Benvenuto Cellini

“ The age of a good prince whose delight is in the encouragement of all beautiful things is the age for men of talent, and such a time came about in the days of the first Cosimo de Medici, who was their great patron. It was he who gave Filippo Brunellesco, Donatello, & Lorenzo Ghiberti their opportunity. Filippo was as fine an architect as ever was; Donatello sculped in marble and in bronze, & even wrought wondrously in the difficult art of painting. Lorenzo Ghiberti made the bronze gates of S. Giovanni that have no equal in the world. ”

“ This marble is the most difficult of all to work, because it is the hardest; it is particularly difficult to fashion the more delicate forms in it without the chisel damaging or cracking them; if you do manage, though after much effort, to bring them off in this stone, they look lovely. I have found that the grain gradually softens through the five different sorts above-mentioned, & the softest of all I have found verging in colour to a delicate flesh tint rather than a white. This sort is the most cohesive, the most beautiful and the tenderest marble in the world to work in. ”

“ But don’t imagine that by touching up the surface of your work with punches and hammer, it will gain anything in the relief, for the enamels will either not stick at all, or the surface that you are enamelling will still appear rough. And just as when a man cuts an intaglio he often rubs it with a little charcoal, such as willow or walnut wood, which he rubs on with a little saliva or water, the same you may do here when you cut your intaglio in order to see it stand out better, because the shine made by the metal tools on the plate will make it difficult for you to see your work. ”

“ To the tradesman, the sculptor’s ghost, the working jeweller, whether of Birmingham, Bond Street, or Clerkenwell, in the thousand and one gimcrack shops where they sell ‘merry-thought brooches,’ & ‘our latest stock of Christmas presents,’ the glorious Art of Goldsmithing has no meaning, or rather is a thing not of eight branches but of a hundred subdivisions, fanned into existence by a hundred callous machines, and workshop tradition has been destroyed by ‘the Trade.’ For the same reason the circle of readers will be small. ”

“ In my opinion your Holiness would do well to commission two or three old and tried jewellers to go and look Benvenuto up & not let him tint the diamond without their advice. It was a jeweller called Miliano Targhetta of Venice, your Holiness, who tinted and set the stone as your Holiness has it at present. This was an old man, and never did any one better know how to fix foils and tint stones.’
Weary of this plaguey babbler, the Pope told him he might go and do what he liked & thought best. ”

“ It is an extraordinary thing that the diamond, which is the most limpid and brilliant of all earthly stones, gains a thousand-fold in beauty when you, as it were, soil it with a black tint, while all other light stones, as soon as you touch them with a tint, lose their splendour, and turn black ”

“ Ofttimes we figure casters call in the help of ordnance founders [245] to aid us, but the most terrible misfortunes not infrequently occur owing to their insufficient experience and want of care, and all our labour is lost. Just such a thing very nearly happened to me when I was casting my Perseus, for, calling to aid some of those fellows, I found them so absolutely devoid of sense that in their stupidity they all swore my mould was spoilt, and that there was no means of righting it, and all this thanks to the muddle they themselves had made with my metal. ”

“ When you are ready to begin soldering, and want to make your solder flow, put your work in the furnace, & place beneath it a few little pieces of well-dried wood, fanning them up a bit with your bellows. Then it is not a bad thing, too, after this to throw a few coarse cinders upon the fire, & this done at the right moment does a deal of good. But it is practice and experience, together with a man’s own discretion, that are the only real ways of teaching one how to bring about good results in this or in anything. ”

“ I have just told how great princes give opportunity to men of genius, & cause to re-kindle through them the beautiful art of the past. Well, I make bold to say that Francis, King of France, was the greatest lover of genius & the most open-handed of any man that ever lived in the world. I was called to his Majesty when I was in Rome, and I joined him in the year 1540, being just forty years of age. ”

“ We must not take Cellini at his own valuation, and we must remember that he did not draw that subtle distinction between designer and executant that we nowadays are wont to do. The fact that every aesthetic criticism is inevitably biased by the style of its period must be taken into account by the student, if such criticisms as I myself, speaking as an artist, should venture to make, are to be of value to him. To Cellini’s best-known critics this applies in equal measure. Vasari, Delaborde, Milanesi, Brinckman, Symonds, have each had their point of view so to speak. ”

“ In my time, too, it was the custom, among other charming things, to make little medals of gold which were worn in the hat or the cap; and on these medals portraits were engraved in low or half relief, and in the round, and they looked just lovely. The greatest master in this art that I ever knew, lived in the times of the Popes Leo, Adrian, and Clement, and he was Caradosso of whom I told you above. Now will I tell you not only of the method which he adopted in his craft, but that which was employed by other masters. ”

“ These angel babies were some of them done completely in the round, others in high relief, others again in bas-relief. And I so devised it that God the Father was seated on the big diamond, which had been bought it was said for 30,000 scudi. This suggests the reflection as to how much harder it is for a man to do a piece of work in which his design is limited by having to use special jewels or aught else in particular. Still for all that, you can do anything if only you set to work at it with all the love & the zeal that your noble craft demands of you, and so did I, and this is how I did it. ”

“ Some artists have gone straight to work at their seals with merely cutting directly into their silver, and without casting at all, but pluckily doing their design straight on in the reverse with genuine knowledge of their art, and using the steel dies of which I told you, and they succeeded in it, too. ”

“ Then take a piece of linen, the size of the crucible, folded into four and soaked with olive oil, and spread it over the tartar that covers the silver; and grip the crucible with the tongs called imbracciatoie. You ought to have many kinds of these, small, medium, great, and adaptable to the quantity of silver you have to melt; they hold the crucible together and prevent it breaking—that happened to me many a time. Just as you’ve got your silver nicely molten and are pouring it into the mould, crack goes your crucible, and all your work and time and pains are lost! ”

“ This done, erect a little grating of coal on top of your work, minding, however, that the charcoal does not touch the work itself. Be ready at hand when the charcoal is beginning to glow and your work is growing fire-coloured, to blow wind over it with your bellows very skillfully and very evenly, so that the flames may play all round it alike. If you blow too hard the fire will spring up and burst into flame, and you run the risk of melting and spoiling your work. Watching with care you will see the outer skin of gold begin to glow and then to move ”

“ Jewellery is, before all others, an art of limitations. An artist cannot but put less of himself into a gem than into a statue, he is necessarily more cabined. Further, Cellini made most of his jewellery as a young man in Florence & Rome, when the traditions of the Florentine workshop which reared Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, were still fresh upon him, & before he had as yet attempted the impossible task of translating the gusto grando of Michael Angelo into minor craftsmanship. ”

“ Affected & uneven and imperfect in handling is his work when set beside that of earlier masters. Attenuated as we see in the nymph of Fontainebleau, thick & exaggerated as in the Perseus at Florence, leaden and stiff as in the Neptune and Cybele of the salt, there is about his figures always something manqué, they seem indeed to have in them the effort of a decaying school. ”

“ CHAPTER IV. HOW TO CONSTRUCT FURNACES FOR CASTING BRONZE, WHETHER FOR STATUES, ORDNANCE, OR OTHER SUCH-LIKE THINGS. Furnaces for casting bronze have to be made by each master according as the special needs of his piece of work require it. Inasmuch as at the beginning of my book I promised always to illustrate what I was describing by work of my own, I will do so with furnaces also. When working for good King Francis, I had to make a great bronze gate, for which a special furnace had to be constructed. ”

“ True it is that the gesso in our part of Tuscany does not lend itself so well to works of this nature as that of Mantua, Milan and France. Several very able youths who have worked for his Excellency the Duke of Florence, have been taken in not once but two or three times, owing to the delusion that ours was the best way of making gesso. The most excellent Duke, who was ever a lover of thoroughness, very thoughtfully had patience with them, but our young men, unacquainted with the difference between the one gesso and the other, stuck to their own method, & remained unenlightened. ”

“ As I told you, I had asked Rafaello, Guasparri and Gaio to allow me some two days’ space; during this time I made a set of experiments [37] in tints, and by great labour produced a composition which made a much finer effect beneath the diamond than had been made by the master, Miliano Targhetta. And when I had made sure that I had beaten so admirable a man, what did I do but set to work anew with still greater energy to see if I could not beat even myself. ”

“ Of these four sorts of stones, the ruby, the sapphire, the emerald, and the diamond, you must know that the first is far the most costly. A ruby, for instance, of five grains of wheat, & of as fine a fire as you could wish, would be worth about 800 golden scudi, and an emerald of the same size and beauty would run to about 400, similarly a diamond would be worth 100, & no more, while a sapphire would fetch about 10. These few facts I thought might be worth having to all those many youths always springing up and eager to learn the beautiful art of the goldsmith. ”

“ Then having your furnace as I say, in its place, you must put your gold work on an iron plate a trifle larger than the work itself, so that it can be handled with the tongs. And you must so ply it with the tongs and hold it to the mouth of the furnace, that it gets warm gradually, then, little by little, put it into the middle of the furnace, but you must take the greatest possible care that as soon as the enamel begins to move, you do not let it run, but draw it away from the fire quickly, so, however, that you do not subject it to any sudden cooling. ”

“ To others, like Delaborde, it was influenced by the Romantic Reaction of the early Nineteenth Century, and to them his work was ‘an exploded myth.’ Criticised from the modern point of view—the point of view that distinguishes between goldsmith and sculptor, between craftsman & designer—we cannot rank him among the highest. There is a want of feeling for proportion in such work as we have of his, & the whole is marred by the overcrowded detail, often very exquisite in itself, of the parts; the craftsman indeed invariably overpowers the artist. ”

“ Divers sorts of diamonds require some a darker, some a lighter tint; some again need a softer, some a harder tint, and so it is necessary, whenever you are setting a diamond of great importance, to try it with the hard and the soft, or with the dark and the light in accordance with the quality of the stone and the judgment of the good jeweller. Some have put as little lampblack as possible when tinting a diamond that seemed too yellow, and have instead mixed with their tint indigo, a blue colour known to every painter. ”

“ It must not be too hot when you spread it on your copper plate. When you have etched on your design make a ridge of wax round the plate and pour on the parting water, letting it stand not longer than half an hour. If then it be not bitten deep enough, do it again. Then remove it and clean it well with a sponge. You draw on the varnish with a stylus of well tempered steel, that is an iron needle, which in the craft is termed a stile. You wash the varnish off the plate with a sponge of warm oil, but very softly so as not to destroy the intaglio. ”