MEANWHILE I was advancing with my great statue of Medusa. I had covered
the iron skeleton with clay, which I modelled like an anatomical
subject, and about half an inch thinner than the bronze would be. This I
baked well, and then began to spread on the wax surface, in order to
complete the figure to my liking. [1] The Duke, who often came to
inspect it, was so anxious lest I should not succeed with the bronze,
that he wanted me to call in some master to case it for me.
He was continually talking in the highest terms of my acquirements and
accomplishments. This made his majordomo no less continually eager to
devise some trap for making me break my neck. Now his post at court gave
him authority with the chief-constables and all the officers in the poor
unhappy town of Florence. Only to think that a fellow from Prato, our
hereditary foeman, the son of a cooper, and the most ignorant creature
in existence, should have risen to such a station of influence, merely
because he had been the rotten tutor of Cosimo de’ Medici before he
became Duke! Well, as I have said, he kept ever on the watch to serve me
some ill turn; and finding that he could not catch me out on any side,
he fell at last upon this plan, which meant mischief. He betook himself
to Gambetta, the mother of my apprentice Cencio; and this precious pair
together--that knave of a pedant and that rogue of a strumpet--invented
a scheme for giving me such a fright as would make me leave Florence in
hot haste. Gambetta, yielding to the instinct of her trade, went out,
acting under the orders of that mad, knavish pedant, the majordomo--I
must add that they had also gained over the Bargello, a Bolognese, whom
the Duke afterwards dismissed for similar conspiracies. Well, one
evening, after sunset, Gambetta came to my house with her son, and told
me she had kept him several days indoors for my welfare. I answered that
there was no reason to keep him shut up on my account; and laughing her
whorish arts to scorn, I turned to the boy in her presence, and said
these words: “You know, Cencio, whether I have sinned with you!” He
began to shed tears, and answered, “No!” Upon this the mother, shaking
her head, cried out at him: “Ah! you little scoundrel! Do you think I do
not know how these things happen?” Then she turned to me, and begged me
to keep the lad hidden in my house, because the Bargello was after him,
and would seize him anywhere outside my house, but there they would not
dare to touch him. I made answer that in my house lived my widowed
sister and six girls of holy life, and that I wanted nobody else there.
Upon that she related that the majordomo had given orders to the
Bargello, and that I should certainly be taken up: only, if I would not
harbour her son, I might square accounts by paying her a hundred crowns;
the majordomo was her crony, and I might rest assured that she could
work him to her liking, provided I paid down the hundred crowns. This
cozenage goaded me into such a fury that I cried: “Out with you,
shameful strumpet! Were it not for my good reputation, and for the
innocence of this unhappy boy of yours here, I should long ago have cut
your throat with the dagger at my side; and twice or thrice I have
already clasped my fingers on the handle.” With words to this effect,
and many ugly blows to boot, I drove the woman and her son into the
street.
Note 1. This is an important passage, which has not, I think, been
properly understood by Cellini’s translators. It describes the process
he now employed in preparing a mould for bronze-casting. First, it
seems, he made a solid clay model, somewhat smaller than the bronze was
meant to be. This he overlaid with wax, and then took a hollow mould of
the figure thus formed. Farther on we shall see how he withdrew the wax
from the hollow mould, leaving the solid model inside, with space enough
between them for the metal to flow in.