The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Oct 27, 2024 10:27 PM

Author:Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who at different times experienced both papal persecution and imprisonment, and the adulation of the royal court. Inn-keepers and prostitutes, kings and cardinals, artists and soldiers rub shoulders in the pages of his notorious autobiography: a vivid portrait of the manners and morals of both the rulers of the day and of their subjects. Written with supreme powers of invective and an irrepressible sense of humour, this is an unrivalled glimpse into the palaces and prisons of the Italy of Michelangelo and the Medici.

Reviews

'A worthy conclusion to their investigations into secret societies ancient and modern'

—— Sunday Times

'Meticulously researched and annotated and well worth reading'

—— Oxford Times

An entertaining read

—— Literary Review

Vastly entertaining... Reading Cities is like wandering with an erudite companion through a great city in which the past rubs shoulders with the present and surprises lurk around every corner

—— Time

A superb historical account of the places in which most of either live or will live

—— Conde Nast Traveller

Extraordinary, intensely passionate and quite beautiful

—— The Manchester Evening News

A bustling, revealing and downright moving portrayal of thwarted genius

—— Attitude

Neil McKenna's book is the most important one to have been written about Wilde for many years

—— Irish Independent

McKenna’s book offers an entertaining and fascinating (sometimes jaw-dropping) insight into Victorian homosexual practices. He is outstanding

—— The Observer

A sensational new biography

—— Bent Magazine

A brilliant reconstruction of Oscar Wilde's dynamic sex life, brilliantly written and meticulously researched

—— Bent Magazine

Where this biography really excels is in recreating the fevered atmosphere of the late Victorian homosexual underground

—— Mail on Sunday

A fully convincing biography of this most intensely symbolic of Victorian lives

—— Gay Times

McKenna makes many interesting connections between Wilde’s life and his literary works

—— Mail on Sunday

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