Cosimo de’ Medici was indeed a very different patron from Francis.  Cautious, little-minded, meddling, with a true Florentine’s love of bargaining and playing cunning tricks, he pretended to protect the arts, but did not understand the part he had assumed.  He was always short of money, and surrounded by old avaricious servants, through whose hands his meagre presents passed.  As a connoisseur, he did not trust his own judgment, thus laying himself open to the intrigues of inferior artists.  Henceforward a large part of Cellini’s time was wasted in wrangling with the Duke’s steward, squabbling with Bandinelli and Ammanati, and endeavouring to overcome the coldness or to meet the vacillations of his patron.  Those who wish to gain insight into the life of an artist at Court in the sixteenth century, will do well to study attentively the chapters devoted by Cellini to his difficulties with the Duchess, and his wordy warfares with Bandinelli.[386] This atmosphere of intrigue and animosity was not uncongenial to Benvenuto; and as far as words and blows went, he almost always got the best of it.  Nothing, for example, could be keener and more cutting than the very just criticism he made in Bandinelli’s presence of his “Hercules and Cacus.”  “Quel bestial buaccio Bandinello,” as he delights to name him, could do nothing but retort with vulgar terms of insult.[387]

The great achievement of this third period was the modelling and casting of the “Perseus.”  No episode in Cellini’s biography is narrated with more force than the climax to his long-protracted labours, when at last, amid the chaos and confusion of innumerable accidents, the metal in his furnace liquefied and filled the mould.  After the statue was uncovered in the Loggia de’ Lanzi, where it now stands, Cellini achieved a triumph adequate to his own highest expectations.  Odes and sonnets in Italian, Greek, and Latin, were written in its praise.  Pontormo and Bronzino, the painters, loaded it with compliments.  Cellini, ruffling with hand on hilt in silks and satins through the square, was pointed out to foreigners as the great sculptor who had cast the admirable bronze.  It was, in truth, no slight distinction for a Florentine artist to erect a statue beneath the Loggia de’ Lanzi in the square of the Signory.  Every great event in Florentine history had taken place on that piazza.  Every name of distinction among the citizens of Florence was connected with its monuments.  To this day we may read the course of Florentine art by studying its architecture and sculpture; and not the least of its many ornaments, in spite of all that may be said against it, is the “Perseus” of Cellini.

Cellini completed the “Perseus” in 1554.  His autobiography is carried down to the year 1562, when it abruptly terminates.  It appears that in 1558 he received the tonsure and the first ecclesiastical orders; but two years later on he married a wife, and died at the age of sixty-nine, leaving three legitimate children.  He was buried honourably, and a funeral oration was pronounced above his bier in the Chapter House of the Annunziata.