St. Paul, correspond exactly to what we learn otherwise about them, adding slight significant touches from private information. Madame D'Etampes and the Duchess Eleanora of Tuscany move across his pages as they lived, the one with the vivacity of a king's insolent mistress, the other with the somewhat sickly and yet kindly grandeur of the Spanish consort to an astute Italian prince. Lesser folk, with whom we are equally acquainted through their writings or biographical notices, appear in crowds upon a lower plane. Bembo, in his dignified retreat at Padua; Torrigiano, swaggering about the Florentine workshops; Giulio Romano, leading the debauched society of Roman artists; Maitre Roux, in his Parisian magnificence; Alamanni, the humane and gentle nobleman of letters; Sansovino, expanding at ease in Venetian comfort; old Michel Angelo, with his man Urbino, in their simple Roman dwelling; Bandinelli, blustering before the Duke of Florence in a wordy duel with Cellini, which Vasari also has reported—all these, and how many more besides, are portrayed with an evident reality, which corresponds in each particular to the man as he is otherwise revealed to us by independent evidence. Yet Cellini had no intention of describing such folk for our benefit. As they happened to cross his life, so he sketched them with sharp, pungent quill-strokes, always thinking more about his own affairs than their personality. Nothing inspires a firmer confidence in his accuracy as an observer and his veracity as a narrator than the undesigned corroboration given to his portraits by masses of external and less vivid testimony.
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