Volume Thirty / Home / Volume Thirty Two

Volume 31:

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (full text)

Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography was a revelation to me. It was long a staple of great books programs, but I was completely unfamiliar with it before I started reading. Unlike the other memoirs among the Classics -- Franklin's Autobiography, Augustine's Confessions -- which are at heart didactic works, Cellini's Autobiography doesn't seek to use its author's life as an example.

This is probably a good thing. Cellini was born in Florence in 1500. He began writing his life's story in 1558. In between, he became the most distinguished goldsmith in Renaissance Italy, as well as a leading sculptor. He flourished in an artistic circle that included Michelangelo. He fought in the Sack of Rome. He witnessed the arrival of the plague to Italy. He was patronised by multiple popes and one king of France. He was a rival to several cardinals. He was exiled from both Florence and Rome. He committed at least two murders -- one to avenge the murder of his younger brother -- and was generally quick to solve disputes with his dagger. He was brought up on charges of using one of his models after the Italian fashion (the original Italian is quite clear on the implication that he was a soddomitaccio, but the English translator demures). Another model bore him a daughter, whom he never saw after the first days of her life. Cellini recounts these facts unapologetically: he isn't offering a confession, but a justification.

All of the above has been confirmed by contemporary sources, but there is much in the book that defies credibility and much else that, though possible, has been proven untrue. Which may suggest that Cellini's memoirs -- like James Frey's and David Sedaris's and Augusten Burroughs' -- are really works of fiction. Certainly, the book reads like a novel -- a loose, baggy pre-modern monster of a novel. Its narrator -- who doesn't seem to be quite the same person as its author -- prefigures the scheming anti-heroes in Balzac and Stendhal. This might not be that remarkable, excpet that Cellini wrote only a few years after the appearance of Pantagruel and Gargantua and almost fifty years before the appearance of Don Quixote.

If the novel as an art form didn't really exist in Cellini's time, one consequence of this fact seems to be that considerable leeway was given to fictionalizing within nominally non-fiction works. Perhaps one might better say that, if there was no tradition of serious prose fiction, there was likewise no tradition of non-fiction. Many of the essays that I've read in the Classics would have been called short stories if they'd been written in another time. For that matter, most of the drama and the poetry in the Classics grapples with ostensibly historical facts. Readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey don't want to be told that there was no Trojan War, any more than readers of the Bible want to be told that there was no Garden of Eden. The earliest novels played on this fact, using epistolary, journalistic or other documentary forms to suggest a realistic basis for their fictions.

But narrative writing has always been drawn towards the imaginative, even in eras when its audience didn't hold the imagination in particularly high regard. We seem to be in such an era today. Memoirs dramatically outsell novels. The biopic has become the ubiquitous film genre. The quickest way to an Oscar is to play a historical character. Based on a true story is the highest accolade that can be attached to any book or movie. Readers clamor for the literal truth. And all the while writers continue to make everything up.


--CRB, September 17, 2007

The Five Foot Shelf