Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/43

Rh pages. The way in which the artist and the lady met, the tone she used toward him, and her exit from the room in which he stayed on to finish the drawing he was making from a figure in the famous ceiling decoration—all this is sketched with the animation of life itself; and Benvenuto's succeeding labours over the jewel, and his rivalry with Lucagnolo, are handled with the same power. Very little space is given to the subject, but we are made, within that little space, to live a part of Cellini's life. Glance, too, at the note, less than a page long, in which he tells of going to see Michael Angelo in Rome, and suggesting that the great man return to Florence and the service of Duke Cosimo. Little is said. Michael Angelo looks his interlocutor hard in the face and briefly answers him with a question, smiling sarcastically the while. Cellini is pressing, whereupon Michael Angelo creates a diversion by turning to his simple-minded servant. The visitor gives up his mission in despair, but he laughs as, without saying farewell, he goes from the house. It is odd, but somehow this casual fragment, which tells practically nothing, yet tells everything. The leonine head of Michael Angelo turns toward us in the dusk of the studio, and we see that sarcastic smile.

This, then, is the supreme merit of the Autobiography—that it has the dramatic reality for which we look, as a rule, only to the creative artists in literature. As for the stuff of the narrative, Cellini may have been born too late to witness the richest