Cellini began dictating his exasperating, brilliant autobiography in 1557, or right after a Florentine judge sentenced him to four years in prison for sodomy. Margaret A. Gallucci finds this abrupt resort to literature puzzling, but it seems a natural enough substitute in a life consumed with drama both criminal and aesthetic, not to mention sexual, and now reduced to comparative inaction.

Gallucci also finds incredible the very idea of Cellini's tumultuous life. She doubts whether it can have whisked along at quite his proclaimed adventurous pace. She adduces no evidence that it did not, however, merely arguing that he “fashioned” himself according to heroic models borrowed from medieval romances and epics. Imitation explains velocity. Literature supplies braggadocio. Again, however, Gallucci's speculations, while not uninteresting, are accompanied by no evidence to show that the Cellini of real life, whose partisans continue to rank him among the Renaissance's maddest, wildest, most boisterous, homicidal, shrewd and clever geniuses of gold and silver— as the most consummate and undisguised rogue of bedroom and atelier— is not identical with the Cellini of his Vita. The sculptor of the Gorgon- slayer was pretty quick on the draw himself, it seems, and no amount of twentyfirst- century incredulity will reduce him to bisexual or homoerotic political correctness.

In any case, Gallucci's brief book itself whisks along at its own fairly high speed, but in a rickety model of deconstructionism borrowed from Michel Foucault and Tzvetan Todorov. It repeatedly proposes, for instance, that throughout his Vita Cellini has installed himself on that old war horse of literary theorists, “self- representation,” a solecism whose true meaning is presumably dishonesty, and that one of his book's aims is to expose “gender stereotypes”— this despite their not having been invented in the sixteenth century. Cellini's Vita, she thus informs us, is less autobiography in some recognizable sense than “judging” literature, in which an author defends himself against criminal charges (hence his resort to autobiography after his [second] conviction for sodomy). To maintain this reductive notion, his ideas about aesthetics, which pepper page after page, and his superb descriptions of battles and private artistic struggles, along with his witty if sarcastic dismissals of the inferior work of competitors— notable for their style, vigor and close observation, as when he recounts his hardships in casting his Perseus— are well- nigh ignored.