Benvenuto Cellini Magnanimously Corrects the Irritating Ignorance of Life Writers in General and in Regard to My Vita in This Letter from Hell

Abstract

Cellini in this letter from hell suggestively echoes many of this volume’s themes. He too sees a Renaissance sense of self evolving in reaction to his developing self-understanding and in his social and cultural interactions. Thus, he adopts a term from Vasari’s Lives, “disegno” (the understanding of the reality behind the surface contingencies of things that made great art) to insist that that is what biographers should provide, undistracted by colorful details which miss the essence of a life. Rejecting the label genius, he opts instead for a less anachronistic status as a writer, artist, and powerful male whose superior virtù marked him out as truly exceptional. He shows in this context how he constructed his Vita to demonstrate how others evaluated him as superior through “consensus realities”: the judgments of those groups that surrounded him and with whom he negotiated his identity constructing a series of often quite different selves. These ongoing negotiations of self, Cellini radically argues, mean that biographers trying to construct a unified vision of the self for their subjects seriously distort them because an early modern person was really a series of multiple selves negotiated with the different groups that one interacted with.