The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

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Benvenuto Cellini

Knopf, New York, 2010; originally published 1728 (Italian), English

Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

ISBN: 9780307592743

From the Publisher. Here is the most important autobiography from Renaissance Italy and one of the most spirited and colorful from any time or place, in a translation widely recognized as the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original.

Benvenuto Cellini was both a beloved artist in 16th-century Florence and a passionate and temperamental man of action who was capable of brawling, theft, and murder. He counted popes, cardinals, kings, and dukes among his patrons and was the adoring friend of—as he described them—the “divine” Michelangelo and the “marvelous” Titian, but was as well known for his violent feuds. At age 27 he helped defend the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, and his account of his imprisonment there (under a mad castellan who thought he was a bat), his escape, recapture, and confinement in “a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms” is an adventure equal to any other in fact or fiction. But it is only one in a long life lived on a grand scale.

Cellini’s autobiography is not merely the record of an extraordinary life but also a dramatic and evocative account of daily life in Renaissance Italy, from its lowest taverns to its highest royal courts.

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Gijs Bakker

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Cellini shows that even a goldsmith can be a great architect.

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