Who Cellini inspired:
From Dalí to Rolex
Cellini died in 1571. His autobiography was published in 1728, more than a century and a half after his death. Since then it has never been out of print. The list of people it has reached, and the ways it has reached them, is unlike any other autobiography in existence.
Salvador Dalí
Dalí kept a copy of Cellini's autobiography in his studio and called it the greatest autobiography ever written. The combination of technical obsession, flamboyant self-regard, and genuine genius clearly spoke to him. Dalí made no secret of his admiration.
Alexandre Dumas
Dumas drew directly from Cellini's life for his fiction. The escapes, the audacity, the man who can talk himself out of anything and fight his way through the rest — those are Cellini's qualities, and Dumas knew it. He adapted Cellini's story for the stage as well as taking from it for his novels.
Mark Twain
Twain translated Cellini's autobiography into English himself, though his translation was never published in his lifetime. His admiration went further: in Huckleberry Finn (1884), Tom Sawyer cites Cellini's autobiography as an authority on how to behave during an escape. Twain put his own favourite book inside his most famous one.
Rolex
Rolex named their luxury watch collection the Cellini line, after Benvenuto Cellini. The connection is exact: a craftsman obsessed with perfection, working in precious metals, making objects intended to last centuries. Rolex saw Cellini as the lineage their watches belonged to.
Hector Berlioz
The French composer Berlioz wrote an entire opera about Cellini, premiered at the Paris Opera in 1838. The opera centres on the casting of the Perseus — the great dramatic scene from the autobiography. Berlioz was drawn to Cellini's combination of artistic passion and chaotic life. The opera is still performed today.
Goethe
Goethe translated Cellini's autobiography into German in 1796 and wrote extensively about it. He called Cellini "a person of great intelligence, talent, and character." For Goethe, Cellini represented a type of creative freedom that the modern world was losing. He wanted German readers to have access to it.
What they all found
Everyone who has been moved by Cellini's autobiography has found the same thing: a man who was completely himself, without apology, from the first page to the last. He was not trying to present a version of himself. He was simply recording what happened, as he experienced it, with all his faults and all his greatness included.
That is what makes it last. Not the Renaissance setting. Not the art history. Just a person, speaking directly, five centuries later still completely alive on the page.
Read it yourself →