ll the phases of
Italian society, since a passion for external beauty was at that time
the heritage of the Italian people, and art bodied forth the innermost
life of the period. Furniture, plate, and personal adornments were not
turned out wholesale by machinery as they are to-day, but engaged the
individual attention of the most skilled craftsmen. The memory and the
traditions of Raphael Sanzio were still cherished by his pupils when
Cellini first came to Rome into the brilliant circle of Giulio Romano
and his friends; Michelangelo's frescoes were studied with rapturous
admiration by the young Benvenuto, and later on he proudly recorded
some words of praise of the mighty genius whom he worshiped; and at
this time, too, Titian and Tintoretto set the heart of Venice aglow
with the splendor and color of their marvelous canvases. The
contemporary though not the peer of those masters of the brush and the
chisel, Cellini, endowed with a keen feeling for beauty, a dexterous
hand, and a lively imagination, in his versatility reached out toward
a wider sphere of activity, and laid hold of life at more points, than
they.

He reflected the Renaissance, not merely on its higher artistic
aspect, but he touched it also on its lower darker levels of brute
passion, coarseness, and vindictiveness. He had more than one murder
to his account, and he did not slur over them in his narrative, for in
his make-up the bravo was equally prominent with the artist. Yet we
must remember that homicides were of common occurrence in those days,
defended by casuists and condoned by the Church. Avenging one's honor,
or punishing an insult with the dagger, were as much a social custom
as the adornment of the body with exquisitely wrought fabrics and
jewelry. But just because Cellini was so thoroughly awake to all the
influences about him, and so entirely bent on living his life, his
'Memoirs' are perennially fresh and attractive. They are the plain
unvarnished annals of a career extraordinary even in that age of
uncommon experiences; they were written, as he says, because "all men
of whatever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or
which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of
truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand; but
they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed
the age of forty."

[Illustration: BENVENUTO CELLINI.]

Cellini was past fifty-eight when he began