Hands On

THE REAL RENAISSANCE MAN

BENVENUTO CELLINI REJECTED HUMAN LIMITATIONS TO PROVE HIS VALOR.

By Bruce Sterling

AGOLDSMITH NEEDS TO LEARN FORGING, casting, filing, soldering, piercing, sawing, and polishing. It’s a difficult craft to master.

Now suppose this same goldsmith was also a fine musician. And a painter. Suppose that he also carved large statues in marble, and cast them in bronze. Let’s further suppose that he was a swordsman, a crack shot, a master of artillery, an occultist, and a part-time cleric, and that he personally killed uncounted numbers of people. What kind of guy would that be?

He’d have to be a “Renaissance man.” Nowadays, many tinkerers, hackers, hobbyists, and dilettantes fancy themselves to be Renaissance men. Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography offers unique personal insight into how it felt to be a genuine Renaissance man in the genuine Renaissance. Because Benvenuto Cellini was that guy; he was there, on the ground, doing it.

Cellini never mentions the word Renaissance. He doesn’t know he’s having one. Every once in a while, some pope or duke will vaguely refer to the glorious rebirth of ancient learning. Still, Cellini’s world is, by our standards, a bloody catastrophe. The graveyards brim over with disease. Looted cities are aflame. Traitors, bandits, assassins, and poisoners lurk around every street corner.

Narrating his career from the perspective of his mid-50s, Cellini is frankly astounded that he has survived so long. He sees his own lifetime — the glorious peak of the Italian High Renaissance — as one long calamity.

To judge by his own words, Cellini himself is a violent megalomaniac. Mind you, Cellini was definitely a great Renaissance artist: after all, Cellini handcrafted the awesome golden Saliera, unquestionably the greatest, grandest, goldest salt-and-pepper shaker ever made. But he’s also unbelievably touchy,

and generally heavily armed. The guy is chop-lickingly fond of every form of weaponry: he’s got dirks, daggers, poniards, swords, and big two-handed broadswords, plus pikes, fowling guns, and arquebuses. He really comes into his own when he’s given command of an artillery squadron.

Perseus is straight out of an R-rated splatter film, but it was a major hit with the Florentines from the moment Cellini unveiled it in 1554.

Cellini’s famous statue, Perseus and Medusa, is his proudest achievement. We’ve all seen pics of this statue; it’s so wreathed in solemn art history that it’s hard for us moderns to understand what we’re seeing. The staue portrays a stark-naked young man trampling the nude corpse of a decapitated Medusa while he waggles her severed head in a dripping welter of gore. Perseus is straight out of an R-rated splatter film, but it was a major hit with the Florentines from the moment Cellini unveiled it. They were so thrilled they wrote sonnets about it.

In the Italian Renaissance, staying alive was for sissies. Cellini fought in the gruesome Sack of Rome in 1527: overwhelmed by a vast armed mob of looters and arsonists, the city’s population was cut in half. When he traveled home to Florence to see his beloved dad, he found his own family wiped out by the Black Death, and the family house occupied by a demented, screaming hunchback. These calamities were happening to an internationally

Photography by Corbis

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