CELLINI, BENVENUTO. - Born in Florence in 1500, he was first set by his father to music and then to goldsmithing; at the age of sixteen he was confined to Siena following a brawl; he then went to Bologna, to Pisa, to Rome (1519), where he stayed for two years with the engraver Tasso. He returned to live in Rome from 1523 to 1540, after further brawls and woundings forced him to leave Florence once again. Protected by Clement VII and by Paul III, he obtained many delicate commissions, among them that of master of the dies at the pontifical mint. In 1540 (after his imprisonment in Castel Sant'Angelo) he went to Paris, where he was honored by Francis I, who placed the beautiful castle of Petit-Nesle at his disposal. Five years later he was again in Florence (1545), well received by Duke Cosimo; however, the bitterness he suffered because of Bandinelli's malice after the famous casting of the Perseus drove him to withdraw; but then in 1563 he married Piera de' Parigi, by whom he had several children. He died on 13 February 1571 and was buried in the church of the Annunziata.
At the age of 58 he wrote his own Vita (first published in 1728 by the physician and philosopher Antonio Cocchi), dictating it, while he was in his workshop, to a fourteen-year-old apprentice of his: in it, following the example of Raffaello da Montelupo and of Baccio Bandinelli, who had set out to tell nothing but the «pure truth», Cellini narrated the origin of his family, his first studies and his first works, the episodes of his stay in Rome with the defense of Castel Sant'Angelo in 1527, those of his sojourn in France, the long time spent in Florence, the labors and anxieties he experienced over the casting of the Perseus, the invitation of the king of France to carve the tomb of Henry II; and all this in an easy and free-flowing prose, effective and popular, though at times too daring as regards morality. To Varchi, asked to correct that extemporaneous text, it seemed well not to lay hands on it, and it was a great stroke of luck: because in the spontaneity and almost tempestuous agility of that prose, not infrequently ungrammatical, lies the faithful self-portrait of the artist, often unscrupulous and superstitious, tender and sincere, boastful and "unruly." Of Cellini we also have a Trattato sull'oreficeria and a Trattato sulla scultura (Florence 1568), as well as some Rime (see 1st ed. edited by A. Mabellini, Turin 1891) and Discorsi e ricordi intorno all'arte (Florence 1857).
He was among the greatest sculptors of his time, certainly the greatest of the goldsmiths. Of his bronze sculptures one recalls the Perseus of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, whose wax model and first bronze casting are in the Bargello, a bust of Cosimo I in the same museum, a Nymph at Fontainebleau, a marble Christ at the Escorial.
His only certain surviving work of goldsmithing is the salt cellar he prepared for Francis I, today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. - See Pl. LXXVII.
