ACTing UP in the Renaissance:The Case of Benvenuto Cellini

Abstract

In the introduction to his English translation of The Life of Benvenuto Cellini (1888), the Victorian John Addington Symonds characterized Cellini’s sexual relations with boys as partaking of“ the darker lusts which deformed Florentine society in that epoch.” In a footnote, he clarified these darker lusts as that “unnatural vice”—commonly understood to signify sodomy—something so unpleasant that Symonds himself could not even name it. Elaborating further, Symonds claimed that Cellini’s desires were “animal, licentious, almost brutal.”¹ Symonds was not the first to note that there was something strange, what we would now call queer,² about Cellini’s sexual behavior, particularly when compared to that other favorite of the Victorian imagination, Michelangelo, whose sonnets Symonds had translated a decade earlier. Symonds joined a long line of famous men that included Stendhal and Goethe who were simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by Cellini’s sexual misdeeds. Of course, that such invective against Cellini should come from Symonds—himself homosexual—suggests a queerness beyond the scope of this brief essay.

I would like to thank Gary Cestaro, Carole Gallucci, Elizabeth Leake, Michael Rocke, and James M. Saslow for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on a draft of this essay