Benvenuto Cellini: Art, sodomy and homocide in Renaissance Italy
According to his autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini was born “on the night of All Saints’ Day at exactly half past four in the year 1500”. In reality, the master sculptor was born on November 3rd but felt that being born on one of the holiest nights of the year lent him an aura of importance. Volatile, jealous and frequently homicidal, Cellini may have been talented but he had very little in common with peace-loving saints like Francis of Assisi. His story, as recounted in Vita, is a head-spinning portrait of romance, rivalry and artistic excellence at the height of the Italian Renaissance. It’s also mostly codswallop. What’s clear is that getting in the way of this goldsmith, sculptor, and occasional necromancer meant almost certain death.
In the early 16th century, amid a backdrop of foreign invasion, Cellini gained admission into the revered Florentine goldsmiths guild, having spent his teenage years honing his skills in university towns like Siena, Bologna and Pisa. In 1523, he was accused of indulging in outlawed sexual practices, having committed an act of “sodomy” with one Domenico di Giuliano da Ripa. Around this time, he became entangled in an ongoing blood feud with the Guasconti family, with the “hot-blooded” young artist stabbing one of them in the belly. He was sentenced to death in absentia, having successfully fled Florence.
He made a new home in Rome, where he exploited his connections with the powerful Medici family to obtain the patronage of Giulio de Medici. His arrival was well-timed in one sense – Giulio had just been appointed Pope Clement VII – but ill-timed in another. In 1527, troops from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s imperial army sacked Rome. In the ensuing blood bath, up to 25,000 civilians were butchered. Cellini later wrote that he’d helped organise the pope’s defences and had quickly found that he was perhaps an even better artillery operator than he was a goldsmith, allegedly shooting the commander of the imperial force, Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, from his horse. With Rome in ruins, Cellini was ordered to melt down the Pope’s gold, extract his jewels and join him in fleeing the city.
When Cellini returned to Florence, he found a city decimated by plague and bloodshed. With no patrons left alive, he travelled to Mantua, Venice, Naples and even Paris to find work as a goldsmith. He’d just landed a position as the head of the Papal Mint when he learnt of his brother’s murder. Overwhelmed with grief and rage, he tracked down the killer and decapitated him with a single slice of his blade before impaling him so deeply that he was forced to leave his sword jutting out of the headless corpse. He was soon arrested and would have been executed had the pope not helped him escape the noose. Clement VII told Cellini to keep his head down and busy himself with work, but this proved impossible. As recounted in Vita, the artist fell for a serving girl. Determined to seduce her, he is said to have enlisted a priest, a necromancer and a 12-year-old virgin servant to conjure dark spirits from the sands of the Roman Colosseum. Apparently, it worked like a charm, which I suppose it was.
Sometime later, Cellini stabbed and killed another of his rivals, a fellow goldsmith called Pompeo de Capitaneis. This one we know happened for real because details of the murder were recorded in official documents. And so, Cellini went into exile once more until the pope agreed to absolve him. After a short spell in France working in the royal place of Fontainebleau, he returned to Rome in 1537, where he was immediately imprisoned by the pope’s son, Cellini’s avowed enemy Pier Luigi Farnese, for stealing papal jewellery during the sack of Rome. After being fed a poison of ground diamonds and engaging in numerous conversations with angels – or so the story goes – Cellini returned to France, where he received the patronage of Francis I. He then murdered a postmaster for some unspecified reason and began work on his large-scale sculptures, splitting his time between Paris and the palace of Fontainebleau, where he worked for the French king designing the palace’s salt-cellar, a reflection of the monarch’s nascent obsession with the spice trade.
This period of relative peace and harmony was not to last. After impregnating one of his models, Cellini was again accused of sodomy. So back to Florence he went – this time looking to secure the patronage of the powerful Duke Cosimo I de Medici. For the next decade, he worked tirelessly to create some of his most celebrated works, including his fabled bronze Perseus, a piece that won him favourable comparisons to his hero, the great Michaelangelo. Finally, Cellini had secured the fame he had spent so many years pursuing. In classic style, he blew it at the very last moment, attacking and injuring another rival goldsmith in 1556. Just a few months after being released from jail, an apprentice with who he’d had “carnal intercourse very many times” accused him of sodomy. This time Cellini didn’t try to resist. He pleaded guilty and spent the next four years under house arrest. His career never recovered. And so, with no commissions on the horizon, he dedicated himself to writing Vita, thus transforming his life story into a legend in which he was always the hero.
