BENVENUTO CELLINI.
Cellini was past fifty-eight when he began writing, and going back to his earliest boyhood, he set down the facts of his long career as he remembered them. Of course he is the hero who recounts his own story, and like all heroes of romance he plays the leading part, is always in the right, and comes out handsomely in the end. Carping critics who tax him with lack of truth in dealing with his enemies, and with pleading his own cause too well, are apt to forget that he wrote long after the events were past, and that to an ever-active imagination ruminating over bygone happenings, facts become unconsciously colored to assume the hue the mind wishes them to have. Yet the fidelity and accuracy of his memory are remarkable, and his faculty for seeing, combined with his dramatic way of putting things most vividly, flashes before our eyes the scenes he recounts. He does not describe much; he indicates a characteristic feature, habit, or attitude; as for example, in referring to a man he disliked, as having "long spidery hands and a shrill gnat-like voice"—all that is needed to make us see the man from Cellini's point of view. Again, he adds much to the vivacity of the narrative by reporting conversation as a dialogue, even if he has it himself at second-hand. So in his trenchant, nervous manner this keen observer, while aiming to recount only the facts of his own life and to set himself on a becoming pedestal in the eyes of posterity, gives us at the same time flash-lights of the whole period in which he played a part. Popes Clement VII. and Paul III., Cosimo de' Medici and his Duchess, the King of France and Madame d' Estampes, cardinals, nobles, princes, and courtiers, artists of every description, burghers and the common folk,—all with whom he came in contact,—are brought before us in a living pageant. Looking back over his checkered career, he lives his intense life over again, and because he himself saw so vividly at the time, he makes us see now. We have here invaluable pictures, by an eye-witness and actor, of the sack of Rome, the plague and siege of Florence, the pomp of Charles V. at Rome. He withdraws the curtains from the Papal policies and court intrigues, not with a view to writing history, but because he happened to have some relations with those princes and wished to tell us about them. Again, he was no critic of the manners of his time, yet he presents most faithful pictures of artist life in Rome, Paris, and Florence. He was not given to introspection and self-criticism, but he describes himself as well as others, not by analysis but by deeds and words. He had no literary training; he wrote as he talked, and gained his effect by simplicity.
He was recognized as the first goldsmith of his time; yet as a man also his contemporaries speak well of him, for he embodied the virtues of his age, while his morals did not fall below the average code of the Renaissance. Vasari says:—"He always showed himself a man of great spirit and veracity; bold, active, enterprising, and formidable to his enemies; a man, in short, who knew as well how to speak with princes as to exert himself in his art."
J. A. Symonds, that inspiring student of the Italian Renaissance, sums up his impressions of the book and the man as follows:—
"I am confident that every one who may have curiously studied Italian history and letters will pronounce this book to be at one and the same time the most perfect extant monument of vernacular Tuscan prose, and also the most complete and lively source of information we possess regarding manners, customs, ways of feeling, and modes of acting, in the Court. Those who have made themselves thoroughly familiar with Cellini's Memoirs possess the substance of that many-sided epoch in the form of an epitome. It is the first book which a student of the Italian Renaissance should handle in order to obtain the right direction for his more minute researches. It is the last book to which he should return at the close of his exploratory voyages. At the commencement he will find it invaluable for placing him at the exactly proper point of view. At the end he will find it no less invaluable for testing and verifying the conclusion he has drawn from various sources and a wide circumference of learning. From the pages of this book the genius of the Renaissance, incarnate in a single personality, leans forth and speaks to us. Nowhere else, to my mind, do we find the full character of the epoch so authentically stamped. That is because this is no work of art or of reflection, but the plain utterance of a man who lived the whole life of his age, who felt its thirst for glory, who shared its adoration of the beautiful, who blent its paganism and its superstition, who represented its two main aspects of exquisite sensibility to form and almost brutal ruffianism. We must not expect from Cellini the finest, highest, purest accents of the Renaissance.... For students of that age he is at once more and less than his contemporaries: less, inasmuch as he distinguished himself by no stupendous intellectual qualities; more, inasmuch as he occupied a larger sphere than each of them singly. He was the first goldsmith of his time, an adequate sculptor, a restless traveler, an indefatigable workman, a Bohemian of the purest water, a turbulent bravo, a courtier and companion of princes; finally, a Florentine who used his native idiom with incomparable vivacity of style."
THE ESCAPE FROM PRISON
From the 'Memoirs': Symonds's Translation
The castellan was subject to a certain sickness, which came upon him every year and deprived him of his wits. The sign of its approach was that he kept continually talking, or rather jabbering, to no purpose. These humors took a different shape each year; one time he thought he was an oil-jar; another time he thought he was a frog, and hopped about as frogs do; another time he thought he was dead, and then they had to bury him; not a year passed but he got some such hypochondriac notions into his head. At this season he imagined that he was a bat, and when he went abroad to take the air he used to scream like bats in a high thin tone; and then he would flap his hands and body as though he were about to fly. The doctors, when they saw the fit was coming on him, and his old servants, gave him all the distractions they could think of; and since they had noticed that he derived much pleasure from my conversation, they were always fetching me to keep him company. At times the poor man detained me for four or five stricken hours without ever letting me cease talking. He used to keep me at his table, eating opposite to him, and never stopped chatting and making me chat; but during those discourses I contrived to make a good meal. He, poor man, could neither eat nor sleep; so that at last he wore me out. I was at the end of my strength; and sometimes when I looked at him, I noticed that his eyeballs were rolling in a frightful manner, one looking one way and the other in another.
He took it into his head to ask me whether I had ever had a fancy to fly. I answered that it had always been my ambition to do those things which offer the greatest difficulties to men, and that I had done them; as to flying, the God of Nature had gifted me with a body well suited for running and leaping far beyond the common average, and that with the talents I possessed for manual art I felt sure I had the courage to try flying. He then inquired what methods I should use; to which I answered that, taking into consideration all flying creatures, and wishing to imitate by art what they derived from nature, none was so apt a model as the bat.