Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini Review

With many caveats, this is said to be the first autobiography, which is the reason it ended up on my reading list.  To be more specific, it is the earliest surviving autobiographical text written with the intent of being autobiographical in nature, as opposed to serving some other didactic purpose while being incidentally autobiographical.  After reading only a few chapters, it will be clear to you that no one should be surprised Benvenuto would decide he needed to write the world’s first autobiography, for he reveals himself to be colossally arrogant, conceited, and entirely unaware of these traits.  Most frustratingly as a reader, it always seems to work out in his favor.  Even being exiled from Florence sees him working directly for the Pope.

Looking past this off-putting personality, the autobiography is well written.  Benvenuto rubs shoulders with numerous, more famous personages throughout its pages, and it is truly autobiographical, not a memoir or a diary, in that he sets out to lay forth the events of his life.  Not in an unbiased fashion – not even close – but at least in a factual, chronological, event-based kind of way, not as reflections or musings such as might appear in a memoir.  In that sense, it made for interesting reading.

However, the lack of perspective and self-awareness somewhat limits the deeper or broader impact of the piece.  Aside from a few bits of historical interest, this is a book that you read because of the tagline about it being the earliest surviving autobiographical text written with the intent of being biographical in nature.  The only deeper question it had me pondering while I read it was why it is that certain places and periods of history seem to generate nexuses of notable personages.  Whether it’s 4^th century Greece, the Italian Renaissance, or the European Enlightenment, certain times and places host a superabundance of Names.  Some of this comes down to the places and periods when people were inclined to write things down so that these people could be preserved to today, but it seems there should be something more.  So many foundational thinkers lived within a generation or two of each other, in one small region of the world, in Ancient Greece.  So many notable artists and intellectuals arose, again within a generation or two of each other, in the Italian Renaissance.  This is not the forum to speculate on why this might be, or if it is anything more than a ghost in the available data, but it is interesting to consider.

That I spent so much time considering it while I was supposed to be reading Benvenuto’s autobiography is, perhaps, testament to how (not) interesting I found the book, and this comes from the person who managed to find interest in the Babur Nama’s extensive footnotes.  Its place in the historical record does not balance its protagonist’s conceited personality, nor does the quality of the writing.  Were it half the length, I might be more charitable, but it grew quite tedious, and I don’t think there is enough of wider substance or significance for me to recommend it.