Italian · 1500–1571
A Florentine goldsmith who made the salt cellar now in Vienna, the bronze Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi, and a life story that reads like a crime novel. He claimed to have fired the shot that killed the Constable of Bourbon during the Sack of Rome in 1527, was imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo by one pope and pensioned by another, killed at least two men, was jailed for sodomy in Florence, worked for Francis I at Fontainebleau, and quarrelled with Michelangelo's admirers and everyone else. He began dictating his autobiography to a boy apprentice in 1558, wrote much of it himself afterwards, and left it unfinished. It circulated in manuscript for a century and a half before it was printed in 1728. Goethe translated it into German. Berlioz made an opera out of it. Almost every colourful thing anyone knows about Renaissance workshops comes from this book.