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Updated: May 8, 2025
The rest have little interest for the visitor to Florence to-day, for whom Cellini's Perseus, made to Cosimo I's order, is the last great artistic achievement in the city in point of time. Tuscany passed to Austria until 1801. In 1807 it became French, and in 1814 Austrian again.
The visitor held Cellini's drawing in his hand, studied it carefully and remarked: "I know this man Michelangelo Buonarrotti we used to draw and work together under the tutorship of Masaccio. One day Buonarrotti annoyed me and I dealt him such a blow on the nose that I felt the flesh, cartilage and bone go down under my knuckles like a biscuit. It was a mark he will carry to his grave."
Cellini's Perseus will not quite do, I think, after Donatello and Verrocchio; but few bronzes are more famous, and certainly of none has so vivacious and exciting a story been written as Cellini's own, setting forth his disappointments, mortifications, and pride in connexion with this statue.
Walsingham, who was an absent man, and floated upon the ocean of his learning serenely and lazily, drawn finely and whimsically, now hither, now thither, by the finest hair of association, glided complacently off into the dim region of visionary prognostics and warnings, and reminded him how Joseph dreamed, and Pharaoh, and Benvenuto, Cellini's father, and St.
The Governor, perplexed by Cellini's vaunt that if he only tried he was sure he could fly, put him under strict guard, saying, "Benvenuto è un pipistrello contrafatto, ed io sono un pipistrello da dovero." Lib. i. cap. 125. Lib. i. cap. 105. "Il Papa diventato così pessima bestia," lib. i. 58; "Il Papa entrato in un bestial furore," ib. 60; "Quel povero uomo di Papa Clemente," ib. 103.
Among the holograph MSS. is Cellini's "Autobiography". The library, in time, after being confiscated by the Republic and sold to the monks of S. Marco, again passed into the possession of a Medici, Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and then of Clement VII, and he it was who commissioned Michelangelo to house it with dignity.
Gian Bologna's Sabine woman, was she not Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini's Perseus with Medusa's head, has it not in truth turned the city to stone? The silence was broken; something had awakened in the Piazza: perhaps a bird fluttered from the battlements of the Palazzo, perhaps it was the city that turned in her sleep. No, there it was again.
Moreover, a near relation of the Pope's was Cellini's sworn enemy, and this sufficed to seal his fate. So, when taking a walk one morning, Benvenuto suddenly found himself face to face with Crespino, the sheriff, attended by his band of constables. Crespino advanced, saying, 'You are the Pope's prisoner. 'Crespino, exclaimed Benvenuto, 'you must take me for some one else.
According to his own account of this mysterious circumstance, Messer Durante Duranti of Brescia, one of Cellini's numerous enemies, had given a diamond of small value to be broken up and mixed with a salad served to him at dinner. The jeweller to whom this charge was entrusted, kept the diamond and substituted a beryl, thinking that the inferior stone would have the same murderous properties.
I should call it a portico if it stood before the palace door; but it seems to have been constructed merely for itself, and as a shelter for the people from sun and rain, and to contain some fine specimens of sculpture, as well antique as of more modern times. Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus stands here; but it did not strike me so much as the cast of it in the Crystal Palace.
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