MEMOIRS OF BENVENUTO CELLINI, A FLORENTINE ARTIST; Written by Himself: Containing a Variety of Information Respecting the Arts, and the History of the Sixteenth Century. A New Edition. Corrected and Enlarged from the last Milan Edition, with The Notes and Observations of G.P. Carpani. Now First Translated by Thomas Roscoe. by Cellini Benvenuto - 1822

London: Henry G. Bohn, 1822. 2 volumes. First Edition of the translation by Thomas Roscoe. Engraved frontispiece portrait. 8vo, very handsomely bound in lovely three-quarter honey morocco over marbled paper covered boards, the spines with richly tooled panels to the compartments separated by raised bands, two compartments lettered and ruled in gilt, endleaves marbled to match, top edges gilt. xiv,457; viii, 357 pp. A very bright and handsome copy, the bindings fine and in excellent condition, internally unusually clean and fresh. FIRST EDITION OF THE TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH. Though many have doubted the full veracity of his recollections, Cellini was a lively and entertaining writer. As stated in the preface, “this work undoubtedly possesses the most striking claims to attention. The Italian literati, particularly Parini and Tiraboschi, have carried their admiration of it to the very highest pitch, describing it as the most entertaining and delightful work in the whole compass of Italian literature; an opinion corroborated by that of Horace Walpole, who regarded it as ‘more amusing than any novel.’”
As another commentator writes, “On many accounts [this is] one of the most interesting and valuable autobiographies ever written. The author was contemporaneous with Raphael and Michael Angelo, and was the most skillful worker in metals in that age of artists... The variety of its incidents, the minuteness of its descriptions, the pictures of the people, and of the manners of the time, and, above all, the view it affords of the life of one of the most powerful characters of the age, give it at once the charm of romance and the value of a record of contemporaneous events” (Adams, Manual of Historical Literature, p. 246).
The translator of this particular edition claims that this is the closest English version to the Italian original--the many omissions that had been previously made are restored here and certain errors corrected.