The Bright Cell
He's a sculptor/And he's got a permanent case/Of "Ask too many questions and my harquebus will answer"
Creatures, Dunstan Thompson has this fascinating little poem where he imagines what it would be like to be the model for a great sculptor. To have your physical beauty seen by someone whose art makes your body seem like the form of a soul greater than the soul you know you possess—how would it change you?
Then, with his purple chiton on,
He had to bear the sight of one
Who seemed himself, yet nobler, shown
In marble as he might have been
Had he but always chosen well.
I just finished re-reading Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography so I can tell you that this sculptural confrontation with one’s conscience may afflict the models, but the sculptor can escape with ego ridiculously intact. Cellini is a blast, I’m so glad I don’t know him—constantly in conflict, violent and self-impressed, a supreme bullshit artist as well as the other kind. There are sad and ugly moments, basically involving women. But, if you can accept that as the price of the ticket, there’s also this:
# I was busy making a cool setting for a unicorn horn I got from the Pope when I took a break to learn necromancy. We ended up conjuring a bunch of demons and it got pretty intense, but they were all scared off by my friend’s farts.
# The Pope threw me in prison (not for murder this time iirc) and my jailer was a kindhearted man who went mad and believed he was a bat. This wasn’t so bad—last year he thought he was a jar.
# They tried to poison me with diamonds.
The Autobiography can get repetitive, and I wish I understood the processes of bronze-casting he describes, since the moments when I can almost picture it give the narrative a weight it might otherwise lack: the pleasure of watching someone exercise his vocation. I also liked this as yet another reminder of the urban gangland quality of Renaissance Italy. Cellini gets indignant about how most of his killings were accidents or self-defense, but even beyond the “most,” let me say that there are certain kinds of accidents that happen to you more if you carry a gun and a knife everywhere you go and like yelling at people. Part of why Baz Luhrmann’s R + J worked for me is that the feuds and hair-trigger tragedies of (one Englishman’s portrayal of) Renaissance Italy are already so contemporary.
His stint in papal prison closes Book I, and it’s probably the high point of the (unfinished) work overall. Martha Grace Duncan wrote a book, explicitly Freudian in ways that make it a bit sillier than it needs to be, called Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Meanings: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment, in which she argues that one of the themes or tropes of prison writing is a longing for the prison. The prison is a place where a shoddy old self is forcibly stripped away, where old fake comforts fail and so some kind of real solace can be discovered. This is what happens to Cellini. The prison sections are full of visions and prayers. He is grateful for his prison, and he writes a poem there, “in praise of the said prison.” It changed him, he says:
Now I’m become fine gold,
Such gold as none flings lightly to the wind,
Fit for the best work eyes shall e’er behold.
You sometimes hear these moral and spiritual conversions cited as reasons to lock people up. The thing is, they happen regardless of the prisoner’s guilt or innocence; regardless of whether we would consider the thing he’s locked up for to be “a crime”; regardless of, and sometimes explicitly because of the absence of, the prison’s respect for human dignity. Cellini’s prison is cruel, they starve people to death in the dark there. He proclaims his innocence. He notes, in that very same poem, that somehow he doesn’t see the men who really deserve punishment in the prison—oppressors of the poor, for example. “Those who best deserved it least I spied.”
Well, and then he gets out, and for a while he has a halo. I mean this literally. He has a visible halo around his physical personal head. You uhhhh may not have seen it, dear reader, because it is most clearly visible in France; here in Italy it’s too misty. Okay then!
He absolutely goes back to yelling and beating and (I’m being anachronistic but, you know, so is Judgment Day) raping people. If anything, in Book II the main lasting change in his character is that he seems even more convinced of his personal righteousness.
I read this book, which I am recommending to you all, under this glorious pulp cover and in the Symonds translation, which is sort of charmingly fusty. (And includes several places where Symonds has Cellini say, like, “…which is an expression I need hardly translate,” but then drops a footnote with the Italian, which is just soddomia. I am not sure which English-speaking reader’s virtue is being protected here!) Cellini himself lays this rueful wisdom on us, and it can stand as my last word, too:
“It is very true that one says to oneself: ‘You will have had a lesson for next time.’ But that is not the case; for fortune always comes upon us in new ways, quite unforeseen by our imagination.”
Links Losers Like
Alex Cox, director of Repo Man and Walker (links go to my reviews), is running a Kickstarter to make a Western-style film of Gogol’s Dead Souls. I feel extremely confident that some of you people want to help him.
Cellini’s Perseus holding the head of Medea—he tells you how he made this thing and it is a very cool description—photographed by Marie-Lan Nguyen, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.