Percy Bysshe Shelly by John Addington Symonds (1978)

We here at The Jade Sphinx are always interested in the lives of great artists; and if the biography is written by one of the preeminent aesthetes of his day, all the better.

Sadly, outside of a handful of devotees, few remember the great writer, biographer, poet, essayist and aesthete John Addington Symonds (1840—1893).  Like most aesthetes, Symonds had a personal and emotional connection to the Italian Renaissance.  He would write a masterful, seven volume history of the era (Renaissance in Italy, 1875-1886), a splendid biography of Michelangelo (1893), and translations of Cellini’s autobiography (1888) and Michelangelo’s sonnets (1878; the first English translation of the painter’s poetry).

Symonds was also deeply devoted to Hellenism, writing Studies of the Greek Poets (1873-1876), which more closely aligned him with the Aesthetic Movement, and he wrote several volumes of poetry, as well.

A mind and aesthetic so protean, however, ranged across history to find congenial subjects.  He wrote of Ben Johnson (1886), Sir Philip Sidney (1886) and Walt Whitman (1893).  However, one of his more interesting biographies is of the Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1878).

It may seem strange that we are emphasizing more the biographer than the biographee, but for Symonds biography and criticism were merely a mode of autobiography.  While we learn a great deal about Shelley (1792-1822) in this volume, we learn even more about Symonds.

Shelley was one of the greatest of Romantic poets.  He was a political radical and champion of the underdog.  He was an important part of a circle of poets and writers that included Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, Thomas Love Peacock and his wife, Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein).  He was also involved with other politically progressive thinkers of the day, including William Godwin (Mary’s father), and influenced the political thinking of Henry David Thoreau.  After his death, Shelley became the idol of figures as diverse as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats.

Though he died just before his 30^th birthday, Shelley’s literary output is remarkable for its virtuosity, its lyricism and its breadth of intellectual scope.  What might have been had he lived longer must remain a mystery, as the poet drowned in a sudden storm off the Gulf of Spezia in his sailing boat, the Don Juan.  The boat had been custom-built for the poet, and sank.  Shelley’s body was cremated on the beach near Viareggio.  Surprisingly, the poet’s heart would not burn, no matter the degree of heat and flame, and his widow took it away with her.

The Funeral of Shelley

Such a Romantic figure would be irresistible to a sensibility like Symonds’, and it is clear that the later aesthete falls, to some degree, in love with his subject.  Here is Symonds on Shelley’s boyhood:

Such as the child was, we shall find the man to have remained unaltered through the short space of life allowed him. Loving, innocent, sensitive, secluded from the vulgar concerns of his companions, strongly moralized after a peculiar and inborn type of excellence, drawing his inspirations from Nature and from his own soul in solitude, Shelley passed across the stage of this world, attended by a splendid vision which sustained him at a perilous height above the kindly race of men. The penalty of this isolation he suffered in many painful episodes. The reward he reaped in a measure of more authentic prophecy, and in a nobler realization of his best self, than could be claimed by any of his immediate contemporaries.

Here Symonds describes the physical appearance of the poet:  His eyes were blue, unfathomably dark and lustrous. His hair was brown; but very early in life it became grey, while his unwrinkled face retained to the last a look of wonderful youth. It is admitted on all sides that no adequate picture was ever painted of him. Mulready is reported to have said that he was too beautiful to paint. And yet, although so singularly lovely, he owed less of his charm to regularity of feature or to grace of movement, than to an indescribable personal fascination.

It is clear that Symonds was besotted by Shelley, and that his feelings for the poet cloud his vision.  He blithely excuses some of the poet’s most egregious behavior, and sponges away sometimes deadly effect he had on others.  Shelley becomes, for Symonds, an ideal; a swain of infinite beauty and even greater promise.  Near the close of the book, Symonds writes:

Shelley in his lifetime bound those who knew him with a chain of loyal affection, impressing observers so essentially different as Hogg, Byron, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Williams, with the conviction that he was the gentlest, purest, bravest, and most spiritual being they had ever met. The same conviction is forced upon his biographer. During his four last years this most loveable of men was becoming gradually riper, wiser, truer to his highest instincts. The imperfections of his youth were being rapidly absorbed. His self-knowledge was expanding, his character mellowing, and his genius growing daily stronger. Without losing the fire that burned in him, he had been lessoned by experience into tempering its fervour; and when he reached the age of twenty-nine, he stood upon the height of his most glorious achievement, ready to unfold his wings for a yet sublimer flight. At that moment, when life at last seemed about to offer him rest, unimpeded activity, and happiness, death robbed the world of his maturity. Posterity has but the product of his cruder years, the assurance that he had already outlived them into something nobler, and the tragedy of his untimely end.

Like many who value art above mere fact, Symonds was incapable of resisting Shelley’s romantic charm.  The book remains a revealing portrait of both subject and author.

My Life, By Benvenuto Cellini

Cellini's Perseus

I have just spent the past week in the remarkable – if exhausting – company of the great Renaissance artist, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571).  Though many of the great Renaissance masters were equally famous for writing as well as the fine arts – Leonardo with his notebooks, Michelangelo with his sonnets, Vasari with his biographies – perhaps the great literary achievement of them all was Cellini with the story of his own life.

Cellini was a master goldsmith, creating many beautiful works of jewelry and coins, as well as being quite a formidable draftsman.  But such work was often relegated to the realm of mere craftsmanship, and Cellini wished to create heroic sculptures, much like his mentor and artistic hero, Michelangelo.

Cellini would realize his ambition when he cast the heroic bronze figure Perseus with the Head of Medusa for the Duke Cosimo de Medici (see above), an undertaking that is vividly brought to life in his autobiography.  Other works – including medallions, rings and busts -- have been lost to time, mostly because of their ephemeral nature, and also because the precious metals involved were often melted down and refashioned for other purposes.

But even if Cellini’s artistic works did not survive, he would still be vividly remembered today for his autobiography, arguably one of the most important (and vivid and bawdy and violent) documents to survive that remarkable era.  There are several excellent translations, and perhaps the most poetic and decorous is that of Renaissance scholar and poet John Addington Symonds (1840-1893).  Symonds, translating for a Victorian audience, was often unable to recreate Cellini’s earthy language.  If you want all the “dirt,” I heartily recommend the translation by Peter and Julia Conaway Bondanella, available through Oxford World’s Classics.

Why has a week with Cellini left your correspondent exhausted?  Well, imagine if you would, a Renaissance artist with a taste for swordplay, court intrigue, whoring, young boys, young girls, street brawling, litigation, illegitimate children, attempted homicide, and endless self-aggrandizing.  Think of a murderous Errol Flynn on speed, and you get the idea.  If he were alive today, he’d be the darling of the New York art scene.

Cellini’s story also has a curious circular quality – he will find the protection of an important patron (the Pope, the French King, a Medici), do everything he could to make himself impossible, and then end up once again on the run.  He never seemed to learn from his past mistakes, and always portrayed himself as a victim.  Here is a taste of Cellini, courtesy of the Bondanella translation:

I had no sooner dismounted when one of those fine people who take delight in uncovering evil came to tell me that Pagolo Micceri had taken a house for that little whore of a Caterina [his former girlfriend]and her mother, that he went there continually, and that in speaking about me he always said, with scorn: “Benvenuto set the geese to guard the lettuce, and he thought I wouldn’t eat it; it’s enough that he now goes around acting brave and believing that I’m afraid of him:  I have strapped on this sword and this dagger by my side to give him to understand that my sword cuts too, and that I’m a Florentine just like him, from the Micceri family, a much better family than his Cellinis.”  The scoundrel who brought me this story told it so effectively that I immediately felt a fever coming on – and I mean a real fever, not a figure of speech.  And since I might have died from such a bestial passion, I found a remedy by giving it the outlet such an opportunity had afforded me, just as I wished.  I told my worker from Ferrara, who was called Chioccia, to come with me, and I had my horse brought behind me by the servant, and when I reached the house where this spiteful man was living, I found the door half-closed and went inside.  I saw that he had his sword and dagger by his side, and that he was sitting on a chest with his arm around Caterina’s neck.  I had hardly arrived when I heard him joking with her mother about my affairs.  I pushed in the door, and at the same time I put my hand to my sword and placed its point at his throat, not giving him time even to think about the fact that he had a sword too, and all at once I said: “Vile coward, commend yourself to God, for you are a dead man!”  Paralyzed, he cried out three times: “Oh, Mother, help me!”  I wanted to murder him no matter what, but when I heard his silly cries half of my anger left me.  Meanwhile, I had told my workman Chioccia not to allow either Caterina or her mother to leave, for once I had attended to him, I wanted to do equal harm to these two whores.

No wonder Oscar Wilde found the rough men of the Wild West enamored of Cellini’s exploits.   Cellini inspired a wonderful book by Alexandre Dumas, pere, an opera by Berlioz, movies and plays.  But he also stands as an important reminder that the hand that crafts beautiful things is not always connected to a noble heart, and that the most gifted artist can also be the most loathsome human being. 

The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti by John Addington Symonds

The great Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was the subject of much biographical interest in his own lifetime.  He lived to see two full-fledged biographies, both by rather historically unimportant painters, Giorgio Vasari (1511 – 1574) and Ascanio Condivi (1525–1574).  Both men were friends of Michelangelo, and that in itself is a testament to their stamina and quality of mercy.  As an artist, no one could touch Michelangelo; as a human being no one wanted to touch him…

In the centuries following Michelangelo’s death, many people attempted to retell his life, including his nephew.  Most of these books following his death are fairly worthless.  The Renaissance was a remarkable time in many ways, and one of the more interesting things about it is that manners and mores were changing at an alarming rate.  One of the facets of his life that raised eyebrows soon after his death was his love for Tommaso dei Cavalieri (c. 1509–1587). This relationship was the subject of much debate in his lifetime, and grew more loaded as the populace became more religious and faithful.  Michelangelo wrote many love sonnets to the young man, who was 23 years old when Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57.  Another beautiful youth, Cecchino dei Bracci, inspired Michelangelo to write 48 funeral epigrams.  When Michelangelo’s nephew gathered these love poems for publication, he changed the genders of the intended to the female.

Another enduring myth generated post-mortem was that the great love of his life was aristocratic widow Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Rome in 1536 or 1538 and corresponded with for decades.  Many have tried to build a legend of romance between the two, but the exchange of sonnets and the occasional afternoon grappa does not a grand romance make.

Credit for the first truly authoritative biography of the great artist must go to aesthete, Renaissance scholar and minor poet John Addington Symonds (1840 - 1893), who wrote The Life of Michelangelo Buounarroti in 1893.  Symonds was the first scholar to have full complete access to the Michelangelo family archives.  This alone is astonishing – the archives had remained closely guarded and only fragments were made available by friends of the Buonarroti family.  The Italian government gave Symonds full access to the archives in the early 1880s, thanks largely in part to Symonds’ impeccable Renaissance scholarship.

It was not just the breadth and depth of Symonds’ historical knowledge, but also the feeling and sensitivity of his artistic judgment that made him the ideal man for the job.  Symonds was also the translator of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, still the most poetic translation extant, as well as the author of biographies of Shelley and Ben Johnson.

Symonds also suffered much from his own conflicted sexuality.  Though largely homosexual, he married Janet Catherine North, and spent the rest of his life in passionate friendships with other (often younger) men.  As would be expected by someone so conflicted (and given the historical period, just two years before Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for “gross indecency”), Symonds vacillates between insisting that Michelangelo’s love of younger men was “spiritual,” or arguing that he was a remarkable man even if it were not.

And Symonds is a compelling, erudite and fascinating writer.  Here is he is, writing about Michelangelo’s David:  In the David Michelangelo first displayed that quality of terribilità, of spirit-quailing, awe-inspiring force, for which he afterwards became so famous. The statue imposes, not merely by its size and majesty and might, but by something vehement in the conception. He was, however, far, from having yet adopted those systematic proportions for the human body which later on gave an air of monotonous impressiveness to all his figures. On the contrary, this young giant strongly recalls the model; still more strongly indeed that the Bacchus did. Wishing perhaps to adhere strictly to the Biblical story, Michelangelo studied a lad whose frame was not developed. The David, to state the matter frankly, is a colossal hobbledehoy. His body, in breadth of the thorax, depth of the abdomen, and general stoutness, has not grown up to the scale of the enormous hands and feet and heavy head. We feel that he wants at least two years to become a fully developed man, passing from adolescence to the maturity of strength and beauty. This close observance of the imperfections of the model at a certain stage of physical growth is very remarkable, and not altogether pleasing in a statue more than nine feet high. Both Donatello and Verocchio had treated their Davids in the same realistic manner, but they were working on a small scale and in bronze.

Symonds’ The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti is available free for your e-readers at manybooks.net or Project Gutenberg, but there is also a splendid two volume edition published by the University of Pennsylvania Press with an introduction by art historian Creighton E. Gilbert that is quite wonderful.  If you have a serious interest in the life of the one of the greatest figures in art history, this is the place to start.