Benvenuto Cellini Research Paper

Benvenuto Cellini, born in Florence, Italy, was a man that lived a perilous and unusual life. When he moved to Rome, his rise to success had stalled when he apparently murdered a man and stole gems from the Pope. He then moved to France, but eventually found conflict and was on the brink of getting imprisoned. Because of this dilemma, he decided to return to Florence where he created the prominent statue of Perseus in the mid sixteenth century. The statue was placed close to Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes in the Piazza Della Signoria. Cellini’s contributions to the modern world include the story of how the Perseus statue came to be, the tale of Perseus himself, and the Greek themes of fate and destiny. The overdramatic and exaggerated description of how the Perseus statue came to be is an interesting one. While preparing his chisels, a steel splinter flew into Cellini’s eye. A surgeon relieved him of the splinter by flooding his eye with the blood of two pigeons, and the splinter came out in less than two days. Then with no notice, his workshop caught fire, a rain and wind storm slowed his work by cooling off the furnace, and a powerful fever sent him to bed thinking he would …show more content…
Perseus, however, has become a powerful man who stands in the way of Polydectes. In order to have Polydectes abandon the island, Perseus had to kill Medusa, a monstrous woman that turned people into stone if they gazed upon her. For his objective, Perseus received several gifts from the gods in order to aid him. He ended up using a shield as a mirror in order to prevent petrification, cut off Medusa’s head with the sword of Hermes, and used her head to turn Polydectes into stone. Finally, Perseus and Danae travel back to Argos where Perseus participates in an athletic event. One of his discus got thrown incorrectly and ended up killing one of the spectators, which just so happened to be