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Updated: May 8, 2025
Challoner, who asked me to give an "Improvisation" at the Grand Hotel that day fortnight. When I went down to breakfast, I mentioned both these letters, and said, addressing myself to Heliobas: "Is it not rather a sudden freak of Raffaello Cellini's to leave Cannes? We all thought he was settled for the winter there. Did you know he was going to Rome?"
Again the surface swelled, and from the glory came the figure of Madonna and her Child; and at the right hand of the sun there knelt S. Peter in his sacerdotal robes, pleading Cellini's cause; and "full of shame that such foul wrong should be done to Christians in his house." This vision marvellously strengthened Cellini's soul, and he began to hope with confidence for liberty.
"Two men, or two books if you like, took a great hold of me on that voyage Mazzini's Duties of Man and Cellini's Life. I suppose they are about as far apart as any two books or men could get. You may laugh at the notion, but I found myself in sympathy with both! Mazzini appealed to my mind, Cellini to my imagination.
Among the very beautiful works of art was a collection of cameos, including some of Cellini's from the antique, which were really entrancing to look upon. Another mansion, which N. P. Willis justly describes as "a fairy palace of taste and art," though not so extensive, was equally beautiful, and possessed a large winter-garden.
Augustine's Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini's Life; Montaigne's Essays; Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz; Rousseau's Confessions; Linnaeus's Diary; Gibbon's, Hume's, Franklin's, Burns's, Alfieri's, Goethe's, and Haydon's Autobiographies.
Cellini's hate of Vasari proves, also, that the Gossipy One stood well with the reigning powers, otherwise Benvenuto would not have thought to condemn his work and allude to the man as a dough-face, trickster, lickspittle, slanderer, vulture, vagrom, villain, vilifier and gnat's hind-foot.
The statue of Cosimo I in the Piazza della Signoria has a bas-relief of his coronation. He was then fifty-one; he lived but four more years, and when he died he left a dukedom flourishing in every way: rich, powerful, busy, and enlightened. He had developed and encouraged the arts, capriciously, as Cellini's "Autobiography" tells us, but genuinely too, as we can see at the Uffizi and the Pitti.
Cellini's account of his residence in France has much historical interest besides the charm of its romance. When he first joined the Court, he found Francis travelling from city to city with a retinue of eighteen thousand persons and twelve thousand horses. Frequently they came to places where no accommodation could be had, and the suite were lodged in wretched tents.
I was much interested, too, in the original little wax model, two feet high, of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus. The wax seems to be laid over a wooden framework, and is but roughly finished off. . . . In an adjoining room are innumerable specimens of Roman and Etruscan bronzes, great and small.
A mass of pewter was thrown in upon the other metal, and by stirring, sometimes with iron and sometimes with long poles, the whole soon became completely melted. At this juncture, when the trying moment was close at hand, a terrible noise as of a thunderbolt was heard, and a glittering of fire flashed before Cellini's eyes. The cover of the furnace had burst, and the metal began to flow!
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