The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

A scandalous and vivid autobiography chronicling the life of one of the most celebrated sculptors of the Renaissance

Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) was a celebrated goldsmith and distinguished sculptor whose powerful talent can still be seen in such works as his bronze statue of Perseus and his gold salt cellar made for Francis 1. He worked for a variety of patrons, including Popes Clement VII and Paul III. 
 
 
George Bull is an author and journalist who has translated 6 volumes for Penguin Classics, including THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER by Castiglione, Vasari's LIVES OF THE ARTISTS and THE PRINCE by Machiavelli.

Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who at different times experienced both papal persecution and imprisonment, and the adulation of the royal court. Inn-keepers and prostitutes, kings and cardinals, artists and soldiers rub shoulders in the pages of his notorious autobiography: a vivid portrait of the manners and morals of both the rulers of the day and of their subjects. Written with supreme powers of invective and an irrepressible sense of humour, this is an unrivalled glimpse into the palaces and prisons of the Italy of Michelangelo and the Medici.

Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini is an artist-craftsman, one of the greatest sculptors in the renaissance, passionately devoted to art, the worshipper and frequenter of the great men of his time, the 'divine' Michelangelo, who came to his studio, the 'marvellous' Titian (the adjectives are Cellini's ). He loathed the sculptor Torregiano because he had broken Michelangelo's nose.His autobiography gives a quite extraordinarily vivid account of daily life in Renaissance Florence and Rome, its studios, its taverns, its violence, his loves, the kings, cardinals and popes who commission his works. At 27 he helps direct the defence of the castello San Angelo; his account of his imprisonment there under a mad castellan (who thought he was a bat), his escape by an improvised rope, his recapture, his confinement in 'a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms' is a chapter of adventure equal to any in fact or fiction. Later he describes burning all his furniture to achieve sufficient heat to cast of one of his most famous works, Perseus and the Head of Medusa. 
Cellini's Life was translated by Goethe into German. The Everyman translation by Anne Macdonell (1903) is widely recognised as the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original.

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