bother to ask medical professionals to cure him. Instead, he retreats into the woods, invents a fad anti-VD diet all his own, and “cures” himself. Later on, Cellini also catches the Black Death. The plague only hits him in his left armpit, so it’s a minor deal for him. When he’s dying of scurvy in a dank, dark papal prison, Cellini pulls out his loose teeth with his own fingers. Dentistry is just another handicraft.

Then Cellini ventures to France to create his greatest works of art. He has to fight off some bandits along the way.

In his blazing enthusiasm, Cellini 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.

You’d think that all this disease, urban violence, warfare, and malnutrition would slow down his art production, but it’s business matters that really bother Cellini. Cellini never gets paid properly for any stunning masterwork that he creates. Various kings, popes, and dukes promise him the moon, but court functionaries consistently rip him off. This maltreatment doesn’t slow his gusting, all-competent creativity. It just annoys him, so that he brutally beats his subordinates. In one minor episode, he kicks a teenage apprentice in the crotch so hard that the kid crashes straight into the King of France.

I’m going on a bit, but these anecdotes are just a few among the dazzling career highlights of this master craftsman. My personal favorite is the extensive episode when Cellini hires a sorcerer to raise a horde of devils straight from hell. The sorcerer actually achieves this feat, and everyone’s very impressed. There’s also a notable moment when the delighted Pope personally blesses him

26 Make: Volume 10

for cutting a Spaniard clean in half with a lucky cannon shot.

Certain modern commentators seem inclined to disbelieve Cellini’s narrative. They think that Cellini is boasting and bragging. I’m inclined to believe that Cellini is underplaying his experiences. If Cellini had wanted to boast, he would have finished his book and seen it copied and spread around widely. That never happened; his incomplete memoirs weren’t published until he’d been dead for 157 years. So Cellini’s not boasting. He has the seasoned, even world-weary air of a master craftsman who is trying to get an apprentice up to speed.

He’s got a more-than-healthy male ego, but, oddly for a supposed “Renaissance genius,” Cellini’s not very bright. He’s never a fancy-pants intellectual, no complex, tormented Leonardo type. Cellini doesn’t much care for philosophy, mathematics, theology, or science. He makes really fine things with his hands; that’s what he’s great at doing, and that’s what life’s all about. At heart, Cellini’s a regular guy: he likes to ride horses, go hunting, eat, drink, and make merry with women. He also likes to stab loudmouths to death in public, and he may very well be bisexual, but these are technicalities.

What’s the big lesson here? It’s not that Cellini was a “larger-than-life figure.” The lesson is that life is larger than we sometimes think it is. We can easily judge Cellini, because he’s dead and we’re not. It’s a better lesson to wonder how he would judge us.

That answer’s obvious: he’d loudly mock us for our sheer cowardice. He’d wonder at our leaden lack of proper dash and spirit. Compared to Renaissance masters — guys with no more than hand tools and maybe a forge and a gear-jack — any artist today has tremendous potential creative capacity, with fantastic access to sophisticated tools, resources, and ideas.

So, why aren’t we all Renaissance people, every last one of us? Why are we so numb and sluggish, so feeble and humble? What possible excuse can we offer for our comprehensive lack of awesome glory and grandeur? What’s stopping us? Do we imagine we’ll live forever? Why don’t we just … change everything?

Bruce Sterling ( bruce@well.com) is a science fiction writer and part-time design professor.