Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/90

Rh which must be lightly touched on. Not even a professed apologist can deny that he was reckless in the indulgence of his sensual appetites. We have no evidence that he ever felt the gentler emotions of love for a woman. Perhaps his passion for Angelica comes nearest to a tender or romantic sentiment; but the grotesque ending of that adventure deprives it of all dignity. On the other hand, women of loose life play a large part in his Memoirs; and it is clear that he changed mistresses with indiscriminate facility. There is, moreover, reason to believe that he was not free from the darker lusts which deformed Florentine society in that epoch. The loves to which he yielded were animal, licentious, almost brutal; determined to some extent by an artist's feeling for beauty, but controlled by no moral sense and elevated by no spiritual enthusiasm.

Passing now from the man to the writer and the artist, we have first to regard Cellini as the composer of one of the world's three or four best autobiographies, and next as the most eminent exponent of the later Italian Renaissance in craftsmanship of several kinds.

It would be superfluous to quote authorities upon the high esteem in which the Memoirs are held, both for their style and matter, by Italians. Baretti's