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Book FirstPart XII
Part XII
When I had recovered my health, I returned to my old friend Marcone, the
worthy goldsmith, who put me in the way of earning money, with which I helped
my father and our household. About that time there came to Florence a sculptor
named Piero Torrigiani; ^1 he arrived from England, where he had resided many
years; and being intimate with my master, he daily visited his house; and when
he saw my drawings and the things which I was making, he said: "I have come to
Florence to enlist as many young men as I can; for I have undertaken to
execute a great work of my king, and want some of my own Florentines to help
me. Now your method of working and your designs are worthy rather of a
sculptor than a goldsmith; and since I have to turn out a great piece of
bronze, I will at the same time turn you into a rich and able artist." This
man had a splendid person and a most arrogant spirit, with the air of a great
soldier more than a sculptor, especially in regard to his vehement gestures
and his resonant voice, together with a habit he had of knitting his brows,
enough to frighten any man of courage. He kept talking every day about his
gallant feats among those beasts of Englishmen.
[Footnote 1: Torrigiani worked in fact for Henry VIII., and his monument to
Henry VII. still exists in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. From England
he went to Spain, where he modelled a statue of the Virgin for a great
nobleman. Not receiving the pay he expected, he broke his work to pieces; for
which act of sacrilege the Inquisition sent him to prison, where he starved
himself to death in 1522. Such at least is the legend of his end.]
In course of conversation he happened to mention Michel Agnolo
Buonarroti, led thereto by a drawing I had made from a cartoon of that
divinest painter. ^2 This cartoon was the first masterpiece which Michel
Agnolo exhibited, in proof of his stupendous talents. He produced it in
competition with another painter, Lionardo da Vinci, who also made a cartoon;
and both were intended for the councilhall in the palace of the Signory. They
represented the taking of Pisa by the Florentines; and our admirable Lionardo
had chosen to depict a battle of horses, with the capture of some standards,
in as divine a style as could possibly be imagined. Michel Agnolo in his
cartoon portrayed a number of foot-soldiers, who, the season being summer, had
gone to bathe in Arno. He drew them at the very moment the alarm is sounded,
and the men all naked run to arms; so splendid in their action that nothing
survives of ancient or of modern art which touches the same lofty point of
excellence; and as I have already said, the design of the great Lionardo was
itself most admirably beautiful. These two cartoons stood, one in the palace
of the Medici, the other in the hall of the Pope. So long as they remained
intact, they were the school of the world. Though the divine Michel Agnolo in
later life finished that great chapel of Pope Julius, ^3 he never rose
half-way to the same pitch of power; his genius never afterwards attained to
the force of those first studies.
[Footnote 2: The cartoons to which Cellini here alludes were made by Michel
Angelo and Lionardo for the decoration of the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the
Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. Only the shadows of them remain to this day; a
part of Michel Angelo`s, engraved by Schiavonetti, and a transcript by Rubens
from Lionardo`s, called the Battle of the Standard.]
[Footnote 3: The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.]
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