Honor and Manliness

Abstract

In the story of his life when Cellini is not holding a chisel, he is often clutching a dagger. Cellini is a complex, contradictory figure whose life and work manifest diverse and conflicting impulses. Like Aretino, he composed scandalous works at the same time as he was producing deeply religious ones. The violent persona that Cellini depicts in his Vita is not the only posture he adopts. In the Vita Cellini employs, for example, the saintly/pilgrim register; one recalls the figure of the Dantesque pilgrim and Otherworld traveler in the prison episodes in Rome. However, viewing the narrative as a whole, these are isolated cases. The sum total of saintly behavior that Cellini exhibits in the story of his life is contained within the prison episodes. In contrast, Cellini’s violence does not begin in a particular moment of his life; rather, he acts violently throughout the course of his entire life. As protagonist, Cellini commits assaults and homicides with reckless abandon from adolescence through adulthood to old age. In fact, it is difficult to recall Cellini’s imitation of Dante when he boasts so frequently about his violence. In a particularly gruesome episode, for example, Cellini recounts stabbing a man so many times with a large dagger that he renders him paralyzed: “una sera gli detti tanti colpi pur guardando di non lo ammazare, innelle gambe e innelle braccia, che di tutt’a due le gambe io lo privai” (one evening I gave him so many stabs, though being careful not to kill him, in the legs and arms, that I deprived him of the use of both of his legs [Bellotto, 543]).