Paris and Fontainebleau, 1540. Benvenuto Cellini - goldsmith, sculptor, brawler, and the most insufferably confident man at any table he has ever sat at - has arrived in France at the invitation of François I, bringing with him his tools, his temper, and his young apprentice Ascanio. The king wants great art. The Duchess of Étampes wants Cellini gone. And Ascanio, who has come to France to learn his craft, has made the mistake of falling in love.
Ascanio, written by Alexandre Dumas in collaboration with Paul Meurice and first published in 1843, takes the extraordinary documented history of Cellini's years at the French court - drawn directly from the sculptor's own outrageous, unreliable, magnificent autobiography - and builds around it a novel of artistic passion, court intrigue, and the particular dangers that await a young man who loves the wrong woman in a world where beauty and power have always been the same currency.
At its center is Cellini himself: one of the great characters of European history, rendered here with the full extravagance he deserves - volcanic, generous, impossible, and capable, in the same afternoon, of creating objects of transcendent beauty and making an enemy for life. Around him, the court of François I glitters and threatens in equal measure.
Vivid, propulsive, and rich with the specific textures of Renaissance art and politics, Ascanio is Dumas at his most historically grounded - and his most irresistible.