Life of Benvenuto Cellini

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Goethe

Life of Benvenuto Cellini is Goethe's translation of the autobiography of the Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini . In addition to the copy of the original, which had been published by the Florentine Antonio Cocchi in 1728, Goethe had access to the translation into English by Thomas Nugent (London 1771). Goethe's version appeared in print in 1803. Its edition is a very free, inaccurate translation with omissions. The emphasis with him is on the literary interest in the figure of the author.

records

In 1557 the 57-year-old Florentine goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini began to write down his memoirs. Cellini worked on this autobiography for several years. The last records are from November 1566.

Writing intent

While Benvenuto spreads many beautiful stories before us, but actually, he writes about from his talking art . He had to go through many things during his arduous life , for example how a pestilential disease raged in Rome in 1523 . Encounters with strange contemporaries dominate everywhere in the book - not only with the divine Michelangelo Buonarroti in Florence, the wondrous Titian and the master Jakob del Sansovino in Venice - but also with people who hardly anyone knows today. For example, Benvenuto mentions his acquaintance with Ludwig Pulci, son of the Pulci whose head was cut off because he did not abstain from his own daughter . Impure love is therefore not kept secret.

resume

Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto says He is welcome! Cellini, the skilled dialogue partner, plays with the meaning of his first name. When the Duke once said you are unwelcome (Malvenuto)! "Greet", replies Benvenuto quick-witted: Sir, that's not my name, because my name is Benvenuto .

Cellini, descended from Florentine citizens, grew up sheltered in his hometown. Finally he can break away from his worried father and goes to Rome via Siena and Bologna . Later he travels back to Florence, visits Venice, Ferrara and again and again his birthplace Florence. The subsequent stay in France led him to the court of King Francis I in Fontainebleau . He commutes between Italy and Paris . On one of his many trips Benvenuto comes near Lyon in a hail the size of hailstones as big lemons . There are injured people and animals.

Cellini can usually bask in the favor of the ruler for whom he is currently working. Benvenuto says of himself: I am a poor goldsmith, I serve everyone who pays me .

Benvenuto tackles different things in life just right. So he evades (~ anno 1527) before the plague, of which his father dies in Florence, to Mantua in time. And he's lucky several times. So he survives a large eye malaise and an illness in which his body is covered with red blisters the size of pennies . Nothing is spared him. During an illness he vomits a hairy worm once, probably a quarter long . In 1545 he suffered a little from kidney disease . When he was working on his Perseus , a splinter of the finest steel jumped into his right eye . The surgeon drips pigeon blood on the eye and the splinter comes out .

Benvenuto went to prison for the first time when he was 37 years old. One of his journeymen had slandered him. It had been said that Benvenuto should own jewels that actually belonged to the Church .

character

Cellini remembers his father with the love of his son. Benvenuto should be a great musician . The father made the son play the flute regularly for years. To the delight of Pope Clemens VII, the boy even blows the practiced motets at dinner and, at the age of 15, tries his own way against his father's will: Benvenuto wants to become a goldsmith . Cellini solves problems independently from a young age; if need be, by force of arms. Cellini not only works as a goldsmith and sculptor for his respective ruler. He also works as a draftsman and miniature painter. Even as a young man in Rome he practiced for the Pope as a fortress builder and then later put his practical knowledge in this sector at the service of his hometown when the Duke started war with Siena. Cellini doesn't mince his words when one of his clients - be it the Pope, the French king or an Italian duke - causes difficulties.

Cellini describes himself as a good guy, who, by nature inclined to melancholy , can sometimes be a little irascible - irritated by a nasty opponent - but otherwise appears to be very vigorous, extremely artful and mostly successful in his professions. He always turns out to be the better goldsmith or sculptor compared to the almost always jealous, vicious competition. Today we would say - a successful entrepreneur presents himself in these memories. Cellini's most prominent character trait, in addition to his unsurpassable vitality and tackling manner, is his disrespect. This is expressed continuously over the very extensive text in the not very delicate feeling description of rulers and countless contemporaries.

disrespect
  • towards rulers and officials
    • Risen in favor of Pope Clement VII, Benvenuto received orders. Unfortunately, happiness does not last. After the Pope left, Cardinal Salviati , legate of Rome, treated him badly. According to Benvenuto, the cardinal looks more like a donkey than a person . When the Pope returns, he rules Benvenuto with wild words , cannot moderate himself, but continues to speak with greater anger . Benvenuto sees that the Pope has become such a bad beast . When his enemies slander Benvenuto, the Pope breaks out in a bestial rage .
    • Benvenuto describes one of the French judges as a fat coward .
  • compared to ancestors and contemporaries
    • Benvenuto's strength was not modesty. In 1545, when he wanted a certain commission, he said to the Duke of Florence : In the square are the works of the great Donatello and the astonishing Michelagnolo , both of whom have been the greatest men of the ancients up to now ... and I trust me to do the work three times better .
    • The English scold Benvenuto as devil ; the French beasts .
    • He contemptuously describes a cashier of the Duke's steward as a little man with spider manners and a mosquito voice, active like a snail .
    • Benvenuto also has to argue with the Duke's steward. When he ran out of arguments, he held up the ancestors of the duke's official: your kind are schoolmasters who teach children to read . The steward is verbally not up to Benvenuto: So the beast remained astonished and earth-colored .
    • One of his enemies at the court of Florence speaks in an ugly voice that sounds through his ass nose .

Directly related to Cellini's disrespect is his dispute.

Disputability

The sword and dagger sit loosely at Benvenuto. He even buys a skewer in Ferrara and in later years he also equips his employees with skewers - just in case.

  • When the College of Eighth - a Florentine court - does not resolve a dispute to his satisfaction, he angrily jumps out of the palace (court), runs into his workshop, grabs a dagger , runs into his opponent's house, finds him eating and pokes but the dagger to his breast .
  • In France, too, Benvenuto cannot cope with the courts there. Against Norman lawyers' tricks , he takes refuge in a large dagger . In doing so he gives the wrongdoer so many stitches on the arms and thighs that he deprives him of the use of both legs .
  • In 1527, on the side of the Pope, Benvenuto kills Duke Karl von Bourbon with a hook box from the wall of the Castel Sant'Angelo and proves himself to be a daring bombardier. The Pope forgives Benvenuto for all murders on the spot . He did it in the service of the Apostolic Church .
  • Benvenuto's surroundings are teeming with enemies. The goldsmith Pompeo of Milan , the Pope's favorite, appears . Pompeo brings his slander against Benvenuto to the Pope so effectively that the latter takes the coin away from Benvenuto - a serious economic blow. Pompeo will not give up. He orders some Neapolitan soldiers to pursue Benvenuto . When the persecuted has a lot of trouble defending his poor life , he turns the tables. When Benvenuto meets Pompeo on the street, he grabs a small, pointed dagger and stabs him two times under the ear. Pompeo dies on the street. Benvenuto flees. The Milanese are demanding punishment from the Pope Benvenutos. Benvenuto is lucky. As the successor to the late Clement VII, Cardinal Farnese reigned as Pope Paul III. started. The new Pope gives the coveted goldsmith a charter .
  • Two deceivers Benvenuto decides to murder both of them on the spot , but gives mercy to "justice".
sense of family

Benvenuto is an obedient son to his father. When his brother struggles in an alley in Florence, Benvenuto hurries up and gets involved. Nevertheless - Benvenuto only occasionally shows a strong sense of family.

  • Benvenuto appears quite boyish towards women. Although he loves his Angelika, he looks for and finds the temporarily lost girl in Naples, but when she and her mom set conditions, he immediately gives her the pass with a laugh.
  • Benvenuto is not squeamish about his opponent. With Benvenuto's sword tip by his throat, the villain is forced to marry a girl on the spot as a punishment.
  • In 1543 Benvenuto took a virgin about fifteen years old as a model for his nymph Fontainebleau . Benvenuto makes the adolescent a child and pays the young mother a dowry. Then he leaves her and his only son.
Benvenuto Cellini: Perseus with the head of Medusa
  • After 1545 the wife of one of Benvenuto's journeymen looked after the son in nearby Fiesole . When the unhappy Perseus did not want to go on, the desperate artist rides from Florence to Fiesole, gives his godfather a hundred scudi , finds the child doing well and , in his annoyance, kisses it . Shortly afterwards, the wife of Benvenuto's only son accidentally suffocates .
  • The brother-in-law died in 1545, leaving Benvenuto with the younger sister with six daughters, big and small . This is his first need in Florence .

In addition to the more negative characteristics mentioned above, we naturally encounter an outstanding man with a positive personality in Cellini.

Craftsmanship
  • The Florentine guild of goldsmiths declares the 18-year-old to be the most skilful fellow .
  • The Duke doubts: “Benvenuto! the figure [Perseus] cannot be made from ore; because art doesn't allow it. ” Benvenuto is very annoyed by these words .
Entrepreneurial energy
  • Benvenuto opened a beautiful workshop in Rome in 1529 and kept five skilled journeymen .
  • Wants to start in his hometown as Benvenuto 1545, to imaginary Perseus to begin in large as well as the medusa from Geripp on , he says the Duke , that he would have a house needed where enough space was to his set up furnaces and works of earth and ore to make, in which also separate rooms were to work in gold and silver .
  • Benvenuto tries to overcome initial hurdles in the creation of new jobs in his own way: among all these difficulties I had designed the location of the workshop, cut down vines and trees, in my usual lively manner, and a little angry .
  • Benvenuto is a workhorse: so I went home, worked day and night, and didn't let myself be seen in the palace .

Goethe's appendix
X. Fleeting description of Florentine conditions
XII. Cellini's description
XIII. Last years of life
XIV. Works left behind
XV. Left behind writings

Quote

“Then I made the statues [of Perseus] from clay and burned them, alone with a few boys, among whom was one of great beauty, the son of a prostitute called Gambetta. I used this boy as a model because we cannot find any other books to learn about art than nature. "

art

  • Goldsmith work
    • Vienna : Salt barrel for Franz I from 1543 (stolen in 2003, rediscovered in 2006)
  • marble
  • bronze
  • Busts
    • Florence : Cosimo I.
    • Bindo Altoviti (1551)
  • Medals and Coins
    • From Cellini's production, a number of coins and medals have been preserved for the Medici family and for Pope Clement VII.

Goethe writes

“Since I have been so much wary of nothing in my life as empty words, and a phrase in which nothing was thought or felt seemed unbearable to others, impossible to me, I suffered when translating Cellini , including a direct view demanded, real pain. I sincerely regretted that I had not made better use of my first trip through, my second stay in Florence, that I had not got a more vivid look at the art of recent times. "

- Goethe in the diaries and annual journals in 1803

“On this occasion I came across Cellini's life inscription, it seems to me impossible to make an extract from it, because what is human life in the extract? all pragmatic biographical characteristics must hide away from the naive detail of an important life. I now want to try a translation, but it is more difficult than you think. "

- Goethe's letter to Johann Heinrich Meyer dated February 8, 1796

“It works with the translation of a book, as you say about copying a painting, you get to know both even more through the reproduction. Cellini , with his art and his way of life, is an excellent point of view for us, from which one can see forwards and backwards with a view to new art. "

- Goethe's letter to Johann Heinrich Meyer dated March 3, 1796

Origin and reception

Hans-Georg Dewitz and Wolfgang Proß have documented the period 1795–1844 in their commentary under the heading "Documents on Creation and Reception":

  • 1795: Goethe asks Voigt and Lichtenberg for Italian sources.
  • 1796: Schiller shows interest in a Cellini translation for publication in the " Horen ". Goethe involved his Kunschtmeyer in various research on site (Florence). Humboldt praises Schiller for one of the first Cellini publications in the "Horen". Lichtenberg and Körner encourage Goethe to continue working.
  • 1798: Goethe writes to Knebel that he now wants to translate and comment on the entire Cellini.
  • 1802: Schiller lets Cotta know Goethe's intention to publish. Caroline von Humboldt works with Goethe from Florence, while Wilhelm von Humboldt forwards the wife's letters to Goethe. Goethe sends Cotta the publication manuscripts “little by little”.
  • 1803: Correspondence between Cotta and Goethe because of printing errors. Ludwig Ferdinand Huber's review appears in the " Freimüthigen " in Berlin. Huber speaks of being a stopgap in the "Horen", but emphasizes "Göthe's" muse. Solger praises both the translator's work and the title character's “pride and ferocity”.
  • 1804: Fernow thinks that Goethe made Cellini's artless, coarse, but also graceful, graceful writing something like a work of art. An anonymous shows himself satisfied in the “ Göttingische learned advertisements ”. He also expects nothing more from Goethe than a work, "faithful, and entirely in the spirit of the original" Siegfried Schmid rises in the Dresden "Archive for Artists and Art Lovers" to the prognosis that future transmissions of the original - also in other languages ​​- could Goethe not reach.
  • 1812: Johannes Veit is inspired to take walks through Rome by reading.
  • 1825: Goethe zu Eckermann on January 18th, reviling the lack of color in the writing of his contemporaries: Cellini did not write so weakly.
  • 1827: Goethe's statement to Friedrich von Müller - concerning Cellini - suggests that Goethe, as a translator, did not struggle with the respective foreign language, but rather translated.
  • 1829: In the “ Italian Journey ”, Goethe names Cellini a child of the world. Francesco Tassi mentions the work of "Giovanni Wolfgang de Goehte" in a foreword to an Italian edition.
  • 1831: On his last birthday, Goethe was given a seal from England which, as he told Zelter , somehow reminded him of Cellini.
  • 1844: Hebbel reads in his Goethe and is pleased about the freshness of Cellini's text passages that have been preserved in the transmission.

Recent comments

  • 1903: Karl Vossler publishes Goethe's translation. The Romanist criticizes the translator's “poor knowledge of the Italian language”, but attests to his confident handling of foreign matter: “Cellini, seen through the prism of Goethe's art form, is a unique spectacle.” A long, meaningful quote on “Cellini's negligence “And Goethe's, which Vossler encountered in Herman Grimm , can be found in Dewitz and Proß.
  • The translation of the biography was intended to be less of an art-historical contribution than a picture of Cellini's life in his time.
  • Before Jacob Burckhardt and even beyond this, Goethe's translation sketches a picture of that Italy in which artist and work of art still appeared as a continuum.
  • Dewitz and Proß bring two text samples of recent transmissions that have to be measured against Goethe:
    • Heinrich Conrad , Munich 1908 (new 1994 Frankfurt am Main)
    • Alfred Semerau, Berlin 1925.
  • Marianne Bockelkamp did her doctorate in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1960 on “Goethe's Cellini Translation”.
  • An abundance of - mostly in Italian - literature references on the subject of Cellini (i.e. not only on Goethe's translation) can be found in Dewitz and Proß.

literature

source
  • Siegfried Seidel (Hrsg.): Goethe - Berlin Edition, Volume 21. Art theoretical writings and translations. I translations . Pp. 5-564. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin 1977.
Other issues
  • Hans-Georg Dewitz, Wolfgang Proß (Ed.): Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Life of Benvenuto Cellini. Translations I. In: Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Complete Works. Letters, diaries and conversations. Forty volumes. I. Department: Vol. 11 (Library of German Classics 150) . Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-618-60310-X , p. 9-526 (text), 821-1178 (commentary) .
Cellini's original
  • Vita di Benvenuto Cellini orefice e scultore Fiorentino da lui medesimo scritta ... P. Martello Colonia 1728 (The first print was not published by P. Martello in Cologne, but by Antonio Cocchi in Naples).
Goethe's translation
  • Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, written by himself. Translated and edited with an appendix by Goethe. JG Cottasche Buchhandlung Tübingen 1803.
Secondary literature

Web links

Captions in Italian:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Source pp. 509-521
  2. ↑ Source pp. 523-529
  3. ↑ Source pp. 529-531
  4. ↑ Source pp. 531-535
  5. ↑ Source pp. 536-539
  6. ↑ Source p. 388
  7. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, pp. 896-947
  8. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, pp. 896-897
  9. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, pp. 897, 899, 902, 906
  10. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 915 above
  11. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 915 below, 918, 919
  12. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 915 below, 922, 923, 925
  13. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 927 middle
  14. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 932
  15. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 937 middle
  16. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 940 middle
  17. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 944 above
  18. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 944 below
  19. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 945 above
  20. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 945 middle
  21. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 946 middle
  22. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 946 below
  23. ^ Vossler, quoted in Dewitz and Proß, p. 847, 10th Zvu
  24. ^ Vossler, quoted in Dewitz and Proß, p. 850, 21. Zvo
  25. ^ Vossler quotes Herman Grimm, reproduced in Dewitz and Proß, p. 849, 8. Zvo
  26. ↑ Wilpert p. 173, 20th Zvu
  27. ↑ Boyle p. 436, 4. Zvo
  28. ^ Conrad's transmission, quoted in Dewitz and Proß, pp. 860–868
  29. ↑ Semerau's transmission, quoted in Dewitz and Proß, pp. 851–859
  30. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, p. 1503, 2nd entry vu
  31. ↑ Dewitz and Proß, pp. 1497–1507