Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography is one of the most vivid, boastful, violent, brilliant, and unforgettable self-portraits of the Renaissance. Goldsmith, sculptor, soldier, courtier, fugitive, and relentless defender of his own genius, Cellini tells the story of his life with extraordinary energy, carrying the reader through the workshops, courts, prisons, streets, churches, and battlefields of sixteenth-century Italy and France.Cellini's account is valuable not only as personal confession but as a dramatic inside view of Renaissance art, patronage, ambition, rivalry, and survival. He writes of popes, princes, artists, patrons, enemies, lovers, duels, imprisonments, escapes, commissions, and acts of violence with a self-confidence so extravagant that the book becomes as revealing in tone as in incident. Whether praising his own skill, denouncing his rivals, describing his work for powerful patrons, or narrating danger with theatrical intensity, Cellini creates a persona larger than life and almost impossible to forget.Written in the late sixteenth century and first published long after his death, the Autobiography remains a landmark of memoir and Renaissance literature. It is essential reading for those interested in Italian history, Renaissance art, artists' lives, court culture, sculpture, goldsmithing, literary autobiography, and the formation of the modern idea of the artist as a defiant, individual genius.