Benvenuto Cellini and the Embodiment of the Modern Artist by Andreas Beyer

Benvenuto Cellini and the Embodiment of the Modern Artist

By Andreas Beyer

Reaktion Books 2025

It’s a near-universal axiom for which we can all be grateful: most egomaniacs write boring books. Once the grave finally, finally stops their endless yapping, they fall into a silence that’s only deepened by the blocks of turgid, lawyer-vetted self-justification they leave behind. We can commence the entirely healthy and long-delayed process of forgetting.

There are exceptions, of course, foremost among them the Vita of the great Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. Long before its first printed Italian edition in 1728, the manuscript was circulating everywhere, providing fantastic, maddening reading experiences for those lucky enough to get their hands on copies. In its pages, Cellini is the ultimate unreliable narrator of his own life, somehow transmuting an endless testament of tiresome bragging into a thrillingly human document the like of which scarcely exists in literature before Cellini. There are hairsbreadth escapes, leaps from balconies, fights with savage mastiffs, knife-blade encounters with all kinds of ruffians, supernatural ceremonies conducted by witches in the moonlight, somersaulting horses, and most of all praise, great heaps of praise directed by everybody in the world right at Cellini. A grumbling Pope’s son assures him that Cellini has “a nature that is beyond bold”; a king tells a cardinal, “Honestly, this man knows how to elicit the love and admiration of all who know him.” And so on.

There are two other strands that run through the Vita, both of which are unsavory and both of which tend to get lost in the high-profile tales of heroism and adventure. Cellini returns with fixated attention to the subject of both sex and illness (to the extent that they were separate subjects for him; he caught not only several venereal diseases but also bubonic plague from sex partners, male and female, voluntary and involuntary), although even here his tendency for telling whoppers remains. In his telling, he almost always fears he’ll soon die – indeed, is once so given up for dead by his friends that they write his obituary poem, which he then read and included in the Vita – and he always astounds the doctors by rallying, either through cures of his own devising or by enduring the barbaric ‘cures’ of his time (two dozen leeches on the buttocks being just about the mildest alternative).

This seedy, corporeal element is often foremost in Benvenuto Cellini and the Embodiment of the Modern Artist by Andreas Beyer (indeed, the element is cheekily present even in the title). This is one of the latest in the “Renaissance Lives” series from Reaktion Books, hardy little hardcover editions generously filled with illustrations and generally not exceeding 250 pages. Beyer, a professor of Modern Art History at the University of Basel, uses the Vita translation by John Addington Symonds (and his own research? The author makes one brief mention of “the original German version” of the book, but no such book is included in the copyright information, and no translator is given for the present volume), in order to discuss as often as possible the physical elements of Cellini’s world.

These discussions are conducted with very energetic readability, even if some of them are phrased in nearly-impenetrable Freudian academic-speak. “It is evidence of the attentiveness with which he constantly observes his physical state and perceives and communicates the body’s own needs,” goes one such passage, “ – and expression of an individual experience and life-world authenticity that constitutes his ego along the lines of his body and locates it in the field of tension between ego and world.” This kind of nonsense-prose, plus the occasional gnomic non sequitur (saying of Cellini that he “only ever wanted to belong to himself,” or some such), can make parts of this little book tough going. John Pope-Hennessy’s 1985 book Cellini, often cited in the “References” section, makes for much smoother reading but lacks the biological concentration that can make Beyer’s book so interesting even when he’s laying it on a bit thick:

Once again, Cellini restores his health by defying the doctors’ advice. He thus appears as the incarnation of cura sui, that self-care which is both a self-technique and an existential art, and that has been recognized as the central practice of the autonomous, individual artist. Cellini is both patient and his healer, which corresponds to his holistic conception of personality; his ego asserts itself by overcoming and liberating itself from life’s fears and threats.

Benvenuto Cellini and the Embodiment of the Modern Artist, beautifully illustrated, has just enough of an agenda to stop it short of being a full-dress biography, but it’s no less fascinating for that fact, particularly since it examines exactly the kind of grubby realities the artist himself tends to glamorize.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News