"Bring this thing here! Take that thing there!"

Cellini's description (3 pages from the Autobiography) of the casting of his Perseus (with the head of Medusa, above, is filled with even more tension than his many endearing intrigues, violent love affairs, and uplifiting homicides. He describes a massive lost wax bronze cast, the culmination of years of work - the essence of the process building a clay sculpture, reinforced with iron, resolved in a half-inch thickness of wax, another case is spread over the wax. A huge woodfire is lit around the figure to melt the wax between the final case and the clay "soul", and simulataneously, a huge vat of molten bronze is poured in the top. The statue is huge. All has to go perfectly. Dozens of people are on scene, rivals waiting gleefully for failure, the Medici waiting to hear it has succeeded. At the key moment, Cellini has collapsed in sudden illness only to hear that diaster has fallen on the cast.

When I had got my clothes on, I strode with soul bent on mischief toward the workshop; there I beheld the men, whom I had left erewhile in such high spirits, standing stupefied and downcast. I began at once and spoke: “Up with you! Attend to me! Since you have not been able or willing to obey the directions I gave you, obey me now that I am with you to conduct my work in person. Let no one contradict me, for in cases like this we need the aid of hand and hearing, not of advice.” When I had uttered these words, a certain Maestro Alessandro Lastricati broke silence and said: “Look you, Benvenuto, you are going to attempt an enterprise which the laws of art do not sanction, and which cannot succeed.” I turned upon him with such fury and so full of mischief, that he and all the rest of them exclaimed with one voice: “On then! Give orders! We will obey your least commands, so long as life is left in us.”