Benvenuto Cellini and the Embodiment of the Modern Artist: (Renaissance Lives)

The art history public has long been both fascinated and repelled by the renowned Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. He was a murderer, thief, lover of both genders, servant and rival of popes and princes, as well as an ingenious artist. In his legendary autobiography, the Vita, Cellini describes his activities vividly and in lurid detail. Often, the most disturbing passages were dismissed as fiction. In this clear-eyed portrayal, Andreas Beyer argues that these sensational accounts of body, sex and extreme experiences are not only entertaining but authentic. They reveal the true depth of Cellini’s character: an artist who embraced life’s full spectrum and shattered all boundaries. This book asserts that the roots of artistic autonomy in modernism can be traced back to Cellini’s audacious life and work.

About the Author :
Andreas Beyer is Professor of Modern Art History at the University of Basel and was previously Director of the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art in Paris. He has published widely on art history.

Review :
Benvenuto Cellini’s famous autobiography has often been seen as wildly untrustworthy. Andreas Beyer treats it instead as a veritable goldmine of psychologically authentic self-representations simultaneously thematizing the passions of the artist’s actual life and the often painful generation of his art, and sharing a “vital centre” in the artist’s own tumultuous body. Unpacking the artist’s vigorously tricky language and many-sided queerness in relation to his aesthetic creations and artistic fortunes, Beyer brilliantly reconstructs Cellini’s boundary-crossing sense of his transgressive singularity – a hallmark of modern artistic identity. This original and compelling book will find a wide readership not only among art historians but in image theory, gender studies and psychology. Andreas Beyer’s Benvenuto Cellini and the Embodiment of the Modern Artist is a wonderful achievement, showing how the artist described by Oscar Wilde as the “scoundrel of the Renaissance” was not just one of its great mavericks, but also the first truly modern artist. A vital book on a singular artist. Andreas Beyer is the rare scholar who writes perceptively both about Cellini's art and about his extraordinary autobiography. Anyone looking for a lively introduction to the man and his work would do well to start here.