The supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance

Accompanies Jerry Brotton’s 10-part BBC Radio 3 series Blood and Bronze

BBC RADIO 3:

Goldsmith, sculptor, poet, soldier, musician, murderer, necromancer, priest and lover – of men and women. The incredible life and times of Benvenuto Cellini, one of the Italian Renaissance’s most extraordinary but now neglected figures, provides a unique perspective on the period. Yet what his surviving art and writings reveal is less an idyllic “golden age” of harmony and beauty, and more a period defined by political turbulence, religious conflict and vicious artistic rivalries.

Although Cellini is now largely overlooked as an artist in favour of his immediate predecessors Leonardo da Vinci (whose position he inherited in France) and Michelangelo (whom he revered), he left behind one of the first – and certainly most dramatic and intimate – autobiographies ever written by an artist. My Life (simply entitled Vita in the original Italian) is a grandiose, scandalous and boastful account of 16th-century art and society. It is largely based on life in Cellini’s native Florence, but it also spans his career spent living and working in the Italian cities of Rome, Venice, Mantua, Ferrara and Siena, as well as Paris and Fontainebleau in France.

The book is a compelling historical document and offers fascinating insights into the period. But no historian takes an autobiography at face value – and rightly so, in this case. By comparing Cellini’s My Life to the surviving historical records, it seems that his autobiography contains a lot of fact, but also quite a bit of fiction – seemingly to adhere to traditions in writing at the time.

Cellini’s autobiography vividly records his fights with his rivals –