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Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book X52 and Cellini’s own Vita are the two key literary sources for this chapter.53 We know from this autobiographical Vita that Cellini began his memoirs after he was charged with sodomy in 1557, when sentenced to four years’

52 This chapter uses excerpts from the Loeb translated version of Ovid’s epic poem to support its central

argumentations.

53 Cellini’s autobiographical Vita, which is widely thought to have been intended both as an apologia aimed at

winning back the trust of the court in order to gain further commissions from the Medici, and as a document of his accomplishments. The Vita manuscript, which was dictated in 1562 to an assistant while Cellini sculpted, was not published at the time because of strained relations with Cosimo I. Cellini appears to have added sections to it around 1566–7. Contemporaries such as Giorgio Vasari knew of its existence but only a small élite,

including Benedetto Varchi, had the privilege of reading it. Later the manuscript was printed in Italian in 1728 after it was believed lost, and formed the basis of Francesco Tassi's fundamental edition, Florence, 1829. Translations followed in English in 1771, German in 1796 and French in 1822. The version used in this thesis is the second edition of the 1956 translation by J. Addington-Symonds, London, 1995, which includes introduction and notes by Pope-Hennessy. In addition to the Vita, Cellini left a number of other writings on art, as well as letters and 142 poems of mediocre quality, some on sexual themes between males. These are published in the collected edition of Cellini's literary works by Maier, 1968, and Ferrero, 1971. Wherever it has been possible to test the events related in the Vita against other sources, Cellini's account has been verified.

imprisonment and under house arrest, and it ends abruptly around the year 1563 when he was approximately 63 years old. Written in an energetic, direct, and colourful style, Cellini’s Vita gives a detailed account of his extraordinary career and tumultuous life, as well as his loves, hatreds, passions, and delights. Sometimes selective and tendentious in its reconstruction of events, the Vita nevertheless is considered a largely truthful document. The information disclosed in the Vita will be discussed more fully in order to construct a more expanded account of Cellini’s character as this chapter develops.

Other textual evidence of the ways in which pederasty pervaded sexual and social relations between men in classical antiquity can also be found in several classical texts, including Plato who states in his Republic:

It does not become a lover to forget that all

adolescents in some sort sting and stir the amorous lover of youth and appear to him deserving of his attention and desirable…but the euphemistic

invention of some lover who can feel no distaste for sallowness when it accompanies the blooming time of youth? And, in short, there is no pretext you do not allege and there is nothing you shrink from saying to justify you in not rejecting any who are in the bloom of their prime.54

In Plato’s Symposium love for a young man was idealised as ‘heavenly love’ having special qualities that set it apart from the ‘common’ love of women.55 Yet, Foucault states classical antiquity was: ‘unable to be either tolerant or intolerant towards homosexuality for the good reason that they had no idea what homosexuality was. They did not classify sexual conduct according to sex, but according to social class and the categories of activity and passivity’.56 As perspicacious readings of ancient Greek and

54 E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Princeton, 1961, p. 474. 55 Plato’s Symposium, quoted in Hamilton and Cairns, 1961, p. 82.

Roman sources reveal, the erastes - eromenos relationship was based upon dyadic mentorship fundamental to that culture’s social and educational system.57 This model

with its own complex socio-sexual etiquette was an important social institution among the upper classes of antiquity. Just as Apollo was the eternal erastes, as Bernard Sergent notes: ‘Loved by a man and three gods, Hyacinthus was the paradigm for the erōmenoi

of the human generations to come …the death of the hero, far from being the end of life, is a transition, a passage, from the beardless, adolescent erōmenos to that of bearded and

therefore, implicitly, erastēs’. 58

Most other scholarship on the matter of Cellini’s oeuvre has been concerned primarily with the artist’s versatility and virtuosity. Perhaps because this work was Cellini’s first foray into marble carving, past scholarship has largely dismissed the importance of Apollo and Hyacinth in general and reference to its erotic aspects is exceedingly timid. James Saslow does refer briefly to Apollo and Hyacinth in

Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society but reads it as ‘not

overtly sexual’, and considers the lovers’ relationship in terms of how ‘the standing male nude Apollo plays with the kneeling boy’s hair’.59 The standard monograph of Cellini remains that by John Pope-Hennessy which integrates a discussion of a variety of textual sources with the artist’s surviving works.60 Pope-Hennessy’s approach to

Apollo and Hyacinth has much to commend it since he provides a full description of the

work together with an informative account of Cellini’s tumultuous life. Absent from this otherwise comprehensive study, however, is any discussion of the homoerotic allure of both the sculpture and the Ovidian source of its subject.

57 J. Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, London, 2007. 58 Sergent, 1987, pp. 85-8. 59 Saslow, 1986, p. 152.