CELLINI’S FLORENTINE ARTWORK: Bronze statue of Perseus, with other statues, in Loggia dell’Oreagna, Florence; sunken relief sculpture of a greyhound,

famous royal jeweler with the richest clients in the world. By our standards, Cellini ought to launch an IPO, mind his branding, and hire subordinates, lawyers, and a PR firm. Cellini never behaves in any such way. That’s precisely why he’s a great Renaissance artist: because, by our standards, Cellini is a lunatic surviving on a razor’s edge.

Every once in a while, somebody, usually some overfed priest or royal lackey, observes that mere goldsmiths really aren’t supposed to be any good at, say, building fortress gates. Cellini despises such dull, insipid warnings. Yesterday’s limits don’t apply to him. He can make anything.

At one point, while he’s jailed in a Roman prison, he tells the warden that he’s sure he can make a flying machine. Yeah, that’ll be simple. Cellini doesn’t fly, but he does escape that prison by secretly hacking the prison door and making a rope from his bedsheets.

In his blazing enthusiasm, this Renaissance man can master a complex new trade in a month. How? Simple: he just doesn’t accept human limitations. He buckles down to the impossible task and burns his way through it in a fanatical orgy of work. We’d call that obsessive-compulsive behavior. Cellini has his own terms for it: he claims that he

housed at the National Museum of the Bargello in Florence; salt cellar with Neptune and Tellus.

is “winning renown” and “proving his valor.”

Here’s Cellini hanging around a palace, with a bunch of overdue royal commissions, as usual. A rival fails to show up for an appointment. Cellini reacts to this insult with his book’s most common leitmotif: he grabs a blade. “He refused to come, which made me so angry, that, fuming with fury and swelling like an asp, I took a desperate resolve ... In the fire of my anger, I left the palace, ran to my shop, seized a dagger and rushed to the house of my enemies, who were at home and shop together. I found them at table; and Gherardo, who had been the cause of the quarrel, flung himself upon me. I stabbed him in the breast.”

Cellini fails to butcher his rival right at the family’s dinner table, mostly because the victim’s relatives batter him with pipes and hammers. Cellini takes this minor debacle in stride. A few chapters later, his little brother, who’s a Florentine hoodlum as dumb as a box of rocks, gets shot dead in a senseless fight with police. Cellini charges headlong into a crowd of ten Roman cops and fatally stabs the cop who shot his brother.

After picking up the brand-new “French disease” from one of many model-courtesan girlfriends, Cellini breaks out in ghastly fetid blisters. He doesn’t

Make: 25