself in his art.”

Enough has been said to prove that Cellini was not inferior to the average morality of the Renaissance, and that we are justified in accepting his life as a valuable historical document. To give a detailed account of a book pronounced by Horace Walpole “more amusing than any novel,” received by Parini and Tiraboschi as the most delightful masterpiece of Italian prose, translated into German by Goethe, and placed upon his index of select works by Auguste Comte, may seem superfluous.  Yet I cannot afford to omit from my plan the most singular and characteristic episode in the private history of the Italian Renaissance.  I need it for the concrete illustration of much that has been said in this and the preceding volumes of my work.

Cellini was born of respectable parents at Florence on the night of All Saints’ Day in 1500, and was called Benvenuto to record his father’s joy at having a son. It was the wish of Giovanni Cellini’s heart that his son should be a musician.  Benvenuto in consequence practised the flute for many years attentively, though much against his will.  At the age of fifteen so great was his desire to learn the arts of design that his father placed him under the care of the goldsmith Marcone.  At the same time he tells us in his memoirs:  “I continued to play sometimes through complaisance to my father either upon the flute or the horn; and I constantly drew tears and deep sighs from him every time he heard me.”  While engaged in the workshop of Marcone, Benvenuto came to blows with some young men who had attacked his brother, and was obliged to leave Florence for a time.  At this period he visited Siena, Bologna, and Pisa, gaming his livelihood by working in the shops of goldsmiths, and steadily advancing in his art.

It must not be thought that this education was a mean one for so great an artist.  Painting and sculpture in Italy were regarded as trades, and the artist had his bottega just as much as the cobbler or the blacksmith. I have already had occasion to point out that an apprenticeship to goldsmith’s work was considered at Florence an almost indispensable commencement of advanced art-study. Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Orcagna, Verocchio, Ghiberti, Pollajuolo, Ghirlandajo, Luca della Robbia, all underwent this training before they applied themselves to architecture, painting, and sculpture.  As the goldsmith’s craft was understood in Florence, it exacted the most exquisite nicety in performance as well as design.  It forced the student to familiarise himself with the materials, instruments, and technical processes of art; so that, later on in life, he was not tempted to leave the execution of his work to journeymen and hirelings. No labour seemed too minute, no metal was too mean, for the exercise of the master-workman’s skill; nor did he run the risk of becoming one of those half-amateurs in whom accomplishment falls short of first conception.  Art ennobled for him all that he was called to do.  Whether cardinals required him to fashion silver vases for their banquet-tables; or ladies wished the setting of their jewels altered; or a pope wanted the enamelled binding of a book of prayers; or men-at-arms sent swordblades to be damascened with acanthus foliage; or kings desired fountains and statues for their palace courts; or poets begged to have their portraits cast in bronze; or generals needed medals to commemorate their victories, or dukes new coins for their mint; or bishops ordered reliquaries for the altars of their patron saints; or merchants sought for seals and signet rings engraved with their device; or men of fashion asked for medallions of Leda and Adonis to fasten in their caps-all these commissions could be undertaken by a workman like Cellini.  He was prepared for all alike by his apprenticeship to orfevria; and to all he gave the same amount of conscientious toil.  The consequence was that, at the time of the Renaissance, furniture, plate, jewels, and articles of personal adornment were objects of true art.  The mind of the craftsman was exercised afresh in every piece of work.  Pretty things were not bought, machine-made, by the gross in a warehouse; nor was it customary, as now it is, to see the same design repeated with mechanical regularity in every house.

In 1518 Benvenuto returned to Florence and began to study the cartoons of Michael Angelo.  He must have already acquired considerable reputation as a workman, for about this time Torrigiani invited him to go to England in his company and enter the service of Henry VIII.  The Renaissance was now beginning to penetrate the nations of the North, and Henry and Francis vied with each other in trying to attract foreign artists to their capitals.  It does not, however, appear that the English king secured the services of men so distinguished as Lionardo da Vinci, II Rosso, Primaticcio, Del Sarto, and Cellini, who shed an artificial lustre on the Court of France.  Going to London then was worse than going to Russia now, and to take up a lengthy residence among questi diavoli ... quelle bestie di quegli Inglesi, as Cellini politely calls the English, did not suit a Southern taste.  He had, moreover, private reasons for disliking Torrigiani, who boasted of having broken Michael Angelo’s nose in a quarrel.  “His words,” says Cellini, “raised in me such a hatred of the fellow that, far from wishing to accompany him to England, I could not bear to look at him.”  It may be mentioned that one of Cellini’s best points was hero-worship for Michael Angelo.  He never speaks of him except as quel divino Michel Agnolo, il mio maestro, and extols la bella maniera of the mighty sculptor to the skies.  Torrigiani, as far as we can gather from Cellini’s description of him, must have been a man of his own kidney and complexion:  “he was handsome, of consummate assurance, having rather the airs of a bravo than a sculptor; above all, his fierce gestures and his sonorous voice, with a peculiar manner of knitting his brows, were enough to frighten everyone that saw him; and he was continually talking of his valiant feats among those bears of Englishmen.”  The story of Torrigiani’s death in Spain is worth repeating.  A grandee employed him to model a Madonna, which he did with more than usual care, expecting a great reward.  His pay, however, falling short of is expectation, in a fit of fury he knocked his statue to pieces.  For this act of sacrilege, as it was deemed, to the work of his own brain and hand, Torrigiani was thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition.  There he starved himself to death in 1522 in order to escape the fate of being burned.  This story helps to explain why the fine arts were never well developed in Spain, and why they languished after the introduction of the Holy Office into Italy.

Instead of emigrating to England, Benvenuto, after a quarrel with his father about the obnoxious flute-playing, sauntered out one morning toward the gate of S. Piero Gattolini.  There he met a friend called Tasso, who had also quarrelled with his parents; and the two youths agreed, upon the moment, to set off for Rome.  Both were nineteen years of age.  Singing and laughing, carrying their bundle by turns, and wondering “what the old folks would say,” they trudged on foot to Siena, there hired a return horse between them, and so came to Rome.  This residence in Rome only lasted two years, which were spent by Cellini in the employment of various masters.  At the expiration of that time he returned to Florence, and distinguished himself by the making of a marriage girdle for a certain Raffaello Lapaccini. The fame of this and other pieces of jewellery roused against him the envy and malice of the elder goldsmiths, and led to a serious fray, in the course of which he assaulted a young man of the Guasconti family, and was obliged to fly disguised like a monk to Rome.

As this is the first of Cellini’s homicidal quarrels, it is worth while to transcribe what he says about it.  “One day as I was leaning against the shop of these Guasconti, and talking with them, they contrived that a load of bricks should pass by at the moment, and Gherardo Guasconti pushed it against me in such wise that it hurt me.  Turning suddenly and seeing that he was laughing, I struck him so hard upon the temple that he fell down stunned.  Then turning to his cousins, I said, That is how I treat cowardly thieves like you; and when they began to show fight, being many together, I, finding myself on flame, set hand to a little knife I had, and cried, If one of you leaves the shop, let another run for the confessor, for a surgeon won’t find anything to do here.”  Nor was he contented with this truculent behaviour; for when Gherardo recovered from his blow, and the matter had come before the magistrates, Cellini went to seek him in his own house.  There he stabbed him in the midst of all his family, raging meanwhile, to use his own phrase, “like an infuriated bull." It appears that on this occasion no one was seriously hurt; but the affair proved perilous to Cellini, since it was a mere accident that he had not killed more than one of the Guasconti.  These affrays recur continually among the adventures recorded by Cellini in his Life.  He says with comical reservation of phrase that he was “naturally somewhat choleric;” and then, describes the access of his fury as a sort of fever, lasting for days, preventing him from taking food or sleep, making his blood boil in his veins, inflaming his eyes, and never suffering him to rest till he revenged himself by murder or at least by blows.  To enumerate all the people he killed or wounded, or pounded to a jelly in public brawls or private quarrels, in the pursuit of deliberate vendetta or under a sudden impulse of ungovernable rage, would take too long.  We are forced by an effort to recall to mind the state of society at that time in Italy, in order to understand how it is that he can talk with unconcern and even self-complacency about his homicides.  He makes himself accuser, judge, and executioner, and is quite satisfied with the goodness of his cause, the justice of his sentence, and the equity of his administration.  In a sonnet written to Bandinelli, he compares his own victims with the mangled statues of that sculptor, much to his own satisfaction.

There is the same callousness of conscience in his record of spiteful acts that we should blush to think of-stabs in the dark, and such a piece of revenge as cutting the beds to bits in the house of an innkeeper who had offended him. Nor does he speak with any shame of the savage cruelty with which he punished a woman who was sitting to him as a model, and whom he hauled up and down his room by the hair of her head, kicking and beating her till he was tired. It is true that on this occasion he regrets having spoiled, in a moment of blind passion, the best arms and legs that he could find to draw from.  Such episodes, to which it is impossible to allude otherwise than very briefly, illustrate with extraordinary vividness what I have already had occasion to say about the Italian sense of honour at this period.

The consciousness of physical courage and the belief in his own moral superiority sustained Cellini in all his dangers and in all his crimes.  Armed with his sword and dagger, and protected by his coat of mail, he was ready to stand against the world and fight his way towards any object he desired.  When a man opposed his schemes or entered into competition with him as an artist, he swaggered up with hand on hilt and threatened to run him through the body if he did not mind his business.  At the same time he attributes the success of his own violence in quelling and maltreating his opponents to the providence of God.  “I do not write this narrative,” he says, “from a motive of vanity, but merely to return thanks to God, who has extricated me out of so many trials and difficulties; who likewise delivers me from those that daily impend over me.  Upon all occasions I pay my devotions to Him, call upon Him as my defender, and recommend myself to His care.  I always exert my utmost efforts to extricate myself, but when I am quite at a loss, and all my powers fail me, then the force of the Deity displays itself-that formidable force which, unexpectedly, strikes those who wrong and oppress others, and neglect the great and honourable duty which God has enjoined on them.”  I shall have occasion later on to discuss Cellini’s religious opinions; but here it may be remarked that the feeling of this passage is thoroughly sincere and consistent with the spirit of the times.  The separation between religion and morality was complete in Italy. Men made their own God and worshipped him; and the God of Cellini was one who always helped those who began to help themselves by taking justice into their own hands.

From the date of his second visit to Rome in 1523, Cellini’s life divides itself into three periods, the first spent in the service of Popes Clement VII. and Paul III., the second in Paris at the Court of Francis, and the third at Florence under Cosimo de’ Medici.

On arriving in Rome, his extraordinary abilities soon brought him into notice at the Court.  The Chigi family, the Bishop of Salamanca, and the Pope himself employed him to make various jewels, ornaments, and services of plate.  In consequence of a dream in which his father appeared and warned him not to neglect music, under pain of the paternal malediction, he accepted a post in the Papal band.  The old bugbear of flute-playing followed him until his father’s death, and then we hear no more of it.  The history of this portion of his life is among the most entertaining passages of his biography.  Drawing the Roman ruins, shooting pigeons, scouring the Campagna on a pony like a shaggy bear, fighting duels, prosecuting love-affairs, defending his shop against robbers, skirmishing with Moorish pirates on the shore by Cerveterra, stabbing, falling ill of the plague and the French sickness-these adventures diversify the account he gives of masterpieces in gold and silver ware.  The literary and artistic society of Rome at this period was very brilliant.  Painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths mixed with scholars and poets, passing their time alternately in the palaces of dukes and cardinals and in the lodgings of gay women.  Bohemianism of the wildest type was combined with the manners of the great world.  A little incident described at some length by Cellini brings this varied life before us.  There was a club of artists, including Giulio Romano and other pupils of Raphael, who met twice a week to sup together and to spend the evening in conversation, with music and the recitation of sonnets.  Each member of this company brought with him a lady.  Cellini, on one occasion, not being provided for the moment with an innamorata, dressed up a beautiful Spanish youth called Diego as a woman, and took him to the supper.  The ensuing scene is described in the most vivid manner.  We see before us the band of painters and poets, the women in their bright costumes, the table adorned with flowers and fruit, and, as a background to the whole picture, a trellis of jasmines with dark foliage and starry blossoms.  Diego, called Pomona, with regard doubtless to his dark and ruddy beauty, is unanimously proclaimed the fairest of the fair.  Then a discovery of his sex is made; and the adventure leads, as usual in the doings of Cellini, to daggers, midnight ambushes, and vendettas that only end with bloodshed.

An episode of this sort may serve as the occasion for observing that the artists of the late Renaissance had become absorbed in the admiration of merely carnal beauty.  With the exception of Michael Angelo and Tintoretto, there was no great master left who still pursued an intellectual ideal.  The Romans and the Venetians simply sought and painted what was splendid and luxurious in the world around them.  Their taste was contented with well-developed muscles, gorgeous colour, youthful bloom, activity of limb, and grace of outline.  The habits of the day, voluptuous yet hardy, fostered this one-sided development of the arts; while the asceticism of the Middle Ages had yielded to a pagan cult of sensuality.  To draw un bel corpo ignudo with freedom was now the ne plus ultra of achievement.  How to express thought or to indicate the subtleties of emotion, had ceased to be the artist’s aim.  We have already noticed the passionate love of beauty which animated the great masters of the golden age.  This, in the less elevated natures of the craftsmen who succeeded them, and under the conditions of advancing national corruption, was no longer refined or restrained by delicacy of feeling or by loftiness of aim.  It degenerated into soulless animalism.  The capacity for perceiving and for reproducing what is nobly beautiful was lost.  Vulgarity and coarseness stamped themselves upon the finest work of men like Giulio Romano.  At this crisis it was proved how inferior was the neo-paganism of the sixteenth century to the paganism of antiquity it aped.  Mythology preserved Greek art from degradation, and connected a similar enthusiasm for corporeal beauty with the thoughts and aspirations of the Hellenic race.  The Italians lacked this safeguard of a natural religion.  To throw the Christian ideal aside, and to strive to grasp the classical ideal in exchange, was easy.  But paganism alone could give them nothing but its vices; it was incapable of communicating its real source of life-its poetry, its faith, its cult of nature.  Art, therefore, as soon as the artists pronounced themselves for sensuality, merged in a skilful selection and reproduction of elegant forms, and nothing more.  A handsome youth upon a pedestal was called a god.  A duke’s mistress on Titian’s canvas passed for Aphrodite.  Andrea del Sarto’s faithless wife figured as Madonna.  Cellini himself, though sensitive to every kind of physical beauty-as we gather from what he tells us of Cencio, Diego, Faustina, Paolino, Angelica, Ascanio-has not attempted to animate his “Perseus,” or his “Ganymede,” or his “Diana of Fontainebleau,” with a vestige of intellectual or moral loveliness.  The vacancy of their expression proves the degradation of an art that had ceased to idealise anything beyond a faultless body.  Not thus did the Greeks imagine even their most sensual divinities.  There is at least a thought in Faun and Satyr.  Cellini’s statues have no thought; their blank animalism corresponds to the condition of their maker’s soul.

When Rome was carried by assault in 1527, and the Papal Court was besieged in the castle of S. Angelo, Cellini played the part of bombardier.  It is well known that he claims to have shot the Constable of Bourbon dead with his own hand, and to have wounded the Prince of Orange; nor does there seem to be any adequate reason for discrediting his narrative.  It is certain that he was an expert marksman, and that he did Clement good service by directing the artillery of S. Angelo.  If we believed all his assertions, however, we should have to suppose that nothing memorable happened without his intervention.  In his own eyes his whole life was a miracle.  The very hailstones that fell upon his head could not be grasped in both hands.  His guns and powder brought down birds no other marksman had a chance of hitting.  When he was a child, he grasped a scorpion without injury, and saw a salamander “living and enjoying himself in the hottest flames.”  After his fever at Rome in 1535, he threw off from his stomach a hideous worm-hairy, speckled with green, black, and red-the like whereof the doctors never saw. When he finally escaped from the dungeons of S. Angelo in 1539, a luminous appearance like an aureole settled on his head, and stayed there for the rest of his life. These facts are related in the true spirit of Jerome Cardan, Paracelsus, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Sir Thomas Browne.  Cellini doubtless believed in them; but they warn us to be cautious in accepting what he says about his exploits, since imagination and self-conceit could so far distort his judgment.

It may be regretted that Cellini has not given a fuller account of the memorable sack of Borne.  Yet, confining himself almost wholly to his own adventures, he presents a very vivid picture of the sad life led by the Pope and cardinals, vainly hoping for succour from Urbino, wrangling together about the causes of the tragedy, sewing the crown jewels into their doublets, and running the perils of the siege with common soldiers on the ramparts.  When peace at last was signed, Cellini paid a visit to Florence, and found that his father and some other relatives had died of plague. His brother Cecchino, however, who was a soldier in the Bande Nere of Giovanni de’ Medici, and his sister Liperata survived.  With them he spent a pleasant evening; for Liperata having “for a while lamented her father, her sister, her husband, and a little son that she had been deprived of, went to prepare supper, and during the rest of the evening there was not a word more spoken of the dead, but much about weddings.  Thus we supped together with the greatest cheerfulness and satisfaction imaginable.”  In these sentences there is no avowal of hard-heartedness; only the careless familiarity with loss and danger, engendered by war, famine, plague, and personal adventures in those riotous times. Cellini gladly risked his life in a quarrel for his friends; but he would not sadden the present by reflecting on inevitable accidents.  This elastic temper permeates his character.  His affections were strong, but transient.  The one serious love-affair he describes, among a multitude of mere debaucheries, made him miserable for a few days.  His mistress, Angelica, ran away, and left him “on the point of losing his senses or dying of grief.”  Yet, when he found her again, a short time sufficed to satisfy his longing, and he turned his back with jibes upon her when she bargained about money.

It is worthy of notice that, at the same time, he was an excellent son and brother.  His sister was left a widow with two children; whereupon he took them all into his house, without bragging about what appears to have been the best action of his life.  In the same spirit he conscientiously performed what he conceived to be his duty to Cecchino, murdered by a musketeer in Rome.  After nursing his revenge till he was nearly mad, he stole out one evening and stabbed the murderer in the back. So violent was the blow that he could not extricate his dagger from the man’s spine, but had to leave it sticking in his nape.  Next to his own egotism the strongest feelings in Cellini were domestic; and he showed them at one moment by charity to his sister’s family, at another by a savage assassination.

After killing the musketeer, Cellini retired for refuge to the house of Alessandro de’ Medici, Duke of Civita di Penna, who had been his brother’s patron.  The matter reached the Pope’s ears, for whom Benvenuto was at work upon crown jewels.  Clement sent for him, and simply said:  “Now you have recovered your health, Benvenuto, take care of yourself.”  This shows how little they thought of homicide in Rome.  After killing a man, some powerful protector had to be sought, who was usually a cardinal, since the cardinals had right of sanctuary in their palaces.  There the assassin lay in hiding, in order to avoid his victim’s friends and relatives, until such time as a pardon and safe-conduct and absolution had been obtained from his Holiness.  When Cellini, soon after this occurrence, stabbed a private enemy, by name Pompeo, two cardinals were anxious to screen him from pursuit, and disputed the privilege of harbouring so talented a criminal. The Pope, with marvellous good-humour, observed:  “I have never heard of the death of Pompeo, but often of Benvenuto’s provocation; so let a safe-conduct be instantly made out, and that will secure him from all manner of danger.”  A friend of Pompeo’s who was present, ventured to insinuate that this was dangerous policy.  The Pope put him down at once by saying, “You do not understand these matters; I would have you know that men who are unique in their profession, like Benvenuto, are not subject to the laws.”  Whether Paul really said these words, may be doubted; but it is clear that much was conceded to a clever workman, and that the laws were a mere brutum fulmen.  No man of spirit appealed to them.  Cellini, for example, was poisoned by a parish priest near Florence: yet he never brought the man to justice; and in the case of his own murders, he only dreaded the retaliation of his victims’ kinsmen.  On one occasion, indeed, the civil arm came down upon him; when the city guard attempted to arrest him for Pompeo’s assassination.  He beat them off with swords and sticks; and, after all, it appeared that they were only acting at the instigation of Pier Luigi Farnese, whom Benvenuto had offended.

During his residence at Rome, Cellini witnessed an incantation conducted in the Colosseum by a Sicilian priest and necromancer.  The conjurer and the artist, accompanied by two friends, and by a boy, who was to act as medium, went by night to the amphitheatre.  The magic circle was drawn; fires were lighted, and perfumes scattered on the flames.  Then the spirit-seer began his charms, calling in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, or what passed for such, upon the leaders of the hosts of hell.  The whole hollow space now filled with phantoms, surging up by legions, rushing down from the galleries, issuing from subterranean caverns, and wheeling to and fro with signs of fury.  All the party, says Cellini, were thrown into consternation, except himself, who, though terribly afraid, kept up the fainting spirits of the rest.  At last the conjurer summoned courage to inquire when Cellini might hope to be restored to his lost love, Angelica;-for this was the trivial object of the incantation.  The demons answered (how we are not told) that he would meet her ere a month had passed away.  This prophecy, as it happened, was fulfilled.  Then they redoubled their attacks; the necromancer kept crying out that the peril was most imminent, until the matin bells of Rome swung through the darkness, freeing them at last from fear.  As they walked home, the boy, holding the Sicilian by his robe and Benvenuto by his mantle, told them that he still saw giants leaping with fantastic gestures on their path, now running along the house roofs, and now dancing on the earth.  Each one of them that night dreamed in his bed of devils.

The interest of this incident is almost wholly picturesque.  It throws but little light upon the superstitions of the age. The magnitude of the Colosseum, the popular legends concerning its magical origin, and the terrible uses of blood to which it had been put, invested this building with peculiar mystery.  Robbers haunted the huge caves.  Rubbish and weeds choked the passages.  Sickly trees soared up from darkness into light among the porches, and the moon peered through the empty vomitories.  If we call imagination to our aid, and place the necromancers and their brazier in the centre of this space;-if we fancy the priest’s chaunted spells, the sacred names invoked in his unholy rites, the shuddering terror of the conscience-stricken accomplices, and Cellini with defiant mien but quailing heart, we can well believe that he saw more than the amphitheatre contained.  Whether the spectres were projected by the conjurer from a magic lantern on the smoke that issued from his heaps of blazing wood, so that the volumes of vapour, agitated by the wind and rolling in thick spirals, showed them retreating and advancing, and varying in shape and number, is a matter for conjecture.  Cellini firmly believed that he had been environed by living squadrons of the spirits of the damned.

The next four years were spent by Cellini chiefly in Rome, in peril of his life at several seasons, owing to the animosity of Pier Luigi Farnese.  One journey he took at this period to Venice, passing through Ferrara, where he came to blows with the Florentine exiles.  It is interesting to find the respectable historian Jacopo Nardi involved, if only as a peacemaker, in this affray. He also visited Florence and cast dies for Alessandro’s silver coinage.  It was here that he found opportunities of observing the perilous intimacy between the Duke of Civita di Penna and his cousin-quel pazzo malinconico filosofo di Lorenzino. In April 1537, having quarrelled with the Pope, who seems to have adopted Pier Luigi’s prejudice against him, Cellini set out for France with two of his workmen.  They passed through Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Padua, staying in the last place to model a medallion portrait of Pietro Bembo; then they crossed the Grisons by the Bernina and Albula passes.  We hear nothing about this part of the journey, except that the snow was heavy, and that they ran great danger of their lives.  Cellini must have traversed some of the most romantic scenery of Switzerland at the best season of the year; yet not a word escapes him about the beauty of the Alps or the wonder of the glaciers, which he saw for the first time.  The pleasure we derive from contemplating savage scenery was unknown to the Italians of the sixteenth century; the height and cold, the gloom and solitude of mountains struck them with a sense of terror or of dreariness.  On the Lake of Wallenstadt Cellini met with a party of Germans, whom he hated as cordially as an Athenian of the age of Pericles might have loathed the Scythians for their barbarism. The Italians embarked in one boat, the Germans in another; Cellini being under the impression that the Northern lakes would not be so likely to drown him as those of his own country.  However, when a storm swept down the hills, he took a terrible fright, and compelled the boatmen at the point of the poniard to put him and his company ashore.  The description of their struggles to drag their heavily laden horses over the uneven ground near Wesen, is extremely graphic, and gives a good notion of the dangers of the road in those days. That night they “heard the watch sing at all hours very agreeably; and as the houses of that town were all of wood, he kept bidding them to take care of their fires.”  Next day they arrived, not without other accidents, at Zurich, “a marvellous city, as clear and polished as a jewel.”  Thence by Solothurn, Lausanne, Geneva, and Lyons, they made their way to Paris.

This long and troublesome journey led to nothing, for Cellini grew weary of following the French Court about from place to place; his health too failed him, and he decided that he would rather die in Italy than France. Accordingly he returned to Rome, and there, not long after his arrival, he was arrested by the order of Pope Paul III. The charge against him, preferred by one of his own prentices, was this.  During the siege of Rome, he had been employed by Clement to melt down the tiaras and papal ornaments, in order that the precious stones might be conveyed away in secrecy.  He did so; and afterwards confessed to having kept a portion of the gold filings found in the cinders of his brazier during the operation.  For this crime Clement gave him absolution. Now, however, he was accused of having stolen gold and jewels to the amount of nearly eighty thousand ducats.  “The avarice of the Pope, but more that of his bastard, then called Duke of Castro,” inclined Paul to believe this charge; and Pier Luigi was allowed to farm the case.  Cellini was examined by the Governor of Rome and two assessors; in spite of his vehement protestations of innocence, the absence of any evidence against him, and the sound arguments adduced in his defence, he was committed to the castle of S. Angelo.  When he received his sentence, he called heaven and earth to witness, thanking God that he had “the happiness not to be confined for some error of his sinful nature, as generally happens to young men.”  Whereupon “the brute of a Governor replied, Yet you have killed enough men in your time.”  This remark was pertinent; but it provoked a torrent of abuse and a long enumeration of his services from the virtuous Cellini.

The account of this imprisonment, and especially of the hypochondriacal Governor who thought he was a bat and used to flap his arms and squeak when night was coming on, is highly entertaining. Not less interesting is the description of Cellini’s daring escape from the castle.  In climbing over the last wall, he fell and broke his leg, and was carried by a waterman to the palace of the Cardinal Cornaro.  There he lay in hiding, visited by all the rank and fashion of Rome, who were not a little curious to see the hero of so perilous an escapade.  Cornaro promised to secure his pardon, but eventually exchanged him for a bishopric.  This remarkable proceeding illustrates the manners of the Papal Court.  The cardinal wanted a benefice for one of his followers, and the Pope wished to get his son’s enemy once more into his power.  So the two ecclesiastics bargained together, and by mutual kind offices attained their several ends.

Cellini with his broken leg went back to languish in his prison.  He found the flighty Governor furious because he had “flown away,” eluding his bat’s eyes and wings.  The rigour used towards him made him dread the worst extremities.  Cast into a condemned cell, he first expected to be flayed alive; and when this terror was removed, he perceived the crystals of a pounded jewel in his food.  According to his own account of this mysterious circumstance, Messer Durante Duranti of Brescia, one of Cellini’s numerous enemies, had given a diamond of small value to be broken up and mixed with a salad served to him at dinner.  The jeweller to whom this charge was entrusted, kept the diamond and substituted a beryl, thinking that the inferior stone would have the same murderous properties.  To the avarice of this man Cellini attributed his escape from a lingering death by inflammation of the mucous membrane.

During his first imprisonment he had occupied a fair chamber in the upper turret of the castle.  He was now removed to a dungeon below ground where Fra Fojano, the reformer, had been starved to death.  The floor was wet and infested with crawling creatures.  A few reflected sunbeams slanting from a narrow window for two hours of the afternoon, was all the light that reached him.  Here he lay, alone, unable to move because of his broken leg, with his hair and teeth falling away, and with nothing to occupy him but a Bible and a volume of Villani’s “Chronicles.”  His spirit, however, was indomitable; and the passionate energy of the man, hitherto manifested in ungoverned acts of fury, took the form of ecstasy.  He began the study of the Bible from the first chapter of Genesis, and trusting firmly to the righteousness of his own cause, compared himself to all the saints and martyrs of Scripture, men of whom the world was not worthy.  He sang psalms, prayed continually, and composed a poem in praise of his prison.  With a piece of charcoal he made a great drawing of angels surrounding God the Father on the wall.  Once only his courage gave way:  he determined on suicide, and so placed a beam that it should fall on him like a trap.  When all was ready, an unseen hand took violent hold of him, and dashed him on the ground at a considerable distance.  From this moment his dungeon was visited by angels, who healed his broken leg, and reasoned with him of religion.

The mention of these visions reminds us that Cellini had become acquainted with Savonarola’s writings during his first imprisonment. Impressed with the grandeur of the prophet’s dreams, and exalted by the reading of the Bible, he no doubt mistook his delirious fancies for angelic visitors, and in the fervour of his enthusiasm laid claim to inspiration.  One of these hallucinations is particularly striking.  He had prayed that he might see the sun at least in trance, if it were impossible that he should look on it again with waking eyes.  But, while awake and in possession of his senses, he was hurried suddenly away and carried to a room, where the invisible power sustaining him appeared in human shape, “like a youth whose beard is but just growing, with a face most marvellous, fair, but of austere and far from wanton beauty.”  In that room were all the men who had ever lived and died on earth; and thence they two went together, and came into a narrow street, one side whereof was bright with sunlight.  Then Cellini asked the angel how he might behold the sun; and the angel pointed to certain steps upon the side of a house.  Up these Cellini climbed, and came into the full blaze of the sun, and, though dazzled by its brightness, he gazed steadfastly and took his fill.  While he looked, the rays fell away upon the left side and the disk shone like a bath of molten gold.  This surface swelled, and from the glory came the figure of a Christ upon the cross, which moved and stood beside the rays.  Again the surface swelled, and from the glory came the figure of Madonna and her Child; and at the right hand of the sun there knelt S. Peter in his sacerdotal robes, pleading Cellini’s cause; and “full of shame that such foul wrong should be done to Christians in his house.”  This vision marvellously strengthened Cellini’s soul, and he began to hope with confidence for liberty.  When free again, he modelled the figures he had seen in gold.

The religious phase in Cellini’s history requires some special comment, since it is precisely at this point that he most faithfully personifies the spirit of his age and nation.  That he was a devout Catholic there is no question.  He made two pilgrimages to Loreto, and another to S. Francis of Vernia.  To S. Lucy he dedicated a golden eye after his recovery from an illness.  He was, moreover, always anxious to get absolution from the Pope.  More than this; he continually sustained himself at the great crises of his life, when in peril of imprisonment, while defending himself against assassins, and again on the eve of casting his “Perseus,” by direct and passionate appeals to God.  Yet his religion had but little effect upon his life; and he often used it as a source of moral strength in doing deeds repugnant to real piety.  Like love, he put it off and on quite easily, reverting to it when he found himself in danger or bad spirits, and forgetting it again when he was prosperous.  Thus in the dungeon of S. Angelo he vowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre if God would grant him to behold the sun.  This vow he forgot until he met with disappointment at the Court of Francis, and then he suddenly determined to travel to Jerusalem.  The offer of a salary of seven hundred crowns restored his spirits, and he thought no more about his vow.

While he loved his life so dearly and indulged so freely in the pleasures of this earth, he made a virtue of necessity as soon as death approached, crying, “The sooner I am delivered from the prison of this world, the better; especially as I am sure of salvation, being unjustly put to death.”  His good opinion of himself extended to the certainty he felt of heaven.  Forgetting his murders and debaucheries, he sustained his courage with devotion when all other sources failed.  As to the divine government of the world, he halted between two opinions.  Whether the stars or Providence had the upper hand, he could not clearly say; but by the stars he understood a power antagonistic to his will, by Providence a force that helped him to do what he liked.  There is a similar confusion in his mind about the Pope.  He goes to Clement submissively for absolution from homicide and theft, saying, “I am at the feet of your Holiness, who have the full power of absolving, and I request you to give me permission to confess and communicate, that I may with your favour be restored to the divine grace.”  He also tells Paul that the sight of Christ’s vicar, in whom there is an awful representation of the divine Majesty, makes him tremble.  Yet at another time he speaks of Clement being “transformed to a savage beast,” and talks of him as “that poor man Pope Clement." Of Paul he says that he “believed neither in God nor in any other article of religion;” he sincerely regrets not having killed him by accident during the siege of Rome, abuses him for his avarice, casts his bastards in his teeth, and relates with relish the crime of forgery for which in his youth he was imprisoned in the castle of S. Angelo. Indeed, the Italians treated the Pope as negroes treat their fetishes.  If they had cause to dislike him, they beat and heaped insults on him-like the Florentines who described Sixtus IV. as “leno matris suae, adulterorum minister, diaboli vicarius,” and his spiritual offspring as “simonia, luxus, homicidium, proditio, haeresis.”  On the other hand, they really thought that he could open heaven and shut the gates of hell.

At the end of the year 1539, the Cardinal Ippolito d’Este appeared in Rome with solicitations from Francis I. that the Pope would release Cellini and allow him to enter his service. Upon this the prison door was opened.  Cellini returned to his old restless life of violence and pleasure.  We find him renewing his favourite pastimes-killing, wantoning, disputing with his employers, and working diligently at his trade.  The temporary saint and visionary becomes once more the bravo and the artist.  A more complete parallel to the consequences of revivalism in Italy could not be found. Meanwhile the first period of his history is closed and the second begins.

Cellini’s account of his residence in France has much historical interest besides the charm of its romance.  When he first joined the Court, he found Francis travelling from city to city with a retinue of eighteen thousand persons and twelve thousand horses.  Frequently they came to places where no accommodation could be had, and the suite were lodged in wretched tents.  It is not wonderful that Cellini should complain of the French being less civilised than the Italians of his time.  Francis among his ladies and courtiers, pretending to a knowledge of the arts, sauntering with his splendid train into the goldsmith’s workshop, encouraging Cellini’s violence with a boyish love of mischief, vain and flattered, peevish, petulant, and fond of show, appears upon these pages with a life-like vividness. When the time came for settling in Paris, the King presented his goldsmith with a castle called Le Petit Nesle, and made him lord thereof by letters of naturalisation.  This house stood where the Institute has since been built; of its extent we may judge from the number of occupations carried on within its precincts when Cellini entered into possession.  He found there a tennis-court, a distillery, a printing press, and a factory of saltpetre, besides residents engaged in other trades.  Cellini’s claims were resisted.  Probably the occupiers did not relish the intrusion of a foreigner.  So he stormed the place and installed himself by force of arms.  Similar violence was needed in order to maintain himself in possession; but this Cellini loved, and had he been let alone, it is probable he would have died of ennui.

Difficulties of all kinds, due in part to his ungovernable temper, in part to his ill-regulated life, in part to his ignorance of French habits, gathered round him.  He fell into disfavour with Madame d’Estampes, the mistress of the King; and here it may be mentioned that many of his troubles arose from his inability to please noble women. Proud, self-confident, overbearing, and unable to command his words or actions, Cellini was unfitted to pay court to princes.  Then again he quarrelled with his brother artists, and made the Bolognese painter, Primaticcio, his enemy.  After being attacked by assassins and robbers on more than one occasion, he was involved in two lawsuits.  He draws a graphic picture of the French courts of justice, with their judge as grave as Plato, their advocates all chattering at once, their perjured Norman witnesses, and the ushers at the doors vociferating Paix, paix, Satan, allez, paix.  In this cry Cellini recognised the gibberish at the beginning of the seventh canto of Dante’s “Inferno.”  But the most picturesque group in the whole scene presented to us is that made by Cellini himself, armed and mailed, and attended by his prentices in armour, as they walked into the court to browbeat justice with the clamour of their voice.  If we are to trust his narrative, he fought his way out of one most dangerous trial by simple vociferation.  Afterwards he took the law, as usual, into his own hands.  One pair of litigants were beaten; Caterina was nearly kicked to death; and the attorneys were threatened with the sword.

In the midst of these disturbances, Cellini began some important works for Francis.  At Paris the King employed him to make huge silver candelabra, and at Fontainebleau to restore the castle gate.  For the chateau of Fontainebleau Cellini executed the nymph in bronze, reclining among trophies of the chase, which may still be seen in the Louvre.  It is a long-limbed, lifeless figure, without meaning-a snuff-box ornament enlarged to a gigantic size.  Francis, who cannot have had good taste in art, if what Cellini makes him say be genuine, admired these designs above the bronze copies of the Vatican marbles he had recently received.  He seems to have felt some personal regard for Benvenuto, and to have done all he could to retain him in his service.  The animosity of Madame d’Estampes, and a grudge against his old patron, Ippolito d’Este, however, determined the restless craftsman to quit Paris.  Leaving his castle, his unfinished works, and other property behind him in the care of Ascanio, his friend and pupil, he returned alone to Italy.  This step, taken in a moment of restless pique, was ever after regretted by Cellini, who looked back with yearning from Florence to the generosity of Francis.

Cosimo de’ Medici was indeed a very different patron from Francis.  Cautious, little-minded, meddling, with a true Florentine’s love of bargaining and playing cunning tricks, he pretended to protect the arts, but did not understand the part he had assumed.  He was always short of money, and surrounded by old avaricious servants, through whose hands his meagre presents passed.  As a connoisseur, he did not trust his own judgment, thus laying himself open to the intrigues of inferior artists.  Henceforward a large part of Cellini’s time was wasted in wrangling with the Duke’s steward, squabbling with Bandinelli and Ammanati, and endeavouring to overcome the coldness or to meet the vacillations of his patron.  Those who wish to gain insight into the life of an artist at Court in the sixteenth century, will do well to study attentively the chapters devoted by Cellini to his difficulties with the Duchess, and his wordy warfares with Bandinelli. This atmosphere of intrigue and animosity was not uncongenial to Benvenuto; and as far as words and blows went, he almost always got the best of it.  Nothing, for example, could be keener and more cutting than the very just criticism he made in Bandinelli’s presence of his “Hercules and Cacus.”  “Quel bestial buaccio Bandinello,” as he delights to name him, could do nothing but retort with vulgar terms of insult.

The great achievement of this third period was the modelling and casting of the “Perseus.”  No episode in Cellini’s biography is narrated with more force than the climax to his long-protracted labours, when at last, amid the chaos and confusion of innumerable accidents, the metal in his furnace liquefied and filled the mould.  After the statue was uncovered in the Loggia de’ Lanzi, where it now stands, Cellini achieved a triumph adequate to his own highest expectations.  Odes and sonnets in Italian, Greek, and Latin, were written in its praise.  Pontormo and Bronzino, the painters, loaded it with compliments.  Cellini, ruffling with hand on hilt in silks and satins through the square, was pointed out to foreigners as the great sculptor who had cast the admirable bronze.  It was, in truth, no slight distinction for a Florentine artist to erect a statue beneath the Loggia de’ Lanzi in the square of the Signory.  Every great event in Florentine history had taken place on that piazza.  Every name of distinction among the citizens of Florence was connected with its monuments.  To this day we may read the course of Florentine art by studying its architecture and sculpture; and not the least of its many ornaments, in spite of all that may be said against it, is the “Perseus” of Cellini.

Cellini completed the “Perseus” in 1554.  His autobiography is carried down to the year 1562, when it abruptly terminates.  It appears that in 1558 he received the tonsure and the first ecclesiastical orders; but two years later on he married a wife, and died at the age of sixty-nine, leaving three legitimate children.  He was buried honourably, and a funeral oration was pronounced above his bier in the Chapter House of the Annunziata.

As a man, Cellini excites more interest than as an artist; and for this reason I have refrained from entering into minute criticism of his few remaining masterpieces.  It has been well said that the two extremes of society, the statesman and the craftsman, find their point of meeting in Machiavelli and Cellini, inasmuch as both recognise no moral authority but the individual will. The virtu, extolled by Machiavelli is exemplified by Cellini.  Machiavelli bids his prince ignore the laws; Cellini respects no tribunal and takes justice into his own hands.  The word conscience does not occur in Machiavelli’s phraseology of ethics; conscience never makes a coward of Cellini, and in the dungeons of S. Angelo he is visited by no remorse.  If we seek a literary parallel for the statesman and the artist in their idealisation of force and personal character, we find it in Pietro Aretino.  In him, too, conscience is extinct; for him, also, there is no respect of King or Pope; he has placed himself above law, and substituted his own will for justice.  With his pen, as Cellini with his dagger, he assassinates; his cynicism serves him for a coat of armour.  And so abject is society, so natural has tyranny become, that he extorts blackmail from monarchs, makes princes tremble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from Buonarroti.  These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, and Aretino, each in his own line, and with the proper differences that pertain to philosophic genius, artistic skill, and ribald ruffianism, sufficiently indicate the dissolution of the social bond in Italy.  They mark their age as the age of adventurers, bandits, bullies, Ishmaelites, and tyrants.