The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini
Published 1728 · 145,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Memoir, Nonfiction, Classic Literature
How hard is The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini to read?
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Sixteenth-century Tuscan rendered in translation with its technical core intact: goldsmithing, bronze casting, alloys, chasing, and the vocabulary of papal and ducal courts.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Dictated prose that runs on for whole pages in a single breathless period, with subordinate clauses stacked in the order they occurred to the speaker rather than in any logical arrangement.
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- Relentlessly concrete. Metals, wounds, prices, feuds and furnace temperatures. Cellini almost never reflects on anything.
- Information density: 66 out of 100
- A crowded chronicle of popes, dukes, kings, rival craftsmen and workshop procedures, with hundreds of named contemporaries and continuous technical detail about how objects were made.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- Everything comes through the most self-serving narrator in Renaissance literature. His enemies are all villains, his failures are all sabotage, and the reader must continuously reconstruct events from a witness with a motive.
- Symbolic density: 34 out of 100
- The salamander in the fire and the halo Cellini sees around his own head after prison are the rare figurative moments in an otherwise literal account.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- The irony is entirely unintentional and enormous. Cellini reports murders, brawls and boasts in the tone of a man describing his good manners, and the comedy comes from the gap between his self-image and his own evidence.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- The manuscript simply breaks off mid-episode in 1562, with the feuds unresolved and no conclusion of any kind.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Two books in rough chronological order with constant digressions, some backdating, and an abrupt unfinished ending, plus a textual history in which the manuscript circulated unpublished for 160 years.
How The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is regarded
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.