This Is A New Release Of The Original 1898 Edition.

"Thus spoke Pope Paul III on learning that Cellini had murdered a fellow artist, so great was Cellini's reputation in Renaissance Italy. A renowned sculptor and goldsmith, whose works include the famous salt-cellar made for the King of France, and the statue of Perseus with the head of the Medusa, Cellini's life was as vivid and enthralling as his creations.

This book offers new perspectives on the artist and his place in Renaissance art, literature, and culture, as well as his legacy in European publishing history and modern American pop culture. The essays in this volume approach the multi-faceted career of Cellini from a variety of perspectives, cutting across disciplinary boundaries, as did the artist himself. Offering new interpretations of Cellini's life and achievements, this richly illustrated work brings new insights into the legacy of a major figure of the Italian Renaissance.

Celebrated goldsmith and sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) fits the conventional image of a Renaissance man: a skillful virtuoso and courtier; an artist who worked in marble, bronze, and gold; and a writer and poet. Using the methodologies of New Historicism, social history, and gender and sexuality studies, this book places Cellini and his cultural production in the context of contemporary discourses about sexuality, law, magic, masculinity, and honor. In his life and literary oeuvre, the notorious artist, rogue, and sodomite aligned himself with the transgressive and oppositional voices of his day.

Benvenuto Cellini is an incomparable source on the nature of artmaking in sixteenth century Italy. A practicing artist who worked in gold, bronze, marble, as well as on paper, he was also the author of treatises, discourses, poems and letters about his own work and the works of contemporaries. By examining how Cellini and those around him viewed the act of sculpture in the late Renaissance, Michael Cole demonstrates his continuing relevance to the broader study of artistic theory and practice in his time.

The self-portrait of Baccio Bandinelli shows the sculptor pointing to an object that he has placed on a kind of pedestal. Among the most remarkable aspects of this object is that it is not a sculpture but a design in red chalk, a medium that few other Renaissance sculptors used. Bandinelli was particularly proud of his skills as a draughtsman, and he produced hundreds of drawings, many of them as striking and unusual as the one his portrait depicts. His talent and productivity set him apart from other sculptors of his day, most of whom left little evidence of having worked extensively on paper. This publication, which accompanies an important exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, puts Bandinelli's portrait in context by looking broadly at the practice of drawing by Renaissance sculptors, including such luminaries as Donatello, Verrocchio, Michelangelo, Cellini and Giambologna. The book surveys two centuries of material, considering rough sketches and more finished sheets, isolated studies and sequences of ideas. Comparing designs on paper to related three-dimensional works by the same artists, the book directly confronts the question of the importance drawing held for sculptors in the period. The authors, who include specialists in the history of sculpture and drawing, among other fields, pose new questions about the creative process and the relation between the arts in Renaissance Italy. A focus of the book will be Bandinellis own drawings and the development of his practice across his career and his experimentation with different media. The broader question considered, however, is when, how and why sculptors drew. Every Renaissance sculptor who set out to make a work in metal or stone would first have made a series of preparatory models in wax, clay and/or stucco. Drawing was not an essential practice for sculptors in the way it was for painters, and indeed, most surviving sculptors drawings are not preparatory studies for works they subsequently executed in three dimensions. When sculptors did draw, it often indicated something about the artists training or about his ambitions. Among the most accomplished draftsmen were artists like Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio and Cellini, who had come to sculpture by way of goldsmithery, a profession that required proficiency in ornamental design. Artists who sought to become architects, meanwhile the likes of Michelangelo, Giambologna and Ammanati similarly needed to learn to draw, since architects had to provide plans, elevations and other drawings to assistants and clients and had to imagine the place of individual figures within a larger multi-media ensemble. Certain kinds of projects, moreover fountains and tombs, for example required drawings to a degree that others did not. Sections on the Renaissance goldsmith-sculptor and sculptor-architect will allow comparison of the place drawing had in various artists careers.

Artists’ Letters is a treasure trove of carefully selected letters written by great artists, providing the reader with a unique insight into their characters and a glimpse into their lives. Arranged thematically, it includes writings and musings on love, work, daily life, money, travel and the creative process. On the theme of friendship, for example, letters provide evidence of a creative community between peers, with support and mutual appreciation that helps to dispel the myth of the artist as solitary genius. Letters between Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin show an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas. We see mutual admiration between Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot, and Picasso’s quick notes to Jean Cocteau illustrate their closeness. Correspondence, some of which includes sketches and drawings, is reproduced with the transcript and some background and contextual information alongside. The book brings together a collection of treasures found in letters, which in our digital age are an increasingly lost art.