ome, led him, after about five years of
laborious and sumptuous work, and of continually-recurring jealousies
and violences, to retire in 1545 in disgust to Florence, where he
employed his time in works of art, and exasperated his temper in
rivalries with the uneasy-natured sculptor Baccio Bandinelli. The first
collision between the two had occurred several years before when Pope
Clement VII. commissioned Cellini to mint his coinage. Now, in an
altercation before Duke Cosimo, Bandinelli insultingly stigmatized
Benvenuto as guilty of gross immorality; in his autobiography Cellini
rather repels than denies the charge, but he certainly repels it with
demonstrative and grotesque vivacity. Two somewhat similar charges had
been made ere this: one in Paris, which he braved out in court--the
other, in Florence, was a mere private quarrel, and perhaps undeserving
of attention. During the war with Siena Cellini was appointed to
strengthen the defences of his native city, and, though rather shabbily
treated by his ducal patrons, he continued to gain the admiration of his
fellow-citizens by the magnificent works which he produced. He died in
Florence in 1571, unmarried, and leaving no posterity, and was buried
with great pomp in the church of the Annunziata. He had supported in
Florence a widowed sister and her six daughters.

Besides the works in gold and silver which have been adverted to,
Cellini executed several pieces of sculpture on a grander scale. The
most distinguished of these is the bronze group of "Perseus holding the
head of Medusa," a work (first suggested by Duke Cosimo de' Medici) now
in the Loggia dei Lanzi at Florence, full of the fire of genius and the
grandeur of a terrible beauty, one of the most typical and unforgettable
monuments of the Italian Renaissance. The casting of this great work
gave Cellini the utmost trouble and anxiety; and its completion was
hailed with rapturous homage from all parts of Italy. The original
relief from the foot of the pedestal--Perseus and Andromeda--is in the
Bargello, and replaced by a cast.

Not less characteristic of its splendidly gifted and barbarically
untameable author are the autobiographical memoirs which he composed,
beginning them in Florence in 1558,--a production of the utmost energy,
directness and racy animation, setting forth one of the most singular
careers in all the annals of fine art. His amours and hatreds, his
passions and delights, his love of the sumptuo