DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.32873#0044
XXX11
INTRODUCTION
with much acumen to demolish the evidence upon which
a very large proportion of the goldsmiths' work of the
sixteenth century preserved in various collections all
over the world has been so recklessly attributed to this
famous craftsman.
Although Mr. Roscoe (quoting Signor Giuseppe
Molini—upon whose then recently published edition of
the he professes to have made his latest revision)
describes with some particularity the condition of the
MS. of and alludes to its re-discovery
by Signor Poirot he gives no account of its history
between the time—somewhere in the seventeenth cen-
tury—when it was in the hands of the Cavalcanti family,
and its reappearance in the book-shop of Cecchino del
Seminario at the beginning of the nineteenth.
The details of this omission may, however, be brieHy
summed up as follows: The MS., begun in 1558, and
written partly in Cellini's own hand, and partly in that
of his youthful amanuensis, the son of Michele di Goro
Vestris, was submitted in the following year to the
historian Benedetto Varchi, one of the author's most
intimate friends, for purposes of revision and advice.
That able critic very quickly appreciated the fact that
the force and brilliance of the work itself far out-weighed
all questions of style or grammar, and that to attempt
to correct it, or to set it in anything like conventional form
would not only be a superhuman task in itself, but would
remove from the original its most salient and delightful
characteristics. Varchi therefore returned the
to Cellini with merely a few marginal notes of
comparatively minor importance. The writer then added
further memoirs up to 1562, when—almost in the middle
INTRODUCTION
with much acumen to demolish the evidence upon which
a very large proportion of the goldsmiths' work of the
sixteenth century preserved in various collections all
over the world has been so recklessly attributed to this
famous craftsman.
Although Mr. Roscoe (quoting Signor Giuseppe
Molini—upon whose then recently published edition of
the he professes to have made his latest revision)
describes with some particularity the condition of the
MS. of and alludes to its re-discovery
by Signor Poirot he gives no account of its history
between the time—somewhere in the seventeenth cen-
tury—when it was in the hands of the Cavalcanti family,
and its reappearance in the book-shop of Cecchino del
Seminario at the beginning of the nineteenth.
The details of this omission may, however, be brieHy
summed up as follows: The MS., begun in 1558, and
written partly in Cellini's own hand, and partly in that
of his youthful amanuensis, the son of Michele di Goro
Vestris, was submitted in the following year to the
historian Benedetto Varchi, one of the author's most
intimate friends, for purposes of revision and advice.
That able critic very quickly appreciated the fact that
the force and brilliance of the work itself far out-weighed
all questions of style or grammar, and that to attempt
to correct it, or to set it in anything like conventional form
would not only be a superhuman task in itself, but would
remove from the original its most salient and delightful
characteristics. Varchi therefore returned the
to Cellini with merely a few marginal notes of
comparatively minor importance. The writer then added
further memoirs up to 1562, when—almost in the middle