Benvenuto Cellini: Autobiography

I have never been so blueballed by a book in my life.  After months of being engrossed in the (mostly) true and verifiable account of this extraordinary man's life, folding his stories and descriptions into my memories of Florence and Rome, mixxing all that in with Vasari's accounts of the same period and people, I was desperate to know what happened next.

I suppose I should have expected that he would leave me on the cusp.  I knew from researching his works as he described them that he never did go back to Paris and finish the other eleven candleabrae.  Neither did he complete the great fountain he began, and plenty of other works that he mentioned beginning are nowhere extant--presumably abandoned before completion.  Even armed with this knowledge, it never occurred to me that a man could spend years of his life dictating a detailed and riveting account of his life and then . . . just stop.

What happened, Benvenuto? I know from history that you eventually got married and died, had offspring, etc., but will I never know the resolution of your intrigues with the Duchess and that brigand Bandinello? Who eventually prevailed?  What treachery did your protegee get up to back in Paris that made you reverse your opinion of them so drastically? When I realized that the autobiography ended in the middle of a chapter, just as you were setting out for Pisa, I assumed you died.  But no.  You just.  Quit.

You lament throughout that any hindrance to your success was the result of villains' conspiracy against you, a perspective easy to adopt if we take your narrative as fact.  As you say, "Si che non basta l'esser uomo dabbene e virtuoso".  This fits perfectly well with what we all know of the world.  And yet, were you really so virtuous as you think?  Your setbacks could just as easily be lain at the feet of your own hotheadness and pride as at the feet of your rivals.  You are the very picture of a Byronic hero, but perhaps your fatal flaw is not your temper nor your arrogance after all.  I can forgive you for those.  But failure to finish what you start, this is more egregious.  If you pulled the same trick on your patrons as you did on me, it would be no wonder that your grand designs were yanked out from beneath you.