The mixture of these qualities in a personality so natural and so clearly limned renders Cellini a most precious subject for the student of Renaissance life and character.  Even supposing him to have been exceptionally passionate, he was made of the same stuff as his contemporaries.  We are justified in concluding this not only from collateral evidence and from what he tells us, but also from the meed of honour he received.  In Europe of the present day he could hardly fail to be regarded as a ruffian, a dangerous disturber of morality and order.  In his own age he was held in high esteem and buried by his fellow-citizens with public ceremonies.  A funeral oration was pronounced over his grave “in praise both of his life and works, and also of his excellent disposition of mind and body."[345] He dictated the memoirs that paint him as bloodthirsty, sensual, and revengeful, in the leisure of his old age, and left them with complacency to serve as witness of his manly virtues to posterity.  Even Vasari, whom he hated, and who reciprocated his ill-will, records that “he always showed himself a man of great spirit and veracity, bold, active, enterprising, and formidable to his enemies; a man, in short, who knew as well how to speak to princes as to exert himself in his art.”

Enough has been said to prove that Cellini was not inferior to the average morality of the Renaissance, and that we are justified in accepting his life as a valuable historical document.[346] To give a detailed account of a book pronounced by Horace Walpole “more amusing than any novel,” received by Parini and Tiraboschi as the most delightful masterpiece of Italian prose, translated into German by Goethe, and placed upon his index of select works by Auguste Comte, may seem superfluous.  Yet I cannot afford to omit from my plan the most singular and characteristic episode in the private history of the Italian Renaissance.  I need it for the concrete illustration of much that has been said in this and the preceding volumes of my work.

Cellini was born of respectable parents at Florence on the night of All Saints’ Day in 1500, and was called Benvenuto to record his father’s joy at having a son.[347] It was the wish of Giovanni Cellini’s heart that his son should be a musician.  Benvenuto in consequence practised the flute for many years attentively, though much against his will.  At the age of fifteen so great was his desire to learn the arts of design that his father placed him under the care of the goldsmith Marcone.  At the same time he tells us in his memoirs:  “I continued to play sometimes through complaisance to my father either upon the flute or the horn; and I constantly drew tears and deep sighs from him every time he heard me.”  While engaged in the workshop of Marcone, Benvenuto came to blows with some young men who had attacked his brother, and was obliged to leave Florence for a time.  At this period he visited Siena, Bologna, and Pisa, gaming his livelihood by working in the shops of goldsmiths, and steadily advancing in his art.