Cellini's Two Childhood Memories

When Benvenuto Cellini was writing the story of his life struggles and achievements at the age of 58, he “recalled” two events from his early childhood. These followed one another, between mentions of his father's reaction to his birth and his father's early attempts to teach him music. When examined in the context of Cellini's art and other recollections of his life, this pair of memories proves extremely rich in images expressive of his conflicts and of the ways in which he attempted to manage them. Even a partial explication of their ramified connections is sufficient to disclose another striking example of the dreamlike richness and organization of memories referred to earliest childhood. (1) In this paper I shall attempt to show how the symbolic elements of early childhood memories may be repeated in memories and works of the imagination in later periods of one's life, their recurrence being expressive of the continuity of an unconscious conflict.

We have no way of knowing more than Cellini tells us of the experiences in his childhood that formed the basis of his two memories. But we are not here concerned with the relation of his report to the earlier experience. We are going to treat the two memories which appear in the beginning of the book as if they were pregnantly allusive “initial dreams” in a psychoanalysis, and then see how their images and elements recur elsewhere in Cellini's memoirs and art creations. Such an approach to the analysis of