Renaissance Medicine, Magic, and Alchemy in Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita

This study is devoted to the emotional experience of the famous Renaissance sculptor, goldsmith, and writer, Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), as it is portrayed in his life writing, the Vita. Providing the variety of arguments on the connection between the artist and contemporary intellectuals, who attended the Florentine Academy (1540–1583) together, I demonstrate that Cellini’s literary production can be examined productively against the background of Neoplatonic thought. In particular, Marsilio Ficino’s On Love, first published in the vernacular Italian in 1544, helps to establish an explanation of what Cellini meant when he decided to play the cornet while falling in love simultaneously with a young boy and girl, or how he justified kicking or punching his servants, or why he did not kill his adversary, the artist Baccio Bandinelli, when he had the chance. These cases of radical affectivity are inscribed into Ficino’s concept of the “melancholy genius” manifesting melancholic madness. In Cellini’s Vita, the latter can not only turn humans almost into beast, literally (for example, in a bat); but, properly tempered by the means of music and poetry, as well as of individual and collective magic, it elevates one’s soul “on high,” which corresponds to the Neoplatonic concept of divine madness. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1. Benvenuto Cellini and the Florentine Academy 1.1 Why did the Italian academies emerge? 1.2 Academic movement before the Florentine Academy 1.3 The Florentine Academy 1.4 Benvenuto Cellini’s writings in the context of the Florentine Academy Chapter 2. “Essendo io per natura malinconico”: Benvenuto Cellini and the Ficinian Legacy 2.1 “Grand theories” and “grounded” early-modern artists 2.2 Marsilio Ficino’s On Love 2.3 “Melancholy genius” concept 2.4 (Neo)Platonic love Chapter 3. “Tu ten sei gito a contemplar su ’n Cielo l’alto Fattore”: Benvenuto Cellini Ascending on High 3.1 Esoteric knowledge and censorship 3.2 “Furor divino” and “diabolico furore” 3.3 Different kinds of furor divino in the Vita Conclusion

2018

2000

Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU, 2018

This paper sketches the intellectual connections to the Florentine Academy (1540-1583) that the famous artist Benvenuto Cellini had during his life. I bring to light the earlier neglected passages of Cellini's Vita in which he describes his activities in the Academy. Connecting the period when the Vita was written with the development of the Academy and with the biography of another Florentine artists, Agnolo Bronzino, participated in there, I conclude that Cellini's autobiography must have been a literary attempt to be admitted again to this Florentine think tank after he had been retired from there in 1547.

2018

This paper is based on the idea that some Renaissance artists deliberately reinforced the exclusive nature of both their creative process (ingegno) and the masterpieces they produced by using elements of Platonic philosophy in order to appropriate the representation of the Divine beauty by disegno. It is no discovery that these artists were the first who intentionally elevated their craftsmanship to a new socio-cultural level; however, an important question needs to be asked. How and through what means did artisans understand their own transformation into artists? I will demonstrate that these means were adopted from Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium. Ficino’s interpretation of amor Socraticus and the diabolic/divine frenzies had a particularly strong influence on Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) and later on became viewed as intrinsic parts of an artistic personality. Thus, Cellini designed an outstandingly long autofiction to legitimize the transcendent origins of his foremost masterpiece, Perseus, and to show off the exceptional learnedness of his maniera. Cellini’s Vita and other literary works, which have not been studied from such an angle, make it possible to substantiate the “Renaissance Neo-Platonic artist” as an ideal type. This model would explain the self-representations of many prominent Florentine artists of the 15th–16th c., namely, Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Bronzino, Cellini, and others.

Intellectual History Review, 2017

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Medical History 42 /3, pp 410-411, 1998