Cellini
In the middle of the Ponte Vecchio over the river Arno in Florence, with its phalanx
of little jewellery shops on each side, is a small statue of Benvenuto Cellini,
1500-1571. A tribute by the city to one of its finest craftsmen. "The greatest
goldsmith of whom the world has ever heard," an admiring Michelangelo once
said. Cellini worked wonders with his chisel; a master sculptor whether in gold,
silver or marble. And he did not mind telling people how good he was. He was a
boaster, a brawler, almost a bandit at times. For him an artist had to be a virtuoso
for whose favours cardinals or princes had to compete. As the art historian E.
H. Gombrich put it, "Picking quarrels and earning laurels, Cellini is a real
product of his time". Cellini told a great anecdote about how he was once
carrying gold from the King of France's treasury to his workshop when he was attacked
by four bandits, all of whom he put to flight single-handed.
Cellini, like so many Renaissance artists, started out in a goldsmith's workshop
in Florence at the age of 13 and learned his craft with various masters over the
next six years. In 1519 he moved to Rome and by 1524 had his own workshop. His
clients were bishops and cardinals and a wealthy physician who chanced by his
shop one day and was so taken with the spirit of his work that he became a patron.
Cellini always saw his role as expressing noble and beautiful ideas. He wanted
to transform Nature into a form that was "bella e graziosa" - beautiful
and gracious.
Goldsmiths of the Renaissance were not so much concerned with making jewellery
as such, but rather sculpting or engraving gold and silver. With a new abundance
of silver becoming available after 1500 from new mines in Germany and then from
Spanish conquests in the New World, making silverware (and sometimes goldware)
for the tables of the wealthy was the major part of production. Clients wanted
salt cellars, pepper pots, bowls, sauceboats, candlesticks and table fountains
in precious metals. Goldsmiths obliged. Among these 'Virtuoso Goldsmiths', as
the author J. F. Hayward christened them in a book (see gold
library/jewellery), Cellini had several great competitors. Tobia da Camerino
in Rome was an early rival, as were Manno di Sbarri and Antonio Gentile. In the
German city of Nürnberg, the leading goldsmiths' centre north of the Alps,
Wenzel Jamnitzer was a contemporary of Cellini, with a reputation for a great
sense of perspective and scale. Yet Cellini's explosive talent somehow got him
the great commissions (for which he then spent years trying to get paid).
Sadly much of what he and other goldsmiths wrought in precious
metals has not survived; it went into the melting pot as fashions changed
or patrons went broke. Cellini himself is remembered for his solid gold salt cellar,
based on a design he proposed originally to the cardinal of Ferrara in italy,
who found it too lavish, but nevertheless recommended him to Francis I of France.
The king summoned Cellini to the palace of Fontainbleu outside Paris in 1540;
a convenient invitation because it got him out of prison after some brawl or escapade.
He spent five years in France completing his salt cellar - the most ambitious
piece he ever made. In his autobiography, Cellini later explained what he set
out to do. "It was oval in form, standing about two-thirds of a cubit (12
inches/30 centimetres), wrought of solid gold and worked entirely with the chisel."
The salt cellar, he went on to explain, depicts the intermingling of land and
ocean with two figures seated with their legs interlaced. "The sea was a
man," wrote Cellini, "and in his hand I placed a ship … well adapted
to hold a quantity of salt. Beneath him I grouped the four sea horses and in his
right hand he held his trident. The earth I fashioned like a woman, with all its
beauty of form … She had a richly decorated temple firmly based upon the
ground on one side and here her hand rested. This I intended to receive the pepper.
In her other hand I put a cornucopia overflowing with all the natural treasures
I could think of. Below this goddess in the part that represented the earth, I
collected the fairest animals that populate our globe. In that quarter presided
over by the deity of the ocean, I fashioned such choice kinds of fishes and shells
as could properly be displayed in that small space."
This unique salt cellar, the only surviving testament to Cellini's work with gold,
is now in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches
museum. In the history of gold it is the finest sculpture in the metal ever
created and a fitting reminder of the talent which was unleashed by the Renaissance.
Cellini's reputation, however, has also been preserved by his egotistical autobiography.
The German poet Goethe much later enhanced Cellini's reputation by translating
the memoir into German and dubbing him a true Renaissance man. "Typical of
his age and perhaps typical of all humanity," wrote Goethe, "such personalities
can be considered spiritual pivots." On a more practical level, Cellini is
remembered, too, for the goldsmiths' technical manual that he wrote in 1568, "Upon
which," observed jewellery historian Graham Hughes, "any modern workshop
could base its activity". Now that is a compliment by one professional to
another over four hundred years later.
See also: library/history
and library/jewellery.