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There was to be nothing finer or sweeter in the life of even Benvenuto Cellini, that rough-hewn saint, ten centuries later. All the nobles of Britain, with their families, attended divine service morning and night daily, in their private chapels, and even the worst of them had family worship five or six times a day besides. The credit of this belonged entirely to the Church.
While gathering up these scattered fragments of Buonarroti's later life, I may here introduce a letter addressed to Benvenuto Cellini, which illustrates his glad acceptance of all good work in fellow-craftsmen: "My Benvenuto, I have known you all these years as the greatest goldsmith of whom the world ever heard, and now I am to know you for a sculptor of the same quality.
It was after the success of the ballet with which a run of success began for the Gaudissart Company that the management presented Pons with a piece of plate a group of figures attributed to Benvenuto Cellini. The alarming costliness of the gift caused talk in the green-room. It was a matter of twelve hundred francs!
Whether cardinals required him to fashion silver vases for their banquet-tables; or ladies wished the setting of their jewels altered; or a pope wanted the enamelled binding of a book of prayers; or men-at-arms sent swordblades to be damascened with acanthus foliage; or kings desired fountains and statues for their palace courts; or poets begged to have their portraits cast in bronze; or generals needed medals to commemorate their victories, or dukes new coins for their mint; or bishops ordered reliquaries for the altars of their patron saints; or merchants sought for seals and signet rings engraved with their device; or men of fashion asked for medallions of Leda and Adonis to fasten in their caps all these commissions could be undertaken by a workman like Cellini.
Next to his own egotism the strongest feelings in Cellini were domestic; and he showed them at one moment by charity to his sister's family, at another by a savage assassination.
That must be admitted. But to have lived in those days when ambition thought only in beauty! To have been the boon companions of men like Da Vinci, Cellini, Michelangelo! Then there are the adventures of this concrete dream of the artist. I can trace it back to the bare studio in which it was conceived, follow its journeys, its abiding places, down to the hour it comes to me."
They may have repeated, too, the gossip of the studios touching rare and curious works of art, paintings by great masters, plate by Cellini and early Sèvres porcelain lost to the world within the walls of the château.
Cellini had an intense personality; he was skilful as a workman; he told the truth as he saw it, and if he ever prevaricated it was simply by failing to mention certain things that he considered were no credit to anybody.
Probably the history of no great work of art has ever been more painstakingly presented than the story of the making of this statue by Cellini. Again and again he was on the point of smashing the clay to chaos, but each time his hand was stayed. Months passed, years went by, and innumerable difficulties were in the way of its completion. Finally he figured out a method to cast it in bronze.
Papal Rome Narrow streets St. Angelo Benvenuto Cellini St. Peter's Piet
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