The treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on goldsmithing and sculpture

by Benvenuto Cellini

THE TREATISE ON SCULPTURE.

CHAPTER I. ON THE ART OF CASTING IN BRONZE	[111]
CHAPTER II. HOW THE ABOVE-MENTIONED CLAY IS MADE	[113]
CHAPTER III. ANOTHER METHOD OF CASTING FIGURES IN BRONZE OF LIFE SIZE OR A LITTLE UNDER	[114]
CHAPTER IV. HOW TO CONSTRUCT FURNACES FOR CASTING BRONZE, WHETHER FOR STATUES, ORDNANCE, OR OTHER SUCH-LIKE THINGS	[127]
CHAPTER V. HOW TO CARVE STATUES OR INTAGLIOS, OR OTHER WORKS, SUCH AS DIVERS BEASTS, IN MARBLE OR OTHER STONES	[134]
CHAPTER VI. OF CARRARA MARBLES	[135]
CHAPTER VII. A DISQUISITION ON COLOSSAL STATUES WHETHER MODERATELY OR VERY GREAT	[139]
CHAPTER VIII. THE MYSTERY OF MAKING GREAT COLOSSI	[141]

[ A GLOSSARY OF ITALIAN TECHNICAL TERMS FOR THE USE OF STUDENTS.]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND DIAGRAMS.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

To face page
A page of reputed Cellini Jewellery	[22]
Another page of the same	[24]
King Francis’ Salt, first view	[58]
King Francis’ Salt, second view	[60]
Specimens of Cardinals’ Seals	[66]
Coins and Medals from various collections	[68]
The South Kensington Breviary and another Cellini attribution	[32]
A Wax Model for the Perseus	[54]
The Crucifix in the Escurial	[134]
The Perseus	[114]
The Nymph of Fontainebleau	[110]

DIAGRAMS.

	page
Diagram illustrating the specchietto for the diamond	[40]
Diagram illustrating the application of the cire perdue process to seals	[64]
Diagram illustrating the coniare process of striking medals	[76]
Diagram illustrating the process of striking medals with the screw	[78]
Diagram illustrating the process of casting silver	[79]
Diagram illustrating the rasoio for paring metal	[83]
Biringoccio’s Furnace from the ‘Pirotechnica’	[133]

AN INTRODUCTORY ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN AND OBJECT OF THE TREATISES & OF CELLINI’S POSITION AS CRAFTSMAN AND AUTHOR.

This translation is intended for the workshop; & to bring home to English craftsmen, & more particularly to my colleagues and pupils at Essex House, the methods and practice of the Goldsmith of the Renaissance. It is with this end in view that the work has been undertaken, and I am in hopes that the knowledge of this may induce my critics to give it a kindlier reading, aware as I am of its many shortcomings.

To the translator of the treatises two things are necessary, Italian scholarship and a thorough knowledge of workshop technicalities; these two qualities are difficult—perhaps impossible—to combine, and I am conscious of grave deficiencies in both, but more especially in the former. My endeavour has been to follow the lead set me by John Addington Symonds and to make this first English translation of the treatises serve, if but in some far-off measure, as a continuation volume to his masterly translation of the Autobiography. I have in many cases, therefore, adopted his manner of handling the subject, but inasmuch as the more technical and less directly personal matter with which the treatises deal, demands a somewhat different treatment, I have sought to retain what I would call the workshop vernacular, without at the same time sacrificing the archaism of the old Italian dialect.

Cellini’s graphic touch, which gives their manifold brilliancy to the varying passages of that wonderful autobiography, is equally evident in the treatises. But this very vividness increases the translator’s difficulty. The book is full of amusing workshop pictures and anecdotes; but it is always a workshop book. Cellini sees each process before him as he describes it, we, however, only hear the description, we do not see the process, hence it is often to the expert metal worker alone that some of the more complex technical narrations appeal, while the translator is as frequently in doubt as to whether he has realised the picture the author sought to draw. If, in my English rendering of some of these pictures, I have gone astray, I trust that my errors may be pointed out by those who are better able to follow the author’s meaning.

Apology is perhaps scarcely necessary for what will often appear to be loose or ungrammatical English; this may be an offence to the stylist or the pedant, & it certainly at first sight jars in what purports to be a scientific text book. It would have been perfectly easy for me to cut out the improper stories, trim up the phrases and give precision, accuracy, and even grammar to certain of the sentences, but this would not have been Cellini. We have him not writing, but rapidly & with a delightful forgetfulness and confusion, talking his treatises to a scribe, and then omitting to revise them; it is the spirit, therefore, of the spoken word, not the careful writing, that I have sought to render.

Another difficulty hampers the translator: the absence of any living workshop tradition upon which to fall back when his subject becomes too technical. In our day of the subdivision of labour the study of the ‘ Eight branches of the glorious Art of Goldsmithing’ as it was in Benvenuto’s time is a thing of the past. Except in a few instances where workshops are conducted with the enthusiasm of the artist rather than with the itching fingers of the tradesman, there is no such thing as an all round grasp of the Art such as Cellini postulates. To the tradesman, the sculptor’s ghost, the working jeweller, whether of Birmingham, Bond Street, or Clerkenwell, in the thousand and one gimcrack shops where they sell ‘merry-thought brooches,’ & ‘our latest stock of Christmas presents,’ the glorious Art of Goldsmithing has no meaning, or rather is a thing not of eight branches but of a hundred subdivisions, fanned into existence by a hundred callous machines, and workshop tradition has been destroyed by ‘the Trade.’ For the same reason the circle of readers will be small. To those of us who in recent years have been seeking to lift the art of the goldsmith out of the slough of industrial despond, to show once more what the human hand and fancy can create, and to relegate, without repudiating it, the machine to its right place in relation to human endeavour, all this manifold production of rubbishy trinkets, useless ornaments, and things made for ‘the Market,’ is stupid and wasteful, and makes for the destruction not the ennobling or beautifying of life.

But though small, the circle of my readers will be an earnest one. To such as are setting the standard of modern Art and Craft, to those who are fighting the trade, and seeking to relate the creations of their hands to their reasons for existence in life, this book of the aspirations & traditions of the old Italian will have some value. Fortunately their number is increasing, not only in England, but in Europe & in the United States. In the workshops of men like Frampton, Alfred Gilbert, Simmons, Fisher, Nelson Dawson; among the artists of Glasgow & Birmingham, or among the keener creative spirits in New York, whom I have found ready to welcome every genuine inspiration of the hand, will the real readers be found.

It is perhaps not my province as a translator to criticise the artistic merit of Cellini’s work, but as my hope in placing his treatises before English craftsmen is to familiarise them with his methods, I may perhaps be allowed to give a few words of warning. We must not take Cellini at his own valuation, and we must remember that he did not draw that subtle distinction between designer and executant that we nowadays are wont to do. The fact that every aesthetic criticism is inevitably biased by the style of its period must be taken into account by the student, if such criticisms as I myself, speaking as an artist, should venture to make, are to be of value to him. To Cellini’s best-known critics this applies in equal measure. Vasari, Delaborde, Milanesi, Brinckman, Symonds, have each had their point of view so to speak. To some, like Vasari, it has been coloured by what the Germans call ‘die Voll-Renaissance,’ of which Cellini in the art of goldsmithing was undoubtedly the central figure. To others, like Delaborde, it was influenced by the Romantic Reaction of the early Nineteenth Century, and to them his work was ‘an exploded myth.’ Criticised from the modern point of view—the point of view that distinguishes between goldsmith and sculptor, between craftsman & designer—we cannot rank him among the highest. There is a want of feeling for proportion in such work as we have of his, & the whole is marred by the overcrowded detail, often very exquisite in itself, of the parts; the craftsman indeed invariably overpowers the artist. Above all there is a want of spirituality in all his more important work, a want of refinement of soul, if one might so term it—a vulgarity. There is none of the εὐηθεια of Donatello, the graciousness of Ghiberti or Duccio, the mingled strength and sweetness of Verocchio, the simple grandeur of Pisanello. Michael Angelo’s manner perhaps we can trace, but of his inspiration and his self-control there is none.

If we take Cellini from the point of view he would himself have wished us to criticise him, he challenges us first as a sculptor & a designer of the figure. In this sphere, however, he falls far short of the standard he calls upon us to judge him by. Affected & uneven and imperfect in handling is his work when set beside that of earlier masters. Attenuated as we see in the nymph of Fontainebleau, thick & exaggerated as in the Perseus at Florence, leaden and stiff as in the Neptune and Cybele of the salt, there is about his figures always something manqué, they seem indeed to have in them the effort of a decaying school.

Much the same criticism applies to his work as a medalist. There is an absence of reserve & the fine feeling for his limitations which puts him to my mind far beneath Sperandio, Marende, Francia, or other of the great Cinquecento medalists, and it needs no artist to point to the superiority of the Greek coins with which with redoubtable modesty he compares his own.

To estimate his position as a jeweller is all but impossible, as there is not one jewel remaining that can be authenticated as his. If, however, we may be allowed to gauge his position as an artist from such pieces as are attributed to him in the Rothschild, Vienna, Paris, & Chantilly Collections, and of which I give some specimens on pages 22 and 24, I should be inclined to place him on an equal footing with any of the great masters of the early Renaissance or the Middle Ages in any country. The reasons of this are not far to seek. Jewellery is, before all others, an art of limitations. An artist cannot but put less of himself into a gem than into a statue, he is necessarily more cabined. Further, Cellini made most of his jewellery as a young man in Florence & Rome, when the traditions of the Florentine workshop which reared Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, were still fresh upon him, & before he had as yet attempted the impossible task of translating the gusto grando of Michael Angelo into minor craftsmanship. Subject to the disproving of the attributions, I give therefore to Cellini as a jeweller an equal place with the artists of Greece and Japan, with those of Spain, England and Germany in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance, whose works are known to us; but as medalist, goldsmith and sculptor, I would place him on a much lower footing. My whole criticism might be summed up briefly thus: he was a very first-rate craftsman, but a very second-rate artist.

The Autobiography and the Treatises of Cellini must be read together, they tail into one another, the former gives the life of the man, the second the methods of the craftsman; both alike bring out the writer’s strong personality. A few words are needed as to their bearing upon one another, and the original of the present translation.

Both the ‘Vita’ & the ‘Trattati’ were dictated by Cellini to amanuenses; &, feeling their stylistic imperfections, he offered both, after their completion, to literary friends to polish and refine before publication. The ‘Vita’ he sent to the great historian Benedetto Varchi, who had the good taste and the wisdom to leave the MS. as it was, saying that he preferred it in its rough & unpolished condition; the latter was placed in less tactful hands,[1] & Gherardo Spini, a literateur[2] of the Florentine Academy, to whom this task has with good reason been attributed, undertook its recasting, to the no small detriment of the original. In this polished and emasculated form the ‘Trattati’ first appeared & for 300 years remained; the Editio Princeps[3] being published in Florence in the shape of a very beautiful volume in 1568, three years before Cellini’s death. It was not till 1857 that Carlo Milanesi, working on the lines of Francesco Tassi, who had in the Marciana re-discovered the original MS., gave to the world the work as Cellini had originally dictated it. It is on the ‘Trattati’ of the Marcian Codex, therefore, & not of the first edition, that this translation is based.

Cellini is fortunate in having been handled in our own day by four eminent and scholarly men, and to the work of each of these am I indebted. Milanesi,[4] 1857, may be placed first, and his admirable and exhaustive edition of the ‘Trattati’ cannot be too highly praised. Herr Justus Brinckman[5] followed him, in 1867, with his excellent translation of the ‘Trattati’ into German, and his very able comparative treatment of the work of the monk Theophilus[6] with that of the Cinquecento artist. In 1883 Eugène Plon[7] brought out his splendid volume on the life and works of Cellini, especially valuable for its illustrations and the critical investigation of the authentic and attributed works of the master. The work of our own John Addington Symonds is familiar to most English readers, and it is to the study of his masterly translation of the ‘Vita’ that I owe my first introduction to Cellini. To his memory I would wish here to express my gratefulness, and perhaps the best expression of this is in the assurance that through his introduction to Cellini has grown up the wish to familiarise the methods of the Renaissance workshop among English metal workers, & particularly among the metal workers of the Guild of Handicraft for whom this book is written.

My thanks are due to Messrs. Plon & Cie. for their kind permission to reproduce the blocks originally used in M. Eugène Plon’s volume, and which illustrate in this book the various examples as Cellini describes them; and I am indebted to many friends, artists & scholars for the most part, who have helped me with difficulties both in the text and in the workshop. To Mr. and Mrs. de Morgan and Captain Victor Ward for many hours of helpful, and, I fear, sometimes tedious revision; to Miss Constance Blount for her great assistance with the enamelling chapter, to Mr. Virtue Tebbs for his advice among the coins, to Mr. Wenlock Rollins & Mr. T. Stirling Lee in the complicated passages dealing with casting and the making of furnaces, and above all to Professor Roberts-Austen and Professor Church, not only for their invaluable help on all points dealing with metallurgy & stones, but also for their kind assistance in correcting the proofs of the whole book. I have likewise to thank for their courtesy in allowing me to refer to them in one way or another over technical & literary difficulties Mr. Heywood Sumner, Mr. M. Hewlett, Professor Giglioli of Naples, and Professor Fergusson of Glasgow.

C. R. ASHBEE.

Essex House, Bow, E.