CELLINI, BENVENUTO (1500–1571)

CELLINI, BENVENUTO (1500–1571), Italian goldsmith, sculptor, and writer. Cellini was the son of Giovanni Cellini, a Florentine court musician, inventor, and minor engineer. A restless, competitive young man, he trained and worked as a goldsmith in Siena and Bologna (1516), Pisa (1517), Rome (1519–1521, 1523–1527), and Mantua (1527–1528), returning to Florence for brief or long stays after each of these periods. From June 1529 to January 1534, Cellini served as incisore at the papal mint; throughout the 1530s, he was known for his fine medals and coins. The artist was in Naples in 1534; in Padua, Ferrara, and Lyon in 1537; and back in Rome thereafter. After serving time in prison there for embezzlement, he traveled in 1540 to France, where he spent the next five years, working among the numerous Italian artists at the court of King Francis I (ruled 1515–1547). In 1545, Cellini returned to his native Florence, where he spent most of the remainder of his life, and where he carried out all of his late works.

Beginning in the 1550s, Cellini became active as a writer, first composing poetry (some of it in reply to encomiastic verses that had been written to his bronze Perseus), then an autobiography, then a pair of treatises on goldsmithery and sculpture (his only long works to be published in his lifetime), and a series of other discourses on the arts. Though the autobiography in particular is now admired especially for its low style and colorful language, all of the writings reveal Cellini's close association with academic movements in Florence, including the Accademia Fiorentina, to which Cellini briefly belonged in the late 1540s and which he probably aspired to rejoin in the 1560s, and the Accademia del Disegno, which Cellini tried to help shape after its founding in 1563. Cellini was a close friend of the painter and poet Agnolo Bronzino, the philosopher and historian Benedetto Varchi, and the court physician Guido Guidi; he was a rival to the goldsmith Leone Leoni, the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, and the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574).

It was initially on account of his writings, rather than his art, that Cellini, who had been largely forgotten after his death, came to interest later authors. The Autobiography, which was first printed in Italian in 1728 (with a dedication to Richard Boyle), in English in 1771 (in a translation by Thomas Nugent), and in German in 1796 (in a translation by Goethe), went through countless editions in the nineteenth century. Cellini's dramatic accounts of chivalric quests, murders, a prison escape, and activities as a soldier made him seem, to Romantic writers, the paradigmatic Renaissance adventurer; he was the subject of a Berlioz opera and an Alexandre Dumas novel. As an artist, Cellini was also celebrated as an icon of Renaissance "universality." Major studies of Cellini as an artist by Eugène Plon (1883) and Friedrich Kriegbaum (1941), establishing the basis for what most people today regard as his oeuvre, clarified, without exactly overturning, this impression. While Cellini could no longer be connected with the enormous range of precious objects attributed to him in the nineteenth century, he could, by the mid-twentieth century, be appreciated as a marble sculptor, no less than as a metalworker. More recently, interest in mannerist art and in early art theory has lent Cellini a different sort of importance, as few artists who practiced his range of arts wrote as voluminously and as informatively about them as he did.

Cellini's major sculptural works include the Saltcellar, commissioned by Ippolito D'Este in Rome, completed for Francis at Fontainebleau, and now in Vienna; the decorations, including the surviving Nymph of Fontainebleau, intended to complement Francesco Primaticcio's frescoes for the Porte Dorée at Fontainebleau; the Perseus and Medusa, still in its original position in the Loggia de' Lanzi in Florence (though the original base has been moved to the Bargello, and replaced with a copy); a series of marble sculptures of classical subjects, most of them now in the Bargello; and the marble Crucifix, originally meant for his tomb, and now at the Escorial in Spain. As an artist, Cellini is probably most significant for having rejuvenated the production of monumental public bronze statuary in central Italy. A number of the important sculptors in the generation after Cellini, including Pier Paolo Romano, Willem de Tetrode, Francesco Tadda, and Stoldo Lorenzi all spent time in Cellini's shop.

CELLINI, BENVENUTO (1500–1571)

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