Benvenuto Cellini
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Yet would to God that I understood so noble an art as you allude to; they say that Jove used it with Ganymede in paradise, and here upon this earth it is practised by some of the greatest emperors and kings."--The Life of Benvenuto Cellini (1896) by Benvenuto Cellini |
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Benvenuto Cellini (1500 – 1571) was an Italian artist of the Renaissance.
His best-known extant works include the Cellini Salt Cellar, the sculpture of Perseus with the Head of Medusa, and his picaresque autobiography.
Personal relationships
Cellini is known to have taken some of his female models as mistresses, having an illegitimate daughter in 1544 with one of them while living in France, whom he named Costanza. After briefly attempting a clerical career, in 1562, he married a servant, Piera Parigi, with whom he claimed he had five children, of which only a son and two daughters survived him.
Outside his marriage, Cellini was officially charged or accused three times with homosexual sodomy and once with heterosexual.
- 14 January 1523 he was sentenced to pay 12 staia of flour for relations with a boy named Domenico di ser Giuliano da Ripa.
- While in Paris, a former model and lover brought charges against him of using her "after the Italian fashion."
- In Florence in 1548, Cellini was accused by a woman named Margherita, for having certain familiarities with her son, Vincenzo.
- 26 February 1556, his apprentice Fernando di Giovanni di Montepulciano accused his mentor of having sodomised him many times. This time the penalty was a hefty fifty golden scudi fine, and four years of prison, remitted to four years of house arrest thanks to the intercession of the Medicis.
Towards the end of his life during a public altercation before Duke Cosimo, Bandinelli had called out to him Sta cheto, soddomitaccio! (Shut up, you filthy sodomite!) Cellini qualified it an "atrocious insult."
