Pietro Aretino | |
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_-_The_Frick_Collection.jpg) Pietro Aretino, byTitian (Frick Collection) | |
| Born | 19 or(1492-04-20)20 April 1492 Arezzo,Republic of Florence(present-dayTuscany, Italy) |
| Died | 21 October 1556(1556-10-21) (aged 64) Venice,Republic of Venice(present-dayVeneto, Italy) |
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Pietro Aretino (US:/ˌɑːrɪˈtiːnoʊ,ˌær-/,[1][2]Italian:[ˈpjɛːtroareˈtiːno]; 19 or 20 April 1492[3] – 21 October 1556) was an Italian author, playwright, poet,satirist andblackmailer, who wielded influence on contemporary art and politics. He was one of the most influential writers of his time and an outspoken critic of the powerful.[4] He gained prominence through his politically charged writings and biting satire, which targeted powerful figures, including monarchs and popes. His works spanned various genres, includingpoetry, drama, and religious commentary, but he is particularly noted for hislampoons anderotic literature. Owing to his communications and sympathies withreligious reformers, he is considered to have been aNicodemiteProtestant.[5][6][7][8]
Aretino was a good friend and publicist of the Venetian artistTitian, who painted his portrait three times. Aretino is also remembered for an exchange of letters he had withMichelangelo concerning the latter's frescoThe Last Judgment.
Aretino was a key figure in 16th-century Italian cultural and literary circles, earning both admiration and condemnation for his fearless critique of authority. His relationship with leading artists and his role as an adviser to rulers cemented his reputation as a formidable intellectual and social commentator.[5][8]
His father was Luca Del Tura, a shoemaker fromArezzo, inTuscany, Italy, who abandoned his family to join the militia. The father later returned to Arezzo, finally dying in poverty at the age of 85, unforgiven by his son, who never acknowledged the paternal name, takingAretino (meaning 'Arretine, from Arezzo') as a surname.
His mother was Margherita, known as Tita, Bonci. Either before or after the abandonment (it is not known which), she entered into a lasting relationship with a local noble, Luigi Bacci, who supported Tita, Pietro and his two sisters and brought up Pietro as part of his own family.[9]
Aretino spent a formative decade in Perugia, before being sent, highly recommended, to Rome. ThereAgostino Chigi, the rich banker and patron ofRaphael, took him under his wing.
WhenHanno the elephant, pet ofPope Leo X, died in 1516, Aretino penned a satirical pamphlet entitled "The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno". The fictitious will cleverly mocked the leading political and religious figures of Rome at the time, including Pope Leo X himself. The pamphlet was such a success that it started Aretino's career and established him as a famous satirist, ultimately known as "the Scourge of Princes".
Aretino prospered, living from hand to mouth as a hanger-on in the literate circle of his patron, sharpening his satirical talents on the gossip of politics and thePapal Curia, and turning the coarse Romanpasquinade into a rapier weapon of satire, until his sixteen ribaldSonetti Lussuriosi (Lust Sonnets) written to accompanyGiulio Romano's exquisitely beautiful but utterly pornographic series of drawings engraved byMarcantonio Raimondi under the titleI Modi finally caused such outrage that he had to temporarily flee Rome.
After Leo's death in 1521, his patron wasCardinal Giulio de' Medici, whose competitors for the papal throne felt the sting of Aretino's scurrilous lash. The installation of the Dutch popeAdrian VI ("la tedesca tigna" in Pietro's words) instead encouraged Aretino to seek new patrons away from Rome, mainly withFederico II Gonzaga inMantua, and with thecondottieroGiovanni de' Medici ("Giovanni delle Bande Nere"). The election of his old Medici patron asPope Clement VII sent him briefly back to Rome, but death threats and an attempted assassination from one of the victims of his pen,Bishop Giovanni Giberti, in July 1525,[10] set him wandering through northern Italy in the service of various noblemen, distinguished by his wit, audacity and brilliant and facile talents, until he settled permanently in 1527, in Venice,the anti-Papal city of Italy, "seat of all vices", Aretino noted with gusto.
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He was a lover of men, having declared himself "a sodomite" since birth. In a letter to Giovanni de' Medici written in 1524 Aretino enclosed a satirical poem saying that due to a sudden aberration he had "fallen in love with a female cook and temporarily switched from boys to girls..." (My Dear Boy).[11] In his comedyIl marescalco, the lead man is overjoyed to discover that the woman he has been forced to marry is really a page boy in disguise. While at court in Mantua he developed a crush on a young man called Bianchino, and annoyed Duke Federico with a request to plead with the boy on the writer's behalf.[12]
Safe in Venice, Aretino became a blackmailer, extorting money from men who had sought his guidance in vice. He "kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege",[13] inJacob Burckhardt's estimation.Francis I of France andCharles V pensioned him at the same time, each hoping for some damage to the reputation of the other. "The rest of his relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar extortion", according to Burckhardt. Addison states that "he laid half Europe under contribution."[14]
At one time, Aretino owned the painting byParmigianino,Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.[15]
Aretino is said to have died of suffocation from "laughing too much".[16] The more mundane truth may be that he died from a stroke or heart attack.[17]
His literary talent, his clear and sparkling style, his varied observation of men and things, would have made him a considerable writer under any circumstances, destitute as he was of the power of conceiving a genuine work of art, such as a true dramatic comedy; and to the coarsest as well as the most refined malice he added a grotesque wit so brilliant that in some cases it does not fall short of that of Rabelais.
Apart from both sacred and profane texts – a satire of high-flownRenaissanceNeoplatonicdialogues is set in abrothel – and comedies such asLa cortigiana andLa talenta, Aretino is remembered above all for his letters, full of literary flattery that could turn toblackmail. They circulated widely in manuscript and he collected them and published them at intervals winning as many enemies as it did fame, and earned him the dangerous nicknameAriosto gave him:flagello dei principi ("scourge of princes"). In 1559, three years after Aretino's death, his entire oeuvre was listed in the papalIndex of Prohibited Books.
La cortigiana is a brilliant parody ofCastiglione'sIl Cortegiano, and features the adventures of a Sienese gentleman, Messer Maco, who travels to Rome to become acardinal. He would also like to win himself a mistress, but when he falls in love with a girl he sees in a window, he realizes that only as a courtier would he be able to win her. In mockery of Castiglione's advice on how to become the perfect courtier, a charlatan proceeds to teach Messer Maco how to behave as a courtier: he must learn how to deceive and flatter, and sit hours in front of the mirror.
Aretino was a close friend ofTitian's,[18][19] who painted hisportrait three times: a 1527 portrait in theKunstmuseum Basel,[20] a 1537 portrait in theFrick Collection,[21] and a 1545portrait in the Pitti Palace.[22] Luba Freedman cites a fourth portrait, from "not later than 1535", butXavier F. Salomon, chief curator at theFrick Collection, writes that "there is no evidence that it ever existed".[23] Titian also portrayed Aretino asPontius Pilate in his painting "Ecce Homo",[24] in theKunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna,[25] "as a nameless soldier in the crowd" in "Alfonso d'Avalos Addressing his Troops", in thePrado Museum, Madrid,[26] and next to a self-portrait in "La Gloria", also in the Prado.[27] Clement VII made Aretino aKnight of Rhodes, andJulius III named him a Knight of St. Peter, but the chain he wears for his 1545 portrait may have merely been jewelry. In his strictly-for-publication letters to patrons Aretino would often add a verbal portrait to Titian's painted one.
Titian was far from the only artist who portrayed Aretino. "Probably no other celebrity of thecinquecento had his image reproduced so often and in so many media: paintings, frescoes, sculptures, prints, medals.... At various stages of his life Aretino was also portrayed bySebastiano del Piombo,Alessandro Moretto,Francesco Salviati,Jacopo Tintoretto, andGiorgio Vasari. His portrait was engraved byMarcantonio Raimondi andGiovanni Jacopo Caraglio. His likeness was reproduced on medals byLeone Leoni, Francesco Segala,Alfonso Lombardi, andAlessandro Vittoria and his image was sculpted byJacopo Sansovino andDanese Cattaneo."[28]
In November 1545, Aretino wrote an open letter to Michelangelo criticizing the nudity inThe Last Judgment, Michelangelo's fresco in theSistine Chapel in Rome. His dialogues,La Nanna, Aretino wrote, "demonstrate the superiority of my reserve to your indiscretion, seeing that I, while handling themes lascivious and immodest, use language comely and decorous, speak in terms beyond reproach and inoffensive to chaste ears. You, on the contrary, presenting so awful a subject, exhibit saints and angels, these without earthly decency, and those without celestial honors.... Your art would be at home in some voluptuousbagnio, certainly not in the highest chapel in the world.... I do not write this out of any resentment for the things I begged of you. In truth, if you had sent me what you promised, you would only have been doing what you ought to have desired most eagerly to do in your own interest."[29]John Addington Symonds writes, "Aretino’s real object was to wheedle some priceless sketch or drawing out of the great master. This appears from a second letter written by him on the 20th of January 1538."[30]
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Symonds describes Michelangelo's answer to Aretino's November 1545 letter: "Under the form of elaborate compliment it conceals the scorn he must have conceived for Aretino and his insolent advice. Yet he knew how dangerous the man could be, and felt obliged to humour him."[30] James Connor notes that, in Michelangelo'sThe Last Judgment, completed in 1541, he had painted Saint Bartholomew displaying his own flayed skin:"[T]he sagging flayed skin ... many scholars believe depicts Michelangelo's own features. Interestingly, the face of Saint Bartholomew [who is holding the skin] is similar to the face of Pietro Aretino, one of Michelangelo's chief persecutors."[31] But these resemblances were unrelated to Aretino's letter to Michelangelo. Bernadine Barnes writes that no sixteenth-century critic noticed "the portrait of Pietro Aretino in the fresco.... [V]iewers of our own time have often seen him as St Bartholomew, who brandishes a knife in one hand and holds the skin with the semblance of Michelangelo's face in the other. However, Aretino's criticism [of Michelangelo] was not written until 1545, four years after the fresco was completed. Even Aretino's good friend Vasari did not recognize him."[32]
Aretino is frequently mentioned in English works of the Elizabethan and later periods and differently appreciated, in comments ranging from "It was one of the wittiest knaves that ever God made" ofNashe (The Unfortunate Traveller) to "that notorious ribald of Arezzo" ofMilton'sAreopagitica.[33]
The English travellerSir John Reresby visited "the obscene profane poet" Aretino's grave in the church ofSan Luca, Venice, in the mid-1650s. He relates that the following epitaph had been removed by theinquisitors:Qui jace Aretin, poeta Tusco, qui dice mal d'ogni uno fuora di Dio; scusandosi dicendo, Io no'l cognosco. This he translates as "Here Aretin, the Tuscan poet, lies, who all the world abused but God, and why? he said he knew him not."[34] Another source states, "At the end of the 1800s, during the reconstruction works of the floor of the church, this plaque disappeared".[35] Yet another source states, "His tomb in San Luca no longer exists".[why?][when?][36][37]
Pietro's first biographer states that there was no epitaph on the tomb.[36] Those who claim that there was a sarcastic epitaph inhendecasyllablesa maiore suspect that it should be attributed to BishopPaolo Giovio, and that it was composed when Aretino was still alive:[38]
Qui giace l'Aretin, poeta tosco:
Di tutti disse mal fuorché di Cristo,
Scusandosi col dir: non lo conosco.
In 2007, the composerMichael Nyman set some of Aretino'sSonetti lussuriosi to music under the title8 Lust Songs. Once again, Aretino's texts proved controversial: at a 2008 performance atCadogan Hall, London, the printed programs were withdrawn following allegations of obscenity.[39]
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