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For “Honor and Profit”: Benvenuto Cellini’sMedal of Clement VII and His Competition with Giovanni Bernardi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abstract
This article examines the frameworks of artistic competition embodied in a 1534 contract for a contest of medalmaking between Benvenuto Cellini and Giovanni Bernardi, and in descriptions of other competitions, especially in Cellini’s autobiography. Strategies, decorum, and rhetoric of such competitions were embedded in notions of honor. In addition to personal and professional honor, court status and patronage were also at stake. By means of his competition with Bernardi and his medal of Pope Clement VII, Cellini hoped to recoup lost standing and favor, along with concomitant commissions and emoluments at the papal court — specifically, it is argued, an appointment at the Roman mint, where Cellini had been replaced by Bernardi in 1534. Cellini, however, was never rehabilitated at Clement’s court, and within days of the death of his patron, he murdered Pompeo de’ Capitaneis, the rival goldsmith whom he blamed for his loss of honor and profit.
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- Copyright © 2005 Renaissance Society of America
Footnotes
The bulk of the material on honor and profit was written in 2002; the remaining section on the imagery of the medal was presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo in May 2003. I would like to thank the staff of the American Numismatic Society in New York, in particular the librarians, Francis Campbell and Barbara Bonous-Smit, and the curator, Robert Hoge, for their assistance during the course of my research. I am also grateful for the thoughtful comments and helpful suggestions of Thomas and Elizabeth Cohen and Michael Cole in the final stages of preparing this article. The remarks of the anonymous RQ reviewer also encouraged me to sharpen some of its arguments. All translations are mine, unless indicated otherwise.
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