Volume 33, Number 9 · May 29, 1986
Jupiter's Boy
By Charles Hope
Cellini
by John Pope-Hennessy, principal photography by David Finn, additional photography by Takashi Okamura. others
Abbeville Press, 324 pp., $85.00
Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society
by James M. Saslow
Yale University Press, 265 pp., $30.00
In 1557 Benvenuto Cellini, who was then living in his native Florence, was convicted of sodomy, and after a brief spell in prison had his sentence commuted to house arrest for four years. It was in this period of enforced inactivity, when his attempts to win major sculptural commissions were increasingly unsuccessful, that he wrote, or rather dictated, the greater part of his autobiography, as well as making the marble Crucifix which is now in the Escorial. Both of these works are masterpieces; but it is the autobiography that has proved to be the basis of Cellini's posthumous fame, in a way that he probably neither anticipated nor wanted. For the picture of the sculptor that emerges from this book, which is by far the most remarkable self-portrait of its period, hardly conforms to modern preconceptions of a great Renaissance artist.
Review, 3301 words
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