Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/56

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Both the artist and the bravo were characteristic and typical products of the Italian Renaissance. The genius of the race expressed itself at that epoch even more saliently in the fine arts than in scholarship or literature. At the same time the conditions of society during what I have elsewhere called "the Age of the Despots" favoured the growth of lawless adventurers, who made a practice of violence and lived by murder. Now these two prominent types of the nation and the period were never more singularly combined than in Cellini. He might stand as a full-blown specimen of either. Sensitive, impulsive, rash of speech, hasty in action, with the artist's susceptibility and the bravo's heat of blood, he injured no one more than himself by his eccentricities of temper. Over and over again did he ruin excellent prospects by some piece of madcap folly. Yet there is no trace in any of his writings that he ever laid his misadventures to the proper cause. He consistently poses as an injured man, whom malevolent scoundrels and malignant stars conspired to persecute. Nor does he do this with any bad faith. His belief in himself remained as firm as adamant, and he candidly conceived that he was under the special providence of a merciful and loving God, who appreciated his high and virtuous qualities. On one occasion, after a more than customary outbreak of violent speech, the Lucchese ambassador remarked to his patron, Cosimo de' Medici, "That Benvenuto of yours is a terrible man!" "Yes,"