The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini dictated his life story to a boy while he went on working, and the result reads less like a memoir than like a man talking loudly across a table. He was a goldsmith and sculptor of real genius, maker of the salt cellar for Francis I and the bronze Perseus that still stands in Florence, and by his own account he was also a brawler, a jailbreaker and the marksman who felled the Constable of Bourbon at the sack of Rome. Whether every boast is true matters less than the voice, since nobody else left so direct a record of what it felt like to be an artist among popes and kings. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.