The Best Artists

When Michelangelo was an old man, all the the younger artists worshipped him. If they had ever even talked to him they bragged about it. Benvenuto Cellini came up with this letter and put it proudly in his Autobiography. Since he never produced the original, and he was known to fib, many people doubt its authenticity.

          My Benvenuto–

I’ve recognized you for many years as the greatest goldsmith of whom we have ever heard, and now I shall recognize you equally as a sculptor. I must tell you that Messer Bindo Altoviti took me to see a portrait head of his in bronze and he told me that it was by your hand. It pleased me very much, but I only regret that it had been placed in a bad light, because if it had been given its proper light, it would be seen to be the beautiful work it is.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Here is the bust of Altoviti Michelangelo is writing about. It is easy to see how its simplicity COULD please Michelangelo, especially as a surprise after he had heard it was by Cellini, who usually covered everything with decoration. Pity about that lion.

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A tourist in Florence turned the corner of the Stada dei Florentini and saw the Perseus. “That´s it!” he said aloud. “And it´s not half-bad.”
He had read Benvenuto Cellini´s autobiography and knew all about the famous statue. Cellini had cast it himself and at the last moment everything had gone wrong. The house caught fire and there wasn´t enough liquid bronze to fill the mold. Cellini collapsed from exhaustion—it looked like all was lost, months of work, his reputation. Then in a dream or a hallucination he was instructed what to do and he jumped up from bed and acted just in time to save the statue. Now here it was—the real Perseus—and it was wonderful—not only because of the exciting story, but because it was actually impressive as sculpture.

He sat down at a table in the piazza to admire the statue and ordered a drink.
Then he tried a little experiment. He tried to see the statue as though he knew nothing about it. “Would I STILL have thought it was good?” he wondered.

And he had to admit that, while it was a very pleasant surprise that the statue was beautiful, it could have been ugly and wouldn´t have mattered to him. In fact, the ugliness would only have made the Perseus more lovable. What he really wanted to see was Cellini´s ghost.

Is it possible to make an impartial judgment on the artistic merits of the Perseus after reading the Autobiography? Can you analyze the shapes without remembering the swaggering artist himself, his own praise of his work, or the stormy circumstances of its creation? Of course the psychologist wants to see in the statue all that he knows about the man, which, in the case of Cellini, is considerable. And he will find it there.
But what does that have to do with ART? Shouldn´t a statue be beautiful only as a shape—without a story or an explanation?

The fact is, most great statues have a story about them. There may be a lively anecdote about the sculptor and about the creation of the figure as in the case of the Perseus. But ALL of them before our time were ILLUSTRATIONS of a story—gods mainly or people out of a myth or the Bible. You can think about old Benvenuto or you can switch to the Perseus story itself and look at his statue THAT way: see how Perseus drops his eyes so as not to see the Medusa, whose look turns you to stone.
Meanwhile the statue can please you as art.

It isn´t that a story ADDS something to the statue. That´s backwards. It´s that the statue CAME FROM the story. The artist was ordered to do a David or a Neptune, knew the story, and represented the David or the Neptune in stone as he imagined him. The statue was a success if you could see the hero of the story IN it. A statue that “was of “ nobody, that didn´t claim to be any of the heroes of any story, didn´t exist.

Take the “nude”. There wasn´t such a thing in the old days—just any naked woman. She was always “Susanna being spied on by the old lechers” or “Venus at bathtime” or “Leda ‘dealing with’ the Swan”. The nude of the last century was like the experiment called “slice of life” writing, which might have virtues of its own—realism, a degree of truth—but which ultimately doesn´t add up to anything and has trouble finding a place to live in our memory.
A statue is very much helped by a story or some context; our imaginations need a reference to become engaged. Our eyes may have great fun sliding and playing on the beautiful forms of a figure, but our minds need a direction too. Many modern works of art survive by their titles.

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Rembrandt’s Bathsheba with a letter from King David 

See what you think when you come down the Strada dei Fiorentini of Florence and spot the Perseus in the corner of the Loggia. If you’ve read Benvenuto Cellini’s book, you must admit you didn´t expect THAT—you didn´t know it was going to be so good, though Cellini swore it was. Of course how could you take his word for anything—such a liar, such a divine liar—such a glorious fairy tale, his book.

And now you see it was true and better than true. You might as well be discovering on a trip to England Jack´s very beanstalk—fresh, giant, CLIMB-ABLE.

Perseus was the biggest statue Benvenuto ever tried in Florence and it almost did him in. And wouldn´t his enemies have liked THAT? They smirked and grinned when they heard his claims and said he was a little-figure man, not a sculptor. How was that little goldsmith going to model a figure twice as big as life and cast it too? Always the bigtime with Benvenuto. What he had was a big mouth.

But like all the Renaissance greats, Cellini trusted in himself. Let the experts cast his giant figure? Not on your life—he would do it himself. He´d get a handful of boys to help him and cast the darn thing in his house. He was sick of experts.

You pay a price for doing things your own way. And at the last minute everything went wrong and Benvenuto collapsed from the strain. He left the boys with his statue while the cauldron was a-bubble and ran off to bed, pale as death. While he was gone the boys lost control, the roof caught fire and the liquid bronze caked in the crucible. “All is lost, Master,” one of them came to tell him. But a ghost or a hallucination warned Benvenuto, told him to hurry back to the workshop—there was time to save the Perseus. Up he sprang and in a twinkle was there shouting orders—Make for the pile of old oakwood by the shed! Gather all the pewter in the house and throw it into the crucible of clotting bronze! Get moving, boys—we´re going to save her!

And the miracle happened. The oakwood fire melted the bronze again and all the pewter Benvenuto had added. Would it be enough to fill the mold? It was a one-shot job. With a cry he ordered the boys to tip the crucible. And the red-hot bronze poured in—all of it, down to the last fiery drop. And when everything had cooled down and the bronze had hardened in the mold, Benvenuto began with great suspense to dig up his statue (for it was buried in the ground) and to knock away the burnt clay jacket that enveloped it.

And if you remember that far, you´ll remember the rest and get up on the stone railing to have a look at the toes of the Perseus.

You might think that bronze statues last longer than stone ones, and that they are easier to make. But in fact they disappear sooner and are often the despair of sculptors. Why?

In the past, bronze was much more expensive than stone and was needed for tools and weapons. When a town was in danger, no one thought twice about melting down its bronze statues to make cannons. This happened to the giant portrait Michelangelo made of Pope Julius in Bologna. It was gone before Michelangelo died. He had worked on it for over a year.

The other reason is that bronze casting is a tricky business. Sculptors usually had to leave it to the technicians. And the technicians often botched a job. They lost Michelangelo’s first version of that same Julius.

Here is Benvenuto Cellini’s famous Perseus, which stands across from the Palazzo de Signoría in Florence. He cast it himself and very nearly lost it. He tells the exciting story in his Life.