The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is a memoir by the Italian goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, written in Italian beginning in 1558, when Cellini was fifty-eight, and left unfinished around 1563, breaking off shortly before an account of a journey to Pisa. In it Cellini recounts his career as an artist working for popes, kings and dukes, along with his loves, quarrels, and violent disputes, narrated in a direct, boastful and often self-aggrandizing style that includes claims of committing murder and of witnessing supernatural events. Long circulated only in manuscript, the autobiography was not printed until 1728, when an edition appeared in Cologne, Germany, and it later reached a wide English-language readership chiefly through John Addington Symonds's 1887 translation. Historians and literary scholars regard the book as one of the most important documents of the sixteenth century, valued both as a vivid firsthand record of Renaissance artistic life and as an early masterwork of Italian autobiographical prose.