Welcome Cellini, tomorrow in Verona International Conference 450th Anniversary celebrations

On the occasion of Benvenuto Cellini’s birth and 450 years after the death of the great Florentine sculptor and goldsmith, the Municipality of Verona, with the patronage of the Veneto Region and the Province of Verona, pays homage to one of the best known representatives of Italian Mannerist sculpture. On Wednesday 3 November at 5.00 pm an International Conference will take place in the Conference Room of the Palazzo di Gran Guardia in Verona, curated by Annalisa Di Maria and Andrea da Montefeltro, members of the Commission of Art and Literature Experts of the UNESCO Center of Florence with the participation and collaboration of the Club for UNESCO of Verona. Of the “bloodthirsty goldsmith”, author of the famous Salt cellar of Francis I of France, as well as of the bronze Perseus with the head of Medusa, a masterpiece of Italian Mannerist sculpture, and of the autobiography La Vita di Benvenuto by Maestro Giovanni Cellini of Florence, written, for he himself, in Florence – one of the most insightful essays in the literature on Renaissance daily life – the Self-portrait will be unveiled for the first time in Italy – oil on paper 61×48 cm – dated around the second half of the sixteenth century. Reappeared in the Parisian antiques market in 2005, the work has remained until today in a private collection and thanks to scientific analyzes – conducted by Silvain Brams in the laboratory of the Institute of Conservation and Color Art in Paris (IACC) – and to the critical studies conducted on the work by Annalisa di Maria and Andrea da Montefeltro, during these fifteen years it has been possible to attribute the authorship with certainty to the great Cellini, whose few autograph works are today in the most important museums in the world, from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, at the Uffizi in Florence, at the Royal Library of Turin. Cellini’s physical resemblance was, until the discovery and study of the portrait, forgotten over time, despite the fact that the Tuscan artist did everything to remain in memory. The self-portrait painting, of great historical and artistic value as well as autobiographical – today represents the only surviving pictorial work of the artist, whose physiognomy, well known through the famous fresco on the ceiling by Giorgio Vasari in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence of 1563 is of fundamental importance for the identification of Cellini’s face himself in some of his best-known works of art.