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.
