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Updated: May 8, 2025
Cellini was born of respectable parents at Florence on the night of All Saints' Day in 1500, and was called Benvenuto to record his father's joy at having a son. It was the wish of Giovanni Cellini's heart that his son should be a musician. Benvenuto in consequence practised the flute for many years attentively, though much against his will.
He found there a tennis-court, a distillery, a printing press, and a factory of saltpetre, besides residents engaged in other trades. Cellini's claims were resisted. Probably the occupiers did not relish the intrusion of a foreigner. So he stormed the place and installed himself by force of arms.
A barometer and thermometer are almost the only novelties that a visitor from the sixteenth century would notice. The statuary is both old and new; for here are genuine antiques once in Ferdinand I's Villa Medici at Rome, and such modern masterpieces as Donatello's Judith and Holofernes, Cellini's Perseus, and Gian Bologna's two muscular and restless groups.
It was the personification of Life not life as we know it, brief and full of care but Life Immortal and Love Triumphant. Often and often I found myself standing before this masterpiece of Cellini's genius, gazing at it, not only with admiration, but with a sense of actual comfort.
Francis among his ladies and courtiers, pretending to a knowledge of the arts, sauntering with his splendid train into the goldsmith's workshop, encouraging Cellini's violence with a boyish love of mischief, vain and flattered, peevish, petulant, and fond of show, appears upon these pages with a life-like vividness.
These visits to Cellini's studio, strange to say, had a remarkably soothing and calming effect upon my suffering nerves.
The weapon penetrated so deep that, though I made a great effort to recover it again, I found it impossible. So much for murder. Now for manslaughter, or rather Cellini's notion of manslaughter. 'Pompeo entered an apothecary's shop at the corner of the Chiavica, about some business, and stayed there for some time.
Carville's reappearance, had not a most exciting game of cow-boys, a game in which I for the nonce was a fleeing Indian brave, led to an abrupt encounter with Mrs. Carville. Benvenuto Cellini's scalp already hung at my girdle, visible as a pocket-handkerchief; and he lay far down near the cabbages, to the imaginative eye a writhing and disgusting spectacle.
No episode in Cellini's biography is narrated with more force than the climax to his long-protracted labours, when at last, amid the chaos and confusion of innumerable accidents, the metal in his furnace liquefied and filled the mould. After the statue was uncovered in the Loggia de' Lanzi, where it now stands, Cellini achieved a triumph adequate to his own highest expectations.
When I arrived, the rooms were deserted, save for the presence of a magnificent Newfoundland dog, who, as I entered, rose, and shaking his shaggy body, sat down before me and offered me his huge paw, wagging his tail in the most friendly manner all the while, I at once responded to his cordial greeting, and as I stroked his noble head, I wondered where the animal had come from; for though we had visited Signor Cellini's studio every day, there had been no sign or mention of this stately, brown-eyed, four-footed companion.
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