Cellini : Artist, Genius, Fugitive

Benvenuto Cellini was one of the great artists of the sixteenth century. His great statue of Perseus stands in the main square of Florence as a tribute to his power as a sculptor – but also reveals something of his personality, for it includes nude portraits of two favourite lovers – a boy and a girl. As a man he defies categorisation: he was the servant of his patrons, but also a buccaneer; an artist but an accomplished soldier; a lover of the human body but in anger or mere irritation so ill-tempered that he would stab and hack the flesh of those who offended him; a man fascinated by the occult, but also intensely practical.

In this biography the author interprets those incidents of his life about which he had to be highly discreet or even silent in his own autobiography, and fills in details which he did not openly record. It is a story which has much to say about the personality of the artist, but also of the life of a remarkable man who led a dangerously open’ almost proud bisexual life at a time when that was extremely dangerous.