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By Root 2829 0

Cellini went into that Aladdin’s cave and sorcerer’s den of the Renaissance, a goldsmith’s workshop. The skills he acquired there became the basis of an encyclopedic knowledge of how to work with materials of all kinds, from gold and silver and the most precious of stones to hard stones of every variety and base metals. Cellini was one of the few Renaissance artists trained as a goldsmith who is celebrated for a surviving piece of goldsmithing. Virtually all his early work vanished in the tragic sack of Rome in 1527, never to surface again, for like bronze, gold was a risky material in which to seek eternal fame, as owners melted it down in hard times. However, Cellini worked for the munificent François I of France, 1540–45, and the superb gold-and-enamel salt he made for the king somehow came through to posterity and is now one of the greatest treasures of the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. This enchanting object took Cellini two years to complete—which was regarded at the time as astonishing speed, and no wonder: no individual or team could produce it today in a century. If any one work of art, with its classical themes, its fecundity and brilliance, its adventurous technology and sheer love of art and humanity, sums up the entire Renaissance, it is this glorious extravaganza.

Cellini made so many different things that it is hard to list them all: ceremonial medals with finely sculpted heads and ingenious reverses, coin dies, emblematic enseignes, the dies for seals—all of great artistry—elaborate candlesticks and ewers, altar furniture and tableware, small bronzes and decorative pieces of every description. He also aimed at the heroic and once or twice succeeded in achieving it, notably in his magnificent Perseus and the Head of Medusa, a large-scale bronze on an elaborate pedestal with a relief panel and four bronze statuettes in its niches. Commissioned by Cosimo I de’ Medici and designed to stand in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria alongside, and in competition with, Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, it was finished in 1560 and seen by the sculptor as the climax of his career. The new duke of Tuscany regarded it as the embodiment of his “Etruscan revival,” which his dukedom symbolized, for the pose recalls an Etruscan bronze of the fourth century B.C. that Cosimo admired. This work, too, with its deliberate recall of the glorious antique past and its brilliant display of what the artists of sixteenth-century Europe, and especially Florence, could now accomplish, was also a recapitulation and epitome of everything the Renaissance stood for.

The great bronze is perhaps the best documented of any Renaissance work of art, for Cellini describes its conception and fabrication in considerable detail. He was a hot-blooded, rash, difficult and audacious man, with all the vices of artistic flamboyance we associate with the more sensational Renaissance artists, and some peculiar to himself in addition. The surviving court records show him in and out of trouble all his life, often being forced to flee to escape trial. He was guilty of at least two killings, being pardoned by virtue of his artistic services—a typical Renaissance touch. He was twice accused of sodomy, the second time after the genesis of Perseus, causing him to flee to Venice, where he met the architect Sansovino and Titian. He was nonetheless convicted, sentenced to four years in prison, and actually endured a long house arrest, which he used to write his autobiography. This delightful and highly informative work, a real window into the artistic world of his day, tells us all about the Perseus and many other works of his. It is also a work of literary art, which in its own way confirms the long process by which the humble and often anonymous medieval craftsman raised himself to the status of a Renaissance hero, albeit that in the violent and boastful Cellini’s case he was more of an antihero. We learn from the autobiography that he was an art collector. Vasari says he amassed several cartoons from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling,