Carrying on the fun Renaissance debate about which art form is the best.
Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) was a goldsmith, sculptor, revenge-killer, likely a rapist, and party animal. Check out his Autobiography for all the energetic and sordid true-confessions details. It was he who did the bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa, now in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, this charming piece of erotica, the Saliera, and other significant works.
In response various claims of the superiority of painting to sculpture, Cellini argued that a painter has to be concerned with only one view. By contrast: “I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good … .”
(Which makes one wonder: What would Cellini say about architecture? Or literature, with its ability to take multiple perspectives of character and narration?)
Source: Goldwater and Treves, editors, Artists on Art: From the XIV to the XX Century (Pantheon, 1945, 1972), p. 87.
Related: “The best art form — architecture version.” Also: Flavia Atzeni’s brief account of the dramatic casting — explosion! fire! — of Perseus. Cellini gives a longer account in his Autobiography. And my lecture in Buenos Aires on what happened to art in the 20th century:
I guess you were brushing up on your “paragone” while in Italia. It certainly was a pleasant pastime back in the Renaissance to debate the relative merits of the various arts. Of course, in some respects the primary arts are incommensurables (at least from the perspective of individual interest).
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