Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 2.djvu/448

Rh petitions to the Medicean princes and to the Soprasindachi of Florence, and a few official documents which mention him.

Some important incidents of his life at Florence before the year 1562, omitted for unknown reasons in his autobiography, have also to be recorded. We find that at the close of 1554 he was admitted to the Florentine nobility. In the year 1556 he was twice imprisoned; on what charges cannot be precisely ascertained, though passages in his poems and petitions make it probable that on one at least of these occasions, he was accused of criminal immorality. On the 2nd of June 1558 he took the first tonsure, without however engaging himself irrevocably to the ecclesiastical state. From those preliminary vows he was released in 1560, and about four years later he married a woman who is named Piera di Salvadore Parigi in one of his Ricordi. She is supposed to have been the same who behaved so genially at the time when the Perseus was being cast, and who nursed him through the illness following his visit to Sbietta in 1559. This identification is, however, to say the least, very dubious. The genealogical table printed at the close of these notes will inform the reader concerning the births and deaths of Cellini's children.

During the year 1559 an act of open-handed charity involved Cellini in a series of troublesome entanglements, which deserve to be briefly narrated. A certain woman called Dorotea, the wife of Domenico Parigi, surnamed Sputasenni, had long served him for a model. Her husband was a worthless fellow, who, being imprisoned in the Stinche for some quarrel, left his family in extreme indigence. Cellini received Dorotea and her son Antonio