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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Plon, 117.
[2] See Milanesi. ‘I. Trattati,’ &c., novamente messi alle stampe, &c.
[3] Pub. Firenze, 1568. Valentini Panizzi e Marco Peri, 8vo.