Background
Benvenuto Cellini was born in 1500 in Florence, in present-day Italy. His parents were Giovanni Cellini - architect and musician and Maria Lisabetta Granacci. Benvenuto was the second child of the family.
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Benvenuto Cellini was born in 1500 in Florence, in present-day Italy. His parents were Giovanni Cellini - architect and musician and Maria Lisabetta Granacci. Benvenuto was the second child of the family.
The son of a musician and builder of musical instruments, Cellini was pushed towards music, but when he was fifteen, his father reluctantly agreed to apprentice him to a goldsmith, Antonio di Sandro, nicknamed Marcone.
At 16 Benvenuto had to leave Florence because of a street fight and spent some months in Siena. In 1519 he moved to Rome, the center of his activity for the next two decades, although his Roman years were frequently interrupted by journeys to Pisa, Bologna, Venice, Naples, and Florence, the city to which he always remained loyal. In Rome, Cellini served popes Clement VII and Paul III, working chiefly on portrait medallions, coins, and jewels.
By his own account Cellini was a notable fighter, and in the sack of Rome (1527) he fought against the imperial troops. An increasingly tense relationship with Paul III and a series of violent incidents led to Cellini's imprisonment in the Castel Sant'Angelo, from which he made a dramatic escape.
Cellini spent the years 1540-1545 in France, serving Francis I as sculptor, decorator, and designer of architectural projects for the royal château of Fontainebleau. In 1543 he completed the famous and elaborate Salt Cellar from a model prepared earlier for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este. Cellini made models for a series of 12 silver statues of gods and goddesses and executed two bronze busts and silver vases (all now lost). He cast the bronze lunette of the Nymph of Fontainebleau (1545). The gold Salt Cellar demonstrates extremely well the technical virtuosity in which Cellini delighted; the architectural relief of the Nymph reveals that even when he was working on a large scale as a sculptor his art was still essentially that of a goldsmith. These two examples of the few extant works by Cellini display the hallmarks of his style: intricately wrought surfaces alternating with highly polished smooth areas bounded by carefully chiseled contours. The precise and elegant effect achieved by such contrasts was enhanced by the use of graceful, elongated figures. Works of art such as these as well as Cellini's actual presence in France, along with other artists working under the enthusiastic patronage of Francis I, played an important part in forming the style of French art in the late 16th century and helped to create an international courtly style favored throughout Europe in this period.
Cellini returned to Florence in 1545. For Duke Cosimo de' Medici he executed a bronze portrait of the duke, some marble statues of classical themes, and his most ambitious creation, the bronze Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi. The rigid, tense pose and biting characterization of the portrait of Cosimo were tempered in the more austere portrait of Bindo Altoviti (ca. 1550). Cellini's love of classical allusions, elaborate decorative effects, and formal elegance makes the Perseus appear more constrained and more stylish than the artist's tempestuous account of its casting would suggest. These later Florentine years of the sculptor's life saw reenacted the earlier pattern of gradually increased difficulties with his patron, Duke Cosimo, and bitter conflicts with other artists, especially Baccio Bandinelli and Bartolommeo Ammanati. At the same time Cellini's admiration for Michelangelo, his constant concern for his family, and the carving of a large ivory Crucifix (1562) as the realization of a vision he had years before in prison reveal other facets of his many-sided character.
Cellini's Autobiography broke off in 1558, the year in which he took preliminary religious vows, but these were never carried further. In 1565 he began work on his treatises on the goldsmith's art and on sculpture; they were published in 1568.
Cellini lived during a period of religious, political, social, and military strife and tension. This stormy atmosphere is nowhere more vividly described than in Cellini's Autobiography and nowhere more apparent than in the evidence of his own life with its sharp contrasts of egoism and religious faith, worldly ambition and filial devotion, and spirited pride in his own talents and genuine humility in his admiration for the greater genius he saw in the work of Michelangelo and the ancients.
He was named a member (Accademico) of the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno of Florence.
Aside from his marriage, Cellini was officially accused or charged with the crime of sodomy once with a woman and at least three times with men, illustrating his bisexual tendencies.
In 1562 he married a servant, Piera Parigi, with whom he claimed he had five children, of which only a son and two daughters survived him.
