Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/92

Rh the full character of the epoch so authentically stamped. That is because this is no work of art or of reflection, but the plain utterance of a man who lived the whole life of his age, who felt its thirst for glory, who shared its adoration of the beautiful, who blent its paganism and its superstitions, who represented its two main aspects of exquisite sensibility to form and almost brutal ruffianism. We must not expect from Cellini the finest, highest, purest accents of the Renaissance. He does not, as an artist, transport us into the heavens of Michel Angelo and Tintoretto. He has nothing of Ariosto's golden melody or Tasso's romantic love-chant. He cannot wield Aretino's lash or Machiavelli's scalpel of analysis. But his Memoirs enable us to comprehend how those rarer produces of the Italian genius at a certain point of evolution were related to the common stuff of human nature in the race at large. For students of that age he is at once more and less than his illustrious contemporaries; less, inasmuch as he distinguished himself by no stupendous intellectual qualities; more, inasmuch as he occupied a larger sphere than each of them singly. He touched the life of that epoch at more points than any person who has left a record of his doings. He was the first goldsmith of his time, an adequate sculptor, a restless traveller, an indefatigable workman, a Bohemian of the purest water, a turbulent bravo, a courtier and companion of princes; finally, a Florentine who used his native idiom with incomparable vivacity of style. These qualities combined in a single personality, strongly marked by specific characteristics, yet