Buy the Autobiography
of Benvenuto Cellini
Available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. This 2025 modern English translation is the edition readers are finding most alive — written directly, without the Victorian polish that flattened every previous version.
Buy on Amazon →Amazon Bestseller
This edition reached the Amazon Bestseller list in the Renaissance category (Top 20, USA and UK) and the Sculpture category (Top 5, USA and UK). It is the edition people are reading.
What readers say
Readers consistently say the same thing: this is the first translation that feels like a real person talking. Not a historical document. Not an academic text. A man, telling his story, in language that moves.
Why this translation
Most available editions of Cellini were translated in the Victorian era. They are correct. They are also flat. Cellini was not flat. He was the loudest, most vivid person in any room he entered, and his autobiography reads that way — when translated honestly.
This edition keeps his voice raw. His boasts land. His rages land. His tenderness about his work lands. He sounds like himself.
About the autobiography
Cellini dictated this book in his late fifties, while working. It covers forty years of his life: his training in Florence, his years in Rome serving Pope Clement VII, his time in France at the court of Francis I, his imprisonment and escape from the Castel Sant'Angelo, and his return to Florence to complete the Perseus for Cosimo I de' Medici.
It is the most personal account we have of what it was like to make things in Renaissance Italy. It is also one of the most entertaining books ever written about anything.
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