The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini: Introduction by James Fenton (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780307592743)

Here is the most important autobiography from Renaissance Italy and one of the most spirited and colorful from any time or place, in a translation widely recognized as the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original.

Benvenuto Cellini was both a beloved artist in sixteenth-century Florence and a passionate and temperamental man of action who was capable of brawling, theft, and murder. He counted popes, cardinals, kings, and dukes among his patrons and was the adoring friend of--as he described them--the "divine" Michelangelo and the "marvelous" Titian, but was as well known for his violent feuds. At age twenty-seven he helped defend the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, and his account of his imprisonment there (under a mad castellan who thought he was a bat), his escape, recapture, and confinement in "a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms" is an adventure equal to any other in fact or fiction. But it is only one in a long life lived on a grand scale.

Cellini's autobiography is not merely the record of an extraordinary life but also a dramatic and evocative
account of daily life in Renaissance Italy, from its lowest taverns to its highest royal courts.

Author: Benvenuto Cellini
ISBN-10: 030759274X
ISBN-13: 9780307592743
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Language: English
Published: 04/06/2010
Pages: 504
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.23lbs
Size: 8.42h x 5.54w x 1.18d