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Here is the most important autobiography from Renaissance Italy and one of the most spirited and colorful from any time or place, in a translation widely recognized as the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original.
Benvenuto Cellini was both a beloved artist in sixteenth-century Florence and a passionate and temperamental man of action who was capable of brawling, theft, and murder. He counted popes, cardinals, kings, and dukes among his patrons and was the adoring friend of—as he described them—the “divine” Michelangelo and the “marvelous” Titian, but was as well known for his violent feuds. At age twenty-seven he helped defend the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, and his account of his imprisonment there (under a mad castellan who thought he was a bat), his escape, recapture, and confinement in “a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms” is an adventure equal to any other in fact or fiction. But it is only one in a long life lived on a grand scale.
Cellini’s autobiography is not merely the record of an extraordinary life but also a dramatic and evocative
account of daily life in Renaissance Italy, from its lowest taverns to its highest royal courts.
- Sales Rank: #1387501 in Books
- Brand: Cellini, Benvenuto/ Fenton, James (INT)/ Macdonell, Anne (TRN)
- Published on: 2010-04-06
- Released on: 2010-04-06
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x 1.19" w x 5.41" l, 1.23 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 504 pages
About the Author
Benvenuto Cellini was born in Florence in 1500 and died in 1571.
James Fenton is a prizewinning poet, former professor of poetry at Oxford, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION
By James Fenton
--
Cellini’s autobiography is a work without precedent, in its frankness, its detail, its glamour and excitement. The author is a goldsmith, and not just any goldsmith but one who from an early age has been recognized as uniquely skillful. For a long time he operates in that area where metalcraft shades into sculpture. He makes medals and coins, objects of a particular interest and veneration in the Renaissance. He makes elaborate sewers and basins, and the famous salt-cellar now in Vienna. In due course he will become a sculptor proper, and will cast the bronze Perseus that has become one of the symbols of Florence and of the Renaissance itself.
Because he is a man of such except ional gifts he deals directly with popes and monarchs and other heads of state. And in these dealings he is often frustrated, by the capriciousness of rulers and by the petty enmities of courtiers. His hot blood and fierce sense of honour continually land him in trouble. He kills three men. He is several times imprisoned. He defends the Vatican during the Sack of Rome. He escapes from the Castel Sant’Angelo. He, if anyone does, lives life to the full.
And yet the story he tells is not always taken seriously. It seems too good to be true, as when, during one of many stand-offs with his enemies, he points his arquebus in the air, the gun goes off accidentally, the bullet hits an arch above his head, ricochets and strikes his enemy in the throat. Surely the narrator here is something of a Baron Munchausen. Surely this all has to be taken with a grain of salt.
The fact was that Cellini’s excellence as a storyteller worked against him, particularly since his unfinished autobiography was not published until the eighteenth century, by which time the majority of his work had been dispersed. If nobody reading the book could easily check on the works of art he was talking about (with the except ion, of course, of the Peruses, which still stood in its intended place, in the Piazza della Signori in Florence), it was easy to think that the artist was a little deluded as to his own merits.
Of course it makes a big difference if one reads the Life in such a way. Indeed it makes it pointless to pay any attention to the detailed descript ions of works of art that it contains. Sir John Pope-Hennessy made this point forcefully when he said that the first premise of his biography of the artist was that Cellini was, ‘in the full sense, a great artist’, and the second that ‘almost every direct statement in the Life . . . is correct’, and that one should read it ‘as a factual record punctuated by passages of fantasy, not as a work of the imagination which intermittently adheres to fact’.
Our understanding and knowledge of Cellini’s oeuvre has grown over the years since the first publication of the Life. In the nature of things, many of the objects in precious metal – the ewers and basins – will have been melted down, but the famous salt-cellar survived, unidentified, in Schloss Ambrass in Austria, and was recognized on the basis of Cellini’s description. In due course it suffered the fate of many super-famous works of world art. It was stolen from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and remained missing for months. Pope-Hennessy himself was involved in two Cellini discoveries. A bronze preparatory model for the head of Medusa, part of the Perseus group, was brought into the Victoria and Albert Museum one day during his directorship, by a ceramics dealer from Brighton. And it was Pope-Hennessy who in 1982 published the bronze figure of a satyr, which had come to light three years earlier in a Swiss collection. It had been found at a gallery in Munich, in use as a doorstop. The discovery of this satyr, which must have been part of a presentation model for the King of France, part of the projected design of the Porte Dorée at Fontainebleau, came only a couple of decades after the identification of Cellini’s finest surviving drawing, depicting the same figure. This drawing had hung, unidentified, in a New York gallery, until a visitor to the gallery worked out one day that the inscription on it (actually in the artist’s hand) mentioning the ‘porta di fontana bellio’ must refer to Fontainebleau.
Now those who wanted to could imagine for the first time what the door had looked like. The enormous lunette above it had been executed and is now one of the treasures of the Louvre. The satyrs had never been made full size, but Cellini describes two of them, designed for either side of the door. And, astonishingly enough, in 2003, news came that the matching model satyr, also in bronze, had been discovered in a cupboard in Buckingham Palace. It emerged that both models had once belonged to the Royal Collection. The one from the Swiss collection, now in the Getty Museum, appeared in a nineteenth-century inventory photograph at Windsor Castle. Someone must have sol d it, stolen it or given it away. No one had noticed the loss, because no one had the slightest idea what it was.
It is possible now to put together the various surviving pieces of material evidence and see what Cellini was talking about in his account of the Fontainebleau commission, what his intentions were and to what extent the project had been realized before it was abandoned. And indeed it should be added that there is no reason to believe that al l the evidence has yet been gathered in. There could easily be further dramatic Cellini discoveries among the palaces and private collections of Europe.
And since we so often encounter a scholarly literature which asks us to take a sophisticated and skeptical view of the Life, it would be worthwhile one day to read a systematic assessment of the way the emerging material record (medals, goldsmith’s work, sculpture, drawings) has confirmed or contradicted the details given in the autobiography. Pope-Hennessy, who was particularly interested in the material record (that is, the artistic achievement), clearly thought that the art confirmed the Life.
For instance, the account of the casting of the Perseus had often been taken as fiction: faced with a crisis during the pouring of the metal, Cellini orders all his household pewter dishes to be brought, and throws them into the mix. It is an incident that appealed to the Romantic imagination, and indeed is reproduced in Berlioz’s opera. But it is not, for that reason alone, a fiction. In two different accounts Cellini is slightly inconsistent: in one he refers to 200 dishes and in the other to dishes weighing 200 pounds. But the metallurgical examination of the Perseus itself reveals that its alloy had been short on tin, but that the proportion rose significantly after the dishes were added. And the dishes themselves appear in Cellini’s expense accounts.
It was for such reasons that Pope-Hennessy came to his formulation, quoted above, that the Life was ‘a factual record punctuated by passages of fantasy’ rather than ‘a work of the imagination which intermittently adheres to facts.’ Cellini was a miles gloriosus, a boastful soldier, and we really cannot tell how much truth there is in his accounts of his military exploits. Nor I think are we expected to believe that he conjured spirits in the Colosseum, or took part in such ceremonies. But still it is fact we are dealing with in this account.
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127 of 132 people found the following review helpful.
Exposes the myth of Islamic tolerance
By Al_Mansur
This book is about the Islamisation of the Middle East (primarily), North Africa, Persia and the Balkans and how Muslim apologists and their Western apologist allies have concealed the countless attrocities, oppression and forced conversions of conquered non-Muslims by "killing history" (i.e supressing the truth and reinventing history).
Before the author is accused of tarnishing Islam and the Muslim community, it must be emphasised that this book draws heavily from quotes from the Quran (the Holy Book which Muslims claim was given by God to Prophet Muhammad); the Hadith (i.e. a compilation of the sayings of Prophet Muhammad); and articles written by renowned Muslim historians, theologians and jurists ....all of which advocates war against unbelievers until finally all of the latter are subjugated and the harsh and humiliating treatment which must be meted out on unbelievers until they embrace the "One True Religion".
The process of Islamisation can be broadly divided into 2 stages :
1) JIHAD - This concept is not only embodied in the Quran but is an obligation of every able bodied Muslim man as a means to bring Islam to the unbelievers. The Prophet Muhammad fought 66 to 67 wars (all or almost all of which were offensive) during his lifetime against Jews and pagan Arabs. A number of his wives and concubines (i.e. Reihana, Safiya etc)were actually taken from Jewish tribes which he defeated or massacred (i.e. Banu Nadir, Banu Quraiza etc). In the first stage of Islamisation (i.e. the Jihad) Muslim armies conquered the whole of the Arabian peninsula and then onwards to the Middle East, North Africa and Persia by the 7th and early 8th centuries. Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians were given the choice of conversion to Islam, death or becoming a Dhimmi (i.e. tributary). Polytheists or pagans were only given 2 choices: conversion or death. Nevertheless, the Muslim Arab tribesmen in their religious zeal and greed for loot would often pillage unfortified villages and enslaved its inhabitants who were Islamised and absorbed into their tribes. [A fair few of the non-Muslim child captives after being brought up as Muslims actually became prominent military commanders who in turn conquered other non-Muslim countries for Islam!] Thus, the Muslim community would gain a number of new converts after the conquest of lands belonging to the Dar Al-Harb (i.e. which are inhabited by Non-Muslims).
2) Dhimmi - In the second stage of Islamisation (and after the Muslim conquests), the non-Muslims who have refused to convert are subjected to numerous humiliations and heavy taxes. Poll tax (known as the jizya) and land tax (known as the kharaj) are imposed. In certain cases, Christain children (such as in the Balkans) and Jewish children (in Morrocco, Yemen and Persia) were taken to be brought up as Muslims. It has been said that after a century of Muslims conquest, Egypt was still 95% Non-Muslim. Gradually, however they converted : the poor converted because the tax was too oppressive, the upper class and the rich converted to retain their privileges (both of these are supported by a few letters written in the Middle Ages by Muslims themselves)and some from the middle class converted for career advancement since at various times, non-Muslims were not permitted to hold high positions.
Massacres were very common even for Dhimmis (i.e. non-Muslims who have submitted to Muslim rule) the last of which was the massacre of the millions of Christians, primarily Armenians (and some Assyrians and Surianis) in 1915. The Islamic nature of the massacre is evidenced by those Armenians embracing Islam were spared and the women and children below 12 were taken captive (i.e. the same fate as the women and chidlren of the Jewish tribe of Banu Quraiza after its defeat by Prophet Muhammad).
Lastly, the author spends quite a bit of time debunking the myth of Islamic tolerance and discusses the reasons for apologists (both Muslim, Westerners and Arab Christians) to reinvent the history of the Islamic conquests and the treatment of the Dhimmis (i.e. Christians and Jews under Islam).
243 of 258 people found the following review helpful.
Exposes Islamic history using Muslims' own historical texts
By A Customer
Despite the number of people posting here saying this book is biased, no one has come forward to refute its conclusions. Why? Because they can't. Bat Ye'or uses eye-witness accounts and Muslims' own historical writings to tell the sad story of Christians and Jews who were made accomplices in their own cultural and actual destruction by the cruel laws of Islamic sharia. This is a very important book that tells the story of a forgotten people. In the 19th century especially, their sufferings were ignored and abetted by Islam-intoxicated Westerners refusing to face up to the aims of a relentless political ideology (NOT a religion) bent on world subjugation and domination. Sadly, such Westerners still exist and still seek to ignore and disguise the sufferings of millions of people persecuted by Islamic law and tradition: the Coptic Christians; Iranian Ba'hais; Indonesian Buddhists and Christians and Southern Sudanese animists/Christians. John Esposito and Karen Armstrong should shrink with shame at the very name of the great Bat Ye'or, an Egyptian scholar who, unlike those two famous Islamic apologists, must publish under an assumed name to avoid the consequences of telling the truth about the dark side of Islam.
107 of 114 people found the following review helpful.
Islam Unveiled
By A Customer
Bat Ye'or has done the world an immeasurable service with this very scholary and sobering book on Islam and its Jihad and Dhimmitude against non-Muslims. We in the West, after having endured centuries of wars of religion, have come at last to accept the idea of tolerance of other religions. Islam, however, has an opposite credo: all non-Muslims live in "dar al-harb", the world of war; and Muslims mean this literally. The reader of this work must gird his loins as he learns of the persistent genocide throughout history of non-Muslims, which evil deeds go on even to this day (eg, against the Lebanese Christians). Of course, the same goes for Jews as well as all other non-Muslim religions. We learn from history here unveiled for Western eyes for the first time that, excepting only the Arabian Peninsula itself, the rest of the Middle East was originally (ie pre-Muhammed) non-Arab and pre-dominantly Christian, with large minorities of Jews as well as Zoroastrians, et al. These non-Muslim populations were brutally murdered (often with the women and children sold as slaves) and then the lands re-populated with Arab Muslims! This includes Palestine itself. The idea, then, that Palestinians have a "right" to this land, as they claim, is ipso facto absurd. It was originally Christian and Jewish land, then systematically and violently "de-populated" through Jihads, and then re-populatedwith Arab Muslims; and this occurred in the entire Middle East! That we are only now finding out about this sordid and tragic and unforgiveable history of unrelenting racial and religiious genocide is highly disturbing. And lest we think that this has stopped, read about the Muslims exterminating the Christian Armenians, millions of them, before and during WWI. (Ye'or includes many illustrations from contemporary sources, including a mass grave of Armenians, taken in 1915. And it is this same extermination policy Muslims wish to effect today with Israel as well as now with the obdurate Christian Western nations like the US and Britain (with whatever weapons of mass destruction they can they can get their hands on). If the reader has a strong stomach for history that is backed up with scholarship of the most thorough kind, then I recommend this book unreservedly.
On a personal note, I now understand why Muslims in the West (and of course the East) have been at such pains NOT to have their history be known to us, and not to let us know above all that they, as Muslims, are and must be (as their religious duty, as cited in the Koran) at eternal war with all non-Muslims. We have been told that it is only the "fanatics" who believe such things. Alas, their histsory of 14 CONSECUTIVE centuries belies this--as does the daily rhetoric of hate that pours out of the mouths of Islamic leaders and clerics all around the world. No, the sad but demonstrably true facts are otherwise. Islam, since its inception 14 centuries ago, has proved itself to be the single greatest factor of unrest in the world through perpetual genocidal wars with all other peoples, thus giving the lie to their oft-stated claims that they are a religion of peace, compassion, etc. I defy anyone who has read this work (or her other books) to conclude otherwise than what I have written here. Neither the West in general, nor the US and GB in particular, are the sources of unrest in the world today; this "honor" belongs solely to Islam. It is a religion of hate and perpetual war against all non-Muslims--period. Such is the sad conclusion one must draw from Bat Ye'or's outstanding, and very disturbing scholary work(s). In my opinion, the world must assume a hostile stance towards Islam until and unless Islam, through religious reformation enacted into law, and begun by stopping persecution against all non-Muslims around the world, assumes a stance that not only tolerates non-Muslims, but embraces and learns from them as well. Until that (unlikely) day, this religion, the source of untold suffering throughout history, and of continuous religious and ethnic genocide, will only perpetuate its historical ways in the future (as has occurred recently in East Timor, Nigeria, et al).
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