Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
27 - How Honest Was Cellini?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
Summary
Cellini began dictating his exasperating, brilliant autobiography in 1557, or right after a Florentine judge sentenced him to four years in prison for sodomy. Margaret A. Gallucci finds this abrupt resort to literature puzzling, but it seems a natural enough substitute in a life consumed with drama both criminal and aesthetic, not to mention sexual, and now reduced to comparative inaction.
Gallucci also finds incredible the very idea of Cellini's tumultuous life. She doubts whether it can have whisked along at quite his proclaimed adventurous pace. She adduces no evidence that it did not, however, merely arguing that he “fashioned” himself according to heroic models borrowed from medieval romances and epics. Imitation explains velocity. Literature supplies braggadocio. Again, however, Gallucci's speculations, while not uninteresting, are accompanied by no evidence to show that the Cellini of real life, whose partisans continue to rank him among the Renaissance's maddest, wildest, most boisterous, homicidal, shrewd and clever geniuses of gold and silver— as the most consummate and undisguised rogue of bedroom and atelier— is not identical with the Cellini of his Vita. The sculptor of the Gorgon- slayer was pretty quick on the draw himself, it seems, and no amount of twentyfirst- century incredulity will reduce him to bisexual or homoerotic political correctness.
In any case, Gallucci's brief book itself whisks along at its own fairly high speed, but in a rickety model of deconstructionism borrowed from Michel Foucault and Tzvetan Todorov. It repeatedly proposes, for instance, that throughout his Vita Cellini has installed himself on that old war horse of literary theorists, “self- representation,” a solecism whose true meaning is presumably dishonesty, and that one of his book's aims is to expose “gender stereotypes”— this despite their not having been invented in the sixteenth century. Cellini's Vita, she thus informs us, is less autobiography in some recognizable sense than “judging” literature, in which an author defends himself against criminal charges (hence his resort to autobiography after his [second] conviction for sodomy). To maintain this reductive notion, his ideas about aesthetics, which pepper page after page, and his superb descriptions of battles and private artistic struggles, along with his witty if sarcastic dismissals of the inferior work of competitors— notable for their style, vigor and close observation, as when he recounts his hardships in casting his Perseus— are well- nigh ignored.
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- Information
- Poetry and FreedomDiscoveries in Aesthetics, 1985–2018, pp. 163 - 164Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020