A Companion to Pietro Aretino (The Renaissance Society of America, 18) 9789004348059, 9789004465190, 9004348050

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A Companion to Pietro Aretino

The Renaissance Society of America texts and studies series

Editor-in-Chief David Marsh (Rutgers University)

Editorial Board Anne Coldiron (Florida State University) Paul Grendler, Emeritus (University of Toronto) James Hankins (Harvard University) Gerhild Scholz-Williams (Washington University in St. Louis) Lía Schwartz Lerner (cuny Graduate Center)

Editorial Assistant Colin Macdonald (Renaissance Society of America)

volume 18

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rsa

A Companion to Pietro Aretino Edited by

Marco Faini Paola Ugolini

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Portrait of Pietro Aretino, 1545. Artist: Tiziano Vecellio (1488/90–1576). Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina, Room of Venus, inventory number 1912 n. 54. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Faini, Marco, editor. | Ugolini, Paola, 1974- editor. Title: A companion to Pietro Aretino / edited by Marco Faini, Paola Ugolini. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Renaissance Society of America texts and studies series 2212-3091 ; volume 18 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: lccn 2021018976 (print) | lccn 2021018977 (ebook) | isbn 9789004348059 (hardback) | isbn 9789004465190 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Aretino, Pietro, 1492-1556–Criticism and interpretation. | lcgft: Literary criticism | Essays. Classification: lcc pq4564 .c66 2021 (print) | lcc pq4564 (ebook) | ddc 858/.309–dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018976 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018977

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 2212-3091 isbn 978-90-04-34805-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-46519-0 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For our parents: Adriana Sandrini, Maria Concetta Montermini, Franco Ugolini

∵

Contents Acknowledgments xi List of Figures xii Timeline: Pietro Aretino in Context Bibliographical Abbreviations xx Notes on Contributors xxii

xv

Introduction 1 Marco Faini and Paola Ugolini

part 1 Selfhood and the Public Sphere 1

Inventing the Celebrity Author Raymond B. Waddington

2

Aretino at Home 44 Harald Hendrix

19

part 2 Criticism and Satire 3

“Pietro Aretino, the Ferocious Prophet,” and Pasquino Chiara Lastraioli

73

4

Aretino and the Court Paola Ugolini

5

Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Aretino’s Ragionamenti Ian Frederick Moulton

91

113

viii

contents

part 3 Arts 6

Aretino and the Painters of Venice 137 Philip Cottrell

7

Veritas Odium Parit: Uses and Misuses of Music in Aretino’s Sei giornate 170 Cathy Ann Elias

part 4 Literary Genres 8

Pietro Aretino, Poet 189 Angelo Romano

9

“A Knot of Barely Sketched Figures:” Pietro Aretino’s Chivalric Poems 202 Maria Cristina Cabani

10

Aretino’s Theater 237 Deanna Shemek and Jane Tylus

11

Pietro Aretino: Attributed Works Giuseppe Crimi

271

part 5 Religion 12

Aretino’s “Simple” Religious Prose: Literary Features, Doctrinal and Moral Contents, Evolution 303 Élise Boillet

13

The Three Hagiographies: Writing about Saints in the Age of the Council 329 Paolo Marini

ix

contents

14

The Figurative Rhetoric of Pietro Aretino’s Religious Works Augusto Gentili

370

15

The Imitation of Pietro Aretino’s Vita di Maria Vergine and Umanità di Cristo in Italy after the Council of Trent 409 Eleonora Carinci

part 6 Networks 16

Aretino as a Writer of Letters Paul Larivaille

435

17

Pietro Aretino and Publication Brian Richardson

18

Aretino as a Target for Criticism, and His Enemies from Berni to Muzio 497 Paolo Procaccioli

464

part 7 Afterlife 19

Aretino’s Troubled Afterlife Harald Hendrix Bibliography 545 Index of Names 586

529

Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank Ingrid De Smet, Craig Kallendorf, Andrew Serio, Maureen Jameson, Colleen Culleton, the two anonymous reviewers, and, at Brill, Eleonora Dragoni, Arjan van Dijk, and Ivo Romein.

List of Figures 1.1 1.2

1.3

1.4

1.5

2.1 2.2

2.3 2.4 2.5

2.6 6.1 6.2 6.3

The woodcut author portrait of Aretino designed by Titian for his first book of letters, January, 1538. Image courtesy of The British Library Board 27 The medal of Aretino with a reverse of a satyr kneeling before the seated figure of Truth. Artist unknown, cast bronze, 59mm., ca. 1536. Private collection 33 Medal of Aretino with reverse of a phallic satyr head. Inscription “All in all and all in every part.” Artist unknown, cast copper, 42 mm., ca. after 1543. Private collection 34 Francesco Salviati, woodcut author portrait of Pietro Aretino, La Vita di Maria Vergine, Marcolini, Venice, 1539. This example is taken from the comedy La Talanta, Marcolini, March 1542. IC5. Ar345.542t. Houghton Library, Harvard University. 37 Alex Shagin’s commemorative medal of Aretino, 2006, struck bronze, 46mm. The reverse combines Marcolini’s pressmark, Truth, the Daughter of Time, with the modern technology Aretino would have used to confirm the truth of his celebrity. Photograph by Kiet-le 43 Ca’ Bolani, Canal Grande, Venice (photo by the author) 52 The lay-out of Aretino’s apartment in Ca’ Bolani, as reconstructed and reproduced in Juergen Schulz, “Houses of Titian, Aretino and Sansovino”, in Idem, Titian, His World and His Legacy, ed. David Rosand (New York, 1982), p. 85 55 Tintoretto, The Contest between Apollo and Marsyas, oil on canvas, 139.7×240cm, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Inv. 1950.438 60 Enea Vico, Portrait of Antonfrancesco Doni, 153×112mm, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 53.600.849 62 The lay-out of Aretino’s apartment in Palazzo Dandolo, as reconstructed and reproduced in Juergen Schulz, “Houses of Titian, Aretino and Sansovino”, in Idem, Titian, His World and His Legacy, ed. David Rosand (New York, 1982), p. 88 69 Anselm Feuerbach, Der Tod des Pietro Aretino, oil on canvas, 267.5×176.5cm, 1854, Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel 70 Titian, Self-Portrait, c. 1562, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, oil on canvas, 96×75cm 142 Titian, Pietro Aretino, 1545, Florence, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, oil on canvas 1.08×0.67cm 143 Gian Paolo Pace, Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, 1545–1546, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, oil on canvas 0.90×0.97cm 147

list of figures 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 7.1

7.2

14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 14.8 14.9 14.10 14.11 14.12 14.13

xiii

Tintoretto, The Miracle of the Slave, 1548, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, oil on canvas 415×541cm 150 Titian, Ecce Homo, 1543, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, oil on canvas 242×361cm 151 Tintoretto, Apollo and Marsyas, 1545, Hartford, Wadsworth Athenaeum, oil on canvas 139.7×240.3cm 153 Giovanni Britto, Titian, 1550, London, British Museum, woodcut 41.5×32.2cm 156 Andrea Schiavone, The Judgment of Midas, 1548–1550, The Royal Collection/ Her Majesty the Queen, oil on canvas 167.6×197.7cm 159 Bonifacio de’ Pitati, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1536, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, oil on canvas 199×180cm 162 Lorenzo Lotto, St Nicholas Altarpiece, 1527–1529, Venice, Santa Maria dei Carmini, oil on canvas 335×188cm 165 Philippe Verdelot, “Divini occhi sereni”, bars 1–4. Di Verdelot. Tutti li madrigali del primo, et del secondo libro a quattro voci (Venice: A. Gardane, 1556) 20 181 “Alma mia fiamma”, Text by Pietro Aretino and music by Tommaso Bargonio. Antonfrancesco Doni, Dialogo della musica, ed. G. Francesco Malipiero (Vienna-Londra-Milano, 1965), 78–82: 78–81 185 Titian, The Sacrifice of Isaac, Venice, Santa Maria della Salute, sacristy 374 Titian, The Sacrifice of Isaac, detail. Venice, Santa Maria della Salute, sacristy 377 Tintoretto, The Sacrifice of Isaac. Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, sala superiore 378 Jacopo Bassano, The Adoration of the Shepherds. Hampton Court, Royal Collection 380 Jacopo Bassano, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana 381 Jacopo Bassano, The Last Supper, detail. Rome, Borghese Gallery 382 Titian, The Crowning with Thorns. Paris, Musée du Louvre 383 Titian, The Crowning with Thorns, detail. Paris, Musée du Louvre 385 Head of Nero. München, Staatliche Antikensammlungen 385 Gillis Sadeler after Tiziano, Nero. Rome, Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe 386 Titian, Penitent Magdalene. Saint Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum 389 Titian, Penitent Magdalene. Naples, National Museum of Capodimonte 390 Workshop of Francesco Mezzarisa (after Francesco Salviati), Crucifixion with Mary Magdalene. London, British Museum 393

xiv 14.14 14.15 14.16 14.17

14.18 14.19 19.1 19.2 19.3 19.4

19.5

19.6 19.7

list of figures Workshop of Francesco Mezzarisa (after Francesco Salviati), Crucifixion with Mary Magdalene, detail. London, British Museum 394 Tintoretto, The Probatic Pool, detail. Venice, Church of San Rocco 396 Tintoretto, The Probatic Pool, Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, sala superiore 398 Lamento di quel tribulato di Strascino Campana Senese, sopra el male incognito (Venice, Niccolò Zoppino e Vincentio compagni: 1521), title page. Venice, Biblioteca Marciana 401 Tintoretto, Mary at the Jordan River meditating on the past, detail. Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, sala inferiore 405 Tintoretto, Mary at the Jordan River meditating on the future, detail. Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, sala inferiore 406 Pierre Aretin, Trois livres de l’humanité de Iesu Christ, [transl. Jean de Vauzelles] ([Lyon], 1539) 533 Quattro comedie del divino Pietro Aretino (London, 1588) 534 Nicolas Poussin, Massacre of the Innocents, oil on canvas, 146×171cm, ca. 1626, Musée Condé, Chantilly 536 [Francois-Felix Nogaret], L’Aretin françois, par un membre de l’Académie des dames, Larnaka [= Bruxelles?], [1792], title page, with the accompanying lines: “A tous les vits le con donne des loix, / Des voluptés c’est la source féconde. / Vits, couronnez le con, ce roi des rois, / Et que le foutre à chaque instant l’inonde.” Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale Paris 539 The actor Léon Lemadre as Pietro Aretino in the play Pierre d’Arezzo by Dumanoir and Dennery (Paris, 1838). Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale Paris 541 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, L’Arétin et l’envoyé de Charles Quint, oil on canvas, 41,5×32,5cm, 1848, Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon, inv. 2013.1.1 542 Anselm Feuerbach, Der Tod des Pietro Aretino, oil on canvas, 267.5×176.5cm, signed and dated 1854, Kunstmuseum Basel, deposit of the Gottfried Keller Foundation 1895, inv. 209 543

Timeline: Pietro Aretino in Context 1492

Pietro Aretino is born in Arezzo in the night between April 19 and April 20 to Margherita (Tita) Bonci (Del Boncio) and (probably) Luca di Domenico Gherardi. Some scholarly sources report his father’s name as Luca Del Tura. 1506–1507 Aretino moves to Perugia. 1512 January: he publishes his first work, the Opera nova, a collection of poems (Venice, Nicolò Zoppino). The title page hints at Aretino’s apprenticeship as painter: the author calls himself “Pietro pictore Aretino” (Pietro painter from Arezzo). 1516/17 After a sojourn in Siena, he moves to Rome, where he enjoys the patronage of Agostino Chigi and of Pope Leo x (Giovanni de’ Medici). He makes the acquaintance of writers and artists such as Giulio Romano, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Raffaello. 1517 October: start of the Protestant Reformation. Many among Aretino’s friends and acquaintances will (at least partially) sympathize with Reformed ideas. It is not unlikely that Aretino himself at some point subscribed to Reformed views. 1521 December 1: Pope Leo x dies. Aretino writes a number of pasquinades on the occasion of the conclave; his reputation as a satirical poet seems to be already well established. 1521–1522 He publishes the Lamento di uno cortigiano, a satiric capitolo on courtiers. 1522 January 9: election of Adrian vi (Adriaan Florensz, 1459–1523); the new papacy marks a dramatic change as Adrian is known for his austerity and does not tolerate the laxity of the papal curia. July: Aretino leaves Rome and travels around Central Italy (Arezzo, Firenze, Bologna). A printed pasquinade, the Lamento de m.o Pasquino per la partenza de la corte, fato con le cortigiane di Roma […] (post April 27, 1522) alludes to an aggression against Aretino. From July he is in Bologna. 1523 February: Federico Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, invites Aretino to join him at court. March: he sends to Rome a new, long Pasquinade, the Confession of master Pasquino (Confessione di maestro Pasquino). The pope tries to have him arrested. Probably to avoid the arrest, in spring he joins the condottiero Giovanni dalle Bande Nere in Reggio Emilia: they become close friends. September 14: Adrian vi dies.

xvi

1524

1525

1526 1527

1530 1531

timeline: pietro aretino in context November 26: Clement vii (Giulio de’ Medici) is elected pope. Aretino, who hoped in vain to obtain benefits from him, will later attack him with a violent sonnet (Sett’anni traditori). He spends the spring and part of the summer with Giovanni dalle Bande Nere. October: he returns to Rome. November: he is appointed Knight of Rhodes. December: Aretino hopes to foster his role within the curia and as an arbiter of international politics by publishing a canzone in praise of the pope, Laude di Clemente vii. He also publishes an exhortation to peace directed to Charles v and Francis i: Esortazione de la pace tra l’imperadore e il re di Francia. Between December 1524 and January 1525 Aretino writes and publishes a canzone in praise of Gian Matteo Giberti (Canzone in laude del Datario). In January he is introduced to the king of France, Francis i. Most likely in the first months of the year Aretino composes the Sonetti sopra i xvi modi. He probably had them printed in 1537, although the only extant printed copy bears a later date. February 25: Charles v defeats the French army of Francis i at Pavia. Also in the first months of the year Aretino writes his first comedy, La Cortigiana (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, ms. Magliabechiano vii 84). July 28: Achille della Volta wounds Aretino in an ambush. It is said that the instigator was the powerful cardinal Giovanni Matteo Giberti; recent scholarship tends to dismiss this hypothesis. September: Pietro Bembo publishes the Prose della volgar lingua (Venice, Giovanni Tacuino). October 13: Aretino leaves Rome headed for Mantua; once again, he joins the camp of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere. November: Giovanni dalle Bande Nere dies; the following month Aretino establishes himself in Mantua. Aretino begins writing Marfisa, a chivalric poem dedicated to Federico Gonzaga. March: Aretino moves to Venice; his residence will be the palace of Domenico Bolani on the Canal Grande. May 6, Sack of Rome. Aretino writes one of his most ferocious pasquinades, the frottola titled Pas vobis, brigate; he also writes a long canzone titled Deh avess’io quella terribil tromba and a capitolo titled Italia afflitta. In Bologna Clement vii crowns Charles v king of Italy. Aretino breaks off connections with Federico Gonzaga. A young poet, Antonio Brocardo, attacks Pietro Bembo. Aretino writes a series of sonnets against him that allegedly drive him to commit suicide. Aretino will long boast about

timeline: pietro aretino in context

1533

1534

1535

1536

1537 1538

1539

xvii

this episode, although he will also write a series of sonnets on the death of the young poet. February: Aretino publishes the comedy Il Marescalco. Francis i presents Aretino with a heavy gold chain. Alvise Gritti, brother of Andrea (doge of Venice and protector of Aretino) invites him to join him in Constantinople. Aretino apparently gives serious thought to this possibility but eventually declines. April: he publishes the Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia, fatto in Roma sotto una ficaia. The title page shows it to be printed in Paris instead of Venice (where most likely Marcolini printed it). Along with the 1536 Dialogo this work is known as Le sei giornate. June: he publishes La Passione di Giesù con due canzoni, una alla Vergine, et l’altra al Christianissimo. The canzone to the Virgin Mary will be republished separately at some point prior to 1538 in a revised version under the title Canzona alla Vergine Madre. August: he publishes a revised version of the comedy Cortigiana. October 13: election of Paul iii (Alessandro Farnese). November: he publishes I sette salmi della penitenzia di David. May: Aretino publishes I tre libri della humanità di Christo, a revised and expanded version of the 1534 Passione. He publishes the first three cantos of his chivalric novel Marfisa, and the first two cantos of another ultimately unfinished chivalric romance D’Angelica due primi canti, also known as De le lagrime d’Angelica. Publication of Dialogo, nel quale la Nanna il primo giorno insegna a la Pippa sua figliuola a esser puttana. Aretino, who had long been a supporter of the French party, turns to the Imperial side (upon receiving a pension of two hundred ducati). January: Aretino publishes the Stanze in lode di Madonna Angela Sirena. The beautiful engraving on the title page is attributed to Titian. January: Francesco Marcolini prints the first book of Aretino’s Letters. It is a groundbreaking publication, the first collection of letters of a living author in the vernacular. Aretino publishes Il Genesi con la visione di Noè (also with Marcolini). Marcolini prints the Ragionamento nel quale […] figura quattro suoi amici, che favellano de le Corti del Mondo, e di quella del Cielo. He undergoes a trial for blasphemy and (possibly) sodomy; he is forced to leave Venice temporarily. January: publishes a capitolo to Charles v on the death of the Duke of Urbino Francesco Maria i Della Rovere: A lo imperadore ne la morte del duca di. October: La Vita di Maria vergine appears in print.

xviii

timeline: pietro aretino in context

1540

Publishes his four capitoli “Allo Albicante”, “Al Duca di Fiorenza”, “Al Prencipe di Salerno”, “Al Re di Francia”. He publishes his (ultimately unfinished) parodic chivalric novel Li dui primi canti di Orlandino. December: Vita di Catherina vergine. Niccolò Franco publishes his Sonetti contra Pietro Aretino con la Priapeia. March: publication of the comedies Lo Hipocrito and Talanta. July 21: Paul iii establishes the new Roman Inquisition. August: Francesco Marcolini prints the second book of the Letters. Publishes the Vita di san Tomaso signor d’Aquino. Dialogo […] nel quale si parla del giuoco con moralità piacevole (also known as Carte parlanti) appears in print. July: outside Peschiera, on the Lake Garda, the emperor Charles v invites Aretino (following the duke of Urbino Guidubaldo ii Della Rovere) to ride at his right: it is a great sign of distinction. October: Aretino publishes Il capitolo et il sonetto in laude de lo imperatore, et a sua maestà da lui proprio recitati. Aretino publishes the Strambotti a la villanesca along with a reprint of the Stanze in lode di madonna Angela Sirena. February: publication of the third book of the Letters. End of May: he publishes his last comedy, Il filosofo. The play was originally composed in 1544. October: he publishes his only tragedy, L’Horatia. April: he writes and possibly publishes a capitolo in praise of Guidubaldo ii Della Rovere, duke of Urbino, along with a sonnet in praise of his wife Vittoria Farnese. His daughter Austria is born. Probably publishes the parodic chivalric novel Astolfeida. February 7: election of Julius iii (Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte). The new pope was born in a small town near Arezzo; Aretino hopes to be elected cardinal. The pope appoints him knight of St. Peter. The city of Arezzo appoints him Gonfaloniere. He publishes the fourth and fifth book of the Letters. April: he publishes an encomiastic capitolo in praise of the pope along with one in praise of Catherine of France: Ternali in gloria di Giulio terzo pontifice cristianissimamente magnanimo, et della maestà de la reina cristianissima. July: he collects in a volume a selection of letters addressed to him: Lettere scritte al signor Pietro Aretino. Gathers in a volume Genesi, Umanità, and Salmi (Venice, heirs of Aldo). He moves to the house of Leonardo Dandolo, on the Riva del Carbon.

1541 1542

1543

1544 1546

1547

1548 1550

1551

timeline: pietro aretino in context 1552

1553 1555 1556 1557

1559 1741

xix

May/October: Libro secondo delle lettere scritte al signor Pietro Aretino. He publishes with the heirs of Aldo Manuzio a volume containing La vita di Maria Vergine, di Caterina santa e di Tomaso Aquinate beato. He accompanies Guidubaldo Della Rovere on a trip to Rome, hoping in vain that the pope will appoint him cardinal. April 9: election of Marcellus ii (Marcello Cervini); the new pope dies on May 1. May 23: election of Paul iv (Gian Pietro Carafa). Aretino dies on October 21 in his home in Venice. Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari publishes the sixth and last book of Aretino’s Letters; it bears a dedication to the duke of Ferrara Ercole ii d’Este. It was probably prepared by Aretino around 1553–1554. Aretino’s opera omnia are put on the Index of Forbidden Books. The Brescian scholar Giammaria Mazzuchelli publishes the first “modern” biography of Aretino; a revised version appears in 1763.

Bibliographical Abbreviations Quotations from Aretino’s works are normally taken from the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere (Rome: Salerno Ed., 1992–) and given in abbreviated form, listed below. Poesie varie i Pietro Aretino, Poesie varie, t. i, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia-Angelo Romano (Rome, 1992). Poemi cavallereschi Pietro Aretino, Poemi cavallereschi, ed. Danilo Romei (Rome, 1995). Lettere i Pietro Aretino, Lettere, t. i, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Rome, 1997). Lettere ii Pietro Aretino, Lettere, t. ii, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Rome, 1998). Lettere iii Pietro Aretino, Lettere, t. iii, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Rome, 1999). Lettere iv Pietro Aretino, Lettere, t. iv, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Rome, 2000). Lettere v Pietro Aretino, Lettere, t. v, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Rome, 2001). Lettere vi Pietro Aretino, Lettere, t. vi, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Rome, 2002). lsa i Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Rome, 2003). lsa ii Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Rome, 2004). Teatro i Pietro Aretino, Teatro, t. i: Cortigiana (1525 e 1534), ed. Paolo Trovato, Federico Della Corte (Rome, 2010).

bibliographical abbreviations

xxi

Teatro ii Pietro Aretino, Teatro, t. ii: Il Marescalco. Lo Ipocrito. Talanta, ed. Giovanna Rabitti, Carmine Boccia, Enrico Garavelli (Rome, 2010). Teatro iii Pietro Aretino, Teatro, t. iii: Il Filosofo. L’Orazia, ed. Alessio Decaria, Federico Della Corte (Rome, 2005). Opere religiose i Pietro Aretino, Opere religiose, t. i: Genesi. Umanità di Cristo. Sette Salmi. Passione di Gesù, ed. Élise Boillet (Rome, 2017). Opere religiose ii Pietro Aretino, Opere religiose, t. ii: Vita di Santa Maria Vergine. Vita di Santa Caterina. Vita di San Tommaso, ed. Paolo Marini (Rome, 2011). Operette politiche e satiriche i Pietro Aretino, Operette politiche e satiriche, t. i: Ragionamento de le corti. Dialogo del giuoco, ed. Giuseppe Crimi (Rome, 2013). Operette politiche e satiriche ii Pietro Aretino, Operette politiche e satiriche, t. ii, ed. Marco Faini (Rome, 2012).

Other Abbreviations Cinquecentenario Pietro Aretino nel cinquecentenario della nascita, atti del Convegno di Roma-ViterboArezzo 28 settembre–1 ottobre 1992, Toronto 23–24 ottobre 1992, Los Angeles 27–29 ottobre 1992 (Rome, 1995). dbi Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960–).

Notes on Contributors Élise Boillet is a cnrs researcher at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance of the University of Tours (France). She is the author of a monograph on Aretino’s biblical works (L’Arétin et la Bible, Genève, 2007) and has provided the critical edition of these texts for the “Edizione Nazionale delle Opere”. She is also the author of several papers on Renaissance Italian writings on the Psalms. She has co-edited several collections of essays related to European and Italian biblical literature and culture, also providing an important bibliographical tool in this field (E. Ardissino, É. Boillet, Repertorio di letteratura biblica a stampa in italiano (ca 1462–1650), Turnhout [in press]). She has recently directed a research project on religious practices and the European urban space in the modern era (eudirem, https://eudirem.hypotheses.org/, 2016–2019). Maria Cristina Cabani is Professor of Italian literature in the Department of Philology, Literature, and Linguistics at the University of Pisa. She has participated in the organization of international conferences and exhibits. She has been part of the committee for the organization of the exhibit Orlando furioso 500 anni (Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti, 2016). She has organized and edited the proceedings of the conferences Alessandro Tassoni, poeta erudito, diplomatico nell’Europa dell’età moderna (2016) and Luigi Pulci, la Firenze laurenziana e il Morgante (2018). She is a member of the Accademia di Scienze, Lettere e Arti of Modena. Her main research interests are chivalric literature, epic poetry, and mock-heroic poetry from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. She has also published numerous studies on mock-heroic poetry. Her publications include Costanti ariostesche, Pisa, 1990, Fra omaggio e parodia. Petrarca e il petrarchismo nel Furioso, Pisa, 1990, Amici amanti. Coppie eroiche e sortite notturne nell’epica italiana, Napoli, 1996, La pianella di Scarpinello. Tassoni e la nascita dell’eroicomico, Lucca, 1999, L’occhio di Polifemo. Studi su Pulci, Tasso e Marino, Pisa, 2005, Eroi comici, Bari-Brescia, Pensa, 2010, Ariosto i volgari e i latini suoi, Lucca, 2016. Eleonora Carinci earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Recent positions include a Society for Renaissance Studies Rubinstein fellowship and a postdoctoral fellowship at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice within the erc Starting Grant “Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular: Rethinking Renaissance and Early Modern Intellectual History”, led by Marco Sgarbi. Her publications include a articles

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and chapters focusing on various authors including Vittoria Colonna, Chiara Matraini, Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella and Camilla Erculiani, as well as a modern edition of Camilla Erculiani’s Lettere di philosophia naturale (Agorà & Co 2016). She is the editor of the English translation of Erculiani’s work, forthcoming in “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series (Iter-acmrs 2019). She is currently working on a book on Felice Rasponi (Classiques Garnier 2021). Philip Cottrell is a lecturer in art history at University College Dublin and has a particular interest in sixteenth-century Venetian painting. He has published several articles in The Burlington Magazine, Art Bulletin, Venezia Cinquecento and Artibus et Historiae as well as essays and entries in several international exhibition catalogues and book anthologies. Alongside Peter Humfrey, he is the co-author of a forthcoming monograph on Bonifacio de’ Pitati. He has also published on a variety of other topics, including the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, the funeral monument of John Donne, and art collecting in nineteenth-century Britain. He has just completed a database project with the National Portrait Gallery, London, involving the digitization of the sketchbooks of its founding director Sir George Scharf. Giuseppe Crimi is Associate Professor of Italian at the Università Roma Tre. His research interests revolve mainly around Dante, comic poetry, games and literature, popular print as well as Pietro Aretino and sixteenth-century culture. He has edited Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamento de le corti and Dialogo del giuoco for the Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Aretino (Operette politiche e satiriche, vol. 1 [Rome, 2013]) is currently working on the edition of the works attributed to Pietro Aretino for the “Edizione nazionale”. He is co-director of the journal L’Ellisse. Studi storici di letteratura italiana. Cathy Ann Elias is a Professor in the School of Music at DePaul University, a Distinguished Professor in the Honors College, and a Fellow in the Department of Catholic Studies. Concurrently she is completing a M.A. in Divinity at Catholic Theological Union. Her research covers a wide range of topics. Articles include “Claudio Baglioni, the Apollo of musica leggera” in Musica pop e testi in Italia dal 1960 a oggi (2015), “Sercambi’s Novelliere and Croniche di Lucca as evidence for musical entertainment in the 14th-Century” in The Italian Novelle (2002), “Erasmus and the Lying Mirror: More Thoughts on Imitatio and Mid SixteenthCentury Chanson Masses” in The Journal of the Alamire Foundation (2016), and

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“Liberation Theology: Affirmation and Homage in Three Brazilian Masses” in Christian Music in the Americas (2021). She is completing an edition of Antonio Buonavita, Il primo libro de madrigali a quattro voci (1587) and Il primo libro de madrigali a sei voci (1591) for the American Institute of Musicology. She is also working on editions, Salvatore Di Cataldo, Tutti i principii de’canti dell’Ariosto posti in musica (1559) and Madrigali di Pietro Havente Libro I (1556). Marco Faini is Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Universities of Venice and Toronto. He was Andrew W. Mellon at Villa I Tatti. The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Research Associate at the Department of Italian, University of Cambridge, and Stipendiat at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. His research interests revolve around unorthodox literature and its connections with religious dissent (Teofilo Folengo, Pietro Aretino, Anton Francesco Doni); sixteenth-century devotional literature; private devotion in early modern Italy. He is currently working on a book project on doubt in Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century, tentatively entitled Standing at the Crossroads. Cultures of Doubt in Early Modern Italy. Augusto Gentili was professor of Art History of the Veneto at the University La Sapienza, Rome (1983–1997) and of History of modern art at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (1997–2013). He works on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian painting with an interdisciplinary approach based on history and iconology in this context. He is currently working on documents, sources, and contexts related to Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. He has a special interest in problems of theory, methodology, and history of artistic historiography. He has published monographs on Carpaccio, Lotto, and Titian and more than 200 articles and short monographs on painting from Venice and the Veneto from Mantegna to Veronese, and a collection of essays La bilancia dell’arcangelo. Vedere i dettagli nella pittura veneziana del Cinquecento (Rome 2009 and 2011) and a major monograph on Titian (Milan, 2012). He was the founder and served as director and editor of the journal Venezia Cinquecento until 2015 when after twenty-five years it ceased publication. Harald Hendrix is Professor and chair of Italian Studies at the University of Utrecht, and served as director of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (2014–2019). With a combined background in Cultural History, Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, he has published widely on the European reception of Italian Renais-

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sance and Baroque culture, on the early-modern aesthetics of the non-beautiful as well as on the intersections of literary culture, memory and tourism. Recent book publications include Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory (New York 2012), Dynamic Translations in the European Renaissance (Rome 2011), The Turn of the Soul. Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature (Leiden-Boston 2012), The History of Futurism: Precursors, Protagonists, Legacies (Lanham MD 2012), Cyprus and the Renaissance, 1450–1650 (Turnhout 2013), and The Idea of Beauty in Italian Literature and Language (Leiden-Boston 2019). Paul Larivaille has for thirty years taught Italian Literature at the University of Paris x Nanterre. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pietro Aretino and of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli. His studies focus mainly on Italian civilization in the sixteenth century. He has published several essays and translations and a biography of Pietro Aretino (Rome 1997). His publications include: Pietro Aretino fra Rinascimento e Manierismo, Rome 1980; Poesia e ideologia: letture della «Gerusalemme liberata» (Naples 1987); La vie quotidienne en Italie au temps de Machiavel (Paris 1989, prize of the Académie française 1980); La Pensée politique de Machiavel. Les discours sur la première decade de Tite-Live (Nancy 1982); L’ Érotisme discret de l’Arioste et autres essais sure le «Roland furieux» (Lille 2010); Letture machiavelliane (Rome 2017); Roberto Ridolfi, Vie de Machiavel, traduction par. P.L. (Paris 2019). His editions include: L’Arioste, Satire / Les Satires, texte italien établi par Cesare Segre, édition bilingue, notes de Cesare Segre et P. L., traductions de P.L. (Paris, 2014); La Veniexiana / La Comédie vénitienne, texte établi par Emilio Lovarini, introd. trad. et notes de P. L. (Paris, 2017). Chiara Lastraioli is Professor of Italian Studies at the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance and in the Faculty of Languages and Literatures at the University of Tours. Her teaching and research explore the relation of Italian and French Renaissance Literatures to theology, propaganda, book trade, and the history of scholarship. She has published numerous essays on Renaissance authors and printers, as well as a monographic volume on Pasquinate, grillate, pelate e altro Cinquecento librario minore. She is also the coordinator of the program Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes, co-editor of the review Italique, of the book collections Savoir de Mantice and Travaux du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, and the principal investigator of the project editef on “Italian Books and Book Collections in Early Modern French Speaking Countries.”

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Paolo Marini is Associate Professor of Philology of Italian Literature at Università della Tuscia. He has worked mainly on Renaissance literature. He has published critical editions of works by authors such as Ludovico Ariosto, Bernardo Bibbiena, Benvenuto Cellini, Ludovico Dolce, and Girolamo Ruscelli as well as essays on these writers. In 2010 he edited the collection of studies Saggi aretiniani by Alessandro Luzio (Manziana, Vecchiarelli). He has published Pietro Aretino’s Opere religiose (vol. 2: Vita di Maria Vergine / Vita di santa Caterina / Vita di san Tommaso, Roma, 2013) for the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pietro Aretino. He is currently working on a critical edition of Dolce’s lyric poetry and of Bibbiena’s correspondence. Ian Frederick Moulton is President’s Professor of English and Cultural History in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. He has published widely on the representation of gender and sexuality in early modern European literature. His most recent book is Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance (Palgrave, 2014). Paolo Procaccioli is Associate Professor of Italian at the Università della Tuscia. He has worked mainly on vernacular literature in the Renaissance, focusing in particular on the critical interpretations of Dante’s works, on parodic texts, on the novella tradition after Boccaccio, and on the “irregular” literature of the sixteenth century. He has worked on Cristoforo Landino, Pietro Aretino, Anton Francesco Doni, Ortensio Lando, Francesco Marcolini, Girolamo Ruscelli, Ludovico Dolce, and has published critical editions and commented editions of their works. In collaboration with the international group of scholars affiliated with the research group Cinquecento Plurale, he has organized numerous conferences and seminars on Renaissance culture. He has edited Aretino’s six books of Letters as well as the two volumes of Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino for the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pietro Aretino. Brian Richardson is Emeritus Professor of Italian Language at the University of Leeds and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research interests centre on the history of the Italian language and the history of the circulation of texts in manuscript, in print and orally in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. His publications include Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (1994), Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (1999), Manuscript

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Culture in Renaissance Italy (2009), Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy (2020) and an edition of Giovan Francesco Fortunio’s Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua (2001). Angelo Romano received a fellowship from the cnr (National Center for Research) to study with Giovanni Aquilecchia in London, where he specialized in sixteenth-century Italian literature. Together with Aquilecchia he has published the first volume of Aretino’s Poesie varie for the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1991). His research interests cover the Cinquecento (Pasquinesque satire, Pietro Aretino, Ludovico Dolce) as well as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Vincenzo Monti). His research presently deals with literature and the Reformation. He has devoted studies to Olimpia Morata and Celio Secondo Curione and has organized the edition and translation of Curione’s Pasquillorum tomi duo (with Damiano Nevoli) as well as of his Araneus (1540–1544). Deanna Shemek is Professor of Italian and European Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (1998) and of In Continuous Expectation: Isabella d'Este's Reign of letters (2021). She has published essays on Aretino, Ariosto, Boccaccio, and others. Her collaborative editing includes Phaethon’s Children: The Este Court and its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara (2005), Writing Relations: American Scholars in Italian Archives (2008), and Itinera chartarum: 150 anni dell’Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2019). She edited and co-translated Adriana Cavarero’s Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender (1995). Her edition and translation of the Selected Letters of Isabella d’Este (2017) won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s 2018 prize for translation. She co-directs idea: Isabella d’Este Archive, an online project for study of the Italian Renaissance: http://isabelladeste.web.unc.edu Jane Tylus is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, where she also has a teaching appointment in the Divinity School. Recent books include Siena, City of Secrets (2015), the coedited Cultures of Early Modern Translation (with Karen Newman, 2015), and The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain (with Gerry Mulligan, 2011), a translation and edition of the complete poetry of Gaspara Stampa (2010), and Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literature, Literacy, and the Signs of Others (2009), which received the Howard Marraro Prize for Outstanding Work

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in Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association. She has been General Editor for the journal I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance since 2013. Tylus is currently at work on a monograph, “Saying Good-bye in the Renaissance: Meditations on Leavetaking,” and a collection of essays on music and translation. She is an honorary member of the Accademia degli Intronati, Siena. Paola Ugolini is Associate Professor of Italian at the University at Buffalo (suny). She is the author of The Court and Its Critics. Anti-Court Sentiment in Early Modern Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2020) and the co-editor and co-translator (with Molly M. Martin) of Veronica Gambara: Complete Poems (University of Toronto Press, The Other Voice, 2014). She has also published articles on early modern satires, on Ludovico Ariosto, Matteo Bandello, and on Gaspara Stampa. Raymond B. Waddington is the author of five books, three on Aretino, eighty articles, and co-editor of three books. He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Foundation for the Humanities. He was senior editor of The Sixteenth Century Journal for eighteen years. Waddington’s 2004 book Aretino’s Satyr received the Modern Language Associations’ Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, and translated into Italian (2009). He is professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis.

Introduction Marco Faini and Paola Ugolini

1

Who Was Pietro Aretino?

In 1647, Girolamo Ghilini (1589–1668), a historian, canon, and a member of the famous Academy of the Unknown (Accademia degli Incogniti) of Venice, devoted to Pietro Aretino a short biographic profile in his Teatro d’huomini letterati (A theatre of learned men). Aretino’s biography immediately preceded that of Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), the ‘other Pietro,’ so as to signal their mutual relationship, despite the gaping cultural and social differences that existed between them. In the concluding section of his biography of Aretino, Ghilini recalled how Aretino, after his death in 1556, was buried in the now demolished church of San Luca. To his tomb a Latin epitaph was appended proclaiming how Aretino had badmouthed everyone except for God, for he had never known Him. In order to make clear to everybody who the buried man was, a vernacular version was also added to the monument: Qui giace l’Aretin amaro tosco Del sem’human, la cui lingua trafisse Et vivi, et morti; d’Iddio mal non disse Et si scusò co ’l dir: “Io no ’l conosco”. (Here lies Aretino, bitter poison / Of the human seed, whose tongue pierced / The living and the dead; he never badmouthed God / Of which he apologized saying: “I do not know Him”). As Ghilini comments, this epitaph “goes around even in the mouth of commoners”.1 This ironic epitaph hinted at Pietro Aretino’s status as an irreverent mouthpiece for anything that stood against morality, and also as an atheist and a libertine. The first line plays on a pun between tosco (poison) and Tosco (from Tuscany, since Arezzo, Aretino’s birthplace is in Tuscany). The epitaph became a proverb of sorts, and is also known in other versions—with the first line reading “poeta Tosco” (Tuscan poet) instead of “amaro tosco.” Francesco Domenico 1 Girolamo Ghilini, Teatro d’huomini letterati […] (Venice, Guerigli: 1647), 192. For a discussion of a slightly different version of this epitaph, see also Harald Hendrix’s essay “Aretino’s Troubled Afterlife.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_002

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Guerrazzi reports it in this form in a nineteenth-century text, where it is quoted as being the product of the sixteenth-century historian Paolo Giovio, and the result of a contest between him and Aretino.2 Intriguingly, despite the lack of sources attesting to its authenticity (Guerrazzi’s claim itself is not supported by sixteenth-century sources), the epitaph has struck the modern imagination, to the point of being believed as the original epitaph engraved on Aretino’s tomb, or even to have been dictated by Aretino himself. However, Ghilini did not indulge in the lurid details of Aretino’s biography, which appealed so much to many of his contemporaries—a heavy burden of often apocryphal episodes that has long prevented an unbiased approach to Aretino’s work. His short biographical profile is sober and balanced; he certainly remembers the prohibition of Aretino’s oeuvre by the Inquisition (in 1559) and that he was famous for his scurrilous writings. He also adds, however, that his “sacred and spiritual works” are “all replete with great beauty and doctrine, and show his marvelous intelligence, most apt to every literary enterprise.”3 The anecdotes concerning Aretino’s epigraph are representative of the reputation that this prolific and multi-talented author has enjoyed throughout the centuries, and of the challenges that an analysis of his life and works still presents. Called both divine and infamous, known as a court poet, a pimp, a chronicler, and a pornographer, Aretino has successfully outwitted attempts to integrate his life and works into a coherent narrative. In addition, Aretino was also the first known author to have made a living through his writing, thus prefiguring the modern notion of author. Born in 1492 to a humble cobbler, Pietro “from Arezzo” (hence Aretino) climbed the social ladder in unprecedented ways. Forty years of literary activity made him into a tireless innovator of literary genres and a point of reference for the Italian and European cultural scenes. The very year of his birth seems to represent a sort of sign. In the year 1492, the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent marked the beginning of the end of the so-called ‘freedom’ of Italy. In the opening page of his History of Italy, Francesco Guicciardini nostalgically described the long-lasting period of peace between Italian states that had fostered an unprecedented cultural and artistic development. This condition came to an abrupt end, as is well known, in 1494, when the French army led by Charles viii invaded Italy, thus marking the beginning of the ‘Italian wars’ that came to an end only in 1559. At the same time, the early 1490s saw the (often premature) deaths of some of the most notable Italian humanists:

2 Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Scritti (Florence, 1948), 188. 3 Ghilini, Teatro, 192.

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Politian (1454–1494), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Ermolao Barbaro (1454–1493), Giorgio Merula (1430–1494). The sudden disappearance of an entire generation of humanists caused in their contemporaries a sense of loss that is evident in numerous documents; at the same time, it exposed unforeseen spaces for emerging writers. The model of the “letterato cortigiano,” or the courtly writer, became quickly problematic for the generations of writers born in the 1470s and 1480s who all seem to show some degree of discomfort towards it. Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) was never the kind of humanist and civil servant that his father Bernardo (1433–1519) was. Ludovico Ariosto’s ambivalence towards the Ferrarese court is well known (Ariosto was born in 1474); and it is almost superfluous to recall the complicated relation between Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and the Medici. While the court as a cultural model embodied in the several minor courts of Italy retained some of its attractions, it soon became apparent that other, more effective means were available to writers who wanted to make a living out of their talent. These means were connected with the booming print industry that determined a cultural shift. The increasing demand for books by an ever-widening audience caused the vernacular to take the place of Latin. Writing in a pleasant, accessible vernacular became key to editorial success, and a proper humanistic background was no longer a necessary pre-requisite for a literary career. Pietro Bembo, who had a traditional training in Latin and Greek chose to write mainly in the vernacular, eventually becoming the ‘legislator’ of the Italian language. Aretino, who was born less than a generation after Bembo, no longer felt the need for a humanistic education. On the contrary, he always boasted of his lack of classical studies as a sign of distinction: the extraordinary gifts received by Nature more than compensated for the lack of a bookish culture that he perceived more as an obstacle than an advantage. Aretino made his debut as a painter, as declared in the title page of his first printed work, the Opera nova (1512), an attempt at Petrarchan poetry, by “Pietro painter from Arezzo.” Aretino always enjoyed styling himself as a connoisseur and a collector. His works and letters are replete with references to artists, works of art, and artefacts of all sorts.4 The sculptor Jacopo Sansovino (1486– 1527) and Titian (1488/90–1576) were among his closest friends but one should not forget his intimate friendship with Raphael (1483–1520), Giulio Romano (1499[?]–1546), as well as his turbulent relationship with Michelangelo (1475– 1564). Aretino always prided himself on his understanding of art although he

4 Lara Sabbadin, Materiali per lo studio della produzione di beni suntuari documentati nelle opere di Pietro Aretino e ‘dintorni’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Padua, 2013).

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probably never achieved major accolades as a practitioner. In a letter to the sculptor Simone Bianco in May 1548 he wrote that, according to Sansovino and Titian, if he had been as good a sculptor or painter as he was a sharp critic, he would have been superior to many of those who are “inferior to no one.”5 At some point around 1516, Aretino moved to Rome where he discovered the secret to his originality as a writer thanks to the recently established vogue of satirical poems known as pasquinades.6 The biting satire of the pasquinades and the mask of Pasquino first gave Aretino a taste of fame. Aretino was able to turn an anonymous and conventional poetic mode into a personal language, and made it his trademark. Although the origins of Aretino’s myth as a Pasquinesque poet are murky, and scholarship is still grappling with the blurry corpus of his satirical writings, to his contemporaries Aretino and Pasquino became almost synonyms. Aretino cunningly exploited the flow of satirical poems attached to the Roman statue known as ‘Pasquino’, and the peculiar nature of a literary genre in which the notion of authorship was weak to say the least. Appropriating other authors’ compositions, as well as neglecting to acknowledge some of his own (at some point he claimed to have written hundreds of poems of which he had no memory), Aretino was able to create the mask of an author equally able to praise and please his patrons, and to threaten and destroy them.7 However, the language of the pasquinades and the mask of Pasquino soon became too small for Aretino. Yet his use of his literary works to ask for favors, and even to blackmail potential and ongoing patrons became the formula of his international success, for better or worse. The intrigues of the Roman papal court that were the subject of Aretino’s pasquinades became also the theme of his first comedy, meaningfully titled La cortigiana (The Courtesan; 1525). Aretino’s tumultuous days in Rome came to an end shortly after the publication of his controversial pornographic sonnets 5 Lettere iv, 394–395. 6 On this genre see Operette politiche e satiriche ii. See also: Valerio Marucci-Antonio MarzoAngelo Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane del Cinquecento (Rome, 1983); Valerio Marucci (ed.), Pasquinate del Cinque e Seicento (Rome, 1988); Antonio Marzo (ed.), Pasquino e dintorni. Testi pasquineschi del Cinquecento (Rome, 1990); Chrysa Damianaki-Paolo Procaccioli-Angelo Romano (eds.), Ex marmore. Pasquini, pasquinate, pasquinisti nell’Europa del Cinquecento, Atti del Colloquio internazionale Lecce-Otranto 17–19 novembre 2005 (Manziana, 2006); Chiara Lastraioli, Pasquinate, grillate, pelate e altro Cinquecento librario minore (Manziana, 2012); Gennaro Tallini, “ ‘Iste omnes lacerat’: Antonio Lelio e la metamorfosi di Pasquino: critica politica e satira umanistica contro Leone x nel primo Cinquecento Romano,” in Paola Baseotto-Omar Khalaf (eds.), Voci del dissenso nel Rinascimento europeo (Mantua, 2018), 177– 201. 7 See Marco Faini, “ ‘E poi in Roma ognuno è l’Aretino’: Pasquino, Aretino and the Concealed Self,” Renaissance and Reformation, 40 (2017): 161–185.

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known as I modi (The Positions) based on a series of engravings by the artist Giulio Romano.8 An assassination attempt in 1525, allegedly (but unlikely) perpetrated on behalf of the powerful Cardinal Giovanni Matteo Giberti, gives a sense of the threat posed by Aretino as well as the measure of his fame. Aretino was forced to leave the city—sparing himself the dramatic experience of the Sack of Rome—and took refuge at the Gonzaga court in Mantua. The “scourge of princes” (as Ludovico Ariosto defined him in the Orlando Furioso) thus found himself in the difficult position of court poet. In 1527 Aretino moved to Venice and became a protégé of Doge Andrea Gritti. The years spent in Venice, especially the 1530s, were a turning point in Aretino’s career. Thanks to the possibilities offered by the print market, Aretino was finally able to stop depending on patronage and to make a living from his literary works. It was in Venice where Aretino became the first author in the modern sense, turning the figure of the writer into a salaried professional. After seeking the patronage of the Medici popes (Leo x and Clement vii) in Rome, Aretino was now free to extend the network of his patrons, including not only Italian lords, but also the king of France, François i, and the emperor Charles v. In Venice, he established a productive collaboration with an innovative printer, Francesco Marcolini (?–1559): Marcolini printed beautiful editions of Aretino’s works, often displaying elegant woodcuts showing Aretino’s portrait.9 This was part of Aretino’s careful strategy intended to multiply his presence and to build a recognizable persona. While in Venice Aretino forged a solid relation with Titian. Aretino often accompanied Titian’s portraits of the great ones of Italy and Europe with ekphrastic sonnets. It was a well-established plan to mutually reinforce each other’s relevance, extolling each other’s craft; to re-instate the arts in a prominent position; and to vaunt the protection of powerful individuals, while also stressing the artists’ role in promoting the public image of those in power.10 In Venice Aretino had to come to terms with the towering

8 9

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See Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1999). On Marcolini see Amedeo Quondam, “Nel giardino del Marcolini. Un editore veneziano tra Aretino e Doni,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 157 (1980): 75–116; Paolo Procaccioli-Paolo Temeroli-Vanni Tesei (eds.), Un giardino per le arti: “Francesco Marcolino da Forlì.” La vita, l’opera, il catalogo (Bologna, 2009). On Aretino’s portraits see Élise Boillet, “L’autore e il suo editore. I ritratti di Pietro Aretino nelle stampe di Marcolini (1534–1553),” in Harald Hendrix-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Officine del nuovo. Sodalizi fra letterati, artisti ed editori nella cultura italiana fra Riforma e Controriforma (Manziana, 2008), 181–201. On Aretino and Titian see Luba Freedman, Titian’s Portraits through Aretino’s Lens (University Park, PA, 1995); Paolo Procaccioli (ed.), In utrumque paratus. Aretino e Arezzo, Aretino a Arezzo: in margine al ritratto di Sebastiano del Piombo, Atti del colloquio internazionale per

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figure of Pietro Bembo. Aretino had long proclaimed his distance from the followers and imitators of Petrarch; Bembo was the most prominent among them. However, Aretino’s attitude toward Petrarch and Petrarchism underwent several changes and adjustments, which eventually led him to share at least some of Bembo’s views on poetry.11 Bembo, besides being one of the leading European intellectuals, had been appointed historiographer of the Most Serene Republic in 1530. His immense cultural and social influence inspired in Aretino a respectful attitude. In 1548, after Bembo’s death, Aretino wrote to his nephew Giovan Matteo, recalling an episode that took place in Rome at the time of Clement vii. After riding with Aretino the whole day, Bembo allegedly told the pope that he was leaving Rome but he was leaving “another me” in the city.12 This identification with the recently deceased cardinal was the peak of a process of approach to Bembo on the part of Aretino. Already in the early 1530s, when the poet Antonio Brocardo wrote some sonnets against Bembo, Aretino had intervened with a series of violent sonnets that allegedly pushed Brocardo to commit suicide (in 1531). Despite praising Brocardo after his death in a series of sonnets, Aretino always boasted to have been the author of the infamous sonnets leading him to his premature death.13 When Bembo was appointed cardinal in March 1539 (he was cardinal in pectore from December 20, 1538), Aretino began to hope that the same honor could befall him. It was probably with this goal in sight that he republished the whole corpus of his devotional works in 1551/52, when the reigning pope was Julius iii (Antonio Ciocchi Del Monte), also from Arezzo. Pivotal to Aretino’s identity as a professional writer was the invention of his correspondence as a literary genre per se. The publication of six volumes of let-

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il 450° anniversario della morte di Pietro Aretino, Arezzo, 21 ottobre 2006 (Rome, 2008); Raymond B. Waddington, Titian’s Aretino. A Contextual Study of all the Portraits (Florence, 2018); Francesco Sberlati, L’infame. Storia di Pietro Aretino (Venice, 2018), 191–212; Paolo Procaccioli (ed.), «Pietro pictore Arretino». Una parola complice per le arti (Venice, 2019); Anna Bisceglia-Matteo Ceriana-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), «Inchiostro per colore». Arte e artisti in Pietro Aretino, foreword by Enrico Malato-Eike D. Schmidt (Rome, 2019) ; Anna Bisceglia-Matteo Ceriana-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Pietro Aretino e l’arte del Rinascimento, exhib. cat. (Florence, 2019). Paolo Procaccioli, “Pietro Aretino sirena di antipetrarchismo. Flussi e riflussi di una poetica della militanza,” in Antonio Corsaro-Harald Hendrix-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Autorità, modelli e antimodelli fra Riforma e Controriforma (Manziana, 2007), 103–129. Lettere v, 81–82. Danilo Romei, “Pietro Aretino tra Bembo e Brocardo (e Bernardo Tasso),” in Angelo Romano-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Studi sul Rinascimento italiano—Italian Renaissance Studies: In memoria di Giovanni Aquilecchia (Manziana, 2005), 148–157; Antonello Fabio Caterino, “Ancora sulla polemica tra il Brocardo, il Bembo e l’Aretino: Fasi, documenti e fazioni,” Humanistica. An Internationl Journal of Early Renaissance Studies, forthcoming.

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ters by Aretino (from 1538 to the posthumous volume of 1557), accompanied by two volumes of letters addressed to him, was fundamental in his self-fashioning as a crucial figure in the literary and artistic arena as well as in the political world, both in Italy and abroad. Before he died in 1556, Aretino could pride himself on his recognition as an interlocutor to Europe’s political and cultural elites, and as the author of works ranging from verse and prose satires to chivalric romances, from pornographic dialogues to religious and hagiographic writings. From the 1530s onward Aretino’s life was comparatively poor in events, but extremely rich in terms of literary achievements. He established himself in Palazzo Bolani, on the Grand Canal, from where he was able to weave a thick network of cultural and political relations. A curious man, fond of all sorts of arts—painting, music, architecture—Aretino established around himself what he termed an ‘Academy’: a circle of young scholars and writers with whom he entertained often conflicted relations (as was the case with two witty and talented writers, Niccolò Franco and Anton Francesco Doni). Aretino’s literary production was impressive: he tried his hand at almost all contemporary genres. We have already mentioned his satirical writings and his Petrarchan poems. It is worth noting that Aretino would never quit occupying himself in these kinds of poetry. Although he famously rejected the practice of imitating Petrarch (a powerful stance against Pietro Bembo, the major supporter of such practice), Aretino promptly recognized the legitimizing effect that producing Petrarchan poetry could generate in the eyes of contemporary literary society. He was ready to take advantage of the increasing success of printed anthologies of lyrical poetry;14 and as early as 1537 he published a collection of poems in Petrarchan style, the Stanze in lode di madonna Angela Sirena, probably in an attempt to gain attention and recognition by Bembo himself.15 Modern readers are certainly puzzled by Aretino’s production from the 1530s and early 1540s. As a matter of fact, he wrote comedies (Marescalco, a rewriting of the Cortigiana in 1534, Talanta, Filosofo, Ipocrito), chivalric romances (although they remain mostly unfinished) and, most notably, the two dialogues that go under the name of Sei giornate. The Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia (1534) and the Dialogo (1536), masterpieces of erotic and pornographic

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See Marco Faini, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle Rime di Aretino: le antologie a stampa (e una rara miscellanea di strambotti),” in Dentro il Cinquecento. Per Danilo Romei (Manziana, 2016), 97–142. On the relationship between Aretino and Bembo see Paolo Procaccioli, “Due re in Parnaso: Aretino e Bembo nella Venezia del doge Gritti,” in Giorgio Patrizi (ed.), Sylva: studi in onore di Nino Borsellino (Rome, 2002), vol. 1, 207–231; Sberlati, L’infame, 179–191.

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literature, are in fact a tremendously effective attempt at reversing the ethical principles set out for European elites by Baldassarre Castiglione in his Libro del Cortegiano (1528), and a biting satire of contemporary society. In them, Aretino ferociously lampoons the members of the clergy, making even more striking the fact that, in the very same years, he was busy elaborating a complex rewriting of the Penitential Psalms (Sette salmi della penitenza di David, 1534); a book on the Passion of Christ (Passione di Gesù, 1534); a book on the humanity of Christ (Umanità di Cristo, in fact a reworking of the Passione, 1535), and a book on the Genesis (Genesi, 1538). Scholars (such as Christopher Cairns, Élise Boillet, and Raymond B. Waddington among others) have long reflected on the nature of these works and of Aretino’s religious inspiration.16 Although the ultimate meaning of these writings is still unclear, it is certainly safe to affirm that when writing these religious works Aretino was not merely trying to please his patrons. Despite being removed from the court of Rome (in those decades probably the main court in Italy) Aretino continued to reflect on the nature of the court and on its effect on the psychology of courtiers, and on their ethical principles. He expressed such reflections on courts and courtiers in the Ragionamento delle Corti (Dialogue on Courts, 1538). Is the court the place for self-affirmation, or is it just a place where one’s true self is brutally effaced? And if the court has, among its nefarious effects, that of pushing courtiers to simulation and dissimulation, how is it possible to understand one’s true identity? Aretino further extended his interest in proto-psychology in a rather neglected work, the Dialogo del giuoco, also known as Carte parlanti (1543).17 A dialogue on the game of cards, in which the cards themselves discuss the various typologies of players, this work resembles an exercise in social physiognomy and psychology. In the 1540s, besides the aforementioned comedies and the Dialogo del giuoco, Aretino wrote three hagiographic works at the behest of his patron Alfonso d’Avalos and of his wife, Maria d’Aragona: La vita di Maria Vergine (The life of the Virgin Mary, 1539); La vita di santa Caterina (The life of the virgin Catherine, 1540); and La vita di San Tomaso d’Aquino (The Life of St Thomas Aquinas, 1543). At the same time, he kept on experimenting with literary gen-

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Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice. Researches on Aretino and his Circle in Venice (1527–1556) (Florence, 1985); Élise Boillet, L’Aretin et la Bible (Geneva, 2007); Raymond B. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire and Self-Projection in SixteenthCentury Literature and Art (Toronto, 2004) and Subverting the System in Renaissance Italy (Farnham-Burlington, VT, 2013). The most recent edition of the text by Giuseppe Crimi has restored the original title, Dialogo nel quale si parla del giuoco. See Operette politiche e satiriche i.

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res, writing a regular tragedy, the Orazia (1546, dedicated to the pontiff Paul iii). Most of all, he continued to write letters, some of which should be considered true masterpieces in the field of literary and art criticism. Aretino died in 1556 and left behind a legacy of attributed works (explored in this volume by Giuseppe Crimi), and a black legend that lasted for two centuries, until the Brescian erudite Giammaria Mazzuchelli (1707–1765) wrote Aretino’s first documented and reliable biography (1741, and 1763).18 In the years to come, the exceptionality of the figure of Aretino would be recognized by some influential scholars. At the end of the 19th-century, Jacob Burckhardt called him “the greatest railer of modern times,” also pointing out that Aretino may be considered the father of modern journalism.19 Burckhardt acknowledged Aretino’s literary talent and capacity for observation, and yet considered him someone not burdened with principles to the point of defining him as a beggar for the favor of the powerful, and stated that Aretino “only reviled the world, and not God,”20 judging his religious writings as mere self-serving attempts at obtaining a cardinal’s hat or at fending off any unwanted attention from the Inquisition. In the twentieth century, the publication of biographies of Aretino in English, Edward Hutton’s Aretino, Scourge of Princes (1922), Thomas Caldecott Chubb’s Aretino: Scourge of Princes (1946), and James Cleugh’s The Divine Aretino (1966) resulted in a renewed interest in his works among Anglo-American scholars. Yet, to many, Aretino remained, and partially remains, the scurrilous and licentious writer of pornographic sonnets and dialogues (suffice it to recall the numerous sexy B-movies dedicated to or inspired by him in Italy in the 1970s),21 and a morally questionable master of the art of blackmailing. It would be impossible, and probably beyond the scope of this Introduction, to assess here the huge corpus of scholarship on Aretino. Suffice it to say that it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that scholars belonging to the so-called “historical school” (scuola storica), fueled by a positivist, although not always unbiased attitude, undertook systematic archival work on Aretino, digging up from local archives and manuscript sources a wealth of information. Alessandro Luzio, Rodolfo Renier, Vittorio Rossi, and Abdelkader Salza are only few of

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Giammaria Mazzuchelli, La vita di Pietro Aretino (Padova, Giuseppe Comino: 1741; Brescia, Pietro Pianta: 1763). Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1st edition 1860; London, 1995), 107. On this point, see also Raymond B. Waddington’s essay in this volume. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 110. On Aretino’s fortune see Sberlati, L’infame, esp. last chapter, and Harald Hendrix’s essay (“Aretino’s Troubled Afterlife”) in this volume.

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the scholars who contributed to the rediscovery of Aretino. Paul Larivaille’s 1972 dissertation, L’Aretin entre Renaissance et Manierisme, 1492–1537, represented a turning point in recent scholarship.22

2

The Companion to Pietro Aretino Project: Aims and Scope

Although recent decades have witnessed a renewed interest in Aretino’s works, a lot remains to be done to overcome the scholarly prejudice that has for a long time relegated Aretino’s writings to the field of marginal—or often even amoral—literature, and reduced this complex figure to stereotypes. The Edizione Nazionale of Aretino’s complete works, which was begun in the early 1990s, is now almost complete. The entry devoted to Aretino in the recent Catalogue of the autographs of the Italian writers has allowed to map Aretino’s autographs as well as to better understand Aretino’s strategies of publication (manuscript versus or along print) and to shed light on some crucial episodes of his life.23 At the same time, new documents have emerged from local archives that have improved our knowledge of Aretino’s familial background.24 The discovery and publication of previously unknown or neglected works, and new editions of well-known works in philologically accurate versions offer scholars the opportunity to reconsider Aretino’s literary contributions—contributions that until recently have often been available only in unreliable or incomplete editions. Aretino has raised an increasing interest also in the English-speaking world: Raymond B. Waddington’s monograph Aretino’s Satyr (2004) was crucial when it appeared, as was Bette Talvacchia’s Taking Positions. On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, 1999). Equally influential were Paul Larivaille’s biography titled Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1997), and Paolo Procaccioli’s numerous studies and editions of texts by and on Aretino (especially of his correspondence). Almost all of these scholars have contributed an essay to our companion. The Companion to Pietro Aretino intends to participate in this lively and renewed scholarly interest in Aretino’s works by gathering some of the most 22 23

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Partially translated into Italian: Pietro Aretino fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome, 1980). Paolo Marini, “Pietro Aretino,” in Matteo Motolese-Paolo Procaccioli-Emilio Russo (eds.), Autografi dei letterati italiani, vol. 1: Il Cinquecento (Rome, 2009), 13–36; Paolo Procaccioli, “Le carte prima del libro: di Pietro Aretino cultore di scrittura epistolare,” in Guido Baldassarri et alii (eds.), «Di mano propria»: gli autografi dei letterati italiani (Rome, 2010), 319–377. Teresa D’Alessandro Camaiti, “Documentazione locale su Pietro Aretino,” in In utrumque paratus, 55–76.

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influential European and American scholars of Aretino’s writings In bringing together scholars from Europe and from the Unites States, working in different fields (literary criticism, history of religion, history of art, musicology, and history of the book) we are hoping that the combination of their different backgrounds, approaches, and methodologies will produce fresh insights and new interpretations. We have attempted to cover all aspects of Aretino’s multifarious literary production. This Companion was also born with the aim to explore previously neglected or little-studied areas of Aretino’s literary and biographical identity: in particular, his religious writings and their fortune, his relationship to music, his use of his private and domestic space as a way of self-fashioning, and his creation of his public persona as both a polemist and a polemical target. The essays here collected support the current scholarly trend that no longer considers Aretino merely as a pornographer with no religious sentiment, but interprets his work in the light of the contemporary religious debate and cultural crisis.

3

Themes and Structure

Our Companion to Pietro Aretino is comprised of seven sections, each of which explores a specific side of Aretino’s literary production, and connects it to the most relevant features of the culture of his time. The first section, “Selfhood and the Public Sphere,” investigates Aretino’s construction of his public figure, and his relationship to paramount historical events of the sixteenth century. In the opening essay, titled “Inventing the Celebrity Author,” Raymond B. Waddington explores how Aretino became a celebrity. While the fame of writers of the earlier generation, like Baldassarre Castiglione or Ludovico Ariosto, rested on their major opus, Aretino’s fame was first and foremost based on his persona. Waddington explores Aretino’s efforts at constructing a series of personae for his campaign of self-representation, and at becoming a popular character with a much-publicized life thanks to the help of the newly created printing press. Harald Hendrix’s essay, “Aretino At Home,” proceeds along the same lines by investigating how Aretino used his private life as an instrument of self-fashioning. Hendrix focuses on Aretino’s two Venetian residences, and analyses how these private residential spaces were arranged as ways for Aretino to project a precise, well-constructed image of himself. The second section, “Criticism and Satire,” focuses on Aretino’s well-known and often controversial activity as a satirist and his ambition to claim for himself the role of censor of contemporary social and political events. In “ ‘Pietro Aretino, the Ferocious Prophet,’ and Pasquino,” Chiara Lastraioli investigates

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Aretino’s activity as an author of pasquinate in early-sixteenth-century Rome. Lastraioli illustrates how Aretino appropriated the mask of Pasquino—thus contradicting the previous tradition of anonymity of pasquinesque poetry— and how later in his career he kept adapting it to different cultural contexts. Paola Ugolini’s contribution (“Aretino and the Court”) is centered on Aretino’s complex relationship with the world of the court. A central topic of all Renaissance literature, the courtly world was paramount in Aretino’s production, either as a point of reference or as a satirical target. Ugolini’s essay sheds light upon the evolution in Aretino’s representation of the court, from his early years in Rome, to his condemnation of the courtly servitude in opposition to Venetian “freedom.” Ian Frederick Moulton’s essay, “Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Aretino’s Ragionamenti,” analyses the cultural economy of Aretino’s Ragionamenti by placing Aretino’s work in dialogue with Jean-Luc Godard’s film Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), underlining how in both works prostitution serves as a key to understand and critique shifting social relationships—personal, political, and economic. Aretino’s relationship with painting and sculpture is the center of the third section of the Companion, “Arts,” which includes an investigation of Aretino’s musical interests. In “Aretino and the Painters of Venice” Philip Cottrell focuses on a series of letters which Aretino wrote to Titian’s Venetian rivals between 1548 and 1549 in order to shed light on the real motives underlying such letters, and, more broadly on the status of the relationship between Aretino and Titian in those same years. The relationship with music is investigated by Cathy Ann Elias in the essay “Veritas Odium Parit: Uses and Misuses of Music in Aretino’s Sei giornate.” Elias explores the use of sound effects (from descriptions of noises of the environments and of the voices of the protagonists), and the use of musical performances in the Sei giornate in connection with the topic of pornography. The fourth section of the Companion to Pietro Aretino, “Literary Genres,” reassesses the role of Aretino with respect to the most prominent literary genres of the Renaissance: lyric poetry, chivalric romance, and theater. Angelo Romano’s essay, “Pietro Aretino, Poet” investigates Aretino’s poetic activity throughout his long and diverse career, paying particular attention to Aretino’s eagerness to experiment with different literary genres, and to the intertwining of the genres of satire and of encomiastic poetry. Maria Cristina Cabani’s “A Knot of Barely Sketched Figures: Pietro Aretino’s Chivalric Poems” explores Aretino’s attempts at providing a sequel to Ludovico Ariosto’s chivalric poem, Orlando Furioso. Cabani studies Aretino’s four chivalric romances (Marfisa, Angelica, Orlandino, Astolfeida), focusing on their main stylistic features, whilst also connecting them to Aretino’s biography. Deanna Shemek and Jane Tylus

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in “Aretino's Theater” investigate Aretino’s six plays: the comedies Il Marescalco (1533), La Cortigiana (1534), Lo Ipocrito (published 1540), La Talanta (1542), and Il Filosofo (1546), and the tragedy, L’Orazia (1546), presenting the six plays in the context of their local settings and their topical relevance at the time of Aretino’s writing, focusing in particular on Aretino’s relationship with Renaissance princes and courts, and with potential, present, or former patrons. Giuseppe Crimi’s “Pietro Aretino: Attributed Works” focuses on the erotic literary production of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries usually attributed to Pietro Aretino, examining works like the Tariffa delle puttane di Venezia, the Ragionamento del Zoppino, the Dialogo di Giulia e Maddalena, and the Dubbi amorosi and taking into consideration their literary features and their printed and manuscript circulation. Section five, “Religion,” shows the novelty of this publication at its best: Aretino’s religious writings have so far been understudied, and his religiosity has been called into question. We thought the moment had come for an indepth evaluation of this rather neglected side of Aretino’s production. This volume therefore aims to provide new evidence for a revised image of Aretino as an author who was deeply involved in the religious turmoil of the time. Élise Boillet’s “Aretino’s ‘Simple’ Religious Prose: Literary Features, Doctrinal and Moral Contents, Evolution” points out how Aretino’s sacred prose deals with central doctrinal questions from the salvation by faith and works to the Immaculate Conception, entrusting the disclosure of simple truths to a high style blending story telling with preaching, while also highlighting the continuity and internal coherence of Aretino’s entire religious production. Paolo Marini’s essay, titled “The Three Hagiographies. Writing about Saints in the Age of the Council” focuses on the editorial history of the Vite of Virgin Mary, Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose compositions are studied in connection to Aretino’s biography and to his other works. Marini also considers the evolution of the three hagiographies from a stylistic point of view, exploring the rhetorical qualities of Aretino’s sacred prose and its strength in moving contemporary readers’ religious feelings. Augusto Gentili’s contribution, “The Figurative Rhetoric of Pietro Aretino’s Religious Works,” intertwines literary and visual studies. Gentili investigates examples wherein Aretino describes or narrates by making explicit reference to paintings or sculptures, or by employing figurative rhetoric, creating images with words, to conclude with examples wherein Aretino describes or narrates creating images that will then be re-created in contemporary or later works of art. Eleonora Carinci’s essay, “The imitation of Pietro Aretino’s Vita di Maria Vergine and Umanità di Cristo in Italy after the Council of Trent” analyzes the ways in which Aretino’s religious works were read and used as models by postTridentine authors despite their condemnation from the Index, concentrating

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in particular on the cases of Bartolomeo Meduna, Maddalena Campiglia and Lucrezia Marinella, who each used in different ways Aretino’s Humanità di Cristo and Vita di Maria Vergine. Section six, “Networks,” explores the most innovative sides of Aretino’s conception of literature: his invention of letter-writing as a genre in and of itself, his use of the printing press as a strategy for self-promotion, and his often complicated relationships with his fellow writers. In “Aretino as a Writer of Letters” Paul Larivaille explores the origins of Aretino’s unprecedented idea of assembling a collection of vernacular letters interpreting it as part of his strategy of self-fashioning, and as a way to earn a living in a time when he could no longer rely on the patronage of the king of France. Brian Richardson’s essay “Pietro Aretino and Publication” analyzes Aretino’s manipulation of the diffusion of his verse and prose through a combination of orality, manuscript, and print, explaining how Aretino’s involvement with print became systematic after his move to Venice, as a way to gain notoriety, seek patronage, and enhance his status. Paolo Procaccioli’s essay, “Aretino as a Target for Criticism, and His Enemies from Berni to Muzio” focuses on Aretino’s best known enemies, and investigates the occasions that caused the various attacks, their implications, and their consequences on Aretino’s public fortune, with the aim of offering a foil to the self-absolution and the self-praise often found in Aretino’s letter-writing. The seventh and final section, “Afterlife,” analyzes the legacy of Aretino’s writings. In the essay “Aretino’s Troubled Afterlife” Harald Hendrix explores in detail the controversial reception of Aretino’s works from the immediate aftermath of his death until the nineteenth century, underscoring as well the persistence of a fascination with the figure of Aretino even at the times when his production was looked upon with suspicion or even contempt.

4

Methodology

In preparing this Companion we felt that an interdisciplinary approach was needed. The multifarious, diverse, and polyphonic nature of Aretino’s work, his closeness to artists along with his own connoisseurship suggested a dialogue among specialists of different disciplines. Just like Aretino delighted in challenging and overstepping the boundaries of genres, we also thought it necessary to break boundaries between disciplines. We have therefore chosen to include essays by historians of the book, historians of literature, art historians, musicologists. Each of the contributors has his or her own background and methodology; however, we can confidently claim that the essays do not abdicate a rigorous philological and historical approach. We are aware that Aretino,

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probably more than any other Italian Renaissance writer, should be analyzed against the complex and evolving background of the society of his time. All the essays in this volume explore the rapidly changing cultural, religious, literary, and artistic panorama of the sixteenth century. We wanted Aretino to emerge as an agent of cultural change more than simply a (however talented) writer. The result is, we hope, a work that while providing an all-round picture of Aretino as both a writer and intellectual, also offers a comprehensive image of Italian culture in the first half of the sixteenth century. This collection of essays reveals Pietro Aretino not only as a transgressive figure who broke the rules, but also as the heir of canonical literary traditions, and, eventually, as the maker of new rules. The essays gathered in the present volume reveal a figure, and a fundamental one, in the development of European literature and culture,25 and carefully reconstruct his literary circles and his European networks. The multidisciplinary approach allows us to bring to life Aretino’s portrait in the round: an innovative, experimental writer who prided himself on his acquaintance with emperors, pontiffs, kings, and princes. A fine connoisseur and a man deeply involved in the tumultuous political changes of his time, Aretino has left behind a tremendous legacy, opening new paths to European cultural production and shaping a new image of the author. This volume approaches this legacy in new ways and, at the same time, paves the way for new interpretations. Note on translations: Quotations from Aretino and other sources have been systematically translated into English. We have resorted to published translations when available. In all other cases translations are by the author or the translator of each essay. Given the highly idiosyncratic use of language on the part of Aretino, in many cases we tried to convey the meaning of given passages rather than trying to translate them literally. 25

Recently Renaissance translations of Aretino’s works have been published; see for example Pietro Aretino, Les trois livres de l’ humanité de Jésus-Christ traduits par Pierre de Larivey, ed. Bruna Conconi (Paris, 2009); Fernán Xuárez-Pietro Aretino, Coloquio de las damas / Dialogo, ed. Donatella Gagliardi (Rome, 2011). A series of essays on Aretino’s European fortune has recently appeared in the following volume: Philiep Bossier-Harald HendrixPaolo Procaccioli (eds.), Dynamic Translations in the European Renaissance: La traduzione del moderno nel Cinquecento europeo (Manziana, 2011). Among them, Paolo Procaccioli, “Aretino e la traduzione del moderno: il lettore, il parafraste, il committente, l’autore,” 223–248; Bruna Conconi, “1539–1618: Tempi, luoghi, protagonisti della traduzione di Pietro Aretino in Francia: con un primo repertorio,” 101–167; Élise Boillet, “Tra sacro e profano: Jean de Vauzelles traduttore dell’Aretino,” 169–206; Eddy K. Grootes, “Aretino’s L’ipocrito Translated and Adapted to the Dutch Stage by Hooft and Bredero (1618),” 207–222.

part 1 Selfhood and the Public Sphere

∵

chapter 1

Inventing the Celebrity Author Raymond B. Waddington

Reflecting on a demographic study of writers during the first century of printing, Brian Richardson surmised its introduction “led to no dramatic, sweeping changes in the professional status of writers,” but immediately entered a caveat: “However, print publication undoubtedly enhanced the general recognition of the identity of the author as the creator and owner of the text.”1 The public recognition of the author of course did entail a change in the status of the author; and a particular aspect of that change is the subject of the present essay. Public recognition of individual writers, then as now, led to classification or identification of authors in several ways, often by convenient simplifications. The first to emerge in the Cinquecento was the “one book” author who, whatever his other literary accomplishments, in the consciousness of the reading public was known by the single achievement. Think of Alessandro Manzoni for a more recent example. Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529) first earned a reputation for an extensive body of poetry in both Italian and Latin. His stroke of genius was the decision to write The Book of the Courtier in vernacular prose, rather than the Latin, for instance, of Paolo Giovio’s Notable Men and Women of our Time, written 1527–1528, just about the time Castiglione’s dialogue finally appeared in print (April 1528). Whereas sixty-two editions of the Courtier appeared in Italy during the century, Giovio’s dialogue, like Castiglione’s poetry, was consigned to the Lethe of specialist scholarship.2 In contrast to Castiglione’s years of foot-dragging reluctance to publish, his contemporary Ludovico Ariosto was taking command of his great book. He initiated all three editions of the Orlando Furioso, investing money, overseeing the printing, and controlling sales in the hope of augmenting his court income. To further the end of achieving a popular success with his epic, Ariosto judged his 1 Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1999), 101. He comments on Christian Bec, “Lo statuto socio-professionale degli scrittori (Trecento e Cinquecento),” in Letteratura italiana, vol. 2: Produzione e consumo (Turin, 1983), 229–267. 2 Sixty-two editions is Peter Burke’s figure, The Fortunes of the Courtier (1995. University Park, PA, 1996), 41 and Appendix 1. On Giovio’s Dialogus de viris ac foeminis aetate nostra florentibus, see T.C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 89–102. There is now an English translation by Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA, 2013), whose title I have borrowed.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_003

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satires and comedies, written for coterie audiences, could be a hinderance and blocked a printing of the comedies near the 1532 Furioso. Regrettably, he died before he could realize any dividends; and it would have been cold comfort to know the epic with which his name was inextricably linked ran to over one hundred editions before 1600.3 Pietro Bembo’s defense of the vernacular, Prose Works of the Italian Language, paradoxically was both timely and already obsolete in its advocacy of an antiquated Tuscan.4 The massive shift from Latin already was “sounding its loud vernacular horn,” as evidenced by these classics of Italian prose and poetry.5 Still, the social status of their authors did not differ from their humanist, Latin-writing, friends and predecessors. The next step would be the professionalization of writing; thus, the second category to appear was the poligrafo. These busy professionals of modest origins earned a living, often marginal, by turning their hands to whatever task of “many writings” the insatiable presses demanded. Enter Pietro Aretino. Some, myself included, have called him “the first poligrafo”; others, Paul Grendler for example, regard him as “essentially a precursor.”6 Certainly, he did no editing and translating, the bread-and-butter work of many poligrafi; and he did not forsake patronage to live entirely by writing for his income. Aretino was the first to understand the uses of the Venetian printing industry, opening the floodgates to followers, a number of whom he employed for copying, translating, and editing. Still, the variety and volume of Aretino’s writings are remarkable; and, despite his successes, he never lost his independence or his bent for social and institutional criticism (Grendler’s touchstones). For the most part, the poligrafi labored in an obscurity ironically echoing that of their scribal predecessors. In the thirteenth century Saint Bonaventura explained four methods of making books: as a simple copyist (scriptor); with additions by others (compilator); with his own explanatory additions (commentator); with his own words in principal place, plus others for confirmation

3 Richardson, Printing, Writers, 85–89. For the enduring popularity of the Furioso, see, e. g., Andrea Camilleri’s detective novel Angelica’s Smile (Il sorriso di Angelica, 2010), in which Inspector Montalbano, infatuated with the eponymous character, recalls reams of pertinent verses from the epic. 4 Prose della volgar lingua (1525). Like Castiglione’s Courtier and Giovio’s Notable Men, this was cast as a dialogue on three consecutive days, a convention Aretino mocked in his Ragionamenti (Dialogues). 5 Quotation adapted from Billy Collins’ poem, “Consolation.” 6 Paul F. Grendler, Critics of the Italian World 1530–1560: Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolò Franco & Ortensio Lando (Madison, WI, 1969), 10.

inventing the celebrity author

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(auctor).7 Three centuries later there would have been only nods of recognition from poligrafi. Some, notably Anton Francesco Doni and Nicolò Franco, sought to escape anonymity by attaching their own names to titles wherever possible. Then and now they are best known for their attacks on Aretino, an unsatisfying parasitical kind of recognition. Regardless of how one positions Aretino, he made a unique contribution to the status of vernacular writers through becoming the first celebrity author. Since “celebrity” is a term that has become ubiquitous and debased currency in the era of social media, let me be precise in what I mean by that statement. A celebrity author is a writer more famous for being famous than for any single work or the totality of his writing. As one such writer acknowledged somewhat ruefully, “Celebrity is the advantage of being known by those who do not know you.” We tend to think of such an authorial construct as a modern concept; and a recent study by Antoine Lilti places its invention in eighteenthcentury France and England.8 We have no difficulty in bringing examples to mind; nineteenth-century England readily evokes Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde; and the recent loss of Umberto Eco causes me to so designate him. Tributes have lauded Eco as “The most famous Italian intellectual and one of the most important in the world,” and more simply, “Eco, world-wide superstar.”9 The term “celebrity” derives from the Latin celebritas, meaning a crowd or multitude and, by extension, fame or renown. Responding to Bembo’s reported witticism implying Aretino had an exaggerated sense of his own importance, Pietro disclaimed any arrogance about his writing. He would prefer having the world think him evil (“reo”) than stupidly arrogant (“stolta arroganza”) because, whereas the wickedness (“malvagità”) would die with him, his example of true audacity could live on among those who will come after. Here Aretino shows his awareness of traditional notions of lifetime and posthumous fame, whether the living achievement is called reputation, renown, or glory; the future simply is literary immortality. He concludes by evoking the “century” or “test of

7 See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979. Cambridge, 1980), 121–122. 8 Antoine Lilti, Figures publiques: L’invention de la célébrité, 1750–1850 (Paris, 2014). Quotation from Nicholas Chamfort, “La célébrité est l’ avantage d’etre connu de ceux qui ne vous connaissent pas,” at 148. 9 See the commemorative issue of L’Espresso, 62, no. 9, 3 March 2016. Quotations from Wlodek Goldkorn, “L’intellettuale più famoso d’Italia e uno dei più importanti al mondo,” 16; and Marco Damilano, “Eco superstar mondiale,” 26. The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980), despite the variety of fields in which Eco attained distinction, certainly is his best-known work. Nonetheless, the film featuring Sean Connery probably means the novel is more widely known than read, precluding any possibility of calling Eco a “one book” author.

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time” standard with a wry twist; no century will forget his name because it has been written by the immortal pen of Bembo.10 The two requisites for celebrity authorship are a strong, engaging or exceptional personality and a colorful life. Aretino shows his awareness an irregular, even scandalous life, as with Byron and Wilde, creates a reputation or public persona that is not necessarily a bad thing.11 But, ironically, he had the calculation wrong. After his death, commencing with the 1559 Index of Prohibited Books banning his entire works, and continuing for over three centuries, his reputation largely was that of a pornographer and blackmailer.12 During his lifetime he was a celebrity. In 1545, near the apex of his success, Pietro responded to a friend, who had described him as the most famous living writer, saying anyone who has not experienced the height of his fame doesn’t know the half of it. Aretino concludes by citing examples of things to which his name has been attached. Outraging pedants even more, others speak of “the style of Aretino”; then there are the women who call themselves “Aretines.”13 Since Pietro himself does not profit materially from any of this notoriety, the phenomenon has not attained the modern refinements of commercial endorsements of clothing, jewelry, and cosmetics bearing his name. In all other respects, I have no hesitation in denominating this a “celebrity culture.” Placing this cultural development in Paris and London during the first half of the eighteenth century, Lilti assigns particular importance to its enablement by the growth of print media and the concomitant rise of journalism.14 Regarding Aretino, Jacob Burckhardt remarked, “in a certain sense he may be considered the father of modern journalism.”15 Without the careful qualification and how-

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Lettere i, Appendix, 12, to Bembo, 9 August 1538. I am indebted to the lucid and concise account of “The Fame Tradition” by H.J. Jackson, Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame (New Haven, CT, 2015), 2–12. As Jackson notes, Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York, 1986), says surprisingly little about literary fame. Lilti, Figures publiques, 297–393, has a section on “Byromania,” but Wilde is beyond his chronological range. For a brief review of Pietro’s reputation in English-language criticism, see Raymond B. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art (Toronto, 2004), xxi–xxiii; Italian trans. Il satiro di Aretino (Rome, 2009). Lettere iii, no. 229, to Junio Petreo, May 1545. Eisenstein, The Printing Press, 130–133, comments briefly on the emergence of journalism. In this respect it seems pertinent that Umberto Eco’s earliest writings were journalism and, beginning in 1985, he wrote the weekly column “La bustina di Minerva” in L’Espresso for thirty years. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (1860. Vienna: n. d., “copyright edition”), 86.

chapter 3

“Pietro Aretino, the Ferocious Prophet,” and Pasquino Chiara Lastraioli

During the 1501 restoration of Palazzo Orsini (now Palazzo Braschi), Cardinal Oliviero Carafa placed an ancient statue—found nearby a few years earlier— on the side of the building.1 No one in Rome could have predicted the political and cultural repercussions of his actions. Unwittingly, the people of the time were witnessing the birth of one of the most feared and everlasting champions of anonymous European propaganda of the modern era. Rechristened Pasquino, the statue became a celebrity in its own right and its success went hand in hand with that of polemicist Pietro Aretino. Although of excellent workmanship, this marble group from the Hellenistic age was badly damaged, so much so as to make the features of the two characters portrayed unrecognizable. Although for a long time the two male figures were believed to be Menelaus and Patroclus, more recent studies have shown them to be Ajax in the act of holding the body of Achilles.2 Having been placed in the Parione neighborhood, very close to Piazza Navona, the statue was also adjacent to the street 1 According to Anne Reynolds the statue could have been found during the 1477 renovation work on Piazza Navona (Anne Reynolds, “Cardinal Oliviero Carafa and the Early Cinquecento Tradition of the Feast of Pasquino,” in “Roma Humanistica: Studia in honorem Rev. adm. Dni Dni Iosaei Ruysschaert,” Humanistica Lovaniensia, 34A [1985]: 178–208 [186]). The marble is mentioned at the end of the fiftheenth century in the anonymous Antiquarie prospettiche Romane composte per prospettivo milanese dipintore, studied by Gilberto Govi in “Intorno ad un opuscolo rarissimo della fine del secolo xv intitolato ‘Antiquarie prospettiche romane’,” Atti della R. Accademia dei Lincei, 273, 2nd ser., 3 (1875–1876): 45–83 (52). 2 On the marble group and its recent restoration see, especially, Paola Ciancio Rossetto, “Pasquino: riflessioni e acquisizioni dal restauro,” in Caroline Michel d’Annoville-Yann Rivière (eds.), Faire parler et faire taire les statues: de l’ invention de l’écriture à l’usage de l’explosif (Rome, 2016), 11–27. On the circulation of the sixteenth-century iconographic model see, especially, Chrysa Damianaki, “Il Pasquino di Giulio Bonasone e di Antonio Salamanca per una interpretazione iconografica,” in Chrysa Damianaki-Paolo Procaccioli-Angelo Romano (eds.), Ex marmore: Pasquini, pasquinisti, pasquinate nell’Europa moderna, Atti del Colloquio internazionale Lecce-Otranto 17–19 novembre 2005 (Manziana, 2006), 275–304, figs. 1–20, Chiara Lastraioli, “Note sulla fortuna iconografica europea del marmo di Parione nella prima età moderna,” in d’Annoville and Rivière (eds.), Faire parler et faire taire les statues, 45–58 and Maddalena Spagnolo, Pasquino in piazza. Una statua a Roma tra arte e vituperio (Rome, 2019).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_005

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where every year, on April 25, a procession in honor of Saint Mark the Evangelist took place. The exact time when Pasquino became one of the protagonists of the Saint Mark celebrations is not known for certain. In the first decade of the sixteenth century a secular poetry contest, that involved the participation of students and teachers from the Roman stadium, was organized alongside the religious festival; and each year Pasquino was dressed up in a different allegorical guise. The poetic entries, which were rigorously anonymous and composed primarily in Latin, would be posted around the Parione marble and, from 1509, the ones worthy of note would be collected at the end of the day and sent to press. Like every self-respecting Roman festival, this contest was sponsored by the cardinal residing in the palace where the statue of Pasquino lay. The cardinal was assisted by a festival secretary who was charged with picking at random the allegorical theme on which the young men of the studium would exercise their own pedantic talents, and would then select the best verses to be published. After Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, the festival’s original patron, the role was reprised by Cardinals Christopher Bainbridge and Antonio Maria Ciocchi Del Monte, while among the best-known secretaries are humanists Donato Poli, Marcello Palonio, and Decio Sillano da Spoleto. These last three were also part of the erudite circle of the Luxembourg prelate Hans Goritz, better known by the name Giovanni Coricio or Johannes Coritius.3 The coat of arms of the cardinal would appear on the illustrated title page that embellished the booklet containing the collection of poems posted around Pasquino, who each year wore a different allegorical costume. In 1509 the statue was dressed up as Janus; in 1510 as Hercules cutting off the Hydra’s head; in 1511 as Grief (in honor of the recent passing of Cardinal Carafa); in 1512 as the god Apollo; then Mercury (1514); Orpheus (1515); Proteus (1516); again Hercules (1517); Peace (1520); a Sibyl (1521); Fortune (1525); Argus (1526); Victory (1532); Religion (1536); Perseus (1639); and Bonus Eventus (1540).4 3 On the Luxembourg prelate, his entourage, and his poetic and artistic patronage see, especially, Rosanna Alhaique Pettinelli, “Punti di vista sull’arte dei poeti dei Coryciana,” La Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 90 (1986): 41–54; Jozef Ijsewijn, “Poetry in a Roman Garden: The Coryciana,” in Peter Godman-Oswyn Murray (eds.), Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Oxford, 1990), 211–231; Rosanna Alhaique Pettinelli, “Ars antiqua e nova religio: gli autori dei Coryciana tra classicità e modernità,” in Tra antico e moderno: Roma nel primo Rinascimento (Rome, 1991), 63–81; Julia Haig Gaisser, “The Rise and Fall of Goritz’s Feasts,”Renaissance Quarterly, 48/1 (1995), 41–57; Anne Reynolds, Renaissance Humanism at the Court of Clement vii: Francesco Berni’s “Dialogue Against Poets” in Context. Studies, with an Edition and Translation (New York, 1997), 89ff. See also, Elisabetta Guerrieri, Donato Poli, secretarius Pasquilli, professore e letterato fiorentino a Roma (Rome, 2011), 323–355. 4 Reproductions of the title page of the official collections are published in Valerio Marucci-

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The Latin poems contained in these “official collections” all follow the randomly chosen theme, mostly connected with the political events of the time; on occasion targeting teachers of the studium, and more rarely denouncing the decadence of the Eternal City, as illustrated by the following verses: Orpheus Farewell Rome / I saw / I am ashamed to have seen / farewell / idlers / elephant / whores / pimps / sodomites / wolves / weapons / hatred / treachery / rape / perjury / theft / sacrilege / incest / impious Rome farewell.5 The clumsy and pedantic nature of the students’ youthful exercises could not be ignored by a pugnacious author whose vernacular denunciation, Che nova c’è, appears in the 1515 edition of the Carmina apposita Pasquillo: What’s new, terque quaterque pedants? Perhaps you think I am a small boy who needs to learn? But this rod, I know, will send you back to your handiwork. Go to your ruin, scoundrel scum, as desperate for bread as a liver, for to fill your stomachs the tripe of elephants would not suffice. With no shame, with no discretion (your mother) you come to Rome, believing here you’ll make your reputation. May it be cursed! And soon to your work you’ll return, I swear, oh great pedants, Antonio Marzo-Angelo Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane del Cinquecento, 2 vols. (Rome, 1983). For the identification of the theme for the 1540 contest see, instead, Paolo Marini, “La maschera di Pasquino: una svista di Luzio e una pasquinata del 1540,” in Enrico Parlato (ed.), Curiosa itinera: scritti per Daniela Gallavotti Cavallero (Rome, 2015), 205–212. 5 Carmina apposita Pasquillo An. M.D.Xv., fol. a4r: “Orphens [sic.] / Roma uale / uidi / puduit uidisse / ualete / Scurræ / elephas / meretrix / leno / cinede / lupi. / Arma / odia / insidiæ / raptus / periuria / furta / Sacrilegi / incestus / impia Roma uale.” Unless otherwise indicated, this and all other English translations in this essay are by Lindsay Eufusia.

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with this club I’ll break your heads. mdx Pedantissimus faciebat.6 The first printed editions already contained some compositions in Italian; and from 1513 onward the poems in the vernacular were so abundant that they were collected in separate pamphlets together with a few compositions in French and Spanish.7 The growing success of the official festival was accompanied by an ever increasing number of anonymous texts produced throughout the year. Although some mildly satirical texts were already appearing during the official celebrations, it is from 1518 onward that a considerable number of polemical pasquinades begins to circulate freely.8 So much so that from that moment on interruptions of the official festival under various pretexts followed, while the printed editions became rarer and rarer, until they finally disappeared after 1536. It is no coincidence that the satirical and polemical connotations of Pasquino developed at exactly the same time as Anton Lelio bursts triumphantly onto the Roman literary scene followed closely by the arrival of Pietro Aretino around 1517.9 The two writers had very different cultural back6 “Che nova c’è, terque quaterque pedanti? / Forse credete che sia un puttariello / da imparar? Ma questo bastonciello / so vi farà tornar a far li guanti. / Iate in malora, schiuma di furfanti, / scaccia pagnotte come un fegatiello, / ch’a riempir questo vostro budello / non basterien le trippe di elefanti. / Senza vergogna, senza discrezione, / che è madre vostra, ne venete a Roma / credendo qua spacciar reputazione. / Che sia maledetto! E sì presto alla soma /vi tornate, io iuro, o pedantoni, / con questa clava spezarvi la chioma. / M.d.X. Pedantissimus faciebat.” Marucci-Marzo-Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:9, 10. The first number here refers to the volume, the second refers to the number assigned to the poem, and finally the page number is indicated; hereafter poems from this text will be cited thus throughout unless otherwise indicated. 7 Allow me to refer to my “L’esportazione di un genere polemico: le prime pasquinate francesi del xvi secolo,” in Luisa Secchi Tarugi (ed.), Cultura e potere nel Rinascimento, Atti del ix Convegno Internazionale (Chianciano–Pienza, 21–24 luglio 1997) (Florence, 1999), 445–463, and “Pasquillus exul: note sulla diffusione di testi e temi pasquineschi al di là dalle Alpi,” in Damianaki-Procaccioli-Romano (eds.), Ex marmore, 461–475. 8 A manuscript collection of licentious and violently satirical pasquilli known by the title Carmina 1518 ad Pasquillum non impressa is among the papers of the Venetian Marin Sanudo and is conserved today at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It seems that the transcriber was Cardinal Giovio himself (see Vittorio Cian, “Gioviana: di Paolo Giovio poeta, fra poeti, e di alcune rime sconosciute del sec. xvi,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 17 [1889]: 277–357). 9 On the decisive role played by the two authors in the détournement of the literary and political function of Pasquinesque production see, especially, Alessandro Luzio, “Pietro Aretino e Pasquino,” Nuova antologia, 3rd. ser., 28 (1890): 679–708, later published in Alessandro Luzio, Saggi aretiniani, ed. Paolo Marini (Manziana, 2010), 155–186; Danilo Romei, “Aretino

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grounds. Anton Lelio was of Roman origin and possessing good humanistic and medical training, wrote poetry both in Latin and in the vernacular. He was also a member of the circle gathered around Goritz, and secretary to Cardinal Agostino Trivulzio. Both were supporters of the anti-Medici party that, on the death of Leo x in 1521, tried to prevent the election of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who in turn had the mercenary support of Aretino.10 Little is known about Lelio’s satirical production, other than what his emulator and antagonist wrote in the first edition of the Cortegiana (1525); Aretino credits five pasquinades to him with certainty. These were written between 1515 and 1521,11 and demonstrate how the didactic nature of the official texts definitively paves the way for a well-orchestrated and slanderous satire that crystallizes both urban tensions and those that arose within the curia. Aretino also acknowledged Lelio’s primacy, a rare occurrence made even more exceptional by the fact that it came from someone who would proclaim himself as the foremost “secretary of Pasquino.” The search for successful models to emulate—like Anton Lelio for anonymous satire and Bernardo Accolti, called the “Unico Aretino”, for courtly poetry12—responds to a strategy aimed at securing a patronage that would allow Aretino, then almost a neophyte of the muses, to join a patrician court (that of Agostino Chigi) or a cardinal curia (that of Giulio de’ Medici). After all he could only boast an autodidactic training and a rather modest experience gathered during his stay in Perugia and Tuscany. As Danilo Romei rightly remarked, “Aretino did not invent Pasquino (as was once believed),”13 but it

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e Pasquino,” Atti e memorie dell’Accademia Petrarca di lettere, arti e scienze, n.s., 56 (1992): 67–92, later published on the Nuovo Rinascimento website: http://www.nuovorinascimen to.org/n‑rinasc/saggi/pdf/romei/aretpasq.pdf; Valerio Marucci, “L’Aretino e Pasquino,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 67–86. See also, Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1997), 57–79. On Anton Lelio see the entry by Stefano Jossa in the dbi, vol. 64 (Rome, 2005), available online at http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ricerca/anton‑lelio; see also, Romei, “Aretino e Pasquino,” 73–81 passim, 85; Rossana Sodano, “Intorno ai Coryciana: conflitti politici e letterari in Roma dagli anni di Leone x a quelli di Clemente vii,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 178 (2001): 420–455 (433 ff.). Non ha papa Leon tanti parenti (datable to April 25, 1514 or 1515); Da poi che Costantin fece il presente (datable to 1513); Cuoco è san Pier, s’è papa un de i tre frati (1521); Piacevi, mona Chiesa bella e buona (1521); O cardinali, se voi fossi noi (1521). See Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 60–61. On the famous courtier poet see the entry by Lilia Mantovani in the dbi, vol. 1 (Rome, 1960), available online at http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/accolti‑bernardo‑detto‑l ‑unico‑aretino, and Howard C. Cole, “Bernardo Accolti’s Virginia: The Uniqueness of ‘Unico Aretino,’ ” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 10 (1979): 3–32. Romei, “Aretino e Pasquino”: “l’Aretino non ha inventato Pasquino (come un tempo si credeva)” (http://www.nuovorinascimento.org/n‑rinasc/saggi/pdf/romei/aretpasq.pdf).

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was, rather, the Parione marble and its garrulous cackling that made the fortune (and perhaps also misfortune) of the author during his Roman years, so much so that the one would end up being identified with the other as much in the opinion of his contemporaries as in many of Aretino’s later writings. Nevertheless, Pasquino’s voice was choral in origin, changeable in style and role, polyglot at times, fruit of dozens of anonymous poets and of some more or less well-known authors, mentioned in the compositions themselves. We thus discover that in addition to Anton Lelio, Strascino and mastro Andrea also enter the arena during the period of the sede vacante following the death of Leo x, even though it was mostly Aretino who, from that moment on, was clearly quoted among the main satirical versifiers: Now that Cornaro has announced the joy that makes Saint Peter die from sorrow, in order to do the cardinals a big favor, among the people it has been decided: that Aretino is to be legate to the emperor’s pedagogue and that he recounts to him the triumphal honor Rome did him when he was created; and with him are mastro Andrea and Strascino, with those lovely verses that in sede vacante the College praises, in the vernacular and in Latin, where sir Adrian, pedantic pope, would meet Brother Egidio, Soderini, and the goodness of the other errant rabble, who, incompetent in their task, made him pope to his detriment and infamy, forever disfiguring the face of Christ. Go on, College, for carnival will make you see that it is better to be a Jew than a Cardinal!14

14

“Or che Cornaro un gaudio ce ha nunziato, / che fa san Pietro crepar di dolore, / per far

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But what do we know for certain about Aretino’s pasquinade activity in Rome? And what was his role according to the testimony of friends and enemies, admirers and detractors? From the end of the nineteenth century onward, critical literature has attributed numerous texts to the Tuscan poet in rather approximate fashion due to the violently polemical character of the compositions themselves, all in the vernacular, clandestinely circulated as anonymous in provenance. The volume Pasquinate di Pietro Aretino ed anonime per il conclave e l’elezione di Adriano vi,15 edited by Vittorio Rossi in 1891, was followed by a series of studies by Domenico Gnoli and Alessandro Luzio aimed at identifying the true Aretinian paternity of the various compositions.16 To these were added, in more recent times, the contributions of Paul Larivaille and Danilo Romei17 who remind us that only the pro-Medici compositions can be ascribed to Aretino, thus excluding many of the texts published by Rossi and ascribable to Anton Lelio and to his acolytes. Romei attributes to Aretino with certainty only five anonymous compositions circulated between 1522 and 1525, three of which were written during the conclave that would elect Adrian of Utrecht to the papal chair (Piàcevi, mona Chiesa onesta e buona; Dice ognun:—Io stupisco che ’l colegio; Savio colegio, miserere mei!).18 A further two were written away from Rome with the clear intention of either attacking the

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a’ cardinali un gran favore; / tra ’l popul⟨o⟩ s’è questo terminato: / che l’Aretino vadia per legato / al pedagogo dello imperadore / e che gli conti il trionfale onore / che gli ⟨fé⟩ Roma quando e’ fu creato; / e seco andrà mastro Andrea e Stracino, / con que’ be’ versi che in sieda vacante / loda il colegio, i⟨n⟩ vulgare e latino, / aciò ser Adrian, papa pedante, / conosca frate Egidio, il Soderino / e la bontà de l’altra turba erante, / che per gara ignorante / l’ha fatto papa a suo danno e dispregio, / per far sul volto a Cristo eterno fregio. / Ma va pur là, collegio, / che ti farà vedere il carnovale / ch’è meglio eser iudeo che cardinale!” MarucciMarzo-Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:291, 288–289. Vittorio Rossi, Pasquinate di Pietro Aretino ed anonime per il conclave e l’elezione di Adriano vi (Palermo, 1891). See Domenico Gnoli, “Ancora delle Pasquinate di Pietro Aretino pubblicate ed illustrate da Vitt. Rossi,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 21 (1893): 262–267; Alessandro Luzio, review of Pasquinate di Pietro Aretino e anonime per il conclave e l’elezione di Adriano vi, Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 19 (1892): 80–103. On this subject see, especially, Romei, “Aretino e Pasquino,” 67–92; Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 57–79; Paul Larivaille, “Per l’attribuzione delle pasquinate pubblicate da Vittorio Rossi,” in Varia Aretiniana (1927–2004) (Manziana, 2005), 13–29. Far more general is the study by Giorgio Petrocchi, “Le pasquinate, l’Aretino e i libellisti del Cinquecento,” in I fantasmi di Tancredi: saggi sul Tasso e sul Rinascimento (Caltanissetta–Rome, 1972), 327– 339. Marucci-Marzo-Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:190, 172–174; 196, 179–180; 197, 180– 181.

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reviled “German pope” (Patafio di mastro Adriano pecora campi)19 or detailing the divine disasters that had befallen the people of Rome and Christianity as a whole (I miracoli al mondo furno sette).20 Among those pasquinades Romei indicates as clearly attributable to the author, there appears the following caudate sonnet, in which the poet makes a mocking admission of guilt portraying himself as a penitent, and no longer as a slandering pasquillante: Wise College, miserere mei, I have sinned, I confess it, I have spoken ill, but what cardinal would be so indiscreet that he will not absolve my sweet verses? I confess my guilt, and I want to walk to the seven churches with the treasury officer, and visit Cordiale’s temple with Troy and Scala, men of Galilee. I promise to observe Lent and the stations with the most reverend Potenza, and with Beltramo to pray always to God. Fridays in March I’ll spend in abstinence with Poggio and in contemplation, from Pucci I want to draw his quintessence, and I’ll be patient when, like a monsignor, the lowly tinello dismisses with a requiem this one and that one; so, great College, forgive Aretino wholeheartedly that God may guard you and protect you from Pasquino.21

19 20 21

Marucci-Marzo-Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:326, 328–329. Marucci-Marzo-Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:333, 338–339. “Savio colegio, miserere mei! / Peccavi, i’ lo confesso; ho detto male, / ma qual fia sì ’ndiscreto cardinale, / che non assolva i dolci versi miei? / Io me ne rendo colpa, e vogli⟨o⟩ a piei / ire alle sette chiese col fiscale / e ’l tempio visitar del Cordïale, / con Troia e Scala, viri galilei. / Prometto far quaresima e sta⟨z⟩one / con il reverendissimo Potenza / e col Beltramo a Dio sempre orazione. / E venerdì di marzo in astinenza / starò col Pogio ed a

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It should be clear that the reputation as a ferocious writer of pasquinades attributed to Aretino, not only through his own writings, but also by third parties, leaves no doubt as to the primary role he played during the two conclaves that elected Adrian vi and Clement vii, despite the ultimately small number of texts that can be attributed to him with certainty.22 Pasquino himself points out, more than once, the curia’s hostility toward the two notorious polemicists of the time, Anton Lelio and Pietro Aretino, who in the text that follows are caught in the act of posting some pasquinades at night, one in the Borgo neighborhood and the other in the Parione neighborhood: In the College Armellini proposed, with wise, good, and asinine reason, that there must be put in prison two strange madmen: Antonio and Aretino. The cursed, stingy Soderini had a different opinion saying that it is good for the religion to get them and Pasquino out of Rome. This opinion, in deeds and words, was pleasing to everyone because they expect not to be touched where it hurts most; but the desperate, angry Ponzetta found the recipe for stilling their lone, stinging tongues, saying that mastro Pasquino must hastily be destroyed for it must be wise Antonio and Aretino

22

contemplazione, / del Pucciaccio vo’ far la quinta asenza, / ed arò pazïenza / quando di monsignor il vil tinello / licenzia con un requie questo e quello; / sì che, colegio bello, / perdona di buon cuore all’Aretino / se Dio ti scampi e guardi da Pasquino,” Marucci-MarzoRomano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:197, 180–181. Marco Faini attributes to the author, with good approximation, about twenty texts disseminated before the sack of Rome; see texts 5–21 and 23–29 in Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 61–76, 83–90.

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who along every street go about at night posting poems: Pietro in Borgo, Antonio in Parione.23 The 1524 election to Saint Peter’s throne of Clement vii—the candidate strongly supported by Aretino—left Pasquino all but mute as one of the most vociferous and authoritative polemist of the city remained inactive.24 Aretino’s absence would be even more felt during the festivities of 1526,25 year in which he left the city following a second assassination attempt against him in July of the previous year. Some critics believe that the assassination attempt was instigated by the curia, at the will of Datary Gian Matteo Giberti, as the inevitable consequence of the circulation of the so-called sonetti lussuriosi that accompanied the renowned erotic engravings attributed to Raimondi.26 Danilo Romei, on the other hand, blames the attempt on the renewed pasquinade activity of Aretino, who would no longer support the Florentine pope, but criticized his court possibly in support of imperial politics.27 And to think that in a 1525 letter to the Duke of Mantua, the author himself announced that the Pasquino festival that year would be held in his own honor (although things would go

23

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25

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“I⟨n⟩ Collegio ha proposto l’Armellino / Con savia, bella ed asina ragione, / che si debbano metter im pregione / dui strani matti: Antonio e l’Aretino. / El maledetto, avaro Soderino / è stato di contraria opinïone / con dir che è bon per la religïone / di cavarli di Roma con Pasquino. / Questo parere, in fatti ed in parole, / si piace a tutti ⟨quanti⟩, perché aspetta / non esser tocco dove più li dole; / ma el disperato, arrabiato Ponzetta / delle lor⟨o⟩ pungente lingue sole / d’acquietarle trovata ha la ricetta, / dicendo che con fretta / si debbia ruinar mastro Pasquino, / che fian poi savi Antonio e l’Aretino, / che per ogni cammino / van di notte attaccando le canzone: / Pietro nel Borgo, Antonio im Parione,” MarucciMarzo-Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:268, 258. See the renowned dialogue, repeatedly cited by criticism, between Viatore e Marforio, whose first quatrain reads: “Marforio, what does it mean that your Pasquino, / since the day that man was made pope, / has become almost entirely mute, nor does Aretino any longer take up the vice?” (“Marforio, che vuol dir che ’l tuo Pasquino / dal dí che fu costui papa creato / è quasi muto afatto diventato, / né più riprende i vizi l’Aretino?” MarucciMarzo-Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:332, 335). Evidence of his definitive departure from Rome and of the regret displayed by Pasquino is found in the caudate sonnet 374, Pasquino quest’anno l’Aretino ha perso: Marucci-MarzoRomano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:374, 367–368. On this see, Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, and Angelo Romano, “Giovanni Matteo Giberti e l’attentato del 28 luglio 1525,” in Periegesi aretiniane: testi, schede e note biografiche intorno a Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1991), 15–18. Danilo Romei, Sonetti lussuriosi, on the Nuovo Rinascimento website: http://www.nuovori nascimento.org/n‑rinasc/testi/epub/aretino/sonetti_lussuriosi.epub, 20–21.

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differently), while in June of that same year Gonzaga stated that by then the names Pasquino and Aretino were one and the same.28 The dagger of the failed assassin Achille della Volta only increased the author’s ill-feeling and sense of disappointment toward the papal curia. This disenchantment merely boosted his polemic and satirical efforts, although from afar and in less stereotypical poetic forms. The author’s identification with Pasquino is thus reinforced with the sole aim of mocking protectors of old and usual enemies. From that moment on, the Pasquino mask would be donned and displayed only on those occasions when his satirical writing would become more irreverent, vindictive, and uncontrollable. Pasquino’s voice would become, through Aretino, a stylistic figure and an instrument of blackmail, for, although it had always been for sale to the rich and powerful, far from Rome it became even less easy to control and driven by the fickle interests of the author. He, in fact, in the course of just a few years (from 1525 to 1528 approximately), used Pasquino’s voice changing sides several times to favor Francis i one moment and Charles v the next.29 One of the clearest examples of the vindictive spirit that fueled Aretino’s writings criticizing the Roman curia is the famous Frottola di Maestro Pasquino, in which the author comments on the many atrocities that took place during the Sack of Rome in May 1527, attributing responsibility to the foolhardy politics of Clement vii.30 The frottola—sent to the Duke of Mantua in July of the same year, along with a disperata (Deh avess’io quella terribil tromba), in which the fate of the entire peninsula at the mercy of the imperial troops is described—effectively ratified the author’s divorce from the Medici pope and his ever stronger bond with the Duke, that would last until 1531. Pasquino would later crop up in numerous of Aretino’s poetic and prose texts, including those not of an instantly recognizable satirical nature, as testimony to an uncomfortable or inopportune truth, but always undeniable and irrepressible. The Parione marble appears several times in various comedies from the 1530s; in that late epic exercise that is the Astolfeida;31 in the Capitolo in laude del Mag28 29

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Luzio, “Pietro Aretino e Pasquino,” 172. Paolo Procaccioli, “O Francia o Spagna: i mutevoli ‘purché’ di un Aretino arbitro e custode delle reputazioni regie,” in Frédérique Dubard de Gaillarbois-Davide Luglio (eds.), Les “rivales latines”: lieux, modalités et figures de la confrontation franco-italienne (Paris, 2014), 27–36. See Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 124–148; Danilo Romei, Scritti di Pietro Aretino nel Codice Marciano It. xi 66 (= 6730) (Florence, 1987), 77–83; Danilo Romei, “‘Pas vobis, brigate’: una frottola ritrovata di Pietro Aretino,” La Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 90 (1986): 429–473. Poemi cavallereschi, 276–277.

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nanimo S. Duca d’Urbino (1547);32 and in his epistolary works. However, it is in the author’s jokingly divinatory compositions that Pasquino fully embodies the role of oracle of all truths, even the most unspeakable. See, for example, the Pronostico dello anno mdxxxiiii: composto da Pietro Aretino flagello dei prencipi e quinto evangelista.33 The dedication to Francis i is a perfect example of the satirical mechanism generated by the author’s Janus-like two-faced identity possessed by a superhuman force that incites him to speak the truth without assuming any responsibility for it, since the misfortunes of the world are not borne of he who denounces them, but by the turpitudes of those who cause them, foster them, and impose them: Driven by that furor that made me prophesy the ruin of Rome coda mundi, to the delight of that dolt Ptolemy and that sniveler Albumasar, I calculated judgment of the current year in the venerable life of the princes […]. And since heaven made them asses, plebeians, and scoundrels, why do Ferrara, Milan, and Mantua, Florence and Savoy, dukes only in name, wish me ill? How is the taciturn Caesarean avarice my fault? Did I incline England to change beds? If Venus urges the Marquis of Vasto to tart himself up, what can I do about it? If Mars denies Federico Gonzaga’s army, why attribute it to me? If Pisces incites Alfonso da Este to salt eels, get angry with him, and not with Aretino.34 However, the end of the dedication leaves no doubt as to the instrumental, and especially venal, character of this burlesque exercise: And if the King of France lacked the evil of avarice and rascality, as others lacked his gilding my tongue, and having bound me with chains of 32 33

34

Poesie varie i, 250–260, esp. 254, ll. 85–87. Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 172–198. A similar parodic prophecy exists in a severely damaged version and dates back to 1527 (Iudicio over pronostico de mastro Pasquino quinto evangelista de l’anno 1527); see, Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 90–91; Romei, Scritti di Pietro Aretino, 54–57. “Spinto da quel furore che mi fece profetizzare la roina di Roma coda mundi, con pace di quel coglione di Tolomeo e di quel moccicone di Albumasare, ho calculato nella venerabile vita dei principi il giudizio dello anno presente […]. E poi che il cielo gli ha fatti asini, plebei e ribaldi, a che proposito mi vol male Ferrara, Milano e Mantova, Fiorenza e Savoia, duchi solamente nel nome? Che colpa ho io della taciturna avarizia caesarea? Ho io inclinato Inghilterra a mutar letto? Se Venere sforza a ’mbellettarsi il marchese del Vasto che ne posso far io? Se Marte refuta la milizia di Federico Gonzaga, perché attribuirlo a me? Se Pisces incita Alfonso da Este a salare le anguille, scorruccisi seco e non con lo Aretino,” Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 172–173.

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gold, could they make it so I would not say about his Majesty (whose wide open hands I kiss) what I have said, do say, and will say about all lords and all monsignors when they imitate Catholic and apostolic costiveness, and not the prodigality of Lorena and Medici, the reproach of pig cardinals for being too good in this cutthroat century as worthy of the Duke of Ferrara as the golden century was worthy of Saturn.35 In short, the line between “speaking the truth” and “speaking ill” is unclear, as it is traced on the edge of blackmail and is governed not so much by Pasquino’s whim but by the largesse that princes are able to reserve for Aretino. Over the years, Aretino would return relentlessly to his role as “censor of the lofty world / and prophet and messenger of truth” (“censor del mondo altero / et de la verità nuncio et propheta”),36 a paradoxical moralizer who moves in a deeply amoral context that inspires him to act accordingly. See, by way of example, this excerpt from a 1537 letter sent to the friar Pietro da Modena, in which Aretino lingers on the clergy’s vices: Because when the spirit of Pasquino puts me in a prophetic furor, I am more horrible than the Devil who appeared up on the pulpit. I do not know which lady said to me: “Is it true that a live Demon appeared in church?” not knowing that Lucifers and hells are among them etcetera. Now I commend myself to God, to you, and to all the convent. From Venice, June 14, 1537.37

35

36 37

“E se il re di Francia fosse diffettoso del male della avarizia e della gagliofferia, come son diffettosi gli altri nel suo avermi indorata la lingua, nel suo avermi legato con le catene d’oro, porrieno far sí che io non dicessi di sua Maestà (alla quale bascio le spalancate mani) quello che ho detto, dico e dirò di tutti i signori e di tutti i monsignori, caso che imitano la stitichezza catolica e apostolica, e non la prodigalità di Lorena e di Medici, vituperio dei cardinali porci, per essere troppo da bene in questo manigoldo secolo degno del duca di Ferrara come lo aureo di Saturno,” Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 173. That the Pasquinesque prognostications had the power to sow discord and steer part of public opinion is evidenced by a 1531 letter from Fausto to the author in which he states that “the Most Reverend Medici does not want Pasquino’s opinion this year to be spread, out of respect, which is infinite, as you well know. If it had been written in Piacenza, or likewise in Verona, a million copies of it would have been made” (“Non vuole il Reverendissimo Medici che ’l giudicio di Pasquino di quest’anno si divulghi, per li rispetti, come voi ben sapete, che sono infiniti. Se fusse stato così scritto in Piasenza, come in Verona, se ne seriano fatte copie a milioni,” lsa i, 205). From the sonnet Dipinto che zetta la laurea girlanda, in Romei, Scritti di Pietro Aretino, 123, ll. 5–6. “Perché quando lo spirto di Pasquino mi pone nel furor profetico, son più orribile che il

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The subversive potential of such a critical approach did not escape some polemicists who were motivated by concerns of a religious nature. In 1539 Pier Paolo Vergerio pushed Aretino to enter the controversial arena that saw Catholics opposed to Protestants: I am still in that mood where I would like you to write a Sonnet to Luther in Pasquino’s style, for this name will make it desirable; against him these people have already written foolishly: Silvestro, Catarino, Latomo, Nausea. Say, therefore, a bit, for I do not know what else there is to come out, that comments on the intimate viscera of that man, from the pen of a little bishop disciple of the Cardinal of Trent, et reliqua.38 While the Tuscan author never aimed to openly take part in confessional controversies, leaving to others the honor of transforming Pasquino into the champion of the reformed propaganda,39 some Roman pasquinades contain traces of a dispute between the Parione marble and Martin Luther—difficult to attribute to Aretino, in truth—that plays entirely off quarrels within the Roman curia rather than confessional in origin:

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39

Diavolo che mostraste in sul pergolo. Onde non so qual madonna mi disse: ‘È vero che ne la chiesa sia stato mostrato un Demonio vivo?’, non sapendo che i Luciferi e gli inferni sono fra le loro e cetera. Or io mi raccomando a Iddio, a voi, e a tutto il convento. Di Vinezia, il 14 di Giugno 1537,” Lettere i, 218–219. “Ancora son in quel mio umor che vorrei che facesti un Sonetto a Lutero in quel stile da Pasquino, che questo nome lo faria desiderabile; contra di lui scrissero già questa gente scioccamente: Silvestro, Catarino, Latomo, Nausea. Dite adunque un poco, che non so che altro ha da uscire, a toccare l’intime viscere di colui, dalla penna di un Vescovetto discepolo del Cardinal di Trento, et reliqua,” lsa i, 178–179. On religious pasquinades circulating in Europe from the second decade of the 1500s and the key role played by the humanist Celio Secondo Curione see primarily the proceedings of the conference Chrysa Damianaki-Angelo Romano (eds.), Pasquin, Lord of Satire, and His Disciples in Sixteenth-Century Struggles for Religious and Political Reform (Rome, 2014), the biblography on Curione edited by Lastraioli in the online database Cinquecento plurale http://studiumanistici‑uniroma3‑it.mirror.uniroma3.it/cinquecentoplurale/​ bibliografie/celio‑secondo‑curione/, and the following studies: Letizia Panizza, “Pasquino and His Pasquinate Turned Protestant: Celio Secondo Curione’s Pasquinus ecstaticus of 1544,” in Dilwyn Knox-Nuccio Ordine (eds.), Renaissance Letters and Learning: In Memoriam Giovanni Aquilecchia (London-Turin, 2012), 181–196; Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci, “La critique paradoxale de la centralité de Rome dans le discours satirique des ‘hérétiques italiens,’ ” in Frédéric Tinguely (ed.), La Renaissance décentrée, Actes du colloque de Genève, 28–29 septembre 2006 (Geneva, 2008), 139–153.

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Martin Luther to Pasquino Three miracles or four, barring the truth, the Lutheran sect ascribes to Pasquino, which neither Christ nor Saint Peter can do, which a son of a whore cannot do: subtract from the pope of avarice even a minimal sum, make the madame Duchess a Christian, free Farnese from madness, make the mute Santa Fiora speak.40 Answer by Pasquino to Luther That the pope is avaricious, I do not agree, for to me he seems liberal in taxation; that the madame is not a Christian, you are wrong, rather she is such a saint she has herself worshipped; you call Farnese mad, I call him shrewd, for he acquires a lot with little effort; you call Santa Fiora mute; God does not allow it: at night he even speaks with the toilet.41 Also in the Ragionamento delle corti of 1538, where the feeling of an evangelical ascension seems to emerge in the final part of the dialogue dedicated to the heavenly court, Aretino never dons the mask of Pasquino, who crops up, instead, in the first part of the dialogue, when the countless turpitudes of the Roman court are described: “and of its being naturally avaricious, haughty, and ungrateful, let Pasquino speak, for it is more his office than mine.”42 On the

40

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“Tre miracoli o quatro, salv’il vero, / scrive a Pasquin la setta luterana, / che far non può né Cristo né san Piero, / far non gli può figliolo di puttana: / scemar al papa di miseria un gero, / madamma la duchessa far cristiana, / e di pazzia Farnese liberare, / e Santa Fior di muto far parlare,” Marucci-Marzo-Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1: 496, 535. “Che ’l papa miser sia non ben comporto, / ch’a me par largo ne l’angarïare; / che madamma non sia cristiana hai torto, / anzi è sí santa che si fa adorare; / tu fai pazzo Farnese, io ’faccio accorto, / ch’acquista assai con poco affaticare; / muto fai Santa Fior; Dio nol permetta: / la notte parla pur con la turchetta,” Marucci-Marzo-Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane, 1:497, 535–536. Pietro Aretino, Ragionamento delle corti, ed. Fulvio Pevere (Milan, 1995), 50. On this work and its religious implications see, especially, Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice: Researches on Aretino and His Circle in Venice, 1527–1556 (Florence, 1985);

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other hand, as Aretino’s contemporaries tell us, Aretino/Pasquino essentially worked for the purpose of profit thanks to his omnipresent blackmail practice of “speaking ill” (“dir male”). The resentful Nicolò Franco, first a follower and subsequently a bitter enemy of the author, to whom he addressed numerous defamatory sonnets, would appeal in vain to the important people of his time so that they would cease yielding to the demands of the “scourge of princes”: Princes, it is known that already your grace does not rain over Aretino, be he of water or be he of wine, be he learned or be he artless. But of the great theme that moves you, that he does not sing of you with Pasquino, I do not speak as a prophesier, for all day evidence of it appears. And if it is thus, let us suppose a bit that your shame were not commented on by Aretino, nor put into play any longer, are you certain in your fortresses that insulting you everywhere there are no more tongues in other mouths?43

43

Chiara Lastraioli, “Ingegneria del dialogo nel Ragionamento delle corti di Pietro Aretino,” Studi italiani, 9/1 (1997): 24–47; the introduction to Operette politiche e satiriche i. “Prencipi, egli si sa che già non piove / la vostra grazia sopra l’Aretino, / o perch’egli sia d’acqua, o sia di vino, / o perch’egli sia dotto, o sia di nove. / Ma per la tema grande che vi move / ch’egli di voi non canti con Pasquino, / n’io vi parlo di ciò come indovino, / che tutto dì ne paiono le prove. / Et s’è così, presuppogniamo un poco / che le vergogne vostre non sien tocche / da l’Aretino, né più poste in gioco, / Sete securi ne le vostre rocche, / che per chiamarvi becchi in ogni loco / lingue non sieno più ne l’altrui bocche?” Delle rime di M. Nicolo Franco contro Pietro Aretino, et de la Priapea del medesimo, terza editione, colla giunta di molti sonetti nuovi, etc., s.l., s.n.t., 1548, fol. xivv. Aretino had already been the object of anonymous defamatory pasquinades at the beginning of the 1530s, precisely in Venice where it seems he had imported the practice of posting anonymous invectives around the Rialto bridge (see Marco Faini, “Due pasquinate contro Pietro Aretino in un manoscritto Oliveriano,” Studi oliveriana, 3rd ser., 5–6 (2005–2006): 175– 181).

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Also Giovanni Mauro, in his paradoxical capitolo on the virtue of lying addressed to Pietro Ghinucci, admonishes poets about “speaking the truth” to princes so that they can avoid the same hazards that befell pasquinade-writing Aretino: There are in Italy many poets who could put Aretino in checkmate, and how many Aretinos have there already been, who wanted to go that route of always writing ill, and speaking the truth, as the school of Pasquino teaches. He who yearns to truly be a poet goes ever further from the truth as a provident helmsman does from rocks. Aretino, thank God, is alive and well, but his face has been nobly slashed, and there have been more blows than a hand has fingers. This has happened to him for being a speaker of those things that must be kept silent to not make people angry. He was wrong, not in the way they said, but because he should have known that about great lords, a hint suffices, without saying more.44 Aretino himself, during the course of the 1540s, appears to change his attitude toward the Parione marble, when he is sometimes called on as a judge, infallible 44

“Sono in Italia di poeti assai, / Che darian schaccomatto allo Aretino, / Et a quanti Aretin furon già mai, / Se volessero andar per quel cammino / Di scriver sempre male, e dire ’l vero, / Come insegna la scola di Pasquino. / Chi brama esser poeta da dovero, / Così vada dal ver sempre lontano / Come da scogli un provido nocchiero. / L’Aretin, per dio gratia, è vivo, et sano, / Ma ’l mostaccio ha sfregiato nobilmente, / Et più colpi che diti in una mano; / Questo gli advenne per esser dicente / Di quelle cose, che tacer si denno, / Per non far gire in collora la gente. / Egli hebbe il torto, e non quei che gli denno, / Perché dovea saper, che a’ gran signori, / Senza dir altro, basta fare un cenno,” Giovanni Mauro, Terze rime, ed. Francesca Jossa (Manziana, 2016), 310–311.

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and Solomonic but unrelated to the debate in progress, to settle disputes that have little in common with the practice of insult.45 In other instances, Pasquino acts as an incontrovertible witness or even a correspondent of brief letters in which Aretino gives free rein to his deep resentment towards the Roman curia, which continues to deny him the prelature he feels he is entitled to.46 Even in his old age, from his Venetian refuge, the indissoluble bond between the author to his marble alter ego (Pasquino) makes its presence felt on several occasions, however the blackmail nature of the invectives seems to noticeably decline, especially after the resounding beating that he suffered in 1548 at the hand of the English ambassador in Venice.47 The use of slander for monetary purposes entailed risks that an elderly Aretino could ill afford; the decline of his influence in Venice and the lack of support from people with power exacerbated the fragility of an apparent impunity that in fact was nothing more than yet another smokescreen devised to obtain favor and protection. 45 46

47

On this see Letter 332 in which Pasquino is called on to give judgment on the precedence of jurists and doctors (Lettere iv, 209). See Letter 424 to Pasquino in March 1548 (Lettere iv, 263) and the following, Letter 504 to Pasquino: “If I ever had in mind, from some daydream about a prelature, that I might become a Cardinal, it would seem to me to be dead to the world, and I live underground. April, in Venice, 1548” (“Se io ho mai avuto in animo per causa d’alcun giardino in aria de la prelatura, ch’io possa diventar Car[dinale], che mi parebbe essere e morto al mondo, e vivo sotterra. Di Aprile in Vinezia 1548,” Lettere iv, 312). See Juan Carlos d’Amico, “Aretino tra Inghilterra e Impero: una dedica costata cara e una lettera non pubblicata,” Filologia e critica, 20/1 (2005): 72–94.

chapter 4

Aretino and the Court Paola Ugolini

If you were the son of a cobbler born in a medium-sized city at the end of the fifteenth century,1 and if you were endowed with enough talent and ambition to make something out of yourself beyond the plain life of a provincial artisan, becoming a courtier would have been your best option. The court, a central institution of the early modern world, the core of political power and a trendsetter in the cultural and artistic sphere, was also a center of patronage that attracted the most eager and ingenious. Thus, it should not come as a total surprise that Pietro Aretino, a man whose name has for a long time been associated with scandalous pornographic works and merciless vilifications of courts and courtiers, and who during his lifetime styled himself as “the scourge of princes,” began his career as a courtier: as one of the young men who in sixteenth-century Italy strived to embody the ideal of perfection set forth by Baldassarre Castiglione’s masterpiece of courtliness, The Book of the Courtier (1528). The court appears an almost haunting presence in Aretino’s literary career. It is quite astonishing to notice how many among Aretino’s works deal, directly or indirectly, with courts and courtiers, from the pasquinades and satires written during his early years in Rome, to the plays, the notorious dialogues among prostitutes, the unfinished chivalric poems, the letters, until the publication of his masterpiece of anti-court satire, aptly titled Ragionamento delle corti (“Dialogue on courts,” 1538) and published when Aretino had already established his residence in the Republic of Venice. Even his eventual rejection of the court in favor of the “freedom” offered by the Serenissima did not dispel the mark left by the court on Aretino’s imagination. What is even more striking is that at the peak of his fame and fortune Aretino has been considered to replicate the model of a court—of which he was a sort of virtual prince—in his own private residence in Venice. It would seem, in the end, that Aretino was committed to his definition of himself as born in a humble hospital, but with the spirit of a king.2 1 For biographical details on the early years of Aretino’s life, see Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1997), 11–38. 2 Pietro Aretino, “Al Cardinal Caracciolo,” in Lettere i, 147–148. Also quoted in Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 19.

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Because of the necessity for ruling families in the early modern period to establish their reputation not only through warfare but through manifestations of cultural and artistic refinement—by literally showing off their prestige to rival courts in works of art and of literature produced with the intent of decorating and celebrating the court and its prince—early modern courts were in constant need of attracting talent. The system of patronage promoted by the courts made them a center of attraction for many writers, artists, and musicians in search of a way to pursue their vocation while making it also remunerative. For men born into the lower social strata, in particular, entering the court often represented the only opportunity for climbing the social ladder. All of such features rendered the early modern court a particularly fertile environment, a center where new ideas, fashions, and customs where elaborated and discussed before being disseminated. At the same time, the abundance of ambitious and gifted individuals striving to attract the prince’s attention in order to achieve commissions, posts, monetary rewards and fame created an extremely competitive atmosphere. Every courtier, especially one who appeared to be set on a successful path, soon had to learn to guard himself from his peers and from the cut-throat rivalry that reigned at court. Princely favor, too, did not come without insecurities. Princes were known for being whimsical in their preferences and an easy prey of flatterers. As a result, the prestige and economic stability that one had painfully achieved could be quickly lost with no hope of recovery.3

3 On Renaissance courts, see Arthur G. Dickens, The Courts of Europe. Politics, Patronage and Royalty, 1400–1800 (New York, 1977); Cesare Vasoli, La cultura delle corti (Bologna, 1980); Carlo Ossola-Adriano Prosperi (eds.), La corte e il cortegiano (Rome, 1980); Sergio Bertelli-Franco Cardini-Elvira Garbero Zorzi (eds.), Le corti italiane del Rinascimento (Milan, 1985); C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness. Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 923–1210 (Philadelphia, 1985); Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, L’onore in corte: dal Castiglione al Tasso (Milan, 1986); Ronald Asch-Adolf N. Birke (eds.), Princes, Patronage and the Nobility. The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Period, 1450–1650 (Oxford, 1991); Franco Gaeta, “Dal comune alla corte rinascimentale,” in Alberto Asor Rosa (ed.), Letteratura italiana, vol. 1: Il letterato e le istituzioni (Turin, 1991), 149–255; Mario Rosa, “La Chiesa e gli stati regionali nell’età dell’assolutismo,” in ibid., 257–389; Aldo Scaglione, Knights at Court. Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (Berkeley, CA, 1991); John Adamson, The Princely Courts of Europe, 1500–1750. Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500–1750 (London, 1999); David Mateer (ed.), Courts, Patrons and Poets (New Haven, CT, and London, 2000); Robert Muchembled, “Manners, Courts, and Civility,” in Guido Ruggiero (ed.), A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2002), 156–172; Denise Aricò, “Corte rinascimentale e barocca,” in Gian Mario Anselmi-Gino Ruozzi (eds.), Luoghi della letteratura italiana (Milan, 2003), 169–179; Stephen Kolsky, Courts and Courtiers in Renaissance Northern Italy (Aldershot-Burlington, VT, 2003).

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Among the many sixteenth century courts that populated the Italian peninsula where a prospective courtier could try his fortune, the papal court of Rome was one of the most rich and splendid, and also most numerous in terms of staff.4 It was also the only court not to be under the exclusive domination of a single lineage: at the death of every pope and at the election of a new one, a different family took residence at the Roman curia, and the balance of power (not only in Rome, but in the entire Italian territory) shifted significantly. Such frequent alternations in ruling dynasties made the Roman court an extremely dynamic and unstable environment at the same time. To anyone with the goal of achieving success through connections and patronage, such a stimulating and mutable environment could offer an ample variety of opportunities, and yet an unprecedented number of risks. The year 1517 is usually considered the most reliable date for Aretino’s arrival in Rome. Upon his arrival in the capital, he entered the household of the banker Agostino Chigi, who became his first patron. Although Aretino initially looked at his employment at the service of a banker as unsatisfactory,5 the Chigi household offered him the opportunity to establish fruitful connections with artists and intellectuals, and with prominent members of the papal curia. By the time Chigi died in 1520, Aretino had made his name known at the papal court, and it is estimated that he was admitted into the circle of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici shortly after Chigi’s death. If Aretino’s proximity with representatives of the courtly elite under Pope Leo x, and his connection with the pope himself can be confirmed, what exact position he may have held at Leo x’s court is still uncertain.6 What is certain is that by the early 1520s Aretino had seen enough of courtly life to feel sympathetic with the tradition of anti-court satire, and to start authoring anti-court writings of his own. The evils of the court—the whimsicality of princely favor, the flattery for those in power, the envy and the ruthless peer rivalry among courtiers—were the object of a long satiric tradition that dated back to Greek and Roman satires and that was experiencing a comeback in the society of the courts of the early modern world. In such writings the court was often represented as a stormy sea where it is easy to shipwreck, and as a lieu 4 On the papal curia in the Renaissance, see Bonner Mitchell, Rome in the High Renaissance: The Age of Leo x (Norman, OK, 1973); Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, IN, 1985), 123–128; Peter Partner, “Ufficio, famiglia, stato: contrasti nella curia romana,” in Sergio Gensini (ed.), Roma capitale (1447–1527) (Pisa, 1994), 39–50; Gianvittorio SignorottoMaria Antonietta Visceglia (eds.), La corte di Roma tra Cinque e Seicento: “Teatro” della politica europea (Rome, 1998). 5 Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 43. 6 Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 53–54.

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dominated by an uncontrollable, capricious fortune.7 Aretino, who had been experimenting with satiric writings through the popular Roman genre of the pasquinade,8 found in anti-court satire a particularly congenial genre. Satire of courts and courtiers was to accompany Aretino throughout his entire career, although with some significant changes in tone related to his mutated relationship with the court. Aretino’s reflections on the dangers of life at court are first expressed at some length in a text composed in the early 1520s and meaningfully titled Lamento de uno cortigiano già favorito in palazzo, et hora in grandissma calamità (“Lament of a courtier once in favor at court, and now in great distress”).9 The text— consisting of a speech given by the ruined courtier of the title—is an invective against the fake hopes of fame and success that the court can raise, and a caution to every prospective courtier not to linger too much in any illusions of future success. This early text is particularly relevant to analyze Aretino’s relationship with the court because it contains in a nutshell many elements that will characterize Aretino’s later satires of courts and courtiers: the merciless mockery of failed courtiers, the almost obsessive enumeration of all the evils and vices of the court, the warning directed to young, enthusiastic prospective courtiers. Most importantly, the text is a testimony to the anxieties of someone who, like Aretino, was aware of being a self-made man, for whom favor at court could be the fastest way to move up the social ladder, but who at the same time could lose everything he had gained in the space of a moment. The issue of real possibilities for upward social mobility at court was, thus, one of Aretino’s primary interests. It is not surprising, hence, that the Lamento starts precisely with a reflection on the power of Fortuna at court: Oh impudent hopes of the court, favor drunk on volatile smoke,

7 On critiques against courts and courtiers, see Pauline M. Smith, The Anti-Courtier Trend in Early Modern French Literature (Geneva, 1966), and Paola Ugolini, The Court and Its Critics. Anti-Court Sentiments in Early Modern Italy (Toronto, 2020), and “Satire” and “Courts and Courtiers,” in Marco Sgarbi (ed.), The Springer Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Berlin, 2017) (online). 8 See Chiara Lastraioli’s essay in this volume. 9 The Lamento de uno cortigiano has remained unknown until very recently, when it was published in a modern edition by Marco Faini as “Un’opera dimenticata di Pietro Aretino: il Lamento de uno cortigiano” in Filologia e Critica, 32 (2007), 75–93, and later in Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 51–60.

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oh vile, liar and dishonest chance, miserable Envy—to courtly life beginning, midpoint, and end, with every evil, as soon as I am done speaking, throw me in the river.10 It is soon revealed that the speaker of the Lamento di uno cortigiano is someone who started from humble beginnings and was able to move from rags to riches, or, as the speaker puts it, “from a stable to a high seat” (“d’una stalla in alto seggio”). However, here he is forced to confess his manifest failure and repent for having believed that his success could last forever. The speaker could be identified with a Giovanni Lazzaro de Magistris also known as Serapica, who had climbed up from the position of kennelman to that of intimate counselor of Leo x.11 At the same time, the failed courtier is also anonymous and unrecognizable: a nobody who could very well be everybody who ever entered the court, and whose destiny casts a dark shadow on any presently successful courtier. The prospect of failure at court presented by the Lamento di uno cortigiano becomes a reminder for any ambitious courtier—including, one may argue, the author himself—holding hopes of self-advancement and of eventual stability. Despite its condemnation for the court and derision for the speaker, the Lamento di uno cortigiano maintains an amused tone, a sense of playful participation in a carnivalesque atmosphere12 such as the one that characterized the city of Rome during the papacy of Leo x. In virtue of this feature, the Lamento di uno cortigiano can be put in connection with another anti-court text that Aretino composed in the mid-1520s: the first version of his play dedicated to the court, Cortigiana (1525).13 The title of the play is a multiple pun: la cortigiana can either be read as “the courtly one,” i.e., the play of the court, but also as “the courtesan,” thus evoking the figure of the high-class prostitutes that populated Renaissance Italy and one of whom is featured in the play, thus also hinting at the personification of the court into a prostitute that was a feature of sixteenth-century Italian

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“O sfacciate speranze della Corte, / favor briaco di volubil fume, / o vil, bugiarda e disonesta sorte; / misera Invidia, al cortigian costume / principio mezzo e fin con ogni male, / principio mezzo e fin con ogni male / come ho parlato getatemi in fiume,” Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 51–52. Faini, “Un’opera dimenticata di Pietro Aretino,” 76–77. The Lamento di uno cortigiano was most likely performed during carnival festivities. In Teatro i. See also Jane Tylus and Deanna Shemek’s essay on Aretino’s theater in this volume.

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anti-court satires. In addition, Cortigiana is also the reverse of Cortegiano, thus alluding to the title of Castiglione’s manual of courtliness. Aretino’s play is precisely a satirical reversal of the precepts of courtliness outlined in Castiglione’s masterpiece.14 The play has a double plot, one concerning the deceiving of the Neapolitan gentleman Parabolano, who is brought to an encounter with a courtesan disguised as a noblewoman, and the other one focusing on the prank played on a gullible aspiring courtier named Maco da Coe. This second plot is the one that makes the parody of Castiglione’s precepts explicit: Maco falls prey to the witty Maestro Andrea,15 who proclaims himself “a master in making courtiers,” and is persuaded to have a bath in a hot-water boiler and is beaten with wooden sticks in order to make him “a courtier in his forms,” with a clear ironic reference to the project of Book of the Courtier of “forming in words” a perfect courtier. The first plot is not alien from anti-court material, since it includes bitter references to the ingratitude of the signori towards their loyal servants. Parabolano, in fact, neglects his faithful servant Valerio in favor of his other servant, the scheming flatterer Rosso, who will eventually defraud him. Open reflections on life at court and on the mechanisms that structure it are present in the play as well. In a dialogue with the procuress Aloigia, Rosso gives a lengthy description of the infamous meals in the tinello, where subordinate courtiers who were not admitted at their lord’s table would dine, which has the effect of making the cunning but witty character and its trick on his master Parabolano appear in a more sympathetic light. Moreover, two secondary characters, Flaminio and the old Sempronio (who can be inferred to be a sort of retired courtier) are featured having a discussion on whether Sempronio should send his son to court. Using a line of reasoning that will be echoed in Aretino’s most famous anti-court writing, the Ragionamento delle corti, Flaminio advises Sempronio to keep his son as far from the court as possible, if he loves him. The court, he proceeds to explain, is no longer what the old man may remember; instead, it has deteriorated to the point of being now almost unrecognizable. As soon as one becomes a

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On this topic see Giulio Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione. Pietro Aretino e la dissoluzione del teatro (Naples, 1977), 37, and Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice. Researches on Aretino and his Circle in Venice, 1527–1556, (Florence, 1985), 36. On the 1525 Cortigiana and the court, see also José Guidi, “Visages de la Vie de Cour Selon Castiglione et l’ Aretin: du «Cortegiano» a la «Cortigiana»,” in Culture et société en Italie du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, homage à André Rochon (Paris, 1985), 219–228. The character is named after Aretino’s real-life friend, a Venetian painter and poet active at the court of Leo x in the same years as Aretino.

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courtier, he becomes as well “envious, ambitious, miserable, ungrateful, flatterer, malicious, unjust, heretic, hypocrite, thief, gluttonous, insolent and liar.”16 Flaminio’s invective is successful, and Sempronio resolves to never send his son to court. Giulio Ferroni has identified in Valerio the character that Aretino may have felt closer to himself in the 1525 version of the play, in virtue of his standing for “a class of subaltern courtiers” with whom Aretino identified at the time when the first draft of the Cortigiana was written. Valerio is for sure the character who shows the most awareness of the mechanisms that regulate the rapport with the powerful, and who relates to courtliness and patronage in the most intriguing way. As much as Valerio may be critical of such mechanisms, he is not ready to give up hope—an attitude that sets him apart from Flaminio and his utterly pessimistic vision of the court. Valerio, on the contrary, is represented as having an open attitude towards the possibilities offered by Fortuna and ready to seize the opportunities that might come from it.17 As he tells the discontented Flaminio, the only available option for a courtier confronted with the whimsicality of princely favor is to “devote oneself to good fortune while catching the best that one can […], but one must not despair, because the profit of courtly merchandise comes at an unexpected moment.”18 As pointed out by Giulio Ferroni, the abandonment to the fluctuations of Fortuna of the first Cortigiana represents as well “the acceptance of a world that is left to itself, where fortune has nullified the weight of ancient values and privileges:”19 an invaluably positive feature for homines novi like Valerio—and Aretino. Thus it is particularly significant that at the end of the play not only is Valerio’s loyalty to Parabolano rewarded, but he even gets the satisfaction of scolding his master over his previous neglect for his faithful servant.20 Valerio shows an open and dynamic attitude,21 a readiness to grasp every opportunity that may present itself in a chaotic world such as the one of 1520s Rome. His final endorsement on the part of his master represents a residual optimistic attitude

16 17 18

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“Invidioso, ambitioso, misero, ingrato, adulatore, maligno, iniusto, eretico, ipocrito, ladro, giotto, insolente e busardo,” Teatro i, 92. As already pointed out by Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 66–67. “Votarsi ala buona fortuna e pigliare el meglio che l’omo può […]. Né bisogna però disperarse, perché ’l guadagno dela mercantia cortigiana sta in un punto non aspettato,” Teatro i, 114. “L’adesione a un mondo abbandonato a se stesso, dove la fortuna ha vanificato il peso di antichi valori e privilegi.” Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 65. Teatro i, 147–148. Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 66–67.

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on the part of Aretino towards the opportunities offered by service as a courtier, the belief that rewards eventually come the way of those who stand alert and work hard. The reflections on the court in the second version of the Cortigiana (1534) will be far from being this optimistic. In the years that had gone by between the first and the second draft of the play, Aretino’s life and his relationship with the world of the court would undergo a complete transformation. Leo x died unexpectedly in 1521, and his death set forward a deep institutional crisis and gave way to a wave of satiric writings criticizing the pope and the members of his entourage. Aretino found himself in a particularly difficult situation, as someone whose position at court was far from being established. When Adrian vi was elected pope, Aretino (who had joined the cause of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici) left Rome for a period of peregrinations in northern and central Italy, to return to the Roman court only after Adrian vi’s death and the cardinal’s election to papacy as Clement vii in 1523. This second experience at the papal court of a Medici pope was going to prove much less rewarding than Aretino may have expected, affecting in turn the way Aretino was going to portray the court in his later works. The scandal that followed the publication of the pornographic sonnets and engravings known as I modi rendered Aretino’s position in Rome a particularly difficult one. In addition, his conflicts with influential members of the court made him in 1525 the victim of an assassination attempt that he survived by a narrow margin. In 1526, Aretino summarized his experience with the Medici pope in an embittered sonnet that—in spite of the short time frame separating the two works—has none of the amusement that still persuaded the first draft of the Cortigiana: Seven traitor years I have wasted four with Leo and three with Sir Clemendacious22 and I am made the people’s enemy more for their sins than for mine and I have scarcely two ducats of income and I am worth less than Gian Manente so that, if one gives some thought to this, all the hopes of such papacies—I have them up my ass. If wounds were vacancies, I would have of them

22

“Ser Chemente” in Italian. I have attempted to render the pun in the original Italian on the second Medici pope’s name: “Clemente” (Clement) becomes “Che-Mente,” or “He-WhoLies.”

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—just for having defended the honor of my masters— with a motu proprio at least four or five every day; but benefits, appointments, and pensions go to bastards and low scumbags who would devour the popes in a couple mouthfuls; while their loyal servants, starve to their death, just like I do —something that could make one disavow God.23 Once back on his feet, Aretino took cover at the camp of his friend Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, and after the latter’s death he moved to a court again—this time, to the Gonzaga court of Mantua. Aretino had already briefly sojourned at the Mantua court after Leo x’s death, and he was confident to have an ardent supporter in Duke Federico Gonzaga. Yet, even in Mantua Aretino was far from finding an ideal court setting. A portrayal of his sometimes conflicted relationship with his new patron can be found in the play Il marescalco (“The stablemaster,” 1533), which centers on a joke played by a duke on one of his subjects.24 The eponimous stablemaster, known for his aversion to women, is forced by the duke to get married—a prospect that clearly terrifies him, but that he, given his subordinate status, cannot refuse. Only at the very end of the play is the marriage revealed to be a joke orchestrated by the duke himself: the bride is a page boy, and the stablemaster’s relief is met with laughter by the entire court. It is important to point out that the happy ending of the play does not wash away the violence implied in its premise and the bleak portrayal of the court that it entails: at court, a subordinate is always forced to comply with a prince’s demands, even when they interfere with his most private choices, and the prince is free to expose any of his subjects to ridicule. The portrait of the Mantua court in Il marescalco, however, acquires an even more bitter nuance

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“Sett’anni traditor ho via gettati, / con Leon quattro e tre con ser Chemente / e son fatto nemico de la gente / più per li lor che per mia peccati / e non ho pur d’intrata duo ducati / e son da men che non è Gian Manente, / onde nel culo, se ponete mente, / ho tutte le speranze de’ papati. / e le ferite vacasser ne avrei, / per diffender l’onore di mie patroni, / motu proprio ogni di ben cinque o sei; / ma benefici, offici e pensioni / hanno bastardi e furfanti plebei / che i papi mangeriano in duo bocconi; / e i suoi servitor buoni / moion da fame come che facc’io, / cosa da rinegar Domenedio,” Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 89. Teatro ii, 10–101. On this play, see Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 71–102, and Deanna Shemek, “Aretino’s Marescalco: Marriage Woes and the Duke of Mantua,” Renaissance Studies, 16/3, (2002): 366–380.

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in Deanna Shemek’s reading of the play, according to which in the figure of the stablemaster one should see duke Federico himself, who in the very same years was being coerced by his mother into an undesired marriage.25 Despite such a grim portrait of courtly life, the idea of a withdrawal from the court to regain control over one’s private life is also denied in the play. The only voice of comfort for the stablemaster comes from Messer Iacopo, a courtier who was similarly forced by the duke into an unwanted marriage. The experience turned out to be a happy one for Iacopo, who, thanks to his new domestic life, was cured from his worries about the court: “my first male child was born, and I got so much happiness from this, that I forgot everything concerning the court, courtly service, what I hoped for in virtue of my worth, and, having been turned from courtier into a lover of quiet and of consolation, I never left my house […].”26 In a sardonic turn, however, the same son that cured Iacopo from courtliness is then depicted as being the living embodiment of the perfect courtier: “he can sing, play music, ride a horse, fence, he has a good hand, he is good at writing, he dances well, carves meat even better, and he would be suitable to serve the Sultan himself.”27 Thus, through the depictions of Iacopo and his son, Aretino seems to denounce the court as a perversely inescapable system, capable of endlessly replicating itself. The reason for the final separation between Aretino and the duke of Mantua is still uncertain, and it has been hypothesized as either due to Aretino’s reluctance to remain in a smaller provincial court, or to the duke’s unwillingness to keep at his court someone having a conflicted relationship with the papal court and whose work was becoming more and more controversial.28 What is certain is that in 1527 Aretino moved to Venice, the Republican city that he would celebrate as a heaven on earth opposed to the hell of the courts. In the initial period of his stay in Venice, however, Aretino did not consider it to be a long-term solution, and appeared instead actively involved in trying to find for himself a new patron.29

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Shemek, “Aretino’s Marescalco.” “Mi nacque il primo figliuolo maschio, e n’ebbi tanta allegrezza, che mi domenticai della corte, del servire e de le speranze de i miei meriti, e trasformatomi di cortigiano in uno amator de la quiete e de la consolazione, di casa mia non usciva […],” Teatro ii, 77. “Egli canta, egli suona, egli cavalca, egli schermisce, egli ha buona mano, belle lettere, balla bene, tringia meglio, ed è atto ad attendere la persona del soldano,” Teatro ii, 82. For a full account of the different hypothesis concerning Aretino’s departure from Mantua, see Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 126–129. Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 131–132.

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During his early stay in Venice Aretino was reached by the news of the sack that in May 1527 devastated Rome. Aretino’s reaction to the sack oscillated between pity and condemnation.30 In the accusatory works, the Sack is explained as a divine punishment for the corruption of the papal curia. The tragic events of 1527 thus become an additional instrument in Aretino’s developing and contradictory anti-court discourse. While on the one hand Aretino continued to seek pacification with the papal court (with the harshly blamed Clement vii first, and later with his successor Paul iii), on the other hand his portrayals of the court—especially of the Roman court—and of the strategies needed to achieve success as a courtier became increasingly negative and cynical. The same seesawing dynamics characterize Aretino’s relationship with Federico Gonzaga even after Aretino’s relocation away from his court. The story of the rapport between Aretino and the duke in this period is complicated by Aretino’s project of following Ariosto’s footsteps in the field of chivalric poetry. Starting from the late 1520s, Aretino made several attempts at writing a continuation to the Orlando Furioso and at replicating its success. In Aretino’s mind, the chivalric poems would have also had a courtly function, bringing prestige to the Gonzaga court as the Furioso had done for the Estes in Ferrara.31 The project of becoming the new Ariosto is undertaken at a time when Aretino appears to be testing the limits of his position as an independent writer and his ability to support himself through patronage. Aretino negotiates patronage by simultaneously employing the courtly art of the encomium and the anti-court weapon of satiric writings: praising potential patrons with the intent of obtaining favors, while at the same time, thanks to his reputation as a merciless satirist, blackmailing them by implying that such praises may easily be turned into condemnation.32 This policy is a testimony to Aretino’s becoming progressively more comfortably settled in Venice, from where he would, in the coming years, perfect his strategy of dealing with princes and courts by remaining safely outside of them. Such a strategy is exemplified in Aretino’s rewriting of the Cortigiana (1534). Although the plot stays the same, major changes are traceable in the charac-

30 31 32

See Nicola Catelli, “Pietro Aretino e il Sacco di Roma,” Campi immaginabili, 32/33 (2005): 22–45. See the Introduction to Aretino’s Poemi cavallereschi, and Maria Cristina Cabani’s essay in this volume. Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 142.

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ters, especially in those who are closer to Aretino’s social position and point of view. Rosso’s lament on the miserable life led by subordinate courtiers through the picture of the meals in the tinello is expanded with the addition of more darkly satirical elements,33 but the most evident novelty in the play is the disqualification of the character of Valerio. Far from expressing Aretino’s point of view, this figure of honest and neglected courtier is now relegated to a secondary role. According to Ferroni, it is Parabolano—the previously criticized unrequiring master—who now becomes Aretino’s double as the effective director of the action of the play, while remaining, nevertheless, a symbol of courtly nonsense.34 Further consideration must also be given to the evolution of the character of Flaminio, who comes now to represent the existence of real alternatives to the world of the court.35 Valerio’s degradation in favor of Flaminio can also be explored as a telltale sign of Aretino’s changed attitude towards courtiers in general—a new perspective that, as a matter of fact, represents the inevitable development of structural ambiguities towards anti-court satire that were already present in Aretino’s earlier works. In previous works depicting courts and courtiers, Aretino seemed to be not completely satisfied with a critique of the court coming from the inside of the courts—that is, a critique of the court that does not present any feasible alternative to courtliness—and appeared to consider such laments against the courts as the mark of a truly courtly attitude. An example can be found in the ambiguity of the figure of Flaminio in the 1525 version of the play: here Flaminio is a character whose aversion to the court does not lead to anything more than to a rather stereotypical invective, and whose pessimism is juxtaposed with the positively cynical attitude of Valerio. It is also interesting to point out, in this regard, that one of the first instructions that Maestro Andrea gives to the aspiring courtier Maco is to always remember to denigrate the court.36 In his new role as the representative of Aretino’s evolved view on courts and courtiers from his new Venetian perspective, in the 1534 Cortigiana Flaminio, whose name is now spelled “Flamminio,” is specified to be a writer—more

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Teatro i, 324–328. Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 123–124. Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 127. “Insomma se voi sentite mai dire ben dela corte di Roma, dite a colui che non dice el vero,” Teatro i, 85. The comment is even more explicit in the second draft: “In somma a chi vi dice bene della corte dite: «Tu sei un bugiardo»,” Teatro i, 251.

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precisely, the writer of satires against the court. In a dialogue with Valerio, Flamminio is accused by the latter of having shown little respect for the court, of having portrayed it as “heretic, counterfeiter, betrayer, insolent and dishonest” to the point that the court is now a popular laughing stock.37 As in the previous version of the play, the most in-depth reflections on courts and courtiers happen in the exchanges between Flamminio and Valerio, and between Flamminio and Sempronio. The dialogue with Sempronio in act ii scene vi38 concerns, again, the question whether Sempronio’s son should be educated at court. Similar to the 1525 version, Flamminio and Sempronio present two contrasting pictures of the court, with Sempronio presenting an idyllic portrait of the courts of the good old times, and Flamminio offering a rebuttal with an enumeration of the many evils of present-day courts. Both parts are expanded in comparison with the 1525 version, in particular Flamminio’s reponse, which now prefigures many of the accusations against the court that will be voiced in the Ragionamento delle corti. In addition, in the 1534 version a new, ironic tone towards Sempronio’s ignorance for the present state of courts is added. The most relevant changes that most clearly show the evolution in Aretino’s attitude towards the world of the court concern the dialogue between Flaminio and Valerio in act iii, scene vii.39 Valerio’s statement that courtly profit comes when one least expects it, that in 1525 was presented as a proactive reaction to Flamminio’s defeatist pessimism, is presented again right at the beginning of the exchange between the two characters, but in order to be debunked through Flamminio’s words. Valerio’s optimism seems now to be the product not of resourcefulness, but of naiveté. He seems resigned to putting up with the evils of the court, against which, as he points out in a monologue,40 pazienza (patience) is the only possible weapon. It is Flamminio who now appears to have a clear sense of the situation, and to be able to come up with alternatives to an unhappy position at court. Flamminio’s alternatives illustrate the state of Aretino’s mind in the early 1530s, oscillating as they do between a praise of the freedom of the Venetian Republic and a desire to enter the court of the king of France.

37 38 39 40

“N’hai fatto historia, per eretica, per falsaria, per traditrice, per isfacciata e disonesta. E è divenuta favola del popolo, bontà delle tue novelle,” Teatro i, 289. Teatro i, 258–262. Teatro i, 283–290. “E perché con l’arme della pacientia si disarma l’invidia, con esse taglierò i legami di che m’ha cinto, dirò, la mia sorte,” Teatro i, 318. On Valerio’s strategy of pazienza see Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 125.

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Questioned by Valerio about where he intends to go if he leaves the court of Rome, and after Valerio has raised objections on all the main courts of the Italian peninsula (Ferrara, Mantua, Milan), Flamminio now replies with a precise plan: he will move to Venice, because “there no favorite, male or female, can arbitrarily have an innocent man assassinated; because only in Venice Justice holds her scales equal; only there the fear inspired by someone else’s disgrace forces you to worship one who was a bum until yesterday.”41 However, shortly thereafter Flamminio claims to be too accustomed to servitude to be able to leave the court: “being used to serve at court for many years, I cannot be without it, so I resolve to go to the court of His Majesty.”42 In his ambiguity between the encomium of republican freedom and the deference to the French court of Francis i, Flamminio reflects Aretino’s desire to have a foot in both camps: preserving the status of independence in Venice that he has been slowly building for himself while at the same time continuing to benefit from the support of powerful and wealthy patrons—a strategy that will be perfected in the coming years and explained in detail in the Ragionamento delle corti. The second version of the Cortigiana also continues to engage in a critical dialogue with Castiglione’s Cortegiano and with the model of courtliness that it presented. In addition to satire on the court through representations of courtly life as full of humiliations, cruel jokes, unrewarding masters, and a continuous denial of success through merit for honest courtiers, the epilogue of the play demonstrates a complete loss of faith in the ultimate ideal of courtliness presented in Castiglione’s Cortegiano. In his masterpiece on courtliness, Castiglione advocated for the courtier the role of wise counselor to his master. The courtier imagined by Castiglione is a moral man able to gain his lord’s favor through refined manners in order to exercise a positive influence on him and guide him along the path of virtue. In the 1525 version of the Cortigiana, in a scene with Parabolano at the end of the play, Valerio has the opportunity to teach his master a lesson by advising him to learn from this experience, while also warning him never again to fall for the tricks of a flatterer, and instead to always trust those who—like Valerio himself—have given proof of being honest servants. In the 1534 version, the exchange between Valerio and Parabolano totally excludes such a pedagogical model. Parabolano shows no repentance 41

42

“Ivi non è in arbitrio di niun favorito né di niuna favorita di assassinare i poverini; perché solamente in Vinegia la Giustitia tien pari le bilancie; ivi solo la paura della disgratia altrui non ti sforza ad adorare uno che ieri era un pidocchioso,” Teatro i, 284–285. “Essendo avezzo tanti e tanti anni a servire, non posso star senza, mi risolvo andare nella corte di sua maestà,” Teatro i, 289.

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for his misguided actions, blaming them on love, and points out how similar jokes are common practice in Rome. A monologue by Valerio that follows this scene is a summary of cynical strategies for advancement at court. There is no hope that a worthy courtier can lead a signore to the path of virtue. Instead, the only way to secure favor and to succeed at court is to readily second the lord’s appetites, even the less commendable ones: “it is well known to anyone that only he is master of his lord who holds the keys to his pleasures and his appetites; and whoever doubts this can look at what Rosso has done to me […].”43 At the end of the play there is no reward or recognition for Valerio, and he is left to make the best of his situation and reconcile with Rosso. The second Cortegiana represents the complete antithesis to the Cortegiano not only thanks to its plot of beffe or its parodic use of some Castiglione’s key terms, but also in its staged collapse of the core principle of the Cortegiano, the dream of the courtier-counselor that represented Castiglione’s most ambitious proposal. Aretino will continue to engage in a parodic dialogue with the foundations of courtliness in his successive works, even in the ones that at first sight would appear to have little to do with courts and courtiers. This is the case of Aretino’s notorious dialogues among prostitutes, the 1534 Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia and the 1536 Dialogo nel quale la Nanna insegna a la Pippa, usually collectively known under the title Sei giornate.44 The Dialogo revolves around the courtesan Nanna instructing her daughter Pippa in the ways of courtesanship. By applying the strategy of the manuals of self-advancement such as the ones for courtiers that were becoming increasingly popular during the sixteenth century to something like prostitution, Aretino is already hinting that courtliness and its strategies, despite all the pretenses of refineness advanced by court culture, are not totally alien to the survival strategies of the low levels of society. More precisely, courtiers and courtesans share many similarities— many more than courtiers would like to admit. For this reason the assonance between the names of courtier and courtesan should come as no surprise. It was courtiers—Nanna points out—who gave courtesans their name, and as a consequence, they also gave courteseans their face.45 The face that they share 43 44

45

Teatro i, 330–331. The Sei giornate have been translated into English with the title Aretino’s Dialogues by Raymond Rosenthal (Toronto, 1971). On the relationship between the Cortegiano and the Sei giornate, see Annick Paternoster, “«Le Sei Giornate» di Pietro Aretino: l’urbanitas parodiata,” in Alain Montandon (ed.), Traités de savoir-vivre italiens, (Clermont-Ferrand, 1993), 225–236, and Paula Findlen, “Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography (New York, 1993), 49–108. Aretino’s Dialogues, 257.

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is that of servility, of flattery, and of tricks played on rich and powerful patrons in order to extort favors and gifts. As Nanna states, “today’s whores are like today’s courtiers, who, if they wish to live in pomp and plenty, are forced to steal; otherwise they’d die of hunger.”46 Aretino’s Sei giornate are known for the sympathetic look that the author casts on whores, whose profession is declared the only honest one. The same cannot be said about courtiers. In denouncing courtly strategies as meretricious, Aretino removes any aura of refinedness from courtliness. In addition, by underlining the state of abject servility to which courtiers need to subject themselves in order to gain favors, Aretino, from his position of growing independence in Venice, is progressively distancing himself from the status of courtier. All such issues resurface in Aretino’s dialogue dedicated entirely to courts and courtiers, the Ragionamento delle corti (1538). The Ragionamento delle corti is the story of a prospective courtier’s “conversion” to anti-courtliness that seems to have been inspired by real-life events. In a letter addressed to that same prospective courtier featured in the Ragionamento delle corti, the literatus Francesco Coccio, Aretino congratulates his friend for “having completely discarded any desire for the courts”47 and for having decided to dedicate his life to his studies instead. As pointed out by Amedeo Quondam, the Ragionamento delle corti is the staging of this letter to Coccio.48 The discussion among friends that follows the disclosure of Coccio’s intent to become a courtier ends in fact with his renunciation to the court and his full commitment to his studies. As noticed by Giuseppe Crimi, it is relevant that the letter to Coccio is added to the volume of his Lettere published in September 1538, thus responding to a precise marketing strategy on Aretino’s part, with the letter functioning as an advertisement for the work that was soon to be published.49 In addition to the letter to Coccio, other letters written shortly before the publication of the Ragionamento delle corti prefigured Aretino’s intent to go back to the topic of the court. Particularly relevant are the letter to Doge Andrea Gritti and the letter to Giovanni Agnello, where contempt for the court is paired with praise of Venice and its freedom. In both letters Aretino proclaims his own

46 47 48

49

Aretino’s Dialogues, 256. Lettere i, 452. Amedeo Quondam, “La scena della menzogna: corte e cortigiano nel ‘Ragionamento’ di Pietro Aretino,” Psicon 3, 8–9 (1976): 4–24. On the Ragionamento delle corti see also Fulvio Pevere, “Vita è il non andare in corte: il Ragionamento delle corti di Pietro Aretino,” Critica letteraria, 20 (1992): 237–260, and Giuseppe Crimi, “Introduzione,” in Operette politiche e satiriche i, 9–49. Crimi, “Introduzione,” 11.

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conversion to life outside the courts, and his commitment to his new life in Venice. In the letter to Gritti, Aretino thanks the Doge for having assisted him in solving his conflicts with Pope Clement vii. This gives Aretino the chance to comment on the Pope’s unjust disdain towards him, and to profess his own virtue—a virtue that is apt for the free environment of Venice, and not for the treachery of the courts: “but I, who amidst the freedom of such a great Nation have managed to learn how to be free, refuse the court eternally, and here I build a tabernacle for the years I have left: because here there is no treachery, here favor cannot wrong the right, here the cruelty of the harlots does not reign, here the insolence of the effeminates does not command, here no one steals, no one rapes, no one murders.”50 In a letter to Giovanni Agnello (dated 1537) Aretino reaffirms the serenity granted to him (and to everyone who lives in Venice) by the Serenissima: “even a slacker could feel like a pope and act like an emperor living in this city and outside of the courts […]. Court ah? Court eh? A boatman here looks happier to me than a steward there.”51 In the ruthlessly competitive system of the court, there is no care for those who are not in a position of power, whose lives are instead considered expendable: “Hopes there. Favors here. Greatness behind. There is a poor servant standing, and right away you see him tormented by the cold, or devoured by the heat. Where is the fire to warm him? Where the water to refresh him? And if he gets sick, what room, what stable, what hospital will give him shelter? Here is the snow, here is the rain, here is the mud that kills you while you ride with the master, or in his service. Where are the clothes for you to change, where is a nice look given to you for having done this?”52 The court not only persecutes the just: its abuses even subvert the natural course of life: “What cruelty is the beard that comes before time to the children in service,

50

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52

“Ma io, che ne la libertà di cotanto Stato ho fornito d’imparare a essere libero, refuto la corte in eterno, e qui faccio tabernacolo agli anni che mi avanzano: perché qui non ha luogo il tradimento, qui il favore non può far torto al dritto, qui non regna la crudeltà de le meretrici, qui non comanda l’insolenza de gli effeminati, qui non si ruba, qui non si sforza e qui non si amazza,” Lettere i, 50. “Ogni poltrone starebbe da Papa e la farebbe da Imperadore vivendo dentro a questa città e fuor de le corti […]. Corte ah? Corte eh? A me par più felice un Barcaiuolo qui che un Camariere,” Lettere i, 353. “Speranza in là. Favori in qua. Grandezze mi dietro. Eccoti la in piedi un povero servidore, eccotelo martorizzato dal freddo, o divorato dal caldo. Dov’è il fuoco da scaldarlo? Dove l’acqua da rinfrescarlo? E amalandosi, qual camera, quale stalla, o quale spedale lo ricetta? Ecco la pioggia, ecco la neve, ecco il fango che ti assassina mentre cavalchi col padrone, o in suo servigio. Dove sono i panni da mutarti, dove un buon viso che te si faccia per ciò?,” Lettere i, 353.

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and the grey hair of young men that consumed their lives around the tables, the doors, and the toilets. ‘Here, let’s take on this one, too!’ Said a learned and just man who was sent to the gibbets while being ill, for having refused to commit a treachery.”53 What is worse, the court takes away a man’s control over his own life, and leaves him completely dispossessed of any sense of mastery over his own needs and feelings: “Court eh? Court ah? It is better for us to eat bread and prawns than the smoke of the meals in silver plates. Nor could one ever give a price to the satisfaction of ridding oneself of the desire of a walnut, or a chestnut, before or after dinner. And just as there is no suffering that can add to that of the Courtier who is tired and has nowhere to sit, who is hungry and cannot eat, who is sleepy and is forced to stay awake, so there is no consolation that equals mine, who can sit when I am tired, eat when I am hungry, and sleep when I feel tired. And all the hours are hours spent according to my will.”54 The same arguments and examples are used in the Ragionamento delle corti to convince Coccio to abandon the idea of becoming a courtier. In two consecutive days of discussions organized by Ludovico Dolce, a Venetian poligrafo and collaborator of Aretino, Coccio will be instructed in the ways of the courts (starting with the papal court and then proceeding to the secular ones) and eventually persuaded against the idea of joining any of them. In the first day of the dialogue, the old courtier Pietro Piccardo has the task of instructing Coccio on the nature of the papal court. Piccardo embarks on his task of disabusing Coccio from the charms of courtly life by pointing out its manifold vices: “The Court, good Sirs, is the hospice of hopes, the graveyard of lives, the governess of hatred, the root of envy, the bellows of ambition, the trading place of trickeries, the seraglio of suspicions, the prison of peaceful accords, the schoolhouse of sneakiness, the homeland of flattery, the heaven of vices, the hell of virtues, the purgatory of good deeds and the limbo of delights.”55 Aretino then has Pic53

54

55

“Che crudeltà è la barba venuta inanzi al tempo al servir de i fanciulli, e i peli canuti de i giovani consumati intorno a le tavole, a le portiere, e a i destri. ‘To’ su quest’altra!’ disse un uomo dotto e buono che fu cacciato a le forche essendo infermo, per non avere voluto fare una ruffiania,” Lettere i, 353. This example is quoted with almost the exact same words in the Ragionamento delle corti (Operette politiche e satiriche i, 120). “Corte eh? Corte ah? Ci fa più pro il mangiare pane e scambietti che il fume de le vivande ne i piatti d’argento. Né si potria pagare il merito de la voglia che ti cavi d’una noce, o d’una castagna, o doppo, o inanzi pasto. E sì come non è passione che aggiunga a quella del Cortigiano, che è stanco e non ha da sedere, che ha fame e non po’ mangiare, c’ha sonno e bisogna che vegghi, così non è consolazione che arrivi a la mia, che siedo quando sono stracco, mangio quando ho fame, e dormo quando ho sonno. E tutte l’ora son l’ore de le mie volontà,” Lettere i, 353. “La Corte, messeri miei, è spedale de le speranze, sepoltura de le vite, baila degli odii, razza de l’invidie, mantice de l’ambizioni, mercato de le menzogne, serraglio de i sospetti,

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cardo depict the court by quoting the most common topoi of anti-court satires. Piccardo narrates how the Corte (court) was originally named Morte (death), and only later the C was changed into a M to avoid scaring away prospective courtiers.56 Piccardo’s intention is precisely the opposite: to make Coccio aware of the perils of life at court, and for this reason Piccardo continues to disclose to a somehow incredulous Coccio unflattering revelations about the real nature of the court. Piccardo lists the many evils that populate the court, such as Envy, Flattery, Deceit, Ambition, and Falsehood.57 Piccardo also presents Coccio with the dismal picture of the destiny that awaits the youngster who enters the court armed with the best education and the best intentions by describing how a young boy, sent to the court with good manners and nice clothes, is neglected and exploited for humbling tasks, to the point of aging before his time. Even time, at court, is more cruel, and distorted from its regular course in nature: only at court one can see “bearded children and white-haired youngsters.”58 The court is the antithesis to living: if Corte is Morte, then “life is not going to court.”59 The court’s disrespect for human life can be seen primarily in the cruel practice of jokes (beffe), often taken to the point of putting the lives of innocent victims in danger. In addition, a scholar like Coccio should be aware that the court has no interest in culture, and that at court it is better to pretend to be unable to read and write.60 Similar arguments are used in the second day of the dialogue by Giovanni Giustiniano,61 and lead to Coccio’s final disillusion on the court. Yet, Giustiniano—a man of letters like Aretino and Coccio—introduces a more nuanced and at the same time more radical way of interacting with the court, by keeping courts and princes at a safe distance. It is precisely this multifaceted way of dealing with the court that results in Coccio’s final conversion. Most importantly, Giustiniano’s speech goes right to the core of the concerns of someone for whom—like Aretino himself—the court could offer the fastest (if not the only) way to upward social mobility. Giustiniano attacks precisely this point, and does so by making it specifically relevant to literati. The court, he claims to a progressively more disillusioned Coccio, holds no respect

56 57 58 59 60 61

carcere de le concordie, scola de le fraudi, patria de l’adulazione, paradiso de i vizi, inferno de le virtù, purgatorio de le bontà, e limbo de le allegrezze,” Operette politiche e satiriche i, 84. Operette politiche e satiriche i, 84. Operette politiche e satiriche i, 85. “Fanciulli barbuti e giovani canuti,” Operette politiche e satiriche i, 88. “Vita è il non andare in corte,” Operette politiche e satiriche i, 97. Operette politiche e satiriche i, 118. Giovanni Giustiniano (or Giustiniani, or Giustinian), originally from Candia, was a translator of classical texts.

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for intellectual and artistic activity. The court offers no reward for talent and hard work. On the contrary, everything valuable is destroyed by the ravaging folly of the court’s beffe. It is fools, not the talented and the virtuous, who are rewarded at court: “buffoonery is the life and soul of the court, and for this reason those who master it climb to earldom and to knighthood.”62 Expanding on an argument already presented by Piccardo,63 Giustiniano states that the court can drive mad even the most wise and virtuous among men. In addition, Giustiniano ties this argument specifically to the case of the artist and of the intellectual: “What respect do you think the Court has for an outstanding intellect? What gain do you think a valiant man can get from the Court? What honor do you think a just man can obtain from the Court? If I could tell with what cruelties she assails such people, I would make you cry.”64 The court as depicted by Giustiniano becomes even more off-putting than in the picture presented by Piccardo. Giustiniano’s court is no longer just the carnivalesque of Piccardo’s picture, but something more disquieting: the negation of its own promises of recognition and upward social mobility for the skillful and the hardworking. Giustiniano’s argument proves to be successful in a way that Piccardo’s could not be. To the description of how the court destroyed valuable works of art, Coccio replies echoing Aretino’s own words in the letter to Andrea Gritti, “Court, ah? Court eh?” thus revealing that his conversion to anti-courtliness has now taken place. If the court holds art and culture in no respect, and if at court there is no real hope of recognition no matter how brilliant one is and how hard one strives, then the very reason for entering the court comes to nothing. Hardships can be endured when they lead to a reward, but rewarding mediocrity cannot be excused. In Coccio’s words, “everything could be tolerated if eventually those who read what is done by those who know judged with their ears and not their nose. What suffering is that of worthy minds lacerated by those who know two syllables and can put together two suffixes!”65 Coccio is now resolved to follow

62 63 64

65

“La buffoneria è vita e anima de la Corte, perciò i suoi maestri ascendano a le contee e a le cavalerie,” Operette politiche e satiriche i, 137. As pointed out by Quondam, “La scena della menzogna,” 14. “Che rispetto credete che abbia la Corte a uno ingegno miracoloso? Che utile credete che ritria da la corte un valente uomo? Che onore credete che acquisti ne la corte un giusto? Se io potessi dire con che villanie ella ribuffa persone così fatte, vi farei piagnere,” Operette politiche e satiriche i, 143. “Tutto si soffrirebbe a la fine se chi legge le cose che si fanno da chi pur sa giudicasse con le orecchie e non col naso. Che penitenzia è quella dei buoni ingegni lacerati dai conoscitori di due sillabe e dai fattori di due desinenze!,” Operette politiche e satiriche i, 148.

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the path outlined for him by Dolce, who exorts him to commit to studying philosophy in order to follow his example of someone dedicated to “courting the sciences.”66 Giustiniano’s commitment to lead Coccio away from the court however coexists with a nuanced attitude towards courts and courtiers. While Piccardo’s picture of the court is entirely negative, Giustiniano negotiates exceptions to the notion of the court as utterly evil. At the beginning of the exchange with Coccio and Dolce, shortly after having declared that the court imposes a state of abject servitude on all of its members, Giustiniano introduces an exception to this notion. The exception is represented by a list of worthy courts (the court of the Emperor Charles v and the court of France, and the Italian courts of Urbino, of Ferrara, of Mantua, of Florence, the court of the Marquis of Vasto, the court of Salerno, and the household of Guido Rangone) defined as the ones where virtue is respected. The list of worthy courts (which includes examples that are very different from one another) responds to what Quondam has defined as “the project-desire of dealing contemporarily with the inside and the outside of the court, of dealing with the inside from outside, from a position of strength and autonomy, thus being able to build one’s own ‘freedom’.”67 Coccio’s conversion to anti-courtliness is thus built on a successful compromise: to the model of the resentful courtier and to the perspective of a complete repudiation of courts and their dynamics of power that characterizes other anti-court writings, Aretino’s Ragionamento delle corti opposes the functioning example of the man of letters capable of building successful relationship with influential court rulers, while at the same time being free from serving at their courts. In this way, Aretino is inventing a new anti-courtliness, one that still denounces the vices of the court, but that allows those who follow this model to keep engaging in relationships with the courtly world. More specifically, the model that Aretino offers is that of a man of letters who benefits (also in pecuniary terms) from his connections with powerful patrons, and who is also able to construct for himself the independence from the court that for most writers of the time remained only a project with no practical consequences. This project, furthermore, is proposed at the time when Aretino had successfully established his residence in Venice, first in the rooms of Palazzo Bolani, and later in Palazzo Dandolo, both facing the Canal Grande—an impressive point

66 67

“Corteggiare le scienze,” Operette politiche e satiriche i, 148. “Il progetto-desiderio di gestire contemporaneamente il fuori e il dentro della Corte, di trattare con il dentro da fuori, da una posizione di autonomia e forza, di poter così costruire la propria ‘libertà’,” Quondam, “La scena della menzogna,” 16–17.

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of arrival for the son of a cobbler.68 In his residence Aretino would live lavishly and generously, as if he were a prince himself. In Larivaille’s definition, Aretino eventually became a sort of prince without land.69 One could also say that he became the mirror opposite of a prince, as exemplified by his liberality towards his friends and his openly stated habit of recklessly spending, opposing the avarice that he had disapproved of so much in the courts and their rulers. Finally, after having explored the courts of earth—the papal one as well as the princely ones—the Ragionamento delle corti ends on a quite unexpected religious turn, with praise of the Court of Heaven here invoked as the only perfect court. Yet, even if the conclusion of the text shows that a perfect court cannot be a thing of this world, it should also be remembered that the strategy presented by Aretino makes it possible to deal with the imperfect courts of reality without having to subject oneself to their evils. 68 69

On Aretino’s houses in Venice, see Harald Hendrix’s essay in this volume. Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 356.

chapter 5

Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Aretino’s Ragionamenti Ian Frederick Moulton

Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti [Conversations] are a series of fictional dialogues in which an experienced courtesan named Nanna spends several sultry Roman afternoons describing her life and experiences to a younger prostitute named Antonia. The dialogues were published in two parts, the first in 1634, the second two years later in 1636.1 Both volumes announced Aretino as the author on their title pages, but both gave vague and misleading information about their publishers, suggesting that while there was a desire to identify the works with their famous author, whoever printed the volumes was aware they would be controversial. And they were. In the first volume, Nanna is trying to decide the future of her adolescent daughter Pippa. Nanna and Antonia see three possible paths for Pippa’s adult life: she could become a nun, a wife, or a whore. Nanna has been all three in her time, and she spends three days talking to Antonia about her experiences— first as a nun, then as a wife, and finally as a whore. At the end of the three

1 On the textual history of the two volumes commonly referred to as Aretino’s Ragionamenti, see Pietro Aretino, Sei giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1969), 369–431. The publication history of the texts is complex because of the rarity of surviving editions, and the practice of printing false publication information for controversial texts. The first volume was initially published with a titlepage reading, Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia, fatto in Roma sotto una ficaia, composto del divino Aretino per suo capricio a correttione de i tre stati delle donne. On the final page of the volume the date of publication was given as 1534, and the place of publication was said to be Paris, though it was probably actually printed in Venice. The second volume had a title page that read Dialogo di M. Pietro Aretino, nel quale la Nanna il primo giorno insegna a la Pippa sua figliola a esser puttana, nel secondo gli contai i tradimenti che fanno gli huomini a le meschine che gli credano, nel terzo et ultimo la Nanna et la Pippa sedendo nel orto ascoltano la comare et la balia che ragionano de la ruffiania. On the final page, the volume was said to have been printed in Turin in 1536, though again the volume was likely printed in Venice. The two texts were first published in a single volume in John Wolfe’s 1584 London edition (Short Title Catalogue 19911.5, 19912, 19912a). The title Sei giornate [Six Days], was adopted by Giovanni Aquilecchia for his definitive edition of 1969, and was not used to refer to the works in the early modern period.

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days, Nanna and Antonia both decide that by far the best option for Pippa is to become a whore, and this concludes the first volume. In the second volume of the dialogues Nanna and Antonia continue their discussion about whoring. They spend a fourth day instructing Pippa on her future profession, and a fifth day sharing stories about the evils of men. On the sixth and somewhat anticlimactic final day Nanna and Pippa sit and listen while a midwife explains to a wetnurse how to be a procuress. Although the text purports to survey all the options available to early modern women, prostitution is at the heart of the Ragionamenti. The Ragionamenti’s satire is grounded in Aretino’s use of prostitution as a fundamental metaphor for broader social relations. What does it mean to sell sex for money? What exactly is being bought and sold? And what are the larger consequences of this commodification? The Ragionamenti are a landmark in the history of erotic representation. Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi (c. 1525) had already given him a reputation for writing sexually explicit material, and the Ragionamenti are remarkable for their frank and detailed description of sexual acts. On the first day, recounting her experiences as a young nun, Nanna describes a wide variety of sexual encounters and activities in lascivious detail—including vaginal and anal intercourse, the use of dildos, lesbian sex, sex between men, group sex, and masturbation. The following passage is typical of the tone and content: The reverend father summoned the three friars and leaning on the shoulder of one of them, a tall, soft-skinned rascal who had shot up prematurely, he ordered the others to take his little sparrow, which was resting quietly, out of its nest. Then the most adept and attractive young fellow of the bunch cradled the General’s songster in the palm of his hand and began stroking its back, as one strokes the tail of a cat which first purrs, then pants, and soon cannot keep still. The sparrow lifted its crest, and then the doughty General grabbed hold of the youngest, prettiest nun, threw her tunic over her head, and made her rest her forehead against the back of the bed. Then, deliberately prying open with his fingers the leaves of her asshole Missal, and wholly rapt in his thoughts, he contemplated her crotch […] Placing his paintbrush, which he first moistened with spit, in her tiny color cup, he made her twist and turn as women do in the birth throes or the mother’s malady. And to be doubly sure that his nail would be driven more tightly into her slit, he motioned to his back and his favorite punk pulled his britches down to his heels and applied his clyster to the reverend’s visibilium, while all the time the General himself kept his eyes fixed on the two other louts, who, having

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settled the sisters neatly and comfortably on the bed, were now pounding the sauce in the mortar.2 Although such descriptions of sexual activity are admittedly salacious, as we can see here their rhetoric is generally metaphoric, even euphemistic. Although Aretino’s sonetti consistently use vulgar sexual slang—“potta” [cunt], “cazzo” [cock], and “fottere” [fuck],3 in the Ragionamenti Nanna tends instead to employ a dazzling array of sexual metaphors. Indeed, after a while her persistent euphemisms begin to get on Antonia’s nerves; she interrupts Nanna to mock her florid way of speaking: Speak plainly and say “fuck,” “prick,” “cunt,” and “ass” if you want anyone except the scholars at the University of Rome to understand you. You with your “rope in the ring,” your “obelisk in the Coliseum,” your “leek in the garden,” your “key in the lock,” your “bolt in the door,” your “pestle in the mortar,” your “nightingale in the nest,” your “tree in the ditch,” your “syringe in the flap-valve,” your “sword in the scabbard,” not to mention your “stake,” your “crozier,” your “parsnip,” your “little monkey,” your “this,” your “that,” your “him” and your “her,” your “apples,” “leaves of the missal,” “fact,” “verbigratia,” “job,” “affair,” “big news,” “handle,” “arrow,” “carrot,” “root,” and all the shit there is—why don’t you say it straight out and

2 Pietro Aretino, Aretino’s Dialogues, preface and trans. By Raymond Rosenthal, epilogue by Margaret F. Rosenthal (New York, 1995), 27–28. All English quotations from the Ragionamenti are from this edition. Original language for all translated citations will be found in the notes. “La reverenda Paternità chiamò i tre fratini e, appogiato su la spalla a uno cresciuto inanzi ai dì tenero e lungo, dagli altri si fece cavar del nido il passerotto che stava chioccio chioccio; onde il più scaltrito e il più attrattivo lo tolse in su la palma, e lisciandogli la schiena come si liscia la coda alla gatta che ronfiando comincia a soffiare di sorte che non si puote più tenere al segno, il passerotto levò la cresta di maniera che il valente generale, poste le unghie a dosso alla monica più graziosa e più fanciulla, recatole i panni in capo, le fece appoggiare la fronte nella cassa del letto: a aprendole con le mani soavemente le carte del messale culabriense, tutto astratto contemplava il sesso. […] Che posto il suo pennello nello scudellino del colore, umiliatolo prima con lo sputo, lo facea torcere nella guisa che si torceno le donne per le doglie del parto o per il mal della madre. E perché il chiodo stesse più fermo nel forame, accennò dietrovia al suo erba-da-buoi, che rovesciatoli le brache fino alle calcagna, mise il cristeo alla sua Riverenza visibilium; la quale tenea fissi gli occhi agli altri dui giovanastri che, acconce due suore a buon modo e con agio nel letto, gli pestavano la salsa nel mortaio,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 19–20. All Italian quotes from the Ragionamenti are from this edition. 3 On the ‘sonetti lussuriosi’, see Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1999), which includes the Italian text of the sonetti and English translations.

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stop going about on tiptoes? Why don’t you say yes when you mean yes and no when you mean no—or else keep it to yourself?4 Whatever Antonia’s frustrations, Aretino’s metaphorical excess in the Ragionamenti is rhetorically appropriate since (like Rabelais) he is using excessive language to describe physical excess.5 For Nanna, almost anything, from birds and vegetables to prayer books and public monuments, can serve as a metaphor for sex. Leeks, keys, obelisks, prayer books, paintbrushes, parsnips: it seems there is no object that cannot be eroticized. Beyond their shocking sexual content, the Ragionamenti are ideologically scandalous as well. In their depiction of all three states of womanhood, the Ragionamenti flout prescribed norms for feminine behavior. In early modern culture nuns are supposed to be chaste, wives faithful, and whores submissive. In Nanna’s account, nothing could be further from the truth. According to Nanna, nuns are sexually obsessed and promiscuous; wives are sex-starved and unfaithful to their husbands; and whores are cold, calculating machiavellians who will stop at nothing to fleece their naive clients. Through Nanna’s narrative of her life, the Ragionamenti systematically critique and contradict sixteenth century notions about the appropriate nature and social place of women. This is not to say that the Ragionamenti are in some sense a feminist text. Aretino’s view of women is often negative and highly critical. But although it might seem at points that Aretino is echoing traditional misogynist attacks on women, Nanna’s corrosive cynicism and cogent analysis of power relations consistently suggest that traditional ideas about women and their place—whether positive or negative—are arbitrary, false, and unfair. The Ragionamenti are thus revolutionary in their representation of gender as well as sexuality. Aretino’s satire is rooted in his ambivalent representation of women and female speech. Nanna and Antonia are both celebrated and mocked throughout the dialogues. At times they appear monstrous parodies of grotesque fem-

4 Aretino’s Dialogues, 43–44. “Parla alla libera, e dì “cu’, ca’ po’ e fo’”, che non sarai intesa se non della Sapienza Capranica con cotesto tuo “cordone nello anello”, “guglia nel coliseo”, “porro nello orto”, “chiavistello ne l’uscio”, “chiave nella serratura”, “pestello nel mortaio”, “rossignuolo nel nido”, “piantone nel fosso”, “sgonfiatoio nella animella”, “stocco nella guaina”; e così “il piuolo”, “il pastorale”, “la pastinaca”, “la monina”, “la cotale”, “le mele”, “le carte del messale”, “quel fatto”, “il verbigrazia”, “quella cosa”, “quella faccenda”, “quella novella”, “il manico”, “la freccia”, “la carota”, “la radice” e la merda che ti sia non vo’ dire in gola, poi che vuoi andard su le punte dei zoccoli; ora dì sì al sì e no al no: se non, tientelo,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 35. 5 Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (New York, 2000), 127–128.

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ininity: overweight, slothful, gluttonous, predatory, vulgar, and trivial. But at the same time, they are also shrewd tricksters, eloquent and clear-sighted social critics who unmask the hypocrisy of corrupt and powerful men. Aretino’s depiction of women is not only contradictory, it is also reductive. Although Nanna’s account is multifaceted and detailed, it ignores, downplays, or elides many features of women’s lives. To start with, the notion that the only options for early modern women were to be nuns, wives, or whores is rhetorically powerful, but ultimately false. Even though Nanna is a widow (having stabbed her abusive husband to death),6 the Ragionamenti take no account of the condition of widows as such. This omission is significant because widows typically had more control over their own finances than other women did. Early modern women certainly did not have to engage in prostitution to enter the market economy.7 Italian women’s role as wage-earners was actually increasing in the period Aretino wrote.8 Most often, women were employed as weavers, spinners, or domestic servants. But in Florence in the fifteenth century 15 percent of female heads of households were involved in minor guilds— as cobblers, butchers, grain merchants, and goldsmiths, for example. A few women were even employed in major guilds as merchants in wool or silk, bankers, or money-changers.9 Despite all this, in the Ragionamenti, women’s work is reduced to prostitution—at least as far as wage labor is concerned. This may be in part because Aretino is exploring his own relations to the market economy through his representation of Nanna and Antonia. While in many ways Nanna is obviously unlike Aretino, nonetheless she often seems a spokesperson for the author. Her self-representation often echoes Aretino’s own public persona, as in this passage where she explains how she treats powerful people with contempt in order to get their respect: I behaved according to the habits of all good whores and took great delight in causing scandals, kindling feuds, breaking up friendships, rousing hatreds, goading men to curse each other and brawl. I was always dropping the names of princes and passing judgment on the Turks, the

6 Aretino’s Dialogues, 103; Aretino, Sei giornate, 90. 7 Parts one and two of Angela Groppi (ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (Roma-Bari, 1996), collect essays dealing with the wide range of female labor in Medieval and early modern Italy, including the role of women in guilds. 8 Angela Groppi, “Lavoro e proprietà delle donne in età moderna,” in Il lavoro delle donne, 119– 163, esp. 121–125. 9 Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., “Women and Work in Renaissance Italy,” in Judith C. Brown-Robert C. Davis (eds.), Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1998), 107–126, esp. 115.

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Emperor, the King, the famine of foodstuffs, the wealth of the Duke of Milan, and the future Pope. […] I skipped from dukes to duchesses and talked about them as if I had trampled over them like doormats with my feet.10 There is little in the Ragionamenti to suggest that Nanna has anything to do with the Emperor, the King, or the Pope, but Aretino wrote letters to all three, and spent much of his public life dropping names and passing judgments on powerful and influential people.11 Aretino’s rhetorical justification for his many provocative opinions was that however offensive he might be, he was merely telling the truth about the world. His motto, after all, was Veritas Odium Parit (“Truth Will Bring Forth Hatred”),12 a traditional rationale for the offensiveness of satire, and a pre-emptive strike against those would object to his harsher claims: if you object to Aretino’s writing, it is because you can’t handle the truth. In the Ragionamenti, Antonia makes a similar argument about the honesty of whores. She convinces Nanna that prostitution is the best future for Pippa because whores are honest about their sexuality; nuns and wives are not. Aretino’s whores accept that humans are fundamentally sexual beings,13 and rather than modeling their behavior on unrealistic ideals, they accept their place in the market economy: The nun betrays her sacred vows and the married woman murders the holy bond of matrimony, but the whore violates neither her monastery nor her husband; indeed she acts like the soldier who is paid to do evil, and

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Aretino’s Dialogues, 143. “A usanza di buona puttana avea gran piacere di seminare scandoli di ordire garbugli, di turbare le amicizie, di indurre odio, di udire dirsi villani e di mettere ognuno alle mani; sempre pondendo la bocca nei prencipi, facendo giudicio del Turco, dello imperadore, del re, della carestia, della dovizia, del duca di Milano, e del papa avvenire […] saltando dai duci alle duchesse, ne parlava come io le avessi fatte co’ piedi,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 126. See Lettere i François i (no. 3, 51–53); Charles v (no. 7, 62–63); Pope Clement vii (no. 8, 63–65). For a brief overview of Aretino’s career, see Raymond B. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art (Toronto, 2004), xx–xxv. On Aretino’s use of this motto, a quotation from Terence’s comedy Andria, see Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr, 96–103. Nanna characterizes women to Antonia: “We are born of the flesh and in the flesh we die; the prick makes us and the prick destroys us” [“Noi nasciamo di carne e in su la carne muoiamo; la coda si fa e la coda si disfà,”] Aretino’s Dialogues, 102; Aretino, Sei giornate, 89.

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when doing it, she does not realize that she is, for her shop sells what it has to sell. The first day that a tavern keeper opens his tavern, he does not have to put up a sign, for everyone knows that there one drinks, one eats, one gambles, one screws, betrays, and cheats, and anyone who would go there to say his prayers or start a fast would find neither altars nor Lent. Gardeners sell vegetables, druggists sell drugs, and the bordellos sell curses, lies, sluttish behavior, scandals, dishonesty, thievery, filth, hatred, cruelty, deaths, the French pox, betrayals, a bad name and poverty.14 Antonia argues that whores are superior to nuns and wives because, however sinful they may be, they have no vows of chastity or fidelity to break. They may be promiscuous, but since they have never vowed to be otherwise, at least they are not hypocrites. And though Antonia initially claims that a whore “does not realize that she is [doing evil],” she goes on to suggest that a prostitute can nonetheless be forgiven for any evil that she does by confessing her sins to a priest: but since the confessor is like a doctor who would rather cure the disease he can see on the palm of your hand rather than the one which is hidden from him, go there freely with Pippa and make a whore of her right off; and afterward, with the petition of a little penance and two drops of holy water, all whorishness will leave her soul.15

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Aretino’s Dialogues, 158. “La monica tradisce il suo consagramento, e la maritata assassina il santo matrimonio ma la puttana non attacca né al monistero né al marito: anzi fa come un soldato che è pagato per far male, e faccendolo non si tiene che lo faccia, perché la sua bottega vendo quello che ella ha a vendere; e il primo dì che uno oste apre la taverna, sanza metterci scritta s’intende che ivi si beve, si mangia, si giuoca, si chiava, si rinega e si inganna: e chi ci andasse per dire orazioni o per digiunare, non ci troveria né altere né quaresima. Gli ortolani vendono gli erbaggi, gli speziali le spezarie, e i bordelli bestemmie, menzogne, ciance, scandoli, dishonestà, ladrarie, isporcizie, odi, crudeltade, morti, mal franciosi, tradimenti, cattiva fama e povertà; ma perché il confessore è come il medico, che guarisce più tosto il male che si gli mostra in su la palma che quello che si gli appiatta, vientene seco alla libera con la Pippa, e falla puttana di primo volo: che a petizione di una penitenzietta, con due gocciole di acqua benedetta, ogni puttanamento andrà via dell’anima,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 139. Aretino’s Dialogues, 158. “Ma perché il confessore è come il medico, che guarisce più tosto il male che si gli mostra in su la palma che quello che si gli appiatta, vientene seco alla libera con la Pippa, e falla puttana di primo volo: che a petizione di una penitenzietta, con due gocciole di acqua benedetta, ogni puttanamento andrà via dell’anima,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 139.

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Of course, Antonia’s theology is a bit shaky here; forgiveness of sin requires not only awareness of one’s sinful behavior, but also contrition and penance.16 But Antonia is correct that excessive indulgence in natural appetites was often considered by theologians to be a lesser sin than the breaking of a vow.17 (That one might actually keep a vow of chastity or fidelity is not a possibility seriously entertained in the cynical world of the Ragionamenti.) So, whores may sin, but this is their job. Antonia’s statement that a whore “acts like a soldier who is paid to do evil” equates the lowest of female occupations with a male profession that was often highly idealized, whatever the sordid realities of sixteenth century warfare. Although the abuses of mercenary soldiers were well-known in early modern Italy, in many contexts the occupation of soldier was still thought of as an honorable one—it is agreed in Castiglione’s Cortegiano, for example, that “the principal and true profession of the Courtier must be that of arms.”18 Antonia’s view of soldiers is more jaundiced than Castiglione’s; she is thinking of hired killers, not noble warriors. She argues that just as soldiers are paid to perform violent acts, whores are paid to perform sexual ones. Given that people are violent and have sexual desires there will always be whores and soldiers. Both sorts of evil are necessary to the functioning of human society in a corrupt and fallen world. Early modern notions of gender tended to assume that the sphere of warfare and violence was fundamentally masculine; that of love and sexuality was fundamentally feminine. (This meant that early modern men who devoted themselves to pleasure with women instead of fighting with men were often accused of being “effeminate,” even if they took an aggressive role in their sexual relations and chose only female partners.)19 Thus, to extrapolate from Antonia’s analogy, whores and soldiers are specialists in performing stereotypical gender identities. Soldiers are paid to be hyper-masculine, and whores are paid to be hyper-feminine. Gender thus becomes both a performance and a commodity. 16

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See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd and revised edition (New York, 1947–1948), Part iiia, question 90: “Penance is composed of several things, viz. contrition, confession, and satisfaction.” In Dante’s Commedia, lust is punished in the second circle of Hell and expiated at the highest level of Purgatory, indicating that it is the least grave fault in both systems. Hypocrisy, on the other hand, is punished in the eighth circle of Hell. See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York, 1995), Inferno, cantos 5 and 23, Purgatorio cantos 25–27. Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel Javitch, trans. Charles Singleton (New York, 2002), 24 (Book 1.17). Because of the multiplicity of editions and translations, all references to Castiglione’s Cortegiano are to book and section numbers rather than page numbers. Moulton, Before Pornography, 70–79.

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Certainly, in Nanna’s account, whores are often in the business of selling caricatures of femininity to their patrons. The most valuable feminine commodity, of course, is virginity, and thus it is not surprising that at the beginning of Nanna’s career as a prostitute, her mother goes to elaborate lengths to market her as a virgin (though she lost her virginity long ago as a debauched nun, to say nothing of her time as a wife). After a few days spent spreading rumors of Nanna’s beauty, her mother displays her prominently in the window of their house to catch the eyes of passing nobleman.20 Nanna draws on her experience in all three spheres of womanhood (as defined by the Ragionamenti) to stage a multi-faceted display of feminine sexual desirability: “I affected the modesty of a nun, stared straight at them with the self-confidence of a wife, and all the while made the gestures of whore” (108).21 Once her mother finds a suitably wealthy and naive client, Nanna spends the night with him. But in a bravura performance of virginal chastity, she refuses to let him have intercourse with her, teasing him till he masturbates to relieve his desire and then leaves in a rage—only to come back the next day with expensive gifts.22 Nanna’s strategy puts her at risk of physical violence—her frustrated lover beats her at several points—but she ends by having him buy her a furnished house to live in.23 Once established, she uses the money she earns to hire gangs of armed men to protect her from her clients.24 She then continues to market her virginity to new customers: I learned all that can be learned about torturing a man with passion, then making it up to him, then getting him to open his purse, then suddenly leaving him. […] I sold my cherry many more times than one of those miserly priests sells his first Mass.25 Earlier, in the second day of the dialogue, Nanna explains in detail how she could fake virginity by inserting an eggshell full of chicken’s blood in her vagina so that the sheets would be satisfyingly bloody after intercourse.26 20 21 22 23 24 25

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Aretino’s Dialogues, 107–108; Aretino, Sei giornate, 94–95. “Fingeva onestà di monica, e guardando con sicurtà di maritata, faceva atti di puttana” (Aretino, Sei giornate, 95). Aretino’s Dialogues, 109–113; Aretino, Sei giornate, 96–100. Aretino’s Dialogues, 113–114; Aretino, Sei giornate, 100–101. Aretino’s Dialogues, 116; Aretino, Sei giornate, 102–103. Aretino’s Dialogues, 114. “Io imparai in tre mesi, anzi in due, anzi in uno, tutto quello che si può sapere in dar martello, in farsi amici, in far trarre […] e vend⟨e⟩i più volte la mia verginità che non vende un di questi pretacci la messa novella,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 101. Aretino’s Dialogues, 60–61; Aretino, Sei giornate, 50–51.

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Although whores make a living by marketing a performance of sexually attractive femininity, the disruption of traditional notions of feminine behavior in the Ragionamenti is paradoxically most pronounced in the dialogues’ depiction of prostitutes. As a result both of their agency and their commodification, Aretino’s prostitutes confound and contradict traditional ideals of feminine identity. They may sell the image of femininity, but in doing so, Aretino argues, prostitutes cease to be feminine. Early modern women were supposed to be passive, emotional, and sexually avid—in part because of a “natural” desire to have children.27 Indeed, the view that woman are fundamentally sexual beings who lack the rational ability to control their desires lies behind Nanna’s account of both nuns and wives: the nuns spend their days in orgies and the wives are perpetually looking for satisfying sex outside marriage.28 The whores, on the other hand are not passive and emotional; they are active and clever. They want money, status, and power rather than sex, pleasure, or children. In Nanna’s memorable formulation: “Whores are not women; they are whores.”29 In Nanna’s view, whores are “not women” in part because their work has taken from them any desire for sex or for romantic love: If anyone ever tells you: “Such a whore died for so-and-so,” you can tell him that it’s not true. Every once in a while we may get a yen for a big prick, wanting to taste it two or three times, but these whims last as long as the sun in the winter and rain in the summer. The truth is, it is impossible for a woman who submits to everyone to fall in love with anyone.30 If we accept Nanna’s contention that whores are “not women,” prostitution in the Ragionamenti becomes emblematic of changes in social relationships, defining new roles for women outside of traditional structures of family and Church. These new roles are not idealized, however. It is clear at every point that prostitutes are subject not only to harsh economic forces but also to sys-

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Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of a Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (New York, 1980), 40–45. Moulton, Before Pornography, 74–79. Aretino’s Dialogues, 135. “Le puttane non son donne, ma sono puttane,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 120. Aretino’s Dialogues, 119. “E dì a chi dice ‘La tale cortigiana è morta del tale,’ che non è vero, perché son capricci che ci entrano a dosso per beccar due o tre volte di un grosso manipolo; i quali ci durano quanto il sole di verno e la pioggia di state; ed è impossible che chi si sottomette a ognuno ami niuno,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 105.

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tematic abuse from men. All of Book Five of the Ragionamenti, after all, is devoted to accounts of the many ways men mistreat and take advantage of female prostitutes.31 It is significant that the “soldier” that Antonia compares to a whore is seen as a paid laborer. Whether a mercenary or a salaried member of a militia or standing army, Antonia’s soldier is imagined as someone who fights for money—not for patriotism, fealty, honor, or glory. This sets up Antonia’s next comparison: whores are like shopkeepers who sell what they have to sell. A whore is like a tavern-keeper, who sells a variety of goods and services, many of them sinful or unhealthy. Antonia has nothing good to say about what whores actually sell: “curses, lies, sluttish behavior, scandals, dishonesty, thievery, filth, hatred, cruelty, deaths, the French pox, betrayals, a bad name and poverty.” But in a world where people are always eager to buy, what sin is there in selling? Beyond the provocative comparisons Antonia proposes in this particular speech, in the Ragionamenti more generally prostitution works metaphorically in two different registers. Just as soldiers can be seen either as hired thugs or feudal warriors, whores are seen as participating both in the market economy and in traditions of service. On the one hand, as Antonia suggests, prostitutes are like merchants—they sell valuable commodities in a new and expanding market economy in which everything has a price and anything can be bought. On the other hand, whores are also equated with courtiers— pampered servants of the prince. Low born female prostitutes and high born male courtiers both work primarily to please the powerful. Their skills, whether physical or intellectual, are employed to gratify their patrons. Since courtiers and merchants play fundamentally different social and economic roles, these two metaphors are at times contradictory, and they are applied inconsistently throughout the text. At times prostitutes seem like courtiers, at other times, like merchants. As both courtiers and merchants, whores have access to power, but their position is fundamentally precarious. They may attain a degree of wealth, autonomy, and status, but they are always at the mercy of market forces or the whims of their patrons. Whether one thinks of whores as courtiers or as merchants, both analogies are resonant, and their implications are worth pursuing in some detail. First, courtiers: In Italian, of course, the terms “courtier” [cortegiano] and “courtesan” [cortegiana] are simply the masculine and feminine forms of the same noun, implying on the one hand that the most obvious role for a woman at court is that of a prostitute, but also suggesting that courtiers and courtesans are simply

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Aretino’s Dialogues, 239–307; Aretino, Sei giornate, 217–281.

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the masculine and feminine form of the same thing. In Castiglione’s Cortegiano, the awkward parallels suggested by cortegiano and cortegiana are elided by the by the invention of the term donna di palazzo [court lady] to describe female courtiers.32 In the Ragionamenti Nanna makes the comparison between cortegiani and cortegiane explicit: “whores and courtiers can be put in the same scales; in fact you see most of them looking like defaced silver coins rather than bright gold pieces.”33 Not only are courtiers no better than prostitutes, neither is particularly valuable. As commodities go, they come cheap. Aretino’s own experience is relevant here. In the 1520s he attempted to establish himself as a courtier at the Papal court, but was driven out of Rome by his enemies. Whereas Castiglione attempts to idealize the role of courtier and to explore ways in which courtiers can exercise power and increase their personal and political autonomy, in his writings from Venice in the 1530s, Aretino tends to represent courtiers as fundamentally servile and impotent—although he all the while was aggressive in his own pursuit of patronage and influence. As Raymond Waddington puts it, Aretino’s years in Rome “taught him to both loathe and depend on the court patronage system.”34 Whatever its value as general social or economic analysis, the equation of whores and courtiers mirrors Aretino’s own position as a man of letters in a changing economy. Traditionally, writers aspired to be courtiers, seeking powerful patrons who would support them financially and protect them from their enemies. But as Aretino well knew, the position of a courtier was fundamentally subordinate. However educated, wealthy, intelligent, or well-born, courtiers had to obey their prince. (This is the dilemma haunting the elegant and melancholy discussions of Castiglione’s Cortegiano.) If a writer wished to write honestly rather than flattering his patrons, he (or much more rarely she) would need to be financially independent. Selling one’s writing thus might seem to offer an escape from the subordinate status of courtier. But in a time before the establishment of copyright laws, it was difficult for an author to support himself (more rarely herself) from the sale of books. Publishers, not authors, tended to profit from book sales. More effective, Aretino found, was the market in patron-

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Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, 2.98. Aretino’s Dialogues, 136. “Le puttane e i cortegiani stanno in un medesima bilancia, e però ne vedi molti più di carlini che d’oro,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 120. Note that Nanna uses the cruder term “puttane” here rather than “cortegiane,” “whore” rather than “courtesan.” See also Moulton, Before Pornography, 134–135. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr, 33.

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age itself.35 Living in the republic of Venice and selling himself as a free agent, Aretino was able to market himself to a number of powerful potential patrons, including Emperor Charles v and the King of France.36 This increased his value, and allowed him to profit from a variety of revenue streams. In other words, he became the commodity. How is this different from prostitution? Having asked the question, one must pause and say that on a practical level, the analogy between courtiers and courtesans is in many ways a poor one. As Margaret Rosenthal points out, it elides important material distinctions; it is a good metaphor but bad social analysis.37 Frustrated male courtiers may feel they are “prostituting” themselves, but their conditions of life are superior in every way to those of actual prostitutes, forced to sell sex to anyone with the cash to pay for it. The Ragionamenti themselves call attention to this discrepancy: Nanna never loses sight of the structural and social inequality between men and women, an inequality which is even greater in the case of female whores and their male clients: If you set on one side all the men ruined by whores, and on the other side all the whores shattered by men, you will see who bears the greater blame, we or they. I could tell of tens, dozens, scores of whores who ended up under carts, in hospitals, kitchens, or on the streets, or sleeping under counters in the fairs; and just as many who went back to slaving as laundresses, landladies, bawds, beggars, bread-vendors, and candle-peddlers, thanks to having whored for this man or that; but nobody will ever show me the man who, due to the whores, became an innkeeper, coachman, horse-currier, lackey, quack, cop, middleman, or mendicant bum.38

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On Aretino’s ambivalent relationship with both the print market and patronage systems, see Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr, 33–55. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr, 71–72. Margaret Rosenthal, “Epilogue,” in Aretino, Aretino’s Dialogues, 387–402, esp. 400–402. Aretino’s Dialogues, 269. “Ma ponghinsi da un canto tutti gli uomini rovinati da le puttane, e da l’altro lato tutte le puttane sfracassate dagli uomini: e vedrassi chi ha più colpa, o noi o loro. Io potria anoverarti le diecine, le dozzine e le trentine de le cortigiane finite ne le carrette, negli spedali, ne le cocine, ne la strada e sotto le banche, e altrettante tornate lavandaie, camere-locande, roffiane, accatta-pane e vende-candele, bontà de lo aver sempre puttanato col favor di colui e di costui; ma non sarà niuno che mi mostri a lo incontro persone che per puttane sien diventati osti, staffieri, stregghiatori di cavalli, ceretani, birri, spenditori e arlotti,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 245.

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Nanna is also well aware that her own case is not normative. She has managed to survive and even thrive by her wits, but that is not the case for most prostitutes: a whore always has a thorn in her heart which makes her uneasy and troubled: and it is the fear of begging on those church steps and selling those candles. […] I must confess that for one Nanna who knows how to have her land bathed by the fructifying sun, there are thousands of whores who end their days in the poorhouse.39 Even wealthy and successful courtesans were subject to shaming, prosecution, and sexual violence.40 And courtesans sat precariously at the top of a hierarchy of prostitution that reached down to the most disadvantaged levels of society.41 Prostitutes working from brothels, or worse, on the streets, were frequently impoverished, controlled by pimps, subject to abuse from clients, and at risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, including syphilis, which was often fatal in the period.42 For many reasons then, equating courtiers and prostitutes is poor social analysis. The analogy between prostitutes and merchants is a more fruitful one—primarily because if forces us to examine the ways in which sex is and is not like other goods and services people provide for money.43 What is it, exactly, that a prostitute sells? Is it pleasure? Particular activities? Particular services? Access to her or his body? The answer that a prostitute sells sex is not particularly useful, given the complexity of the term “sex.”44 Most prosti-

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Aretino’s Dialogues, 135–136. “Una puttana sempre ha nel core un pongolo che la fa star malcontenta: e questo è il dubitare di quelle scale e di quelle candele […] e ti confesso che, per una Nanna che si sappia porre dei campi al sole, ce ne sono mille che si muoiono nello spedale,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 120. Margaret Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, IL, 1992), esp. 153–203 on Franco’s trial before the Inquisition and 37–41 on poems written attacking Angela Zaffetta. On the hierarchy of prostitution, see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: 1993), 35–37. Paul Larivaille, La vie quotidienne des courtesanes en Italie au temps de la Renaissance (Paris, 1975), esp. chapter 6 on the economic and personal exploitation of whores and chapter 7 on syphilis. See Ian Frederick Moulton, “Whores as Shopkeepers: Money and Sexuality in Aretino’s Ragionamenti,” in Diane Wolfthal-Juliann Vitullo (eds.), Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Farnham, 2010), 71–86. On the complexities of sex as an analytical category see Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia, 2016), 8–17. See also James M. Bromley-Will Stockton (eds.),

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tutes, for example, are not selling their procreative potential (that is another market entirely, and on the whole a more modern one). Clients rarely have sex with prostitutes in order to engender children. Presumably a client is paying for pleasure, but what pleasure exactly? Are they paying to have an orgasm? Are they paying for the privilege of penetrating another person’s body? Are they paying for a particular act—whether it ends up being pleasurable or not? For the privilege of telling someone else what to do? A common metaphor says that a prostitute is “selling herself” (or himself) or “selling her (or his) body.” The assumption in these phrases is that the person (or the body), sold is being entirely passive. The client pays for the use of the prostitute’s body to ejaculate into. She, or he, is simply a receptacle for sperm. But of course prostitutes are not generally supposed to be entirely passive. And selling one’s body is not exactly the same as selling one’s self. What makes sexual activity synonymous with selfhood? One generally would not say someone was “selling themselves” if they were paid to give someone a foot massage. But if the body part “massaged” is a penis, things may be different. Since the publication of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality in 1976 (English edition 1980) there has been a contentious academic debate over the history of sexual identities. In the modern world, people often define themselves by their sexual preferences—whether they are gay or straight, bisexual, or even asexual. These preferences, many people feel, constitute an essential part of who they are—they define identity, both for the self and for others. This is in part because sexuality and identity are both commonly understood to be inward and private, part of a world the individual subject understands (and may shape) but that is not necessarily available or comprehensible to others. Sexuality may well have been less “private” in the early modern period than it is now.45 Michel Foucault influentially argued that sexual preference as a marker of identity comes into existence historically as part of the nineteenth century transformation from a pre-modern to a modern society.46 This formulation has been much debated, and of course sexual activities and preferences are only one facet of questions about what constitutes identity.47 In the Ragionamenti,

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Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England (Minneapolis, MN, 2013), esp. 1– 19. Roger Chartier, introduction to A History of Private Life, vol. 3: Philippe Ariès-Georges Duby (eds.), Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 15–20; and Moulton, Before Pornography, 14–15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980). See Guido Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance

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women’s identity is defined not by their sexual desires and preferences, but by their way of life: nun, wife, or whore. As a whore, Nanna is not selling herself; her self is selling. And so, Aretino implies, is everyone else’s self. In the Ragionamenti, prostitution comes to represent market exchange more generally. Selling sex becomes a model for all sale of services, all wage labor, all commodity exchange. Though this analogy is apt, resonant, and valuable, one should note that it is not in any sense natural or obvious. Prostitution has no specific historical link to capitalism, either in its early modern, modern, or postmodern phases. Prostitution existed in many forms and many societies long before the establishment of a modern capitalist economy.48 Nonetheless, in its reduction of sexual pleasure and intimacy to a cash transaction, prostitution provides a potent metaphor for the power of capitalism to monetize all aspects of human experience. The audacity of Aretino’s analysis of prostitution stands out in full relief if one brings it into dialogue with a very different work—one that despite its many differences shares a core of ideas with the Ragionamenti across a gulf of time, culture, language, and medium: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 film 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle [Two or Three Things I Know About Her]. Godard’s film, shot in 1966 and released in 1967, is an avant-garde work—more a cinematic essay than a narrative film. Godard made 2 ou 3 choses at a critical point in his career, as he found himself rejecting the commercial American cinema that had inspired his early 1960s films like Breathless for a more experimental, explicitly left-wing, polemical style of film-making. This transition explains, in part, the film’s general rejection of traditional narrative structures in favor of detached observation, speculation, and analysis. The film follows a day in the life of a young woman named Juliette Janson, played by Marina Vlady, an established actress in mainstream French films. Juliette lives with her husband and young son in an enormous new high-rise hous-

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(Baltimore, MD, 2007), 19–24, for a nuanced critique of Foucault that sees Aretino’s Nanna as defined in part by her taking pleasure in her sexual encounters. On prostitution in antiquity, see Thomas A.J. McGuinn, The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: A Study of the Social History of the Brothel (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004). He argues that based on material evidence prostitution was ubiquitous in Roman cities and “their aim was to make as much money from the practice of prostitution as they could, both for the individual and for the state. […] Instead of keeping prostitution hidden in their cities the Romans preferred to have it out in the open as much as possible” (4). On prostitution in the Medieval period, see Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago, IL, 1985). She stresses that prostitution is essentially an urban phenomenon, relying on circulation of money, goods, and traveling or unmarried men (2).

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ing development in the suburbs of Paris. Her husband works as a mechanic in a garage. In the morning, Juliette leaves her son at a makeshift daycare facility and goes into Paris, where she shops for clothes, spends time in cafes, and picks up clients as a prostitute. In the evening she returns home, visiting her husband at his garage on the way. The film’s narrative is attenuated to the point of barely existing. There are no dramatic events of any kind, and the structure is episodic, simply following Juliette from one place to another, sometimes lingering over other characters who are only tangentially connected to her—young couples in cafes, salesgirls in shops, other prostitutes and their clients. And all the while Godard’s voice whispers in a voice-over about the gulfs that divide people, the ways language impedes communication, the gap between subject and object, the void.49 Godard’s attitude towards Juliette is explicitly one of Brechtian alienation. We are always aware we are watching an actress—not a “real” person. She is initially introduced by a voice-over that says “This is Marina Vlady. She is an actress.” (24)50 There is no attempt to create sympathy or empathy with the character. She is presented simply as an object of study—someone the director knows two or three things about.51 Indeed, the focus of the entire film is sociological. Early in the film a title card tells us that the “her” in the title actually refers not to Vlady or the character that she plays but to “la region parisienne”—the greater Paris area. Thus, though the film’s title seems to promise titillating secrets about an individual (two or three juicy secrets about a woman’s sex life), it refers instead to partial and incomplete knowledge about the city itself: two or three things I know about Paris and its suburbs.52 49

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On the disconcerting, intrusive intimacy of these whispered remarks, see Amy Taubin, “The Whole and Its Parts” an essay accompanying the Criterion dvd release of the film: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. dvd. (Criterion, 2009). https://www.criterion.com/current/​ posts/1198‑2‑or‑3‑things‑i‑know‑about‑her‑the‑whole‑and‑its‑parts. All English translations from the script of 2 ou 3 choses are taken from Alfred Guzzetti, Two or Three Things I Know About Her: Analysis of a Film by Godard (Cambridge, MA, 1981), which reproduces the entire script of the film in French and in English translation. The style and mood is in direct contrast to Godard’s earlier film dealing with prostitution, Vivre sa vie [My Life to Live] (1962), which encourages emotional connection with its sympathetic and tragic protagonist. The protagonist of Vivre sa vie is named Nana, but this probably derives from the prostitute in Emile Zola’s famous 1880 novel of the same name, not from Aretino in any specific way. Godard confirmed this reading: “In Deux ou trois choses […] the ‘elle’ is not Marina Vlady, but Paris,” Jean-Luc Godard, “One or Two Things,” Sight and Sound, 36/1 (Winter 1966): 2–6 (5).

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2 ou 3 choses was based on an article entitled “Les étoiles filantes” [“The Shooting Stars”] that appeared in the Spring of 1966 in the left-wing French magazine Le Nouvel observateur.53 The article alleged that middle-class housewives in new high-density housing developments in the Parisian suburbs were turning to prostitution in order to pay for consumer goods. They prostituted themselves not to survive on the mean streets but to wear designer clothes in affluent suburbs. Six weeks later, the magazine published a letter from a woman calling herself “Stella,” who claimed that the article was an accurate reflection of her life.54 Stella wrote that she was 45 years old, a single mother and grandmother, with a university education. She said that she first turned to prostitution in her late 30s in order to maintain a middle-class lifestyle for her family: It’s very expensive to ensure that a child doesn’t want for anything, on top of his education: summer and winter vacations, piano and fencing lessons, riding school. […] Until seven years ago I was barely making ends meet, modestly sewing my own dresses, washing my hair at home, no perfume, and certainly no beauty salon for those regular treatments necessary after thirty. She recounts how a man of her acquaintance suggested she could easily make extra money from prostituting herself, and how she eventually followed up on his suggestion. She goes on to argue that powerful men would rather pay anonymous women for sex than to pay loyal female employees for their professional work: Now you can tell the pack of the self-righteous who condemn prostitution officially, the better to enjoy it incognito, that the hundred francs they won’t grant a female colleague for a monthly raise—thereby denying her professional experience, her work skills, her ability to back someone up, her efficiency (believe me, it’s happened to me)—will be spent by them a few hours later for a brief moment with a woman, temporarily buying what she has in common with all her sisters: her sex. 53

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Le Nouvel observateur, March 23, 1966. See Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York, 2008), 278–279, 285–291, on the genesis and production of the film. Le Nouvel observateur, May 4, 1966. An English translation of the entire interview by Nicholas Elliott may be found in the booklet accompanying the Criterion dvd release of the film: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. dvd. (Criterion, 2009). All English quotations are from this version.

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And she concludes by reviewing the material advantages that her career as a prostitute have earned her: I’ve practiced this activity outside of office hours for seven years now. I always used to be short of money. Now I go to the hairdresser twice a week, and without being extravagant I buy myself whatever I like to wear. I was also able to buy my apartment, which to my tremendous concern was for sale. Prostitution as a metaphor for the condition of salaried employees under modern capitalism is a recurrent motif in Godard’s work, from Vivre sa vie in 1962 to Sauve qui peut (la vie) [Every Man for Himself ] in 1980, and beyond. In interviews publicizing 2 ou 3 choses Godard spoke openly about his views on the wider political and economic significance of prostitution: In order to live in society in Paris today, on no matter what social level, one is forced to prostitute oneself in one way or another—or to put it another way, to live under conditions resembling those of prostitution. A worker in a factory prostitutes himself in a way three-quarters of the time, being paid for a job he has no desire to do. The same is true of a banker, a post office employee, a film director. In modern industrial society, prostitution is the norm.55 This is the same argument that Aretino makes in the Ragionamenti about whores and shopkeepers: in a market economy, everyone is a whore, living by selling themselves—their time, their labor, their integrity, their health, their bodies. To be sure, unlike Godard’s film, Aretino’s dialogues are not part of a systematic Marxist critique of capitalism. But, like other sixteenth century writers,56 Aretino is highly critical of—and deeply insightful about—the ways in which traditional structures of authority and patronage were being undermined by new forms of exchange based on money.

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Jean-Luc Godard, “One or Two Things,” 4. For example, Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and Ben Jonson’s Volpone, both of which relate the cash economy to prostitution and disorderly sexuality. Marx himself felt that in Timon of Athens, Shakespeare had expressed “the real nature of money,” Karl Marx, “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society,” in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition (New York, 1978), 101–105: 103. See also Moulton, “Whores as Shopkeepers.”

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Though they were produced by very different men, in different media, from different time periods and different cultures, the Ragionamenti and 2 ou 3 choses both make the same fundamental arguments about prostitution and the market: 1) In a market economy everything can be commodified; and anything can be bought. 2) Selling sex is no different than selling any other commodity. 3) Sex has little to do with identity, because it is fundamentally a fungible commodity. 4) In a market economy, all workers are prostitutes—they live by commodifying themselves. 5) Capitalism is based on the sale of the most intimate aspects of the self: one’s body, one’s ideas, one’s skills, one’s time. Another similarity is that in focusing on prostitution, both Aretino and Godard use female prostitution as a metaphor for their own situation as male artists: creative and oppositional figures compelled to work in a market economy. Though the representation of women is central to the work of both men, neither could be easily thought of as feminist—their attitudes to women are much too negative and ambivalent. Whatever insights they have into the lives and social conditions of women, both use those insights to better understand their own dilemmas and frustrations. 2 ou 3 choses may be about middle class female prostitutes, and the transformation of Paris under Charles de Gaulle, but it is also about Godard’s own filmmaking. It is, after all, his inescapable voice-over whisper that provides the through-line of the film. Similarly, the Ragionamenti provide an incisive analysis of early modern gender and sexuality, but they are also about Aretino’s drive for authority and his animosity towards the Papal court. It is no accident that the most graphically described sexual encounters in the text involve members of the clergy.57 As we have seen, reducing capitalist exchange to prostitution is in many ways a simplistic and reductive argument. But it is a compelling idea precisely because it is simple—it reduces or ignores different categories of commodities and services to argue that selling is selling is selling. When you put a price on human activity of any kind, you put a price on activity of all kinds—including aspects of human life, like sexual acts and preferences, that one might prefer to think of as being “outside” market forces, in a privileged and protected realm of privacy, intimacy, and individual choice. Both Aretino and Godard in their very different, yet oddly similar ways, make the argument that there is no such

57

Moulton, Before Pornography, 130–131.

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realm. Everything and everyone is for sale. In such a world, only unapologetic whores like Nanna are honest. At least they know they can be—and will be— bought and sold. If one finds this vision of the world and its dealings overly harsh or objectionable, that is to be expected: After all, veritas odium parit.

part 3 Arts

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chapter 6

Aretino and the Painters of Venice Philip Cottrell

A useful opportunity for reviewing Aretino’s relationship with the painters of Venice arises out of a twelve-month period between January 1548 and January 1549. At this time Aretino’s close friend and the dominant force of Venetian painting, Titian, was almost wholly absent from the city. He was first summoned by the Emperor Charles v to the Imperial Diet at Augsburg in order to execute portraits of the monarch and other members of his court—an arduous, frost-bitten journey for the sixty-something artist, and one not to be undertaken lightly even at a more hospitable time of year. Titian set off in early January and was away for 10 months. Although well used to pirouetting around the Italian courts, never in his long and illustrious career had he been so far from Venice for so long. Then, only a few weeks after his return in late October, Titian was again dispatched, this time to Milan to complete a portrait of Charles’s son, the future Philip ii of Spain, and stayed there until the following January.1 There was more to this than the inexorable whims of an Emperor who, having ennobled Titian, likened his sovereignty over the artist to that which Alexander the Great had exercised over Apelles. Still smarting from a recent Roman adventure which had failed to win him the perpetual backing of Pope Paul iii and his Farnese relatives, Titian now seemed willing to throw in his lot with the Habsburgs once and for all.2 Was it even possible that this perennial 1 For summaries of Titian’s movements during this period see Joseph Archer Crowe-Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, Titian, his Life and Times, 2 vols. (London, 1877), vol. 2, 162–213; Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. 1: The Religious Paintings; vol. 2: The Portraits; vol. 3: The Mythological and History Paintings (London, 1969–1975); see vol. 2, 35–38; Charles Hope, Titian (London, 1980), 109–119; Peter Humfrey, Titian (London, 2007), 150–159; Giorgio Tagliaferro-Bernard Aikema-Matteo Mancini-Andrew John Martin, Le botteghe di Tiziano (Florence, 2009), 133–151. 2 The summons to Augsburg was hard to resist, but similar invitations had been issued to Titian before and declined; see Hope, Titian, 78. For Titian’s pursuit of Farnese patronage and his expedition to Rome between October 1545 and May/June 1546 see Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian, vol. 2, 112–126; Hope, Titian, 90–91; Humfrey, Titian, 146–147. Titian was particularly motivated by a longed-for benefice for his feckless son, Pomponio. But in a letter that reached Titian in Rome soon after his arrival, Aretino presciently warned Titian to expect little more than promises from the Farnese. See Lettere iii, 342–343 (= Pietro Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, with a commentary by Fidenzio Pertile-Carlo Cordié, ed. Ettore Camesasca, 4

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godfather of Venetian art was on the verge of quitting the lagoon for good, or willing to expire in the effort? Titian’s Venetian friends and supporters must have been concerned, not least of all Aretino who had long acted as the artist’s intimate self-interested agent, impresario and ‘pr guru’ (the language is inevitably awkward).3 Equally, Titian’s perpetually outranked Venetian competitors were now presented with a golden opportunity to exploit the painter’s prolonged absence, and this fact was certainly not lost on Aretino. Via a letter-writing campaign that began a few months into Titian’s Augsburg odyssey, Aretino started to systematically engage with these other Venetian painters as never before.4 Although some of the letters, particularly those to Tintoretto and Lorenzo Lotto have been frequently discussed, they have seldom been analyzed as a group and represent an intriguing and revealing episode in Aretino’s art writing. Larded with the kind of barbed comments which are typical of their author’s satire, they are usually seen as a means by which Aretino could remind these artists of their still subordinate role in the heliocentric cosmology of Venetian art: Titian was the sun around which they were all inevitably destined to revolve. A closer

vols. [Milan, 1957–1960], vol. 2, cclxiv, 106–107, henceforth Aretino, Lettere sull’arte). See also note 18. 3 The following are key texts: Lora Anne Palladino, “Pietro Aretino: Orator and Art Theorist” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1981); Norman E. Land, “Ekphrasis and Imagination: Some Observations on Pietro Aretino’s Art Criticism,” The Art Bulletin, 68/2 (June 1986): 207–217; Luba Freedman, Titian’s Portraits through Aretino’s Lens (University Park, PA, 1995); Una Roman D’Elia, “Tintoretto, Aretino, and the Speed of Creation,” Word & Image, 20/3 (July 2004): 206–218. 4 April 1548: Tintoretto, Lettere iv, 266 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdii, 204–205); Lorenzo Lotto, Lettere iv, 310–311 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxx, 218–219); Gian Paolo Pace, Lettere iv, 319–320 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxxiii, 220–221); Andrea Schiavone, Lettere iv, 320–321 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxxiv, 221); May 1548: Giuseppe Porta, Lettere iv, 359–360 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxlii, 232–233); Bonifacio de’ Pitati, Lettere iv, 384–385 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdl, 239). A coda follows in December/ January 1548/ 9: Gianmaria—an otherwise unknown pupil of Savoldo—Lettere v, 107 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, cdlxxxiv, 266–267); Paris Bordone, Lettere v, 107–108 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte cdlxxxv, 267); January 1549: Domenico [?] Molino—another obscurity—, Lettere v, 137–138 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte xdvii, 276–277). Titian’s mediocre follower, Pace, is the only one who could be counted among Aretino’s regular correspondents, and for reasons explained in the main text. Among the well-known names listed above, only Tintoretto received a letter from Aretino at any other time (in February 1545 see note 54). A subsequent letter to Titian’s ex pupil, Parrasio Micheli, in September 1549 (Lettere v, 255 = Lettere sull’arte, dxxi, 298–299) renders complete Aretino’s run of correspondence with Titian’s rival Venetian depentori di figure (as opposed to minor craftsman and furniture painters). See also note 34.

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analysis, however, may reveal Aretino’s own sense of isolation and personal anxiety over the imminent erosion of such interplanetary harmony.5

1

Likenesses of Aretino and Titian

Following the death of the great Giovanni Bellini in 1516, Titian had enjoyed spectacular artistic pre-eminence in Venice, and not only on account of his prodigious talent: he was also a shrewd businessman and strategist, particularly adept at seizing opportunities for state-sponsored advancement, and was ruthless in doing down competitors, including ex-pupils.6 His influence at home was also underwritten by a growing demand for his pictures among those courtly patrons whose political allegiances were often fundamental to the interests of the Venetian government. By the 1530s Titian was fast becoming the darling of a pan-European aristocratic elite, and the Venetian state recognized his ambassadorial worth in the exertion of a type of soft

5 Augusto Gentili, “Aretino, Tiziano e gli altri pittori: il 1548, con qualche antefatto,” in Paolo Procaccioli (ed.), In utrumque paratus. Aretino e Arezzo, Aretino a Arezzo: in margine al ritratto di Sebastiano del Piombo, Atti del colloquio internazionale per il 450° anniversario della morte di Pietro Aretino, Arezzo, 21 ottobre 2006 (Rome, 2008), 235–251—one of the few sources to have given these letters the collective analysis they deserve. See also the brief discussion in Norbert Huse-Wolfgang Wolters, The Art of Renaissance Venice, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, IL, and London, 1990), 222–223. For individual recipients see Anna Laura Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed: A Documentary Survey of Critical Reactions from the 16th to the 20th century (Ravenna, 1983), 12–17; Tom Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (London, 1999), 17–18, 37–38; D’Elia, “Tintoretto, Aretino,” 206–218; Frederick Ilchman, “Jacopo Tintoretto in Process: The Making of a Venetian Master, 1540–1560” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2014), 131–133, 155–168, 197–205; Francis L. Richardson, Andrea Schiavone (Oxford, 1980), 9–11; Andrea Donati, Paris Bordone—Catalogo Ragionato (Soncino, 2014), 182–183; Lionello Puppi, “Pietro Aretino,” in Enrico Dal Pozzolo-Lionello Puppi (eds.), Schiavone (Milan, 2015), 311–312; Peter Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto (New Haven, CT, and London, 1997), 114, 156–158. For Lotto see also Raymond B. Waddington, “Aretino, Titian, and ‘La Humanità di Christo’,” in Abigail Brundin-Matthew Treherne (eds.), Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Aldershot, 2009), 171–198 (183–185). 6 See Charles Hope, “Titian’s Role as Official Painter to the Venetian Republic,” in Tiziano e Venezia (Vicenza, 1980), 301–305. The artist’s ruthlessness in stealing away a prominent commission from his ex-pupil, Paris Bordone, is recorded in Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nella redazione del 1550 e 1568, eds. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 6 vols. (Florence, 1966–1987), vol. 6, 170–171. See also Donati, Paris Bordone, 194. For the legend that Titian frustrated Tintoretto’s career by ejecting him from his workshop on the grounds of a jealous desire to frustrate the younger artist’s ambitions see Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte (1648), ed. Detlev von Hadeln, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1914–1924), vol. 2, 13.

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power.7 Undoubtedly, another essential factor in Titian’s international success was the advocacy of Aretino who arrived in Venice as a political and cultural undesirable (and broke) in late March 1527. Venice rehabilitated Aretino: he found himself under the protection of Doge Andrea Gritti and other local patricians, and the liberality of Venice’s printing presses rendered it an ideal centre of operations. From now until his death in 1556, Aretino seldom left the city.8 He struck up a firm friendship with Titian, and together with another newly arrived central-Italian émigré, the architect and sculptor Jacopo Sansovino, these three formed the mutual advancement society popularly known as the Triumvirate.9 They became, in essence, the city’s artistic establishment, and a nucleus around which gathered a squad of lesser followers, hangers-on and creati. In particular, Aretino lost no time in recruiting Titian and Sansovino to his pursuit of the patronage of the Marquis of Mantua, Federico ii Gonzaga, and this had particularly beneficial consequences for Titian: by the autumn of 1527 the Marquis had received a (lost) portrait of Aretino from Titian’s brush, opening the door to a slew of high profile Mantuan commissions and an introduction to the Emperor Charles v. Thereafter, Aretino began to use his letters, published in six volumes between 1538–1557, to ceaselessly and energetically promote Titian’s genius—particularly as a portraitist. Aretino was thus crucial to a further, dramatic widening of the range of Titian’s patronage which eventually encompassed not only the Habsburgs, but also, with less success, the Papal family of the Farnese.10 Here it is instructive to consider Titian’s likenesses of himself and Aretino in Berlin and Florence (figs. 6.1 & 6.2). The former, self-portrait, has been ascribed to anywhere between c. 1550–1562.11 Dating it on the sitter’s apparent age is tricky since we still—remarkably—do not know when exactly Titian was born. Although he would have been in his sixties / early seventies when he painted it, Titian may have also ‘aged’ his own likeness in line with other efforts to mythol-

7 8 9

10 11

Titian’s quasi-ambassadorial status is implicated in his first major court commissions— see Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian, vol. 1, 170–184. See Patricia H. Labalme, “Personality and Politics in Venice: Pietro Aretino,” in David Rosand (ed.), Titian: His World and his Legacy (New York, 1982), 119–132. As applied to these three, the label certainly had a currency by the later eighteenth century: Tommaso Temanza, Vita di Jacopo Sansovino Fiorentino, scultore et architetto chiarissimo (Venice, Giacomo Storti: 1752), 15. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian, vol. 1, 311–323, 335–336; Hope, Titian, 66; Humfrey, Titian, 90–94; Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, 116–118; 37; Wethey, Titian, vol. 2, 3–4. Wethey, Titian, vol. 2, 143–144 (cat. 104); Peter Humfrey, Titian. The Complete Paintings (Ghent, 2007), 315 (cat. 244).

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ogize himself in a city which depended on gerontocratic authority (he also exaggerated his age as a means of securing pensions from patrons hoodwinked into underestimating the longevity of their largess).12 In addition, the development of Titian’s mature technique is notoriously non-linear—literally so in its diffuse sketchiness—and, even putting aside ongoing controversies over the status of his late non finito style, Titian never cheapened expectations of his craft by the prompt delivery of paintings.13 He could afford to evolve pictures slowly over time, adapting them to circumstance, keeping them back in the studio for years, and such seems to have been the case with the Berlin portrait.14 The casual assurance of the pose, the aristocratic attire, and the sketchy handling of paint also reflect the huge influence of Castiglione’s concept of artfully artless nonchalance as promoted in the pages of Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528). In search of an analogy for technical sprezzatura, Castiglione has one of his characters peddle an anecdote concerning Apelles’s criticism of the rival painter Protogones for continually over-finessing, and therefore deadening, his picture surfaces. This is transformed into a witty joke at the expense of the gluttonous Fra Serafino who, like Protogones, never knew “when to take his hands away from the table”: “tavola” = “board/ panel/ picture”—the ingenious wordplay is lost in translation, and it may have an overlooked significance for Titian’s self-portrait.15 The inclusion of the table (unusual in Titian’s portraits in that it is not part of a backdrop, but an agent in the composition), and the sitter’s restless, fugitive relationship with it may very well acknowledge Castiglione’s anecdote, and partly account for the conspicuous absence of any other emblem of the sitter’s artistic profession.16 Titian impatiently rests the fingers of one hand on the table top—possibly a visual analogy for the picture surface, and the act of painting—while the other, barely sketched-in hand presses down on one

12 13 14

15 16

The general consensus is that Titian was born c. 1488–1490. For a discussion of the evidence in the context of Titian’s pursuit of a pension from Philip ii, see Hope, Titian, 11. For a summary see Humfrey, Titian. Complete, 22–25. It may be identified with the self-portrait “finished four years earlier” which Vasari saw in Titian’s studio in 1566. See Wethey, Titian, vol. 2, 143–144 (cat. 104); Humfrey, Titian. Complete, 315–316 (cats. 244–245). “Che non sapea levar le mani dalla tavola,” Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of The Courtier (Venice, Aldo Manuzio: 1528), trans. George Bull, 1967 (London, 2003), 69. Of Titian’s two other major self-portraits, the one in the Prado Museum, Madrid, possibly of the late 1560s, shows the painter brush in hand, while the other, known only by a print after it by Giovanni Britto of c. 1550 [Fig. 6.7], portrays Titian in the act of drawing on a board. See Michelangelo Muraro and David Rosand, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut (Washington, D.C., 1976), 202 (cat. 45); Tom Nichols, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London, 2013), 162–163.

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figure 6.1 Titian, Self-Portrait, c. 1562, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, oil on canvas, 96×75cm

knee in a manner that emphasizes an insistent motion to rise and leave. It is with this action that Titian’s fur cloak casually parts to better reveal, both in its glister and gravity, the weighty double gold chain he was famously awarded by Charles v in May 1533. One should recall that it was the accompanying deed of ennoblement that granted Titian a monopoly over the Emperor’s painted portrait in a manner that explicitly likened the artist to Apelles and the privileges he similarly enjoyed as court painter to Alexander the Great (Castiglione’s Cortegiano was, reputedly, one of the three books, alongside Machiavelli’s Il Principe and the bible, which Charles kept by his bedside).17 Titian’s portrait of Aretino in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence [Fig. 6.2] shares many similarities with the Berlin painting, although it is earlier in date and

17

On Titian’s knighthood see Wethey, Titian, vol. 2, 21. On Titian and Castiglione see Philip Cottrell, “ “More Like Himself Than He is in Reality”: Portraits of Baldassarre Castiglione by Raphael and Titian,” Venezia Cinquecento, 20/39 (2011): 37–71 (60–64). The conceit ‘Apelles reborn’ was commonly applied to any painter worth his salt during this period, but it had a particular currency where Titian was concerned and was one that Aretino often exploited. He mentions it, for example, in his letter to Schiavone in April 1548, see note 4. See also Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, 131–133.

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figure 6.2 Titian, Pietro Aretino, 1545, Florence, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, oil on canvas 1.08×0.67cm

was intended as a means by which Aretino could curry favor with Cosimo i de’ Medici of Florence. It was sent as a gift in October 1545.18 The painting too shows its subject turning to the right as if distracted by something (or someone—see below). And, as in the Berlin Self-portrait, the sitter sports a gold chain as a mark of royal favor. It was the French King Francis i who sought to draw the satirist’s poison with this expensive bauble—weighing eight pounds, and worth 600 scudi, it was modelled on a motif of intertwined serpents’ tongues. Aretino received it from Francis in 1533, the same year in which Titian received his chain from Charles v.19 And here it is important to reiterate that it was the industry of Aretino’s pen which lent authority to Titian’s brush and how, in championing the artist to an ever-expanding cadre of international patrons, Aretino made gifts of his friend’s paintings as a means of greasing his

18 19

Wethey, Titian, vol. 2, 75–76 (cat. 5); Humfrey, Titian. Complete, 198 (cat. 143); Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, 62–67. See Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, 62, 170, 173.

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own interests (he had Titian create a portrait of Francis, now in the Louvre, which was duly dispatched to France in October 1538).20 In the case of the Pitti portrait, mindful of both its donor and recipient, Titian has Aretino’s posture overwrite that of Michelangelo’s Moses from the tomb of Pope Julius ii. This was appropriate to Aretino’s admiring, yet combustible attitude to Titian’s great Florentine, Medici-nurtured rival, but also to the writer’s Roman career as self-proclaimed “censor of the proud world/ And nuncio and prophet of truth”—albeit a lusty and satirical one, and there is something of the satyr’s leer in Titian’s rendering of the head (so more Marsyas than Moses, then).21 As with Titian’s Berlin Self-portrait, his likeness of Aretino also appears somewhat unfinished, particularly in the arms. But as Aretino had been partially crippled in the right arm and disfigured in the hands due to an assassination attempt in Rome, this may be Titian’s way of skirting round the disability.22

2

“O Titian, Where Are You Now?” Aretino’s Presence in Titian’s Absence

Titian’s portrait of Aretino is, of course, dramatically at odds with the standards of plasticity and the polished, leccata finish expected from CentralItalian painting. Aretino’s own awareness of Cosimo de’ Medici’s inevitable resistance to this aspect of it is clear from the letter he wrote to the Duke in October 1545 to accompany the work. To begin with, Aretino is at pains to leave Cosimo in no doubt as to his portrait’s wonderful evocation of physical presence and its power as a near living simulacrum: “truly it breathes, its pulses beat […]”.23 He had already written of the painting in similar terms— as “an awesome marvel”—in an earlier letter to Paolo Giovio in April 1545, and scholars are fond of highlighting Aretino’s advocacy of the passionate, liv-

20 21

22

23

Wethey, Titian, vol. 2, 102 (cat. 37); Humfrey, Titian. Complete, 174 (cat. 121). The extract is from Aretino’s sonnet on his lost portrait by Titian sent to Federico Gonzaga in October 1527. See Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, 37, 64–65. For Aretino’s volatile relationship with Michelangelo see Palladino, “Aretino,” 390–394. See James Cleugh, The Divine Aretino Pietro of Arezzo, 1492–1556, A Biography (London, 1965), 129. Titian’s earlier portrait of Aretino in the Frick Collection, New York, c. 1537, also shows its subject gloved: Wethey, Titian, vol. 2, 76 (cat. 6); Humfrey, Titian. Complete, 176 (cat. 123). “Certo ella respira, batte i polsi,” Lettere iii, 345 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cclxv, 107–108).

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ing vibrancy of Titian’s art.24 As Peter Humfrey has remarked, “Aretino had an instinctive appreciation for the particular qualities of Titian’s art and a genius for translating visual observations into words”.25 This is particularly apparent in a succession of showboating ekphrases of Titian’s paintings—both the real and imagined—which frequently appear in Aretino’s letters of this period. These often amount to a florid, yet unusually sympathetic textual repainting of Titian’s works, expressive of a wonderful sympathy for his goals as a painter.26 Luba Freedman has also emphasized Aretino’s particularly innovative celebration of Titian’s portraits as not mere likenesses, or contraffazioni, but as masterpieces of light, color and atmosphere.27 And in a letter of May 1544, in his most famous panegyric to his friend’s pictorial genius, Aretino has the passionate atmospherics of a sunset lagoonscape glimpsed from the window of his Grand Canal apartments aspire to equivalent effects in Titian’s art, rather than vice versa: I was truly astonished at the variety of tones which [the clouds] displayed: the nearest ones burned with the flames of the sun’s fire, the more distant glowed less brilliantly in tones of red lead. Oh with what beautiful strokes did Nature’s brush push back the air, making it recede from the palaces just as Titian does when he paints a landscape! […] With her dark and light tones [nature] pushed into the background and brought to the fore the very things she wished to emphasize or to set back, so that I who know that your brushes are the very essence of her soul cried out three or four times, “Oh Titian, where are you now?”28

24

25 26

27 28

“Una sì terribile maraviglia;” the living presence of the portrait is also given prominence in further comments Aretino made in a letter written to the Treviso-based lawyer Marcantonio Morosini in July of the same year—see Lettere iii, 181; no. 265, 238–239 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, ccxviii, 60–61; ccxliii, 80–81). See also Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, 62–67. Aretino was right to be concerned: the portrait seems to have found little favour with Cosimo—see Gentili, “Aretino, Tiziano,” 239. Humfrey, Titian. Complete, 16. See the examples discussed in Humfrey, Titian, 132, Hope, Titian, 70–71; Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, 14, 22–26; Land, “Ekphrasis,” and Werner Busch, “Aretinos Evokation von Tizians Kunst,” Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, 62 (1999): 91–105. Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, part. 9–10, 22–23, 26–33. “Mi stupii certo del color vario di cui essi si dimostravano. I più vicini ardevano con le fiamme del foco solare, e i più lontani rosseggiavano d’uno ardore di minio non così bene accesso. O con che belle tratteggiature i pennelli naturali spingevano l’aria in là, discostandola da i palazzi con il modo che la discosta il Vecellio nel far de i paesi. […] Ella con i chiari e con gli scuri isfondava e rilevava in maniera ciò che le pareva di rilevare e di sfondare, che io, che so come il vostro pennello è spirito de i suoi spiriti, e tre o quattro volte escla-

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Such comments reveal a sensitivity to the effects of Titian’s paintings, rather than their technical strategies—that is to say, the ends, not the means. One struggles to find anything in Aretino’s writings that directly celebrates Titian’s increasingly florid and sketchy style. Aretino’s view of Titian’s brushwork was tempered by a concern with how his paintings might appeal to patrons less tutored in the painter’s genius and venezianità and, as a consequence, how useful they might be to himself. In his letter to Cosimo therefore, Aretino quips that his portrait might have been brought to a better state of finish, particularly in the drapery, had he paid its author a few more scudi. Thus Aretino also skewered Titian’s renowned sharpness in matters of business.29 But Cosimo’s expectations are also something of which the painter himself would have been well aware. And Titian is known to have adapted his finish to suit the patron, as is clear from the finely modelled and contemporaneous Danaë (Naples, Museo di Capodimonte), which he personally delivered to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in Rome (it too partly draws on a template provided by Michelangelo).30 Furthermore, in the same month in which Aretino wrote to Cosimo, October 1545, he also sent a letter to Titian in Rome in which he complained about his portrait, saying that the painter had left him with a work which was “sketched rather than finished.”31 If all of this reflects a genuine irritation on Aretino’s part, he had further cause: the Pitti portrait was intended as one of a pair, and was to show its subject turning in deference to a posthumous likeness of the sitter’s former patron, Cosimo’s late father, the mercenary general Giovanni delle Bande Nere. But Titian never got around to the pendant, and after leaving Aretino waiting for it during the first half of 1545, he prioritized the Roman expedition which occupied him from that September till the following spring. Aretino was forced to send Titian’s likeness of himself to Cosimo on its own, before resorting to the painter’s mediocre imitator, Gian Paolo Pace, for its companion. Mattia Biffis has recently referred to Pace as a virtual ‘creato’ of Aretino’s; he was a useful standby in the absence of Titian, and one who had actually

29

30 31

mai: «Oh, Tiziano, dove sete mo’?»,” Lettere iii, 79–80 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, clxxix, 16–18). The translation is as in Hope, Titian, 112–113. “E se più fussero stati gli scudi che glie ne ho conti, in vero i drappi sarieno lucidi, morbidi e rigidi, come il da senno raso, il velluto, e il broccato,” Lettere iii, 345 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cclxv, 107–108). On Titian’s notoriously avaricious temperament see Humfrey, Titian, 135. In this case, Michelangelo’s Night from the Medici Chapel. See Humfrey, Titian, 135. “Il mio ritratto più tosto abozzato che fornito,” Lettere iii, 342 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cclxiv, 106–107).

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figure 6.3 Gian Paolo Pace, Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, 1545–1546, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, oil on canvas 0.90×0.97cm

taken the road north, albeit very briefly, to Augsburg in autumn 1543.32 Here Pace obtained a license to practice as a portraitist for all of two months, and possibly under Aretino’s direct sponsorship. Pace’s, inevitably weaker, likeness of the late Medici condottiere was sent in the winter of 1545 and is now in the Uffizi [Fig. 6.3]. It drew on a death mask which Aretino, when present at the bedside of the fallen warrior in 1526, had personally commissioned (from Giulio Romano no less). Like the chain awarded by Francis i, the death mask became part of the kit of relics, gifts and mementos crucial to the writer’s own legitimizing credentials. But Titian’s desultory attitude to fashioning a portrait from this prop, and to finessing its pendant, at this point raises the question of who needed who more?33 By the mid-1540s, despite their enduring friendship, it is arguable that Titian’s professional trajectory was becoming increasingly independent of Are32 33

Mattia Biffis, “Di Zuan Paolo Pace, chierico e laico. Documenti e riproposte,” Studi tizianeschi, 8 (2009): 48–67 (49–51). In 1546, however, Titian seems to have completed a drawing from the death mask as the basis for a print. Aretino was also in the custom of lending out the death mask to a range of artists, including Titian’s ex-pupil, Parrasio Micheli. In September 1549 the latter was the recipient of a letter seeking its return. See Georg Gronau, “The Portrait of Giovanni delle Bande Nere attributed to Titian,” Rivista d’arte, 111 (1905): 135–141; Biffis, “Zuan Paolo Pace,” 50–51.

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tino’s endorsement and counsel, and one may even implicate Titian’s developing technical freedom in this process. Whether his portrait of Aretino was intended as finished or not, there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that such painterly looseness was an aspect of the artist’s approach that always sat uneasily with its subject. Prior to settling in Venice, Aretino’s own—very rich—experience of painting had been steeped in the plasticity and sculptural relief of Raphael, Giulio Romano, and other painters of the Romano-Florentine school. Aretino, it seems, had even briefly trained as a painter not long after leaving his native Arezzo—also the birthplace of the author of the Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari.34 The latter famously marveled at the protean power of Titian’s loose brushwork and its ability to capture the ‘liveliness’ of things, but also disapproved of how bad an example such “pittura di macchia” set to other, less capable artists.35

3

The Young deturbatori dell’arte: Tintoretto, Schiavone and Giuseppe Porta

The issue of technical diligenza is also to the fore in the letters Aretino sent to leading Venetian painters in April and May of 1548—a few months after Titian had embarked on his lengthy expedition to Augsburg. These included three rising stars, Andrea Schiavone, Tintoretto and Giuseppe Porta, and two of the old guard, Lorenzo Lotto and Bonifacio de’ Pitati. In a second, less active burst towards the end of the year when Titian was in Milan, Aretino also wrote to his friend’s disgruntled and alienated ex-pupil, Paris Bordone. But with Titian’s return in early 1549, the campaign came to an abrupt halt. Excepting Tintoretto, Aretino had never written to these painters before and never would again.36 This becomes all the more significant when one considers how much of Aretino’s career was spent in Venice and the large amount of his correspondence which is awash with talk of art and artists; throughout his long career, as well as constantly writing to Titian, and about him, Aretino was frequently in correspondence with a wide range of leading artists outside Venice, Michelangelo, Vasari, and Giulio Romano among them.37 The fact 34 35 36 37

For the evidence that Aretino briefly trained as a painter in his youth see Cleugh, Divine Aretino, 27. Vasari, Vite, vol. 6, 166. See note 4. See Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, 13 and Robert Echols-Frederick Ilchman, “New Rivals,” in Frederick Ilchman (ed.), Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (Farnham, 2009), 112–115.

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that any sustained or direct engagement with Titian’s leading Venetian rivals is restricted to the year 1548/49 seems, therefore, almost surgical in its timing and focus. Clearly Titian’s prolonged absence from the city was a factor; as previously suggested Aretino was possibly looking after his friend’s interests by flattering, and sometimes teasing, his rivals into remembering their place in the established pecking order of Venetian art. And there is some independent evidence that a febrile atmosphere existed among the artist’s local competitors at this point: the seventeenth-century biographer of Venetian art, Carlo Ridolfi, had seen correspondence sent from Venice to Titian in Augsburg by the latter’s own obsequious pupil, Parrasio Micheli, warning him of upstart rivals at home. In busily trying to emulate Titian’s success, Parrasio accused them of “deturpavano l’arte” (‘destabilising/defacing art’). From this, Detlev von Hadeln, extrapolated the label “deturbatori” for a group of local troublemakers at whose core we should surely place Tintoretto—Venetian painting’s notorious enfant terrible.38 Actually, not so much of an enfant since he was pushing thirty when, coeval with Titian’s Augsburg trip, he achieved his professional breakthrough with the grandstanding Miracle of the Slave [Fig. 6.4] for the Sala Capitolare of the Scuola Grande di San Marco.39 This plum commission for the premises of the city’s most prestigious civic confraternity was unveiled in April 1548, advancing a decorative cycle which had previously received contributions from such local illustri as Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Palma il Vecchio and Paris Bordone (though not Titian).40 Tintoretto’s picture may be instructively compared with Titian’s Ecce Homo, painted in 1543 for the Venetian palazzo of a

38

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Detlev von Hadeln, “Parrasio Michele,” Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 33 (1912): 149–172 (150); Ridolfi, Le maraviglie, vol. 2, 137. The possibility exists that Parrasio’s letters were written during Titian’s second trip to Augsburg of 1550–1551, but given the circumstantial evidence analyzed here, and the fact that Parrasio was beginning to secure independent state commissions by the 1550s, this seems unlikely. See Philip Cottrell, “Parrasio Micheli’s St Francis: A Rediscovered Work from the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, Venice,” The Burlington Magazine, 156, no. 1332 (March 2014): 159–162. For Parrasio’s own efforts to replace Titian in the affections of Philip ii of Spain see Philip CottrellRosemarie Mulcahy, “Succeeding Titian: Parrasio Micheli and Venetian Painting at the Court of Philip ii,” The Burlington Magazine, 149, no. 1249 (April 2007): 232–245. See Rodolfo Pallucchini and Paola Rossi, Tintoretto: opere sacre e profane, 2 vols. (Milan, 1982), vol. 1, 157 (cat. 132); Ilchman, “Jacopo Tintoretto,” 144–148. On Tintoretto’s birthdate see Linda Borean, “Documentation,” in Miguel Falomir (ed.), Tintoretto (Madrid, 2007), 417–450 (419). Peter Humfrey, “The Bellinesque Life of St. Mark Cycle for the Scuola Grande di San Marco in its Original Arrangement,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 48 (1985): 225–242; Sandra Jackson, “Not Without Honour: Paris Bordon in Sixteenth-Century Venice and Beyond” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Aberdeen, 2005), 9.

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figure 6.4 Tintoretto, The Miracle of the Slave, 1548, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, oil on canvas 415 × 541 cm

wealthy merchant of Flemish extraction with strong connections to the Habsburg court, Giovanni d’Anna [Fig. 6.5].41 Titian’s work is composed of a typically Venetian palette of warm, symbiotically suffuse colors and a carefully balanced interpenetrative tonal range which avoids any discordant clashes or contrasts. The forms are also bound closely to the picture surface in accordance with the local method of building up color and form across space, rather than into it. At the top of the steps, gorgeously resplendent in blue, Titian casts the garrulous, larger-than-life Aretino as Pilate. This likeness was possibly in deference to Aretino’s recent Humanità di Christo, which itself fashioned a relatively sympathetic portrait of Pilate’s role at Christ’s trial.42 Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave is analogous in its theatrical scope, and proportions, but it is painted in a far more provocative style, showcasing a daringly florid and abbreviated

41 42

See Wethey, Titian, vol. 1, 79–80 (cat. 21); Waddington, “Aretino, Titian,” 187. Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, 48–54, 195. On the religious context of the picture see Augusto Gentili, “Tiziano e la religione,” in Joseph Manca (ed.), Titian 500: Studies in the History of Art (Washington, D.C., 1991), 146–165.

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figure 6.5 Titian, Ecce Homo, 1543, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, oil on canvas 242 × 361 cm

handling of paint which arguably ‘out-Titianed’ Titian. At the same time, the latter’s attention to tonality is convulsively hybridized with discordant clashes of color and chiaroscuro. Tintoretto exhibits an actively Michelangesque, not to say Mannerist, grasp of energetic foreshortened poses and scenographic space. Ironically, given their respective locations, it is Tintoretto’s work, and not Titian’s, which ruptures continuity with the staid, processional traditions of Venetian scuola painting as established by Carpaccio and Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. In adopting a high, dramatically impelling viewpoint, and by wrenching figures away from any parallelism with the picture plane (as is particularly the case with the dramatically foreshortened figures of St Mark and the Slave), Tintoretto arguably threw down the gauntlet to Titian as an emblem of local tradition. Scholars of Venetian painting, and writers on Tintoretto in particular, are therefore fond of highlighting the ‘splash’ caused by the Miracle of the Slave.43 But direct evidence for this is surprisingly scanty and depends largely on comments made by Aretino.44 Of particular importance is a letter he wrote to Tin-

43 44

See for example Ilchman, “Jacopo Tintoretto,” 131. See, however, Andrea Calmo’s laudatory letter to Tintoretto of 1548, which was perhaps

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toretto immediately following the Miracle’s unveiling in April 1548. Here, in the opening salvo of his campaign to engage Titian’s Venetian rivals, Aretino writes in his capacity as the city’s self-appointed arbiter of taste: he begins by congratulating Tintoretto on how well his work had been received so as to also congratulate himself on anticipating such adulation: Since the voice of public praise accords with the opinion I myself gave you on the great painting of the Saint in the Scuola di San Marco, I am no less delighted with my judgment, which sees so deeply, than with your art, which is superlative.45 This lends context to another letter Aretino wrote to Sansovino at around the same time in which he expressed the opinion that among Titian’s rivals, Tintoretto was the one “near the winning post”.46 Aretino clearly prided himself on encouraging Tintoretto’s talent, and had previously commissioned from him two paintings of Mercury and Argus (lost) and Apollo and Marsyas [Fig. 6.6] for the ceiling of his own bedroom in the Palazzo Bollani on the Grand Canal. These were delivered in February 1545, as is clear from a letter which Aretino wrote to express his gratitude to their author.47 It might be useful to see the episode in the context of Giorgio Vasari’s earlier decision to patronize another Venetian newcomer, Andrea Schiavone. In 1541–1542 Vasari had been in Venice to help stage Aretino’s play, La Talanta, and had, rather curiously, taken the opportunity to commission a battlepiece from the young Schiavone—at this stage, a more precocious and stylistically advanced confederate of Tintoretto. Perhaps Vasari wished (and for not much outlay) to exhibit his approval of a local newcomer whose frenetic approach to human form seemed to pay homage to central Italy rather than to any Titian-centric Venetian tradition.48

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inspired by the painting’s unveiling, discussed in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 17–19. Ridolfi too details a fuss caused by the painting’s unveiling; see Ridolfi, Le maraviglie, vol. 1, 163; vol. 2, 22. “Da che la voce de la publica laude si conferma con quella propria da me datavi nel gran quadro de l’istoria dedicate in la scola di San Marco, mi rallegro non meno con il mio giudizio, che sa tanto inanzi, ch’io mi facci con la vostra arte, che passa sì oltra.” (Lettere iv, 266 = Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdii, 204–205). The translation is from Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 17. “Se bene Iacopo nel corso è si può dir presso al palio” (Lettere iv, 281 = Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdii, 209–210). Lettere iii, 167–168 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, ccxi, 52–53). For the Apollo see Pallucchini and Rossi, Tintoretto, i, 143–144 (cat. 82). See Richardson, Schiavone, 6–8. As Ilchman also observes, Aretino customarily linked Tin-

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figure 6.6 Tintoretto, Apollo and Marsyas, 1545, Hartford, Wadsworth Athenaeum, oil on canvas 139.7 × 240.3 cm

Aretino’s patronage of Tintoretto may, therefore, have been partly conceived as a response to such a critically self-serving species of talent-spotting. But it is intriguing to speculate as to what Titian thought of it all: Ridolfi tells us that as a youth Tintoretto had been unceremoniously ejected from Titian’s workshop after a matter of days on the grounds that the latter had spied a dangerous and potentially usurping talent to whom he wished to lend no further encouragement.49 Such a mean-spirited attitude echoes yet another of Ridolfi’s anecdotes concerning how, during Titian’s prolonged absences, students were in the habit of breaking into a locked inner sanctum in order to copy pictures secreted there by their master. This suggests that, even within his own workshop, Titian’s jealous nature engendered an atmosphere of rivalry and backsliding.50 It is possible, however, that by 1545 Aretino considered Titian and Tintoretto’s falling out (in particularly Venetian terms) as water under the bridge;

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toretto together with Schiavone in his writings: in addition to the swift concurrence of his letters to them in April 1548, he also paired them in a list of painters which appears in a poem he wrote in 1551; see Lettere vi, 42–51 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, dciv, 373– 381); Ilchman, “Jacopo Tintoretto,” 95–96. Scholars generally accept the story; recently discussed in Ilchman, “Jacopo Tintoretto,” 203; see also note 7. Ridolfi, Le maraviglie, vol. 1, 227. See also Tagliaferro et alii, Le botteghe di Tiziano, 56.

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Tintoretto had already sorted out his own training, probably with the help of Schiavone and the older Bonifacio de’ Pitati.51 Ridolfi mentions the mentorship of both these artists and also that Tintoretto picked up tips from lowrent painters who set up stalls in the Piazza di San Marco. These were chiefly manufacturers of painted items of interior décor—furniture and wall friezes, cassoni, spalliere, ceiling paintings, and the like.52 Tintoretto’s early output, as with Schiavone’s, certainly reflects this lowlier, bread-and-butter genre as, to some extent, do the two ceiling paintings for Aretino. Such commissions were of no threat or interest to Titian, and one wonders if Aretino even paid his young protégé. The letter he wrote in February 1545 thanking Tintoretto for his work was probably all that its recipient might have expected or wanted: it was sufficient that Aretino should publicly promote this newcomer as a good— and prompt—purveyor of this kind of domestic decoration.53 The speediness expected of painters of this class lends context to how Aretino praised Tintoretto’s alacrity: All connoisseurs agree that the two fables, that of Apollo and Marsyas and the tale of Argus and Mercury, are beautiful, lively and effortless, as are the attitudes adopted by the figures therein: these you, so young, have painted to my great satisfaction and indeed to everybody else’s, for the ceiling of my house, in less time than normally might have been devoted to the mere consideration of the subject. Often one finds that haste and imperfection go together, so that it is an especial pleasure to find speed in execution accompanied by excellence.54

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See Philip Cottrell, “Painters in Practice: Tintoretto, Bassano and the Studio of Bonifacio de’ Pitati,” in Miguel Falomir (ed.), Jacopo Tintoretto: Actas del Congreso Internacional (Madrid, 2009), 50–57. Ridolfi, Le maraviglie, vol. 2, 15. Tintoretto’s Apollo has garnered comment for the way its iconography emphasizes the theme of critical giudizio. It has even been suggested that the group of judges at the right includes likenesses of Titian and Aretino. See Gentili, “Aretino, Tiziano,” 241–242. “E belle, e pronte, e vive, in vive, in pronte, e in belle attitudini, da ogni uomo ch’è di perito giudicio sono tenute le due istorie; una in la favola di Apollo e di Marsia, e l’altra in la novella di Argo e di Mercurio, da voi così giovane quasi dipinte in meno spazio di tempo che non si mise in pensare al ciò che dovevate dipignere nel palco de la camera che con tanta soddisfazzione mia e d’ogniuno, voi m’avete dipinta. Ma se ne le cose che si desiderano il presto e male è nel lor compimento desiderato, che piacere si sente poi che il tosto e bene le dà ispedite?,” Lettere iii, 167 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, ccxi, 52–53). The translation is as in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 15–16.

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This shows how, as in 1548, Aretino is at pains to align himself with a body of connoisseurial opinion which is arguably idiosyncratic and notional, rather than public and actual. In both this first letter to Tintoretto and its sequel four years later, Aretino addresses the artist not with his surname of Robusti, but as Jacopo ‘Tintore’ in reference to the painter’s father, Battista, who was a dyer. In the aforementioned letter to Sansovino of April 1548 this then becomes ‘Tintoretto’ (or ‘Tintorello’)—the nickname is quite probably Aretino’s invention.55 There is some evidence to suggest that artist’s actual family name was ‘Comin’, and ‘Robusti’ was itself an honorific awarded to Battista after he had won fame as a valiant (‘robust’) soldier in the defense of Padua during the War of the League of Cambrai (1508–1516).56 In addressing Tintoretto’s suitability to a painter’s profession, Aretino’s letter of 1545 may also reveal an awareness of this family history: Philosophy and theology are arts, and arms, and the art of war too is a craft. And as one sort of timber is good for masts, one for oars and one for the hulls of ships, and this serves better than that for beams or stairs, so this talent, which varies in excellence in everyone throughout the professions, allows you to soar above this one in paintings and allows that one to surpass you in working marble.57 Putting aside philosophy and theology, the analogies with soldiery and boatbuilding are noteworthy. Tintoretto’s deliver-to-deadline virtues were peculiarly appropriate to a craftsman of his background and station, and something to be contrasted with the unhurried, gentlemanly Titian (known more for missing deadlines, than meeting them). And in the conjuring of Tintoretto’s nick-

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As argued in Nichols, Tintoretto, 17–18. See also my discussion of the artist’s nickname in “ ‘Thence comes it that my name receives a brand’: Tintoretto’s Nickname Reconsidered,” in Marie Louise Lillywhite-Tom Nichols (eds.), Jacopo Tintoretto: Identity, Practice and Meaning (Rome, forthcoming). See Miguel Falomir, “Jacopo Comin, alias Robusti, alias Tintoretto: An Exhibition and a Catalogue,” in Falomir (ed.), Tintoretto, 17–24 (22–23). “È arte la filosofia e la teologia, e l’armi e la milizia similmente mistiero. E sí come una sorte di arbori vale per l’antenne, una pe i remi, e una per le navi; e di grado in grado meglio questa in le travature, che quella; e quella di più conto ne le scale, che questa, così la inclinazione, che ne la varietà de le professioni varia in tutti di eccellenzia, comporta che voi avanziate colui ne le tavole, e costui superi voi ne i marmi,” Lettere iii, 167–168 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, ccxi, 52–53). The translation is as in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 15–16.

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figure 6.7 Giovanni Britto, Titian, 1550, London, British Museum, woodcut 41.5×32.2cm

name there is a witty conceit in how both the profession of father and son involved introducing color to fabric. Here the Venetian tradition of painting on canvas—inevitable in a city of sailmakers—also comes into play (in Tintoretto’s case it was frequently rough canvas too).58 This continuation of a local artisanal tradition required that Tintoretto remained a ‘little dyer’ still, and this further contrasts with Titian’s pretense, notionally at least, to a more august, Apellesian tradition of working on panel. Even if one resists a punning interpretation of Titian’s aforementioned likeness of himself in Berlin in this regard (a tablecloth is present after all), a related self-portrait known only from an engraving by Giovanni Britto pointedly shows its subject drawing with a stylus on a panel (figs. 6.1&6.7).59 Writing in response to the unveiling of the Miracle of the Slave in April 1548, Aretino’s second letter to Tintoretto is, for the most part, even more enthusi-

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And roughly stitched too; see Eric Newton, Tintoretto (Westport, CT, 1972), 99. See note 16.

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astic in its praise. The persistence of a transactional element is likely: it might explain Tintoretto’s inclusion of a prominent bearded figure among the onlookers to the left which resembles Aretino—if an intentional likeness of the writer, it actively rejects Titian’s proprietorial, quasi-Falstaffian formula in favor of the tidier, aquiline graphic profile portraits which served as frontispieces to Aretino’s published letters and other printed works.60 It also recalls the equally protrusive sculpted portrait of Aretino which leans out of a compartment on the bronze door to the sacristy in the Basilica di San Marco upon which Sansovino was then at work. This affinity is appropriate given the latter portrait’s proximity to the relics of the saint whose exciting posthumous heroics are vigorously celebrated in Tintoretto’s picture (which also seems to draw on a bronze panel of the same scene which Sansovino had recently installed in the north choir stall at the basilica).61 Perhaps Tintoretto’s possible likeness of the writer gazing down admiringly at the prostrate, skilfully foreshortened Michelangesque Christian slave was a pre-arranged cue for Aretino, as the critical spectator of the picture itself, to fasten his attention on this detail in his letter of April 1548: […] there is no man so little instructed in the virtue of design that he would not marvel at the relief of the figure who, quite naked on the ground, lies open to the cruelties of his martyrdom. The colors are flesh, indeed, the lines rounded and the body so lifelike that I swear to you, on the goodwill I bear you, that the faces, airs and expressions of the crowd surrounding it are so exactly as they would be in reality, that the spectacle seems rather real than simulated. But then, at last, comes the famous caveat in which Aretino upbraids Tintoretto for his “prestezza del fatto;” his ‘slapdash’, brushwork: And blessings be upon your name, if you can temper haste to have done with patience in the doing. Though, gradually, time will take care of this; since time, and nothing else, is sufficient to break the headlong course of carelessness, so prevalent in eager, heedless youth.62

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Such as the frontispiece to Aretino’s Humanità di Christo of 1535—illustrated in Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 3/2, 377 (facing). See Bruce Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT, and London, 1991), vol. 2, 331–332; Ilchman, “Jacopo Tintoretto,” 136. “Non è uomo sì poco instrutto ne la virtù del disegno, che non si stupisca nel rilievo de la figura, che, tutta ignuda, giuso in terra, è offerta a le crudeltà del martiro. I suoi colori

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Aretino thus invidiously reverses his earlier praise of the painter’s swiftness in his letter of 1545. Such painterly economy had then been appropriate to the standards of abbreviated brushwork naturally expected of the kind of domestic friezes and, especially, ceiling paintings which could only be scrutinized from a distance.63 In other words, was Tintoretto—to paraphrase Hamlet— now expected to ‘suit the action to the place, and the place to the action’? And while a private commission for Aretino’s bedroom was one thing, could Tintoretto seriously expect unqualified support from such a staunch ally of Titian with a work as public and as prominent as that for the Scuola Grande di San Marco?64 Aretino and Titian’s relationship was still too strong, too mutually advantageous to be so easily jeopardized. In his 1548 letter, Aretino’s suggestion that Tintoretto’s sketchy lack of finish was the product of a sloppy, immature corner-cutting attitude seems strategically placed as a wounding parting shot, and one that other critics were soon keen to perpetuate. Aretino himself quickly gave traction to the pejorative notion of sketchy prestezza via a letter written in the same month to Andrea Schiavone. Schiavone has long been identified as the pioneer of an overtly brushier style in Venetian painting. In this respect he probably acted as a mentor to the emergent Tintoretto. His smeary style is reflected in a Judgement of Midas of c. 1548–1550 [Fig. 6.8] which bears striking analogies with the earlier Apollo and Marsyas that Tintoretto painted for Aretino’s ceiling.65 In his letter to Schiavone, Aretino loses

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son carne, il suo lineamento ritondo, e il suo corpo vivo, talché vi giuro per il bene ch’io vi voglio, che le cere, l’arie, e le viste de le turbe, che la circondano, sono tanto simili a gli effetti ch’esse fanno in tale opra, che lo spettacolo pare più tosto vero che finto. […] E beato il nome vostro, se reduceste la prestezza del fatto in la pazienzia del fare. Benché a poco a poco a ciò provederanno gli anni. Conciosia ch’essi, e non altri, sono bastanti a raffrenare il corso de la trascuratezza, di che tanto si prevale la gioventù volonterosa e veloce,” (Lettere iv, 266 = Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdii, 204–205). The translation is from Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 17. On the question of speed and technique see Susannah Rutherglen, “Ornamental Paintings of the Venetian Renaissance” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2012), 40. Tom Nichols has sought to identify Tintoretto’s prestezza as also allied to the literary styles of the Venetian poligrafi and such eager supporters of Tintoretto as Anton Francesco Doni and Andrea Calmo, and as a result antithetical to Aretino; see Nichols, Tintoretto, 69– 99. Although this has been challenged in D’Elia, “Tintoretto, Aretino,” 206, see also the response in Tom Nichols, “Tintoretto’s ‘Prestezza’: Literary and Other Approaches to the Contested Artistic Culture of Mid-Cinquecento Venice,” in Harald Hendrix-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Officine del Nuovo: Sodalizi fra letterati, artisti ed editori nella cultura italiana fra Riforma e Controriforma (Manziana, 2008), 51–64. On this point see also Gentili, “Aretino, Tiziano,” 243. See Lucy Whitaker, “Favole mitologiche: xi., 1” in Dal Pozzolo et alii. (eds.), Schiavone, 370– 371; Richardson, Schiavone, 163–164 (cat. 263).

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figure 6.8 Andrea Schiavone, The Judgment of Midas, 1548– 1550, The Royal Collection/ Her Majesty the Queen, oil on canvas 167.6×197.7cm

no time in addressing the artist’s energetic and speedy technique—something that has amazed even Titian we are told (and it seems that, in contrast to Tintoretto, Titian and Schiavone were on good terms).66 But we also learn that Aretino’s own recollection of Schiavone’s talents would be confirmed if only the latter’s “speed of execution” in certain works “would convert itself into diligence of finishing them”.67 This paraphrasing of his comments to Tintoretto seems once again intended to establish a clear distinction between the mature, considered, gentlemanly élan of Titian (who, as Aretino reminds Schiavone, is to the Emperor Charles v what Apelles was to Alexander) and the hasty impetuosity of the youthful Schiavone. But in stressing Schiavone’s tender years, this is certainly mischievous: it is likely that Schiavone was born c. 1510, and was therefore even older than Tintoretto.68 This censuring of youthful, inexperienced haste may be contrasted with the letter Aretino addressed the following month to another ‘young Turk’, Giuseppe Porta (b. 1520) called Salviati, after his master, the Florentine painter Francesco Salviati. After accompanying Francesco on a sojourn to Venice between 1539– 1541 (at which time they benefitted from the patronage of both Aretino and his editor, Marcolini), Giuseppe had decided to settle, and did so with the support of Sansovino, and possibly Aretino also.69 During the rest of the 1540s, Giuseppe had completed little in the way of any major ecclesiastical or state commissions, but had become known for his chiaroscuro frescoes (lost) on the exteriors of a number of Venetian palaces. This is the context for the letter 66 67 68

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For Titian’s cordial relationship with Schiavone see Richardson, Schiavone, 59–60. Lettere iv, 320 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxxiv, 221): “se la fretta del farle si convertisse ne la diligenzia del finirle”; the translation is from Richardson, Schiavone, 8–10. On Schiavone’s birth date see Silvia Miscellaneo, “Verifiche e novità per Andrea Schiavone: genealogia, cronologia e fonti documentarie,” in Dal Pozzolo et alii (eds.), Schiavone, 41–56 (45). See David McTavish, “Giuseppe Porta called Giuseppe Salviati” (Ph.D. dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2014), 31–38; 54–57.

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Giuseppe received from Aretino who praises his facades on the Grand Canal for their quotations from ancient Roman art. Aretino declares that they exceed equivalent work by the painter’s venerable countrymen Polidoro da Caravaggio and Baldassare Peruzzi, and ends by declaring that, “every old painter would very well be content to know what you, who are instead so young, already know about painting.”70 Is this just further evidence of a central-Italian partiality on Aretino’s part, and representative of a wish to draw a distinction with the locally nurtured Tintoretto and Schiavone? Or could Aretino merely afford to gush with a young artist still working modestly in a style and milieu which did not impinge, either professionally or stylistically, on Titian? Giuseppe’s presence among the local painters to whom Aretino wrote in the spring of 1548 may suggest something associative and innocuous about his motives; in other words, perhaps a letter to one painter merely suggested another etc. This might explain why the now virtually semi-retired Gian Paolo Pace, to whom Aretino wrote in April, was also included in the group. But here Aretino’s decision to revive his correspondence with this old standby suggests that Titian’s absence was, once more, an operative factor. Mindful of how Aretino had last employed Pace on a substitute for the portrait of Giovanni delle Bande Nere that Titian had failed to complete, the letter to Pace could be seen as a sudden call to arms; as if Aretino now saw a need to reactivate this ‘sleeper agent’—the phrase is well chosen for while Aretino extols the painter’s miraculous talent as demonstrated by a flattering roll call of (apparently nontoo recent) portraits, he also berates him for his professional idleness—“a sin against the goodness of nature, and the grace of God who has given us an existence which, after death, will bestow upon us perpetual fame”.71

4

The Old Guard: Bonifacio and Lotto

Aretino’s letters to two older veterans, Lorenzo Lotto and Bonifacio de’ Pitati, now deserve attention. Taking Aretino’s approach to the latter in May 1548 first, this letter, like its recipient, has frequently been ignored by modern scholars.72 But Bonifacio was an important and amazingly industrious force within

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Lettere iv, 360 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxlii, 232–233): “ogni vecchio Pittore si potrebbe molto ben contentare di sapere quanto sa la gioventù vostra del dipingere.” Lettere iv, 320 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxxiii, 220–221): “è una ingiuria che si fa a la bontà de la natura e a la grazia di Dio, donatore di quella vita che ci serba la fama dopo la morte.” See also Biffis, “Zuan Paolo Pace,” 51. Lettere iv, 384–385 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdl, 239).

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Venetian painting of the first half of the sixteenth century, even if his best years were now behind him. In contrast to Schiavone and Tintoretto, Bonifacio was an artist of Titian’s generation, the proprietor of one of the city’s largest workshops, and something of an elder statesman.73 In the late 1520s he had given Titian plenty of food for thought: his public debut, the grandstanding St Michael Vanquishing Satan for the Venetian church of Ss Giovanni e Paolo (in situ, though moved from its original altar) of c. 1528 probably anticipated analogous elements in Titian’s great lost St Peter Martyr Altarpiece for the same church.74 Soon after, Bonifacio also achieved the unique feat of virtually monopolizing for life a large state commission, the decoration of the Venetian treasury, the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi which lay across from Aretino’s Grand Canal apartments near the Rialto. This secured the kind of official favored status that was surpassed only by Titian’s custodianship of a state sinecure, the sanseria, which was traditionally bestowed on the city’s leading painter. Bonifacio was also enormously receptive to central-Italian devices, as his Massacre of the Innocents of 1536 [Fig. 6.9] for the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi makes clear: with its scenographic staging, writhing figures, and sly steals from Giulio Romano, it clearly foreshadows Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave.75 And here it is important to stress that Bonifacio also posed an indirect threat to Titian because of his willingness to keep open house for those younger artists who could pose a more active challenge, including Tintoretto, Schiavone, and certainly the young Jacopo Bassano—all were associated with Bonifacio’s workshop at one time or another.76 It is appropriate then that Aretino’s letter to Bonifacio seems engineered towards giving its author the opportunity to snoop around the painter’s workshop. First, he admits his shame in never visiting the artist (even though he has such a fondness for him), and recalls a recent encounter with some of Bonifacio’s “istoriette” in a house of a distinguished friend, the procurator Giovanni da Legge.77 Such “little histories” undoubtedly refer to those smaller-scale fur-

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For Bonifacio’s career see Philip Cottrell, “Bonifacio’s Enterprise. Bonifacio de’ Pitati and Venetian Painting” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2000); Philip Cottrell, “Corporate Colors; Bonifacio and Tintoretto at the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi in Venice,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (December 2000): 658–678. See Philip Cottrell, “Unfinished Business: Palma Vecchio, Lorenzo Lotto and the Early Career of Bonifacio de’ Pitati,” Venezia Cinquecento, 14, no. 27 (2004): 5–34 (20–30). See Cottrell, “Corporate Colors,” 676–677. See the discussion in Cottrell, “Painters in Practice.” For Giovanni da Legge (Lezze) see Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic

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figure 6.9 Bonifacio de’ Pitati, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1536, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, oil on canvas 199×180cm

niture panels previously mentioned which were traditionally the speciality of artists of meagre ambition and less means. It was a genre to which Bonifacio increasingly turned during the 1540s, and it indicates that, beyond his work for the Treasury (which was never well paid), Bonifacio was beginning to suffer a general drying up of lucrative commissions; in his Dialogo di pittura also published in 1548, the minor Venetian painter-turned-critic Paolo Pino has one of his interlocutors complain of how established masters sometimes had to stoop to such pictures when the going got tough. This comes hot on the heels of a passage criticizing hasty brushwork, and in a manner sympathetic to Aretino’s criticisms of Tintoretto and Schiavone. Pino even goes so far as mentioning

of Venice: Researches on Aretino and His Circle in Venice 1527–1556 (Florence, 1985), 15–23, 29–30.

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Schiavone by name.78 Traditionally Bonifacio’s workshop has been identified as an important and influential context for Tintoretto and Schiavone’s early forays into this type of work. Was Aretino, therefore, being deliberately disingenuous when he addressed the following remarks to Bonifacio: I know only too well that there are works being completed in your own house for this or that church which are superior and of a greater splendour and for this reason […] I will come to your house tomorrow after vespers, to confess my sins, and satisfy myself with the sight of that which you deign to show me. If Aretino wanted to see for himself just how well Bonifacio’s workshop was faring, he throws the artist off the scent by then conspiratorially recruiting him in a private joke at the expense of an unnamed mutual acquaintance: so long as, however, in arriving with that friend of mine who you know will accompany me you do not whisper in my ear, but say out loud that he looks like a wooden figure painted a secco.79 As painting ‘a secco’—wet on dry—frequently led to a peeling surface one assumes this unfortunate anonymous individual had flaky skin—this kind of malicious fun is reminiscent of a set up in one of Aretino’s own plays. Very different in tone is the letter Aretino wrote in the previous month to Lorenzo Lotto—a close associate and contemporary of Bonifacio, Lotto was a more talented painter who had pursued a varied and peripatetic career.80 Also a good friend of Sansovino, Lotto too was now becoming increasingly marginalized and impoverished; he struggled to afford materials and models during this period, and was forced to sell work on the open market (and even on one occasion by public lottery; he was, then, literally Lorenzo Lotto).81 Aretino writes to him to inform him that:

78 79

80 81

See Mary Pardo, “Paolo Pino’s ‘Dialogo di Pittura’: A Translation with Commentary” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1984), 344. See also Richardson, Schiavone, 10. “Io so bene che d’altro istudio e d’altro splendore appaiono le tavole che andate lavorando in casa per quel tempio e per questo […] domani dopo vespro venga e a confessare l’errore, e sodisfarmi la vista di ciò che vi parrà ch’io vegga; con patto però che venendo l’amico che sapete in mia compagnia, non mi diciate ne l’orecchio, ma forte, ch’egli pare una figura di legno colorita in secco,” Lettere iv, 384–385 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdl, 239). On Bonifacio and Lotto see Cottrell, “Unfinished Business,” 20–30. See Humfrey, Lotto, 156–162.

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Titian in Augsburg surrounded by the favours of the whole world, greets and embraces you by way of the letter he sent me two days ago. He says that the pleasure he receives from the approval of the Emperor of his works would be doubled if you would look at them and give him your verdict.82 Of course, Titian did not esteem Lotto highly enough to write to him himself. Perhaps here is a smoking gun—evidence that Titian had indeed solicited Aretino to check up on his local rivals, and had been prompted to do so by letters sent to him by his pupil Parrasio (see above).83 Aretino is then at pains to suggest that while Lotto can never hope to rival Titian’s success in this world, he will be amply compensated in the next: There is no envy in your breast […] And even if you are outclassed in the profession of painting, you cannot begin to be equalled in your attention to religion. Therefore heaven will compensate you with a glory that surpasses earthly praise.84 In effect, this casts Lotto as the virtuous and impoverished Lazarus to Titian’s wealthy Dives (Aretino also begins his letter with: “O Lotto, good as goodness itself and virtuous as virtue”).85 In better times, Lotto had won some prominent local commissions, particularly the splendid St Nicholas Altarpiece for the Church of the Carmine [Fig. 6.10]. Despite its obvious merits, it was later censured by Aretino’s literary disciple Ludovico Dolce in the critical dialogue named in honor of Aretino. Dolce’s L’Aretino was published in 1557 a year after Aretino’s death, but also, rather distastefully, around the time of Lotto’s demise. Its criticism of the late artist for his poor judgment in color may reflect not so much Aretino’s own

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Lettere iv, 310 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxx, 218–219): “Tiziano, sin d’Augusta, e in mezo la grazia di tutti i favori del mondo, vi saluta e abraccia con il testimonio de la lettra che due dì sono mandommi. Egli, secondo il dir suo radoppiarebbe il piacere che sente ne la sodisfazzione che mostra lo Imperadore de l’opere che gli fa, se il vostro giudizio gli desse d’occhio, e parlassene.” The translation is as in Humfrey, Lotto, 156–157. Aretino also wrote to Parrasio in September 1549; see note 33. Lettere iv, 311 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxx, 218–219): “Non è invidia nel vostro petto […]. Ma lo essere superato nel mestiero del dipingere, non si acosta punto al non vedersi aguagliare ne l’offizio de la religione. Talché il cielo vi ristorarà d’una gloria che passa del mondo la laude;” the translation is as in Humfrey, Lotto, 156. Lettere iv, 310 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdxx, 218): “O Lotto come la bontà buono, e come la virtù vertuoso.”

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figure 6.10 Lorenzo Lotto, St Nicholas Altarpiece, 1527–1529, Venice, Santa Maria dei Carmini, oil on canvas 335×188cm

opinion of Lotto, as that of Titian, or at least the latter’s spiteful wish to further diminish a rival’s reputation.86 And Raymond Waddington has also sought to challenge the standard view that Aretino’s letter to Lotto is an example of the writer at his most insincere and condescending. This is to open a can of worms relating to Lotto’s Protestant sympathies, which is something that emerges

86

See Humfrey, Lotto, 96, and Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’ and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York, 1968), 154–155.

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from various evidence, including the company he kept, and the commissions he accepted. Waddington has even suggested that Aretino’s letter is in fact sincerely sympathetic and indicative of its writer’s own Nicodemist tendencies.87 But this is to consider the letter in isolation from the others Aretino wrote to local painters in April and May 1548. Peter Humfrey has, instead, persuasively suggested that any genuine respect for Lotto’s art and piety was hardly likely to get in the way of Aretino’s satiric instincts, nor his wish to leave Lotto at anything but a disadvantage in comparison with Titian. The subsequent publication of Aretino’s letter in 1550 may even be implicated in Lotto’s decision to finally abandon Venice for good at around this time. Given their mutual acquaintances, Aretino was surely aware of Lotto’s prickly hypersensitivity— something that also emerges in the painter’s confessional account book, his libro di spese.88 Aretino also knew how his letters clearly had the potential to ‘spook’ the artists concerned, highlighting both their recipients’ merits and shortcomings to a wide and influential readership. Given this, it is still hard to see Aretino’s letter to Lotto as anything other than naughty and impertinent.

5

‘While the Cat’s Away …:’ Paris Bordone

If Aretino’s intention was to leave such prominent local painters as Bonifacio, Lotto, Schiavone and Tintoretto—and his own future readership—in no doubt as to the difference that existed between them and Titian, this also reinforced his own power as a critic and connoisseur. Aretino’s spring offensive may reflect too an assertion of his own freedom to engage with other Venetian painters during Titian’s long absence in Augsburg; to ‘put out feelers’, as it were. This was at a time when, as Augusto Gentili has stressed, he was feeling increasingly isolated and neglected. At the start of April 1548—not long before the letter from Titian that supposedly prompted that to Lotto, Aretino himself complained to Titian that the latter had only written to him once since his departure that January.89 And even as his devotional works began to face the prospect of bans and burnings, this one-time writer of pornographic sonnets now seriously— anxiously—entertained an ambition to become a cardinal.90 Who knew if the

87 88 89 90

Waddington, “Aretino, Titian,” 184–185. See Humfrey, Lotto, 158. Lettere iv, 285–286 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdx, 211). Gentili, “Aretino, Tiziano,” 239. See also Labalme, “Personality & Politics,” 127.

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aging Titian, as an important conduit to those patrons from whom Aretino sought protection and advancement, would even return to Venice on a permanent basis? Possibly Aretino wished, therefore, to briefly cast his net further afield, stress-testing an inventory of local artistic contacts, and to gauge his power over them. This certainly colors an understanding of one final letter worthy of discussion: chronologically removed from the earlier group, this was to Titian’s estranged ex-pupil Paris Bordone, but sent in December 1548, when Titian was again away—in Milan, in order to paint Charles v’s son, the future Philip ii of Spain (though it seems Bordone was there too at this point, possibly as a preface to a trip to Augsburg of his own—see below). It is particularly intriguing because of a lack of any apparent waspishness with regard to one of Titian’s established rivals. Its opening gambit echoes that of Aretino’s letter to Bonifacio, as the writer recalls an encounter with Bordone’s work in the local house of a patron—none other than the wealthy Augsburg merchant Christopher Fugger: Whichever angelic character Raphael might ever have imagined in the divine features of his celestial figures I saw the same for certain as soon as my eyes were presented with in your paintings, as in the various pictures emanating from your hand, that the good and worthy Fuccari has in his room.91 The comparison with Raphael skates over the fact that Bordone was Titian’s most successful and able pupil, although the latter had sought to frustrate his independent career: Titian had, for example, miserably robbed the young Bordone of an altarpiece commission for the Venetian church of S Niccolò dei Frari. And, with one notable exception, the Fisherman Delivering the Ring of 1534–1535 (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice—a work, significantly, for the Scuola Grande di San Marco), Bordone failed to win any major public commissions in Venice thereafter.92 He found himself, however, in demand with a powerful group of wealthy German patrons with links to Venice, such as the

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Lettere v, 107 (= Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, vol. 2, cdlxxxv, 267): “Qualunque indole angelica fingesse mai vivacemente ne le divine sembianze de le sue celesti figure Rafaello, viddi per certo io, subito che me si rapresentarono a gli occhi le pitture che, in diversi quadri de lo stil vostro usciti, tiene in camera sua il buon Fuccari e degno.” The translation is, with some alterations, as in Jackson, “Paris Bordon,” 25; Donati, Paris Bordone, 182. See Humfrey, “Bellinesque Life,” 236–237; Jackson, “Paris Bordon,” 9–10; Donati, Paris Bordone, 201, and also note 6.

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plutocratic Fuggers—the merchant clan who had bankrolled Charles v. And like Titian, Bordone had opted to increasingly specialize in portraiture as a means of pursuing such lucrative northern patronage.93 Here one recalls how Aretino had previously sought to sponsor Gian Paolo Pace’s activity in Augsburg to a brief and unsatisfactory end. Accordingly, Aretino now wrote to Bordone to congratulate him on his pictures for Christopher Fugger, from whom he himself had also received financial support. With his international contacts among French and German patrons (precisely those customers Aretino had also previously sought to cultivate through his sponsorship of Pace), Bordone was just the sort of artist who would have been of real benefit to Aretino should Titian’s absence ever be placed on a more permanent footing.

6

Conclusion

In the end, in early 1549 Titian did return, and apart from a second shorter visit to Augsburg between 1550–1551 at the invitation of Philip ii, he resettled into his life in Venice, and was present there, pretty much constantly for the remaining 25 years of his exceptionally long career.94 Initially, things carried on as before: despite some high profile commissions, Tintoretto was still a decade away from continuing his work at the Scuola Grande di San Marco, or from beginning his masterpieces at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. He was forced to pick up the slack with poorly paid works at the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi thanks to the declining health of Bonifacio who died in 1553, but Tintoretto did not inherit his monopoly.95 A cryptic reference in a letter of January 1549 suggests that Aretino was involved in a brief spat with the newly returned Titian over some unspecified transgression involving Tintoretto. After that, the latter’s name virtually disappears from Aretino’s correspondence, and it is likely that even a teasing advocacy of Tintoretto was intolerable to Titian.96 Perhaps it is significant that when Aretino found himself a new Venetian address in 1551, he abandoned Tintoretto’s ceiling paintings in his bedroom at the Palazzo Bollani 93

94 95 96

See Andrew John Martin, “Paris Bordone (1500–1571), Thomas Stahel, 1540,” in Bernard Aikema-Beverly Louise Brown (eds.), Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer, and Titian (New York, 1999), 380. For Bordone’s trip to Milan between 1548–1552, the possibility of an interval in Augsburg, and rivalry with Titian in this context see Donati, Paris Bordone, 211–215. For Titian’s second stay in Augsburg see Humfrey, Titian, 164. See Cottrell, “Corporate Colors,” 668–671. The incident is discussed Ilchman, “Jacopo Tintoretto,” 200. For one further occasion in which Tintoretto’s name appears in Aretino’s correspondence see note 48.

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for a new owner to enjoy, though took a duplicate of a Titian Ecce Homo painted for Charles v, which hung on the wall of the same chamber, with him.97 Aretino died in October 1556, but, as we have seen, he was posthumously resurrected a year later as one of the two interlocutors of Dolce’s Dialogo della Pittura—often known simply as L’Aretino of 1557. No doubt also directly inspired and influenced by Titian himself, Dolce continued to take pot shots at the painter’s Venetian rivals, including Lotto, who died that year, and the still dangerous Tintoretto.98 At exactly the same time, Tintoretto then found himself conspicuously excluded, probably at Titian’s behest, from a prominent public commission that involved the competitive efforts of other leading Venetian artists, including Andrea Schiavone and Giuseppe Porta. This concerned a set of painted roundels for the ceiling of the reading room of Sansovino’s Library. Titian presided as a judge, and awarded the prize of a gold chain to a newcomer on the scene, the exceptionally talented, and also notably deferential, Paolo Veronese. Here, only a few months after Aretino’s death, one is tempted to see the whole commission as another strategic coup de grace on Titian’s part. Now, as Titian began to withdraw from local commissions in order to concentrate on those for Philip ii of Spain and other foreign patrons, with Prospero-like ingenuity he helped to engineer the trajectory of Paolo’s career. He did so (to return to an analogy introduced at the start of this essay) to bind both Paolo and Tintoretto on mutually neutralizing orbits around his own position of Venetian stellar centrality—a position he maintained until his own death in 1576.99

Acknowledgements Sincere thanks go to Corinna Ricasoli, Peter Humfrey and Tom Nichols for their advice in the preparation of this essay. 97 98 99

This also stress the lowlier ‘fixtures and fittings’ nature of Tintoretto’s work for this chamber. See Huse and Wolters, Renaissance Venice, 279. See Cottrell, “Corporate Colors,” 668–671, for the original reference see Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, 126. See the recent discussion in Ilchman, ‘New Rivals,’ 22–23.

chapter 7

Veritas Odium Parit: Uses and Misuses of Music in Aretino’s Sei giornate Cathy Ann Elias

1

Introduction

Pietro Aretino, pseudo cortegiano, poet, writer, polemicist, self-appointed judge of contemporary affairs, has left his mark on most intellectual and artistic endeavors of his time. Music was no exception: although he was not a musician, there are numerous important loci that attest to his interactions with music. In this essay, I will address the ways in which musical allusions and aural references enrich Aretino’s prose in selected works. I will focus on his musical language in two works, his Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia (1534) and the Dialogo nel quale la Nanna insegna a la Pippa (1536), the first associated with Rome and the second with Venice. A close reading of selections from these works also gives us insights about the social roles of music in Aretino’s time. Agostino Chigi, Il Magnifico (1466–1520), Aretino’s first major supporter, was the richest man in Rome, a patron of art and literature. While in Rome Aretino traveled in the circles of Sebastiano del Piombo, Jacopo Sansovino, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo x (1475–1521). Aretino’s interactions with painters and sculptors in Rome are well documented. Leo x, the Medici Pope, sponsored an elaborate musical establishment, and Aretino had contacts with some of the musicians in the Papal Court. While in Rome, he became infamous for his political tracts, satires, and illustrated erotica. Eventually, he developed contempt for the Church, and for Roman political life. In 1525, in spite of the protection of his aristocratic patrons, he was forced to flee Rome. The two events that led to this were the publication of his erotic I Modi sonnets (with illustrations by Marcantonio Raimondi after Giulio Romano) and an assassination attempt, probably on behalf of Bishop Gian Matteo Giberti. By 1527 he had settled permanently in Venice. Aretino often found it debasing and humiliating to have to print at his own expense, and then sell the run, sometimes cannibalizing his work. He described the process in a vivid image of visiting the bookstore “like a pimp who empties the purse of his women before

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_009

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he retires to bed.”1 “Throughout the Renaissance, genius, intellectual creativity, is gendered as a male attribute; therefore extended analogies—bookstore as brothel, book as prostituted child, author as pimp—spell out that such prostitution means a figurative sex transformation.”2 Waddington suggests that this may account for Aretino’s obsession with prostitutes. Aretino reinvented himself, becoming an internationally sought-after celebrity, selling not only his writings but his persona. Or, as some of his detractors would say, acquiring patrons who supported him, hoping to avoid becoming the target of his often vicious satire. He and Erasmus became perhaps the first modern independent intellectuals. In Venice, he became a friend of Titian and renewed his friendship with the architect Jacopo Sansovino. He traveled in the elite musical/literary circles associated with Domenico Venier’s salon. There Aretino, already a well-known satirist, interacted with musicians and writers including AntonFrancesco Doni, Girolamo Parabosco, and Adrian Willaert. Parabosco, in his capitolo for Count Alessandro Lambertino—written in hopes of luring him to Venice—includes Aretino as one of the attractions there.3 I’ll go ever so often to the Veniers’ house Where I’ve never gone for four whole years Without learning about a thousand things. For eminent spirits are always there And folk reason divinely there Among that company of rare men. Who Badoer is you know, and who Molino is, Who the father of the stanza, and Amalteo, Corso, Sperone, and Aretino, Each one in the sciences is a Capaneus, Great, I mean, and so equal are they That if one is an Amphion, the other is an Orpheus.

1 Raymond B. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in SixteenthCentury Literature and Art (Toronto, 2004), 43. 2 Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr, 43–44. 3 “Andarò spesso spesso a ca’ Venieri, / Ove io non vado mai ch’io non impari / Di mille cose per quatr’ anni intieri; / Per ch’ivi sempre son spiriti chiari, / Et ivi fassi un ragionar divino / Fra quella / compagnia d’huomini rari. / Chi è il Badoar sapete, e chi il Molino, / Chi il padron della stanza, e l’Amaltèo, / Il Corso, lo Sperone, e l’Aretino. / Ciascun nelle scienze è un Campanèo, / Grande vo’ dire, et son fra lor sì uguali, / Che s’Anfion è l’un, l’altro è un Orfeo,” in Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal in Venice (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 86.

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Aretino is a truly sensual writer in that his works appeal to all the senses— eroticism, visual imagery, and sound images often combine in torrents of words that evoke a visceral reaction from the reader. He not only used vivid graphic visual passages, but also incorporates musical language throughout some of his works. I would like to focus on two of Aretino’s techniques: (1) the use of recyclable musical sound bites permeating selected texts, infusing sex with the sounds of the church into an erotic aural experience; and (2) the portraying of music as a tool to lure and deceive those who try and use others. Aretino had little interest in academic-humanist eroticism that flourished in the academies; his approach was in fact against classicism. He was interested in using erotic discourse to denounce false clerical piety, court life, humanist educational programs, and Neoplatonic philosophies of love. A better image is given by the coins with his effigy featuring the phrase veritas odium parit, “truth breeds hatred.”4 Aretino wants to emphasize his message: instead of telling bucolic tales, he reverts to the dialogue form, used from Plato to Galilei as a vehicle for the teaching of ideas. Within the dialogues, he uses direct speech and interesting stylistic devices. While mocking Castiglione (whose work he read) he uses sprezzatura—which is easy to overlook in the avalanche of bawdy stories and graphic sexual language. In fact, graphic language is one of the “modern” stylistic characteristics of his prose. Perhaps because of his early training as a painter, or his close friendship with important artists like Titian, his writing is visual. Graphic details abound not only in the erotic domain, but also in descriptions of the environment, of the people, and of the events. For example, Nanna tells how her mother removed her from the convent because she was attacked and beaten by her lover, a member of the clergy. Parts of the Catholic establishment deemed Aretino particularly dangerous because he did not write just for men of “virtue” who were allowed to read the classics, but for everyone. He points out that the female form of “cortigiano,” the elegant courtier, is “cortigiana,” the whore—and he criticizes the first, and glorifies the second. For good measure, he adds that the clergy are sodomites. Aretino delivers his message through the voice of the whore/cortigiana (it depends on his whim which term he uses) Nanna, the Other, member of a “third sex,” a person who transcends social boundaries. As in the Roman de Fauvel and in Don Quixote, Aretino turns the world upside down, but this time with the whore/cortigiana as the messenger in the public arena using eroticism as the vehicle to entertain while still

4 For a discussion of Aretino’s medals see Raymond B. Waddington, “A Satirist’s Impresa: the Medals of Pietro Aretino,” Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989): 655–681.

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instructing and illuminating the plight of women. He even goes further and disdains the “honest” cultured courtesan (cortigiana onesta like Veronica Franco) who engages in anal sex to please the noblemen. Instead, Aretino’s Nanna— whose only concern is the market—has una civilà puttanesca that allows her to be his voice.

2

Literature and Music

Aretino had a complex personality and seemly ever-changing sexual orientation. In the works I will address in this article, he appears to take the women’s side, something that is not consistent throughout his works. Aretino was, among many things, a committed and eloquent critic of contemporary society, and one wonders if in many ways, he was an “almost” early feminist, who used a plethora of devices to support his position through the rhetoric of reversal. Such devices included not only unabashed use of lascivious and vulgar language, but classical rhetorical devices, vivid graphics, sound effects, and song. I will discuss the uses of music in his Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia (1534), and his Dialogo nel quale la nanna insegna a la Pippa (1536), often referred to as Sei Giornate. I will conclude by briefly discussing recent settings of Aretino’s texts. Sei Giornate is an important work because Aretino pretends to present the world upside down—convents are described as brothels and courtesans are the only honest people in town. What Aretino is really doing, although exaggerated for the reader’s pleasure, is presenting his world as it really was to illustrate the conditions of the female in society. There are very few safe places for women where they have control over their lives. Aretino suggests that the one place appears to be in the world of the courtesan. In this social space, women can talk freely and mostly control their destiny. Nanna, our main character, is written off as a chatterbox, a blabbermouth. Only women of no importance, like Nanna, a useless chatterbox, or Folly, the insane woman of Erasmus’ work, both outside the social hierarchy, can get away with telling the truth.5 Aristotle is credited with the traditional classification of the five sense organs: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing.6 Aretino, throughout Sei Giornate, invokes a wonderful sense of synesthesia—we hear smells, and touch 5 “La Nanna è una cicala e dice ciò che le viene alla bocca; e alle suore sta bene ogni male da che si fanno vedere dal vulgo peggio che le femine del popolo,” Pietro Aretino, Sei Giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1969), 5. 6 See Thomas K. Johansen, Aristotle on the Sense-Organs (New York, 1997).

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tastes, and feel musical sounds. Aretino creates an erotic landscape where the senses melt together, often evoking an earthly experience while alluding to something more noble and fundamentally honest. I will focus on sound as the primary sense unfolding, slipping, and sliding around, colliding with the others creating an erotic religious space where food (taste and smell), music (hearing), and sex (touch) blend into a colorful pallet of uncensored human emotions. When Aretino is not trying to make us taste the sexual encounters he is using known musical pieces and allusions to musical works to benefit the exploits of Nanna and her company in the art of luring or tricking lovers through musical means.

3

The Setting and Musical Language of Sei giornate

The first conversation, the Ragionamento, is between Nanna and Antonia; Nanna is very concerned about the future of her daughter Pippa who is sixteen and needs a place in life. Nanna is not sure what vocation Pippa should pursue. There are three choices: perhaps Pippa should become a nun, or she could marry and become a wife. Then again, she might flourish as a whore. Nanna, under a fig tree in Rome, describes her experience as a nun in a convent to Antonia. Her experiences sound more like the life of happy whores in a brothel. Next Nanna describes the unfair trials and tribulations of being a wife. Finally, again in graphical sexual detail, Nanna tells Antonia about the lives of whores. In the second conversation, the Dialogo, Nanna instructs Pippa in the art of being a good whore. Next Nanna describes to Pippa the awful things men do to women, and how they cannot be trusted. In the last conversation, the midwife explains to the wet nurse how to procure men with Nanna and Pippa both listening. Aretino uses music in three ways: (1) saturating the text with sound bites, (2) describing courtly musical performances, both sincere and mocking, and, (3) making allusions to religious texts with well-known musical settings. Aretino’s use of continuous scattered sound bites, musical and otherwise, gives the text a multidimensional atmosphere. Aretino’s visual prose invites us to be voyeurs within the world he criticizes: (1) the convent has erotic pictures on the walls— mocking sacred paintings, which almost talk to us; (2) there are peepholes for the nuns to both hear and watch their sisters engage in various sexual activities—mocking the church structures with peepholes for cloistered nuns to observe Mass; and (3) material with sexual sound-images bringing the written word alive while disguised as prayer books. The following examples once again illustrate Aretino’s seemingly casual approach to writing which is any-

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thing but casual in his use of sprezzatura in a new context. The apparently effortless sensual prose is in fact full of clever allusions to biblical texts such as the Song of Songs, which is well suited for double meanings and eroticism. In conclusion, such borrowings and allusions are particularly interesting because of their “reverse” character: musicologists have long debated the role of “low culture” borrowings in “high culture” topoi—for example in masses based on courtly songs. The examples above show how Aretino borrows and alludes to “high culture” cultural objects in “low-brow”, obscene environment. A coherent theory of the role of borrowings in the Renaissance must be applicable to both practices, but further thoughts on this must be left for another publication.

4

Selected Musical Examples from the Ragionamento

In painting a multi-dimensional depiction of Nanna as a young innocent novice who will become embroiled in a den of iniquity more in line with a brothel than a convent, Aretino weaves traditional musical sound bites of conventional convent life with graphic double entendre ones, creating a world of eroticism, abuse, piety, and humor. By moving the camera lens away from the intimate peepholes—one after another—from where we view, hear, and in some cases, taste, each sexual encounter, we get an overview of Aretino’s convent life, leaving us somewhere between laughing at the slapstick encounters, and appalled at the suggestion that this is a reflection of reality. At the very least, we must consider both options for Aretino’s reason for writing it. We begin day one of the Ragionamento with Nanna telling Antonia about her final stage in becoming a nun. Her description includes the singing of the mass, and a clerk performing laude (songs of praise) on the organ. After that her new clothes are blessed, and there was more Gospel singing. She knelt down while a priest sprinkled her with holy water, and then they sang the Te Deum laudamus and perhaps hundreds of psalms. Nanna was placed in her spiritual clothes, and when the celebration was over with the singing of the Benedictus, Oremus, and Alleluia to her, a door opened with the grating groaning sound of the lid of the poor box and the door slammed shut.7 We can almost hear and feel that final slamming of the door. 7 “Cominciò la messa cantando: e io fui acconcia inginocchioni in mezzo a mia madre Tina e alla mia zia Ciampolina; e un cherico cantò in sugli organi una laldetta; e dopo la messa, benedetti i miei panni monachili che erano in su l’altare, il prete che avea detto la pistola, e quello che avea detto il vangelo mi levaro suso e fecero ripormi inginocchioni in su la predella

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Aretino continues to saturate the text with musical sound bites to describe people’s behavior, and often their physical state. Visual and aural images reinforce each other. For example, Nanna describes a pig of a friar, his cheeks so fat that he is like a trumpet player.8 A little later while people are drinking at a banquet, they receive “fruits of the earthly paradise.”9 When Antonia asks what kind of fruit it is, Nanna replies that they are the glass fruits from Murano; the ones shaped like the letter “K,” except they have two dangling bells that would have done honor to a grand keyboard (referring more specifically to a grand organ).10 This graphic description of a dildo at a meal conjures up a sense of sound, smell, and taste. These types of sensory images are common in Aretino’s writing. Aretino also includes references to musical pieces, and to two different types of singing. Some references are simple sound bites, while others refer to actual pieces of music. For example, Nanna points to a picture on the convent wall of the life of St. Nafissa, patron saint of whores. She tells that when Nafissa’s money ran out, she loitered on the Sisto Bridge—a place infamous for prostitutes—with nothing but her stool, doing the work of “covering the naked.” Nanna explains—and provides us with a sound bite—that she held her head high as if she were singing the following song, “What is my love doing that he has not come?” Aretino is inventing the title of this song as a double entendre on the word “come.”11 Another time when the nuns were all busy having sex in their cells, the Bishop’s Suffragan, the convent’s protector, terrified everyone with his knocking on doors. He was about to knock on the door of the abbess who was entangled

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dell’altar grande: allora quello che disse la messa mi dette l’acqua santa, e cantato con gli altri sacerdoti il Te deum laudamus con forse cento ragioni di salmi, mi spogliaro le mondanità e vestiro dello abito spirituale. […] Finite le cerimonie e datomi l’incenso con il benedictus e con lo oremus e con lo Alleluia, si aprì una porta che face il medesimo stridore che anno le cassette delle limosine,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 10–11. “Rido d’un frate poltrone, Dio mel perdoni, che mentre macinava con due macine, e che avea le gote gonfiate come colui che suona la tromba, pose la bocca a un fiasco e lo tracannò tutto,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 12. “Un servidore di questa bella brigata vi manda dei frutti del paradiso terrestre,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 13. “Erano di quei frutti di vetro che si fanno a Murano di Vinegia alla similitudine del K, salvo che hanno duo sonagli che ne sarebbe orrevole ogni gran cembalo,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 14. “Ci stava per fare l’opre del rivestire gli ignudi; ella, così giovanetta come io ti ho detto, si stava sedendo, e con il viso in alto e la bocca aperta, diresti ella canta quella canzone che dice: Che fa lo mio amore, che non viene?” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 15.

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with the general when a nun, like Ancroia or Buovo d’Antona’s Drusiana, well versed in canto figurato distracted him. The simultaneous noise of polyphonic sex, and the fearful scurrying and disentanglement of the nuns combined with the angelic singing of chant create a lively sound bite.12 In another description summoning multiple senses, Nanna peeps through a hole in the wall and describes a sister who “resembled the stern mother of discipline, the aunt of the Bible, and mother-in-law of the Old Testament.”13 The literary allusions are followed by a vivid image: “her eyes were oozing yellow stuff … her breasts dangled like a scrotum without balls … and around her piss hole was a wreath of cabbage leaves … her fingernails were filthy.”14 The scene is completed by Nanna hearing her invoking devils by secret names, while drawing figures—squares, letters, stars, and fabulous illustrations—on the ground.15 Aretino creates a wonderful polyphonic sound bite in the next example. Like the stretto in a fugue where each voice enters in quick succession in close repeating proximity, interrupting the voice before it to create musical excitement, Aretino too creates a grand climax in Nanna’s initiation into the convent: After pushing and squirming for a half hour, the general said, let’s do it all together; and you my little prick kiss me; also, you my little dove, and holding one hand in the box of the angel, and with the other hand fondling the apples of the one behind him, now kissing him and then her. […] Finally, the nuns on the bed, and the young boys, and the general, and the girl he was on top of, and the boy behind him, and the lass with the glass dildo

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“Mentre passava per il dormitorio, non entrò nella camera della badessa che col generale riformava il vespro allo ufficiulo delle suore sue: e dice celleraia che alzò la mano per percuoterla e ogni cosa, e poi se ne scordò per esse[r]segli inginocchiata a’ piedi una monichetta dotta come l’Ancroia e Drusiana di Buovo d’Antona in canto figurato,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 18. “A un fesso che ci mostrò una suora che parea la madre della disciplina, la zia della bibbia e la suocera del testamento vecchio […] gli occhi che gocciavano una certa cosa gialla,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 36. “Le poppe pareano borse d’uomo sanza granelli, che nel petto le stavano attaccate con due cordelle, il corpo (misericordia), tutto scropuloso, ritirato in dentro e con il bilico in fuora. Vero è che ella avea intorno al pisciatoio una ghirlanda di foglie di cavoli che parea che fossero stati un mese nella testa a un tignoso,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 37. “Ora ella, chinata in terra, con un carbone facea stelle, lune, quadri, tondi, lettere e mille altre cantafavole, e ciò facendo chiamava i demoni per certi nomi che i diavoli non gli terrebero a mente,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 37. Cantafavole is usually associated with reciting/singing fables, especially to children.

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from Murano,—all agreed to sing in unison like singers in a choir, or rather blacksmiths hammering away simultaneously. Each of them doing their own thing with cries of ooh la la, hug me tight, turn around, stick your lovely tongue in it, give it to me, take it out, push hard, wait, I am coming, do it to me, hold me, help! One was murmuring and the other howling like a cat; they all sounded as if they were singing sol fa mi re and they were panting, writhing, humping and bumping so much that they made the benches, chests, and bedposts and chairs, soup bowls shake like houses in an earthquake.16 This climactic passage covers all senses; the singing solmization syllables would invoke the image and sound of young boys learning to sing at a Cathedral School.17 Aretino periodically creates allusions to sacred music by alluding to passages from the Song of Songs. Composers often use verses from it as the text of their motets. In particular, passages from Canticles 4 and 7 were very popular.18 Compare the passage below from the Song of Songs with the description Nanna provides us of her lover’s words of praise for her, right before the convent door closes with the screech of the poor box lid.

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“Menatosi e dimenatosi mezza ora, disse il generale: «Facciamo tutti ad un’otta; e tu, pinchellon mio, basciami; così tu, colomba mia»; e tenendo una mano nella scatola dell’angeletta, e con l’altra facendo festa alle mele dell’angelone, basciando ora lui e ora lei […]. Alla fine le suor del letto, e i giovincelli, e il generale, e colei alla quale egli era sopra, colui il quale gli era dietro, con quella dalla pestinaca muranese, s’accordaro di fare ad una voce come s’accordano i cantori o vero i fabbri martellando: e così, attento ognuno al compire, si udiva un «ahi ahi», un «abbracciami», un «voltamiti», «la lingua dolce», «dàmmela», «tòtela», «spinge forte», «aspetta ch’io faccio», «oimè fà», «stringemi», «aitami», e chi con sommessa voce e chi con alta smiagolando, pareano quelli dalla sol, fa, mi, re ne; e faceano uno stralunare d’occhi, un alitare, un menare, un dibattere, che le banche, le casse, la lettiera, gli scanni e le scodelle se ne risentivano come le case per i terremoti,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 21. Several scholars link musical solfege syllables to sex. See for example, Flora Dennis, “Unlocking the Gates of Chastity: Music and the Erotic in the Domestic Sphere in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (ed.), Erotic Culture of Renaissance Italy (Farnham, 2010), 223–245, and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, “Fa mi la mi so la: The Erotic Implications of Solmization Syllables,” in Bonnie J. Blackburn-Laurie Stras (eds.), Eroticism in Early Modern Music (Farnham, 2015), 43–58. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Song of Songs, accessed 26 August 2017, http://www.usccb.org/bible/books‑of‑the‑bible/#Song%20of%20Songs.

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example 1

a. Passages from the Song of Songs nos. 1 and 4 4:1 How beautiful you are, … 4:1 Your eyes are like doves … 4:1 Your hair is like flock of goats 4:2 Your teeth are like a flock of ewes tp be shorn, 4:3 Like a scarlet strand, your lips, 4:5 Your two breasts are like two fawns, … 4:11 Your lips drip honey, … 4:11 honey and milk are under your tongue; 7:8 Your very form resembles a date-palm, and your brests, clusters. 7:9 Let your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the fragrance of your breath like apples. b. The Lover’s description of Nanna my face was more serene then the sky … my eyelashes, like the black wood used to make combs that my cheeks were so white that they made milk and cream jealous my teeth were like a string of pearls my lips like pomegranate blossoms and that my voice was like the canticle Gloria in excelsis and coming to my breasts, he said marveling and that they were two apples shining like the hot snow19

Nanna continues and says that finally he allowed himself to slip down to the fountain, saying that he had drunk from it all unworthily, and that it distilled nectar and manna, and that the curls of hair around it were made of silk.20 Aretino is describing oral sex using religious terminology: la fonte, the sacred 19

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“La mia fronte era più serena che il cielo […] le ciglia a quel legno nero di che si fanno i pettini […] che le mie guance faceano aschio al latte e al cremisi […] a una filza di perle mi agguagliò i denti […] le labbra a’ fiori delle melagrane […] che la mia voce era simile al canto del gloria in eccelsis […] venendo al petto, disse mirabilia, e che tenea duo pomi candidi come la neve calda,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 42. It should be noted that Aretino is also alluding to Petrarch with phrases like “neve calda.” “Alla fine si lasciò sdrucciolare alla fonte, dicendo averci bevuto indegnamente, e che ella stillava manuscristi e manna, e che di seta erano i peluzzi suoi,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 42.

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baptismal in a church, manuscrisi, rose-water or literally the hand of Christ, and manna, the food God gave to the Israelites in the desert. Nanna’s vagina is the baptismal (she is the church), and he ate and drank from her it. The proclamation that her lover is unworthy is a mockery of the Domine Non sum dignus response of the Mass. In this example, Aretino is mocking the church but, in effect, praising Nanna. Many composers set variant combinations of Canticles 4 and 7 from the Song of Songs; “Quam pulchra es” was set by John Dunstable, Noel Bauldeweyn, Orlando di Lasso, Giovanni di Palestrina, and others. In example 1b above, Aretino alludes to the sacred music, the motet, of the time. Later in the story Nanna tells Antonia about a young monk from the university who took her out of the convent for dinner, and to disguise herself, she dressed like a young boy. One night after the Ave Maria she snuck out with the monk and went to a special place for religious couples, nuns, monks, witches and warlocks. Soon the musicians arrived; she describes four singers singing from a book, and one with a silver lute tuned to their voices. They sang, “Divine eyes, so calm and pure ….” Then a woman from Ferrara danced.21 The piece of music they were singing is a madrigal; the elegant poem, praising a woman, possibly Nanna, is by Aretino and the music was composed by Philippe Verdelot, someone he might very well have had contact with at some point. One can assume that Aretino knew this piece of music. This eloquent praise of a woman will later slip into a similar song but one of mocking women. Divine, serene eyes, Eyes that are always full of love and grace, From other eyes I beg forgiveness, as the splendor is only yours And if such words seem to challenge The honor of the sun, Let him, like you do, make the night Shine with the light of the day.22

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“E stando in sui vezzi, arrivò la virtù della musica che mi fece risentire fino alla anima: erano quattro che guardavano sopra un libro, e uno, con un liuto argentino accordato con le voci loro, cantava «Divini occhi sereni …». Dopo questo venne una ferrarese che ballò sì gentilmente, che fece maravigliare ognuno: ella facea cavriole che non le avria fatte un cavriuolo con una destrezza, Dio, con una grazia, Antonia, che non avresti voluto vedere altro,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 45–46. Aretino only includes the first line of the text. “Divini occhi sereni, / Occhi sempre di gratia e d’amor pieni, / Perdonimi gli altr’occhi, vostro sole ’l splendore / Et se questa parola par che tocchi, / Al sol il ver’ honore, / Faccia

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figure 7.1 Philippe Verdelot, “Divini occhi sereni”, bars 1–4. Di Verdelot. Tutti li madrigali del primo, et del secondo libro a quattro voci (Venice: A. Gardane, 1556) 20

Singing in an improvisatory style was very common during this time. At one point, Nanna describes her suitors—beautifully dressed noblemen—who swarmed around her with their books of Petrarch that they keep in their pockets, singing verses: “Se amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento?”23 This was a very popular sonnet to set to music at the time, and although this description suggests an improvisatory performance based on a simple formula for singing, it was not uncommon for courtiers to sing only the top voice from a madrigal setting. Jacquet Berchem, a contemporary of Aretino, whom he might have known from Venice, set this text to music.24 This collection of madrigals also includes madrigals by Verdelot who set the music to “Divini occhi sereni” cited above. Berchem’s melodies in many of his madrigals were simple and didactic, often resembling improvisatory formulas.

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egli chiaro a noi, / Giorno la notte, come fate voi,” Philippe Verdelot, Di Verdelot. Tutti li madrigali del primo, et del secondo libro a quattro voci (Venice, A. Gardane: 1556) 20 (rism B/1 156520). “Cavalli lucenti come gli specchi andando soavi soavi con [i] loro famigli alla staffa, nella quale teneano solamente la punta del piede, col petrarchino in mano, cantando con vezzi: Se amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento?,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 94–95. Madrigali di Verdelot et de altri autori a sei voci novamente con alcuni madrigali novi ristampati & corretti (Venice, A. Gardane: 1546).

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Selected Musical Examples in the Dialogo

As in the Ragionamento, Aretino uses references to music in a variety of ways but this time includes more descriptions of possibly different types of singing, and even a mock song alluding to the Song of Songs. The permutation of musical language, religious and secular, fills the Ragionamento. I will discuss some of the most interesting examples. Sound bites often equate food and sex— both delicious and disgusting. For example, at one point Nanna complains that women smell and blames it on the monks, priests, and other clergy who sleep with them, because they spoil them like foods are spoiled by those who eat until their guts burst. Nanna says even if you sing to them the “old man’s song”— snail, o little snail; bring out your three little horns, the three and the four; and the one of the marshall—they don’t rise up until you do it with their husbands. Pippa is shocked that monks and priests have husbands.25 Aretino refers to performances in a variety of ways including canto figurato, biscantare, cantarono al libro, and legge cantando, along with the usual madrigal performances. For example, there are several passages where Aretino indicates that someone might be improvising in a formulaic fashion—legge cantando—to sing verses from a book of poetry as we saw earlier in the Ragionamento. For example, Nanna describes a monk chanting from a written text, but this time the nature of the material is lewd. The monk begins singing (legge cantando): My lady, to tell the truth, If I do it to you may I die: For I know that you know How in your sweet vulva Love often jousts with crab lice.26 Balia praises the monk, he turns the page, and begins singing several more verses.27 25

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“Fa de le vivande un che ha cenato a crepastomaco allotta allotta. E benché si canti loro la canzona che si canta ai vecchi, cioè il Luma, lumachella; cava fuor le tre Cornella; le tre e le Quattro; e quelle del marescalco, non se gli rizza fino a tanto che non si corcano seco i lor mariti,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 105–106. “Madonna, per ver dire, / s’io vel facessi, che io possa morire: / perchè so che sapete / che ne la vulva vostra / sovente Amor con le piattole giostra,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 339. Translation from Pietro Aretino, Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, preface by Alberto Moravia, introduction by Margaret F. Rosenthal (Toronto, 2005 [1971]), 362. “Balia. O bene. Comare. […] il frate volge carta e legge cantando: Madonna, io ’l vo’ pur dir

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There are also several descriptions referring to biscantare. For example, Nanna says her godfather told her that today’s courtesans are like courtiers; they both sin equally!28 She describes a particular courtier, using a string of epithets beginning with one that describes him mockingly as a nobody who eats in the servants canteen and dies on straw—instead of a bed.29 He bragged about his cardinal who would sing (biscantare) to him with a voice like a cracked bell. Nanna points out that he had a satin bag and breast full of madrigals by famous poets, and that she knew them from a certain play.30 Both texts he sings are from Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta): “Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi” (no. 90 set to music by Giovanni Maria Nanino and others), and “Si è debile il filo, oh.” These texts were set by musicians at the time but as madrigals for several voices. As it was common at the time, he sang one voice from the polyphonic madrigal. In another example, Comare talks about how crazy and obscene painters and sculptors are, and Balia suggests that they should be tied up. Comare suggests that they led off singing “Occhi, per voi, per voi morir sopporto ….” She suggests that several people are singing together (Lasciamo il biscantare).31 Nanna also talks about people singing from the book (cantarono al libro)— Aretino mentions a group singing from a book with a large group around them: “Poi che il mondo non crede.” This is the second instance of singing from a book, suggesting that the musicians are singing from written music.32 At this time, there is no surviving musical setting of this piece. Another example of canto figurato—by which Aretino may simply mean polyphonic music—occurs later

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che ognun m’intenda, […] He sings three more poems after this one,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 340–341. “Gli mi disse: ‘Nanna, le puttane d’oggi dì si simigliano ai cortigiani dal dì d’oggi, che per la divizia di loro stessi bisogna mariolare’,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 233–234. “Un messere, signore-vive-in tinello-e-more-in-paglia,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 234. “Nanna. Del cardinal suo, la reverendissima Signoria del quale lo teneva in collo ogni dì due volte, né mangiava cosa che non la partissi seco, e tutti i suoi secreti gli sgoluppava; e come aveva anfanato di regressi, conserve e spettative, mostrando avvisi di Spagna, di Francia e de la Magna, si dava a biscantare con voce di campana fessa: Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi e Si è debile il filo, oh, avendo sempre piena la sacchetta del saio e il seno di madricali di mano dei poeti, i nomi dei quali contava nel modo che raccontano le feste i preti di contado,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 235. “Comare. I dipintori e gli scultori, salvo la grazia di Baccino, son matti volontari: e che sia il vero, tolgano il naturale a lor medesimi per darlo a le tavole e ai marmi. Balia. Leghiamogli adunque. Comare. Lasciamo il biscantare: Occhi, per voi, per voi morir sopporto: voi, voi mi avete morto […]. Balia. Fà tu,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 328. “Comare. Cantarono al libro, con un monte di gente intorno; Poi che il mondo non crede che in me, d’amor mercede, ogni mal sia,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 327.

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in the book. Nanna is telling Pippa a story and uses the song as a lesson … because canto figurato says, “to him who nourishes a cold serpent in his breast …”33 Unfortunately, again, there is no known surviving musical setting of this verse. One of the highlights of the Dialogo is when Nanna tells Pippa the story about a man, Mister Sonnet-singer, whom she allows to sing to her. He gathers a crowd of paper-smudgers and song-screechers and tells them that he wants to sing to a married prostitute to make her run away with him, and performs a mock courtly song. Instead of singing verses from the actual Song of Songs, Aretino has created a text mocking verses from the canticle. With his lute he sings to her (biscantò questo cotale) suggesting that this is one voice of a polyphonic piece.34 For all the gold in the world, Lady, In praising you I would not speak a lie, For then I would shame both myself and you. No, by God! I will never claim That your mouth is scented like India or Sabine, Nor that your hair Is lovelier than gold. Nor that love lodges in your eyes, Nor that the sun robs its radiance from them, Nor that your lips and teeth are White pearls and lovely gleaming rubies,

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“Pippa. Saviamente. Nanna. Anzi pazzamente. Pippa. Perché? Nanna. Perché dice il canto figurato che […] Chi s’alleva il serpe in seno / le intervien come al villano: come l’ebbe caldo e sano, / lo pagò poi di veleno,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 224. “Avuto che ebbe il messer fa-sonetti il sì trovò non so quanti sconquazza-carte e stiracchiacanzone, dicendo ‘io vo’ fare la sernata a un puttanino maritato’ […] poi, tolto un liuto, accordandolo in un soffio, stroncò una calata assai contadinescamente; e doppo uno “ah! ah! ah!” a la sgangarata, si messe sotto la finestra de la camera de l’amica, la quale rispondeva in un borghicciuolo dove passava una persona l’anno; e appoggiato con le rene al muro, adattatosi lo stormento al petto, porse il viso in alto; e mentre ella balenava lassuso, biscantò questo cotale: ‘Per tutto l’or del mondo, / donna, in lodarvi non direi menzogna / perché a me a voi farei vergogna / Per Dio che non direi / che in bocca abbiate odor d’Indi o Sabei, / né che i vostri capelli / de l’oro sien più belli, / né che negli occhi vostri alberghi Amore, né che da quelli il sol toglie splendore, / né che le labbra e i denti / sien bianche perle e bei rubini ardenti, né che i vostri costume / faccino nel bordello andare i fiumi: / io dirò ben che buona robba sète, / più che donna che sia; / e che tal grazia avete / che, a farvelo, un romito scapparia / Ma non vo’dir che voi siate divina, / non pisciando acqua lanfa per orina,’ ” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 271–272.

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Nor that your pretty ways would The rivers run merrily through brothels. But I do say you are a lovely piece, More so than any other dame And have such grace that, to do it To you a hermit would desert his vows. Though I will not say you are divine, And piss orange water instead of urine.35

figure 7.2 “Alma mia fiamma”, Text by Pietro Aretino and music by Tommaso Bargonio, bars 1–8. Antonfrancesco Doni, Dialogo della musica, ed. G. Francesco Malipiero (Vienna-Londra-Milano, 1965), 78–82: 78–81

35

English translation from Aretino, Dialogues, 289–290.

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There are many other descriptions of people singing madrigals but one is particularly interesting because Aretino composed the text and knew Antonfrancesco Doni, who wrote Dialogo della musica (1554). Like most of Aretino’s relationships, they began as friends and ended enemies. In the Dialogo, Doni invents a conversation between several musicians and he includes the music scores. The group discusses the music; Aretino’s text, “Alma mia fiamma e donna” appears in it set to music by Tommaso Bargonio.36 One of the musicians points out that these words are from the “Divino Aretino.” Unlike the solo performance by the singer with a lute described by Aretino, Doni’s characters perform it a cappella.37

6

Conclusion

After the Renaissance there seems to be little interest in setting Aretino’s verse to music. However, more recently, there were two such works: (1) G. Francesco Malipiero composed his opera, Il Marescalco, (1960), Commedia in due atti (da Pietro Aretino) performed in Treviso at the Teatro Comunale 22 October 1969, and (2) Michael Nyman set Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi (2007) to music. Unfortunately even in the 21st century people were offended by Aretino’s words, and the program notes were not allowed to circulate at the London performance because they were “obscene.”38 Aretino’s pure honesty is still not accepted today. Aretino points to his readers that “it would be more honest to show the prick, cunt, and ass, than one’s mouth, hands, and feet. … the prick, cunt, and ass do not curse, bite, and spit in one’s face as mouths do. They do not kick like feet, or lend themselves to false oaths, belabor with clubs, steal, and murder like hands.”39 Long live honest eroticism in song and dance! 36 37

38

39

Antonfrancesco Doni, Dialogo della musica, ed. Gian Francesco Malipiero (ViennaLondon-Milan, 1965), 78–82. “Comare. Così mi ricordassi io di avere a morire, e degli orazioni i quali mia madre mi insegnò da piccina. Egli cantò suso il liuto: ‘Alma mia fiamma e donna, / s’io veggio ogni mio ben nel vostro viso, / io dico che ivi solo è il paradiso; / e s’egli è pure altrove, / debbe esser uno essempio da voi tolto, / ed è bel perché vien dal vostro volto’,” Aretino, Sei Giornate, 327. “The Classical Source News: Michael Nyman Festival Controversy,” Classical Source, 9 June 2008, accessed 15 March 2017, http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_news.php​ ?id=993. Aretino, Dialogues, 317.

part 4 Literary Genres

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chapter 8

Pietro Aretino, Poet Angelo Romano

1

Introduction

The focus of this essay is an analysis of the poetry of Pietro Aretino, starting with the collection of his early works, the Opera nova (1512), and concluding with the Ternali in Gloria di Giulio terzo e de la Reina Cristianissima di [Francia] (1551). Critical attention will also be paid to the conspicuous though sparse lyrical works, which took up the final years of the Aretino’s life.1 In this essay I will attempt to list the major poetic forms used by Aretino,2 while also discussing his literary education, in order to dispel some of the obscurity surrounding Pietro’s early period, which he spent between his native Arezzo and cultured Perugia. As I will argue, this was a crucial period for Aretino’s cultural and spiritual formation, predating his ambitious move to Rome. As is well known, Aretino spent his infancy in Arezzo. He was born into a bourgeois family, on his mother’s side (Margherita [Tita] Bonci), though his father was a humble cobbler named Luca di Domenico Gherardi.3 As he writes in his Sei giornate, it was there that he learned his “abc s.”4 Then his two maternal uncles, Niccolò and Fabbiano, took charge of his care.5 Niccolò was a lector

1 References to these works can be found in Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 203–236. For more on Aretino’s central place in poetry collections from 1545 until his death in 1556, see in particular Marco Faini, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle Rime di Aretino: le antologie a stampa (e una rara miscellanea di strambotti),” in Dentro il Cinquecento. Per Danilo Romei (Manziana, 2015), 97–141. 2 For the texts of Aretino’s poems consulted here, in addition to those in the volumes of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pietro Aretino (Poesie varie i), see also Poemi cavallereschi, as well as the collections prepared by Sborselli and Romei: Pietro Aretino, Poesie, ed. Gaetano Sborselli (Lanciano, 1930–1934); Pietro Aretino, Scritti nel Codice Marciano It. xi 66 (= 6730), ed. Danilo Romei (Florence, 1988). 3 Aretino’s father’s name has now finally been established by Teresa D’Alessandro Camaiti, “Pietro Aretino e Arezzo: nuove indagini su un rapporto di affetto sincero,” Annali Aretini 12 (2004): 179–196 (184). 4 This is how the author himself refers to the alphabet in Sei giornate: Pietro Aretino, Sei giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1969), 63. 5 Useful archival information on both figures is available in D’Alessandro Camaiti, “Pietro Aretino e Arezzo,” 181–182.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_010

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at the Studio of Siena (which would later become the University of Siena), and Fabbiano was a churchman. As Giuliano Innamorati rightly observes, both were “definitely present and participated in the education of their nephew, Pietro,”6 a fact that Aretino, many years later in 1540, would openly acknowledge in a letter addressed to Niccolò, where he also affectionately remembers his other uncle Fabbiano (Lettere ii, 191): Your card, honored uncle, colored my face with such shades of vermillion and red, as is usually done by shame. Since you are full of honest virtue and adorned with civil knowledge, I should be prompt to write you; as when I was a child, I was quick to run to you every time the sweet love of the fatherland dragged you off to the Studio of Siena. Nevertheless, the spirit, in which I hold you in the highest esteem, cancels out the shortcomings of the pen, whose tardiness will in the future be converted into quickness. Meanwhile, love me with a heart as open as your older brother Messer Fabbiano, the venerable churchman, wonderful priest, and splendid man, loved me. Fabbiano’s splendid, wonderful, and venerable memory draws passionate tears from my eyes, since he was one of the most loyal friends, the most gracious company, and the most courteous persons that I have ever known.7 The problem of Aretino’s literary education also interested the author’s main biographer Giammaria Mazzuchelli from Brescia. In the absence of conclusive documents, Mazzuchelli discarded any evidence that Pietro studied classical literature and philosophy, emphasizing instead the author’s self-directed studies, and his natural talent, stating that “he was able to learn the graces and the erudition that he could gain from his own reading of vernacular writers in the

6 Giuliano Innamorati, “Aretino, Pietro,” in dbi, vol. 4 (Rome, 1962), 84–109. 7 “La vostra carta, zio onorando, mi ha sparso il volto di quei colori vermigli e rossi con cui gli dipigne lo stile de la vergogna. Peroché essendo voi ripieno di virtù oneste e adorno di scienze civili, devrei esser sollecito a scrivervi; come io essendo fanciullo era presto a corrervi intorno ogni volta che il dolce amor de la patria vi toglieva a lo studio di Siena. Benché l’animo, nel qual vi tengo con somma riverenzia, cancella il diffetto de la penna, le cui pigrizie per lo avvenire si convertiranno in velocità. Intanto amatemi con quel core aperto col qual mi amava il vostro maggior fratello messer Fabbiano, canonico venerabile, sacerdote ottimo e uomo splendido. La cui memoria splendida, ottima e venerabile mi trae ora da gli occhi lagrime isviscerate, peroché egli fu uno de i più leali amici, de i più grati compagni e de le più cortesi persone che per me si conoscesser mai;” on the letter, see Paul Larivaille, L’Arétin entre Renaissance et Maniérisme 1492–1537, 2 voll. (Lille, 1972), 31, 804–805.

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native language, and particularly the poets.”8 It is clear, however, that not all the “erudition” in his possession was the product of independent study. Indeed, in school he must have received some fundamental instruction in grammar since in the Farza (1519–1521; vv. 114–116), in the first redaction (1525) of the Cortigiana (Prol. e Arg. 13), and in the Marescalco (iii 10 1) we find allusions to the Ars minor of Donatus, the Doctrinalis of Alexandre de Villedieu, and the humanist Antonio Mancinelli, respectively.9 Although before the sixteenth century Italy did not have a strong tradition of poetic treatises, we known that the texts of Donato and Villedieu were very much in use in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (examples of which survive in scholastic collections). In addition, Mancinelli’s grammatical writings were very popular between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.10 Thus, with his move to Perugia in the early sixteenth cen-

8

9

10

“[…] gli fecero apprendere quelle grazie e quella erudizione che poteva somministrargli nella nativa lingua la privata lettura degli scrittori volgari, e in particolar de’ poeti,” Giammaria Mazzuchelli, La vita di Pietro Aretino, edizione seconda riveduta ed accresciuta dall’Autore (Brescia, Pianta: 1763), 10. Aretino often boasts of his ignorance of Latin in his letters: cfr., for example, Lettere i, 408 (“Al Fausto Longiano,” 17 December 1537); Lettere ii, 333 (“A Mariano Borro,” 6 November 1541); Lettere iii, 224 (“A M. Giovanni Giustiniano di Candia,” July 1545), 271 (“Al Mag. M. Marco Antonio da Mula,” September 1545); Lettere iv, 369 (“Al Cerruto,” May 1550); these affirmations seem now to have been corroborated by Claudio Marangoni, “Il Virgilio dell’Aretino,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana 160 (1983): 524–546. See, in order of citation, Pietro Aretino, La Cortigiana, ed. Giuliano Innamorati (Turin, 1970), 137; Pietro Aretino, Teatro comico. Cortigiana (1525, 1534). Il Marescalco, ed. Luca D’Onghia, intr. Maria Cristina Cabani Pietro Aretino, Cortigiana, Opera nova, Pronostico, Il Testamento dell’Elefante, Farza, ed. Angelo Romano, introduction by Giovanni Aquilecchia (Milan, 1989), 379–382; Lettere iii, 215, 565–566; Dialogo di Pietro Aretino, nel quale si parla del giuoco con moralità piacevole, in Operette politiche e satiriche i, 318. See also Angelo Romano, Periegesi aretiniane. Testi, schede e note biografiche intorno a Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1991), 61 (the fate of the Donatian expression “que pars est” is documented in Albicante, in Aretino, in Berni, and in Doni) and Danilo Romei, Aretino e Pasquino, in Da Leone x a Clemente vii. Scrittori toscani nella Roma dei papati medicei (1513–1534) (Manziana, 2007), 33, note 23. Paolo Procaccioli brought to my attention that the first verse of Doctrinalis is quoted in Lettere v, 444 (“Al Doni,” September 1550). See Giuseppe Manacorda, Storia della scuola in Italia. Il Medio Evo, foreword by Eugenio Garin (Florence, 1980), vol. 1/2 (facsimile reprint of the Milan-Palermo-Naples edition, Sandron, s.a. [1914]), 225–228 (Donato minor), 228–230 (Doctrinalis). For the teaching of Italian in school and for the fate of grammar in the 15th and 16th centuries, see, respectively, Nicola De Blasi, “L’italiano nella scuola,” in Luca Serianni-Pietro Trifone (eds.), Storia della lingua italiana, vol. i: I luoghi della codificazione (Turin, 1993), 383–423; Giuseppe Patota, “I percorsi grammaticali,” Ibid., vol. 1, 93–137. On Antonio Mancinelli (1452–1505 ca.), referred to in the Farza, see also the brief notes given in Operette politiche e satiriche

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tury (the exact date of his move is unknown), Aretino decisively breaks free from his cultural isolation, coming into contact with the most brilliant minds of the Umbrian city. While his stay in Perugia was brief, lasting only a few years, it radically changed his intellectual personality and allowed him to refine his indubitable artistic abilities.11 Aretino’s friendly relationships with nearly all the members of the city’s literary elite (Alberto and Mario Podiani, Tito Ramazzani, Giovan Battista Caporali, and Giulio Oradini, to name a few), his likely “scholastic” apprenticeship with Francesco Bontempi, and the decisive influence of the lyric of Antonio Mezzabarba (whom Aretino considered, even in his later years, to be a master of vernacular poetry),12 give us a picture of the cultured though still inexperienced author of the Opera nova. Printed in Venice in 1512, the Opera Noua del Fecundissimo Giouene Pietro Pictore Arretino zoe Strambotti Sonetti Capitoli Epistole Barzellete & una Desperata, impresso in Venetia per Nicolo Zopino nel mcccccxii, Adi .xxii. De Zenaro (or 1513, according to the stile veneto, which begins the year on March 1, as Roberto Fedi suggests),13 included a number of sonnets, strambotti, letters,

11

12

13

ii, 45, l. 115, and above all the biographical and bibliographical profile by Carla Mellidi, “Mancinelli, Antonio,” in dbi, vol. 68 (Rome, 2007), 450–453. On Aretino’s time in Perugia, see particularly Carlo Bertani, Pietro Aretino e le sue opere secondo nuove indagini (Sondrio, 1901), 9–13; Giuliano Innamorati, Pietro Aretino. Studi e note critiche (on the front cover: Tradizione e invenzione in Pietro Aretino) (Messina-Florence, 1957), 94 ff.; Pietro Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, with a commentary by Fidenzio Pertile, ed. Ettore Camesasca, vol. 3/1 (Milan, 1959), 129–132; Aretino, Cortigiana, Opera nova, 186–188. On the diffusion of metrical and grammatical studies, which could have influenced the young Aretino, in Perugia, see Norberto Cacciaglia, Sul primo cinquecento perugino (Poesia minore e dispute sul volgare) (Perugia, 1992), 75–77. Cfr. Lettere iv, 848 (“Al Meza Barba,” June 1548). On Mezzabarba, see the growing scholarship now available: Roberto Fedi, “ ‘Juvenilia aretiniani’,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 92–93, fn. 13; but above all, see Dante Pattini, “Mezzabarba, Antonio Isidoro,” in dbi, vol. 74 (Rome, 2010), 58–61. The poems of Mezzabarba are edited in the meantime in Antonio Mezzabarba, Rime, ed. Claudia Perelli Cippo, introduction by Domenico Chiodo (Turin, 2010). On the cultural ambiance of Perugia in the first decades of the 16th century, see Cacciaglia, Sul primo cinquecento perugino, 57–94. The text of this short work by Aretino is published in Poesie varie i, 37–84, 287–288 (textual note), but also in an annotated form in Aretino, Cortigiana, Opera nova, 183– 269. There are also useful critical contributions, which are also textual and hermeneutical, by Fedi, “ ‘Juvenilia’ aretiniani,” 87–119, at 91 for his dating of 1513, by Antonio Rossi, “A4 sull’Opera nova di Pietro Aretino,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 44 (1992): 45– 51, and by Angelo Romano, L’officina degli irregolari. Scavi aretiniani e verifiche stilistiche, foreword by Giovanni Aquilecchia (Viterbo, 1997), 19–26. The printing of the Opera nova is also described in Lorenzo Baldacchini, Alle origini dell’editoria in volgare: Niccolò

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barzellette, one disperata and an eclogue. These were all compositions of an especially learned variety, which together comprise the earliest evidence of Pietro Aretino’s poetic production. This short work (24 pages in all) contains 78 poems: 56 strambotti of various kinds, 12 sonnets (mostly love sonnets), four capitoli ternari (two on the subject of night, one on death, and one on a beloved lady), one disperata (on death), one dialogical eclogue (on love), and four barzellette (dedicated to fortune, to destiny and death, to peace, and to fate and freedom). A short prose prologue addressed to the reader—written in a gently satirical tone, somewhere between improvisation and formal rhetorical measure—opens the collection. The prologue’s style looks forward to the great formal balance that Aretino would attain in his Lettere. The arrangement of the lyrics appears generally well conceived, despite the obvious typographical errors and often incorrect punctuation. The work is subdivided into two parts: the first comprising the strambotti (about two-thirds of the poems, all short and seemingly elementary poetic exercises), and the second comprising the sonnets and the remaining longer and more challenging compositions. The Opera nova’s primary source text is Petrarch’s Canzoniere, itself a brilliant summation of the entire courtly lyric literary tradition. Indeed, Petrarch’s lyric poetry would later be consecrated as the official poetic language by Pietro Bembo in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Aretino thus inserts himself into the vast history of pre-Bembian lyric, among one of the most famous fifteenth-century poets influenced by Petrarchism, such as Cariteo, Serafino Aquilano, and Angelo Poliziano. The Opera nova offers a repertoire of monotonous and somewhat repetitive poetic images. From love to time and night to death, each theme is treated with sufficient skill, often with considerable erudition, but in the end the resulting text is devoid of poetic inspiration, even if it is accompanied by the most ornate and elaborate stylistic techniques and meters of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century rhetoric. In comparison with Aretino’s later literary taste—his aversion to every traditional literary form in general and Petrarchan forms in particular—this first work, while coming across as rather flat, is nonetheless a kind of laborious literary exercise, in which the young Aretino sharpens his poetic weapons. With this cultural baggage, Pietro Aretino, described as “almost a child,”14 arrives at the papal court of

14

Zoppino da Ferrara a Venezia. Annali (1503–1544), notes by Amedeo Quondam (Manziana, 2011), 73–74. Extensive details on the printer Niccolò Zoppino, active from 1503 to1544, can be found in Baldacchini’s introduction (1–53). “[…] Sendo quasi garzone.” See Lettere i, 236 (“Al S. Ferieri Beltramo”). See also Romano, Periegesi aretiniane, 17.

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Leo x around 1512–1514, to become, just a few years later, one of the most visible literati in the Rome of the Medici popes.15 Aretino’s participation in Pasquino satire secured his reputation as a slandering poet. The Pasquino is a stone torso from the Roman era, dating back to the first century c.e. (it was a copy of a Hellenistic original), that is located in Rome on a corner of Piazza Navona. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it served as an extraordinary means of propaganda for anonymous Roman poets including Aretino to hurl polemics against the pope and the Roman Curia.16 The satirical and biting poetic genre (in the vernacular) had already existed in Rome before Aretino’s arrival. The works of Antonio Lelio (1465–1527/1530), could be considered an example of a Roman literary satire rooted in the internal social and cultural dynamics of Roman erudite circles. One could argue that even in the presence of sparse and unreliable evidence such as anonymous pasquinades, Lelio was one of the earliest poets of the satirical genre of the pasquinade, which at the time was still steeped in an academic tone in the Carmina apposita ad Pasquillum, as well as in the first stunted attempts in the vernacular during the controversial papacies of Leo x (1513–1521) and Adrian vi (1522–1523). Ultimately, Aretino inherited this tradition, a genre very much still in development but with a well-delineated shape. Aretino’s early pasquinades against the conclave that elected pope Adrian (11 December 1521– 8 January 1522), and his later pasquinades in support of the candidacy of Giulio de’ Medici (who later became Pope Clement vii, 1523–1534), solidified his position as a preeminent satirical writer.17 And thus in 1525 Aretino was directly responsible for organizing the Pasquino festival, only to later be stripped of his leadership role because of the heavily satirical content of the scrolls affixed to 15

16

17

At least according to the evidence of Angelo Colocci, who includes Aretino in a list of notable contemporary poets: see Romano, Periegesi aretiniane, 22. On the probable date of young Aretino’s move to Rome (1512–1514), see also Romano, Periegesi aretiniane, 16–18. On the origins and development of Pasquino satire, as well as on its formation as a literary genre, see Angelo Romano, “La satira di Pasquino: formazione di un genere letterario,” in Chrysa Damianaki-Paolo Procaccioli-Angelo Romano (eds.), Ex marmore. Pasquini, pasquinisti, pasquinate nell’Europa moderna, (Manziana, 2006), 11–32 (with bibliography). The following recent contributions consider the origins of Pasquino and his being dressed as Hercules slaying the Hydra, which took place in 1510, see: Concetta Bianca, “Da Coluccio a Pasquino: il mito di Ercole,” in Giuseppe Izzi-Luca Marcozzi-Concetta Ranieri (eds.), Nello specchio del mito. Riflessi di una tradizione, (Florence, 2012), 49–63; Concetta Bianca, “Da Diogene Laerzio a Pasquino: il cardinale Oliviero Carafa,” in Dentro il Cinquecento. Per Danilo Romei, 9–21. See also Chiara Lastraioli’s essay in this volume. Larivaille attributes Aretino with little more than eight sonnets, though he does so rather dubiously: Paul Larivaille, “Per l’attribuzione delle pasquinate pubblicate da Vittorio Rossi,” in Varia aretiniana (1972–2004) (Manziana, 2005), 13–29.

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the Pasquino statue. Indeed, the collection that was printed was actually censored. In early summer of that same year, Aretino was assaulted by Achille della Volta and forced to leave Rome in October to ensure his safety, and because the cultural climate of Pope Clement vii’s Rome was now ill-suited to the Tuscan writer.18 This did not end Aretino’s satirical activities, however. Aretino continued to write and circulate pasquinades: a series of satirical predictions in Mantua; an angry frottola titled Pas vobis brigate, in Venice19 with a seeming awareness of his past and present role as a pasquinista until his death in 1556. Aretino thus ended his career by putting on “the mask of Pasquino,” as Domenico Gnoli calls it, “which he conformed to his face and with which he identified.”20 Paolo Procaccioli has shown how Aretino has been positioned as the inheritor of the role of pasquinista, which continued throughout his long and productive stay in Venice.21 Thus, Aretino’s stay in Rome not only cemented his reputation as one of the fiercest satirists, but it also saw him playing a leading role in the contemporary scene of Roman poetry from a critical and satirical point of view. This is evidenced in the capitolo Lamento de uno cortigiano (1521),22 as well as in his laudatory poetry, Laude di Clemente vii (1524), the Esortazione de la pace tra l’Imperadore e il Re di Francia (1524),23 and the Canzone in laude del Datario (1525). The Lamento, as Marco Faini writes, “engages the topic of the courtier’s education. The Farza, certain sections of the Cortigiana, and the Ragionamento delle corti take up the same theme.”24 The Farza (circa 1520–1521), attributable to the Tuscan author, represents one of Aretino’s first significant poetic challenges. Composed during the first few years of his 18 19 20 21

22

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24

On the sudden attack on Aretino in Rome on 28 July, see Romano, Periegesi aretiniane, 15–37. See the comprehensive study by Danilo Romei, “Pas vobis brigate: una frottola ritrovata,” in Da Leone x a Clemente vii, 55–106, with an extensive biography on the subject. “La maschera di Pasquino […] se l’adattò sul viso e s’identificò con lui,” Domenico Gnoli, La Roma di Leon x, ed. Aldo Gnoli (Milan, 1938), 139. Paolo Procaccioli, “«Tu es Pasquillus in aeterno». Aretino non romano e la maschera di Pasquino,” in Ex marmore, 67–96. On Aretino as a satirist or pasquillista after his departure from Rome, see also Valerio Marucci, “L’Aretino e Pasquino,” in Cinquecentenario, 67–86 (82 ff.). On this Lamento see Marco Faini, “Un’opera dimenticata di Pietro Aretino: il Lamento de uno cortigiano,” Filologia e Critica 32 (2007): 75–93; see also Aretino, Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 51–60, 291–292. See the autograph version, rediscovered by Paolo Marini, “Un autografo dell’Esortazione de la pace tra l’Imperadore e il Re di Francia di Pietro Aretino,” Filologia e Critica 31 (2006): 88–105. “[…] rientra in quel filone di educazione del cortigiano cui appartengono anche, a diverso titolo, la Farza, alcune sezioni della Cortigiana, e nel quale ancora rientrerà il Ragionamento delle corti,” See Faini, “Un’opera dimenticata di Pietro Aretino,” 78.

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eventful stay in Rome,25 several internal references in the work clearly demonstrate its dependency on the Laude di Clemente vii from the Canzone […] al santissimo Clemente vii by Gian Giorgio Trissino.26 Aretino’s move from Rome to Mantua and then Venice, following the attack he suffered on 28 July 1525, coincided with his involvement in a serious matter of moral debate linked to the publication of his Sonnets on “xvi Modi” (ca. 1524– 1525). Commonly known as the Sonetti lussuriosi (“Lustful Sonnets”), this short, pornographic work included licentious prints designed by Giulio Romano and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi which Aretino paired with the highly sexual sonnets.27 The long and productive period in Venice, from his arrival in 1527 until his death in 1556, allowed Aretino to experiment with various poetic projects, ranging from religious lyrics to encomiums. In the Canzona alla Vergine Madre (printed in Venice sometime before 1538) we find traces of influence of Bernardo Accolti’s Ternale in laude della gloriosa Virgine Maria (1515).28 With regards to his encomia, the capitolo ternario known as A lo Imperadore ne la morte del duca d’Urbino (Francesco Maria i Della Rovere, d. 1539), the four capitoli ternari printed in 1540 and addressed to notable literati, powerful dukes, princes, and rulers: “Allo Albicante” (Giovanni Alberto Albicante), “Al Duca di Fiorenza” (Cosimo i de’ Medici), “Al Prencipe di Salerno” (Ferrante Sanseverino), “Al Re di Francia” (Francis i, King of France),29 and Il Capitolo e il sonetto di M. Pietro Aretino in laude de lo Imperadore Carlo v (printed in 1543)30 can be read as various types of elegies. In 1544 Aretino republished two works together in a single printed edition: the Stanze in lode di Madonna Angela Serena (first published in 1537) and the 25 26

27

28 29 30

Considerations about the Farza, as well as an accurate edition of the text, prepared by Faini, are included in Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 41–48, 280–291. On the Laude di Clemente vii, on the Esortazione de la pace tra l’Imperadore e il Re di Francia and on the Canzone in laude del Datario see Poesie varie i, 11–12, 288–290 (“Nota al testo”), and also Angelo Romano, “Come lavorava l’Aretino nelle Poesie,” in Cinquecentenario vol. 1, 335–348 (341–344). For the content of the work and on its controversial history, see the relevant pages in Aquilecchia in Poesie varie i, 12–15, 290–298 (textual notes), as well as Romei’s recent notes in Pietro Aretino, Sonetti lussuriosi, ed. Danilo Romei (s.l. [Raleigh], 2013), 5–24, and particularly 13–15. See, respectively, Poesie varie i, 298–299 (textual notes), with an edited version of the Canzona from 1534, pp. 300–302; Romano, “Come lavorava l’Aretino,” 344. On the Capitoli see, in order of citation, Bertani, Pietro Aretino, 282–284; Poesie varie i, 304–307 (“Nota al testo”); Faini, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle Rime di Aretino,” 122–123. For the Capitolo e il sonetto see Aretino, Poesie varie i, 307–308; Faini, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle Rime di Aretino,” 107–108.

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Strambotti a la villanesca. This is a highly significant editorial decision that helps us better understand Aretino’s poetic maturation. The poet tries his hand at both the love lyric tradition (Stanze), that had its highest expression in Bembo’s poetry, and the rustic nenciale tradition (Strambotti) that was associated with Lorenzo de’ Medici.31 Within this constant poetic activity, there are various attempts at imitation of Ariosto’s heroic-chivalric poem. The literary genre of the epic chivalric poem seemed to have fallen into decay after Boiardo’s Innamorato (1495) until Ariosto published his three versions of Orlando furioso (1516, 1521, and finally the revised and expanded edition of 1532). Aretino, challenged himself to compose a single chivalric poem.32 The original idea was to produce a single epic poem, but Aretino was never able to complete it and left it in a fragmentary form:33 the two cantos of Marfisa (1532–1535; composed in celebration of the glory of the Gonzagas); as well as the two cantos of Angelica (1536); the two cantos of Orlandino (1536–1547); the three cantos of Astolfeida (after 1547); and finally, the two cantos from the Opera nova del superbo Rodamonte (posthumous).34 Another literary genre in which Aretino dabbled is tragedy, which was a far cry from the comic and polemical works in which he had previously excelled. His Orazia (1546), a tragedy in five acts that was inspired by Livy’s Ab urbe condita (i xxiii–xxvi), offered the sixteenth-century educated public a superb example of the genre. In dedicating it to Pope Paul iii Aretino hoped in vain to receive a cardinalship.35 During the mid-sixteenth century, Aretino returned to the poetry of praise and adulation, as we see in the Capitolo in laude del S. Duca d’Urbino (1547?) and especially the Ternali in gloria di Giulio iii pontifice, e della Maestà de la 31

32 33 34 35

On the Stanze 1537 see in particular Bertani, Pietro Aretino, 261–274; Poesie varie i, 308– 317; Marco Faini, “Notizie dalla Biblioteca Queriniana: Sannazaro, Giovanni Francesco Caracciolo, il Pistoia, Pietro Aretino,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana 128 (2011): 386–395, which deals with a sixteenth-century copy of the Stanze a Madonna Angela Serena held in the Queriniana library of Brescia. On the Strambotti 1544, as well as on the Stanze of 1537 see Bertani, Pietro Aretino, 284–285 and Giovanni Aquilecchia, “Nota al testo,” in Poesie varie i, 17–20, 308–317. On Aretino’s chivalric poems see Maria Cristina Cabani’s essay in this volume. Danilo Romei says as much in his well documented “Introduzione” to Pietro Aretino, Poemi cavallereschi, 9–32. See also Romei’s fastidious textual notes in Poemi cavallereschi, 317–389. On the Orazia see the editions by Michael Lettieri and Federico Della Corte, respectively: Pietro Aretino, L’Orazia, edizione critica a cura di Michael Lettieri, con un saggio sulla storia della critica e una nota bibliografica di Rocco Mario Morano (Rovito, 1991); Teatro iii, 165–296. See also Bertani, Pietro Aretino, 306–320 and Deanna Shemek’s and Jane Tylus’s essay in this volume.

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Reina Cristianissima (1551). The first capitolo is in the ternale form; in it, Aretino unleashes his talents for shrewd flattery on Guidobaldo ii Della Rovere, captain general of the Venetian troops in 1546 and of the pontifical troops in 1553, with whom he was acquainted.36 In the Ternali of 1551, he tries to laud Pope Julius iii, again with the hope of becoming a cardinal.37 The longest of the capitoli in this collection (310 verses) is dedicated to Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France. The capitolo is noteworthy not only for its praises of her body (vv. 10–81) and her soul (vv. 85–96), but also for its remarkable exposition (vv. 163–282), as Aquilecchia writes, “of the contemporary artistic and literary world of Italy, called upon to exalt the physical and moral qualities of the queen with visual or verbal representation.”38 However, as Aretino writes in a letter to Vincenzo Rosso in 1545, these were extremely prolific years for Aretino’s poetry. He mentions writing “at least four hundred satirical sonnets,” then lost, as well as “three thousand stanzas” of Marfisa, which made “Marcolini burn.”39

2

Conclusion

It is important to point out that the sonnet, which was already in Aretino’s lifetime the most characteristic form of Italian poetry, was the poetic form he used most often.40 In the Opera nova, the sonnet is gnomic and amorous and also reveals Serafino Aquilano’s influence on Aretino’s poetry.41 During the period in Rome, Aretino’s sonnet is transformed into a biting satirical pasquinade coupled with the descriptive pornography of the Sonetti. It takes on a courtly style

36 37 38

39 40

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See the textual notes in Poesie varie i, 23–24, 317–320. On the ternale in relation to Julius iii, see Poesie varie i, 24–25, 320–321 (textual notes), and Pietro Aretino, Lettere vi, ad indicem, 494–495. “[…] del contemporaneo mondo artistico e letterario italiano, chiamato ad esaltare con rappresentazione visiva o verbale le doti fisiche e morali della regina;” on Aretino’s relationship with the Queen of France, see Poesie varie i, 24–25 (including Aquilecchia’s definition), 320–321 (textual note); but see also Bertani, Pietro Aretino, 255; Lettere vi, ad indicem, 504. “almeno quattrocento sonetti satirici […] tre millia stanze […] dal Marcolino abbrusciare,” Lettere iii, 423 (“A M. Vincenzo Rosso”); Bertani, Pietro Aretino, 275. For a complete biography on Aretino’s lyrical works, especially on metrical and stylistic aspects, see Angelo Romano, “Osservazioni metriche e stilistiche sulle poesie di Pietro Aretino,” Lingua e Stile 31 (1996): 505–524. Aretino, Cortigiana, Opera nova, 190, 260 ff.; Antonio Rossi, Serafino Aquilano e la poesia cortigiana (Brescia, 1980), 86–87.

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in his lyrics to lords, and often as a “complement or accompaniment” to his letters.42 Aretino was a writer who liked to take on the challenge of a wide array of genres, maneuvering through a “comparison” of the styles—as Aquilecchia has aptly described it43—that simultaneously adhered to and opposed established poetic norms. Although the Opera nova (1512) and the Sonetti sopra i “xvi modi” were written twelve years apart, both are characterized by a desire to experiment with meter and genre, which is emblematic of Aretino’s stylistic diversity. As Aretino himself explains, these works have their roots “in the very origins of our short-form poetry, as it was practiced—notwithstanding the differences in the metaphors used in the opposite, lower style—already in both the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from Guinizzelli to Cino and beyond, including Dante (while Petrarch would remain uncontaminated by the above mentioned style, at least in his love poetry.)”44 The Opera nova then, through its “anthologicalauthorial” nature, seems to reconnect with the late-fifteenth-century tradition of short poetic books divided into metrical sections.45 The poetic experimentalism of Aretino continues throughout his time in Rome and the surviving texts, starting with Farza and ending with the laudatory canzoni, illustrate the important moments of his artistic career. The three canzoni, whether laudatory or patriotic, confirm Aretino’s conformity to the illustrious tradition of the Italian lyric while also reflecting the author’s “political” attempt to resolve a serious dispute with the pope and the Roman Curia. The papal conflict originated with the publication of Aretino’s erotic Sonetti with the Raimondi engravings. While these sonnets explained the meaning of the iconographic representations to the reader, they also began the great era of pornographic poetry of the sixteenth century.46 In addition, there are two frottole-pasquinate (one against the papal court, the other about the 1527 Sack of Rome), written between Mantua and Venice. When taking into account also the Canzona alla Vergine Madre we begin to see traces of Aretino’s the erudite style that will culminate in the Stanze.

42 43 44

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“Complemento o accompagnamento,” Giovanni Falaschi, “Appunti sui sonetti aulici dell’Aretino (e in particolare su un sonetto disperso),” Belfagor 5 (1978): 574–578 (576). See Poesie varie i, 9. “Per l’un versante e l’altro, nelle origini stesse della nostra poesia breve, quale esercitata— metafora più metafora meno per il registro oppositivo—già nell’ambito del Due-Trecento da Guinizzelli a Cino e oltre, senza esclusione di Dante (mentre incontaminato, per il registro suddetto, almeno di applicazione amatoria, sarebbe risultato Petrarca),” Poesie varie i, 9. “Antologico-autoriale.” Poesie varie i, 15.

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Completed after six months of hard work,47 the Stanze in praise of Angela Serena show signs of influence from Bembo’s Stanze (1507) despite the considerable gap in time between the two works. Bembo’s verses enjoyed considerable success in the sixteenth century.48 Aretino’s literary engagement with Bembo’s Stanze was not simply about paying homage to the preeminent theorist of Renaissance Petrarchism, or creating a “mannerist” patina in his octaves. Rather, it reveals Aretino most original contribution to the genre on a thematic level: he took away the element of the “springtime invitation to love” from the octaves, in favor of a more accentuated eroticism, sometimes exuberant, other times pompous, but not to be discarded entirely, as modern criticism would have it:49 “There are different kinds of octaves. Those in the Stanze certainly differ from those in the Strambotti a la Villanesca, however they differ neither in meter nor in their rhyme scheme, since both conform to the Tuscan octave.”50 The difference resides in their language. Here, however, Aretino’s desecration takes place at the level of expression. The Stanze become a parody of the peasant’s rustic world, which appears in his experimental use of language, in contrast to the example of his earlier attempts that resembled the nenciale poem in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s style (and the fact that Aretino intended to write a series is evidenced by a hint that he would compose one of his own Nencia).51 Finally, the use of the capitolo offers Aretino the chance to bring back a genre that had previously been “downgraded” by Francesco Berni and his followers. Aretino employs the capitolo to praise and commemorate illustrious persons using appropriate stylistic strategies. For example, Aretino’s funeral elogio for Francesco Maria Della Rovere (A lo Imperadore ne la morte del Duca d’Urbino, 1539) has often been compared to Bembo’s canzone, “Alma cortese, che dal mondo errante,” written upon the death of his brother Carlo and considered an exemplum of aulic funeral poetry. But this comparison is insufficient. While

47 48 49 50

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Lettere i, 126 (“A M. Francesco da l’Arme”): “Ho penato poi sei mesi ne l’opra de la Sirena.” Poesie varie i, 16. “Invito primaverile all’amore,” Poesie varie i, 17. “Ci sono ottave e ottave. A quelle delle Stanze senza dubbio contrastano le altre degli Strambotti a la Villanesca; certo non per il metro e neppure per lo schema delle rime che, nell’un caso e nell’altro, è quello dell’ottava Toscana,” Poesie varie i, 17. Poesie varie i, 176: “Give my greetings not only the great masters of this very real court, but also the servants that serve it, not forgetting the brave Barbuglia, telling him that soon he will see addressed to his name the Nencia, just as racy and titillating as the Viola” (“Salutatemi non solo i gran maestri di cotesta realissima corte, ma sino a i famigli che la servano, non te scordando lo strenuo Barbuglia dicendogli che presto vedrà drizzata al suo nome la Nencia non manco galluta e non men treccola de la Viola,”) Strambotti, dedicatory letter.

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Aretino does not renounce the “adoption of customary jester-like forms,”52 he gestures towards a rhetorical-encomiastic style of lyric, as we see in the Ternali for Julius iii and Catherine de’ Medici (1551), mentioned above. By 1547 Aretino had bid farewell, albeit ironically, to a poetry of reproach, justifying this move through none other than Pasquino, the “speaking statue:” “What Pasquino dislikes, / is that he is old, and Marforio is senile: / now that they are old, the world has become whorish” (Pasquino a li lettori sopra l’Astolfeida del divino Pietro Aretino, vv. 36–38).53 52 53

They can be found, for example, at the end of the capitolo, Al Re di Francia (1539), and at the end of the same capitolo for the death of Della Rovere; see Poesie varie i, 20. “Quel che a Pasquino spiace / che gli è vecchio e Marforio rimbambito: / or che son vecchi il mondo è imputtanito,” Poemi cavallereschi, 242.

chapter 9

“A Knot of Barely Sketched Figures:” Pietro Aretino’s Chivalric Poems Maria Cristina Cabani

And since good painters truly appreciate a knot of barely sketched figures, I let my works be printed as they are, and I do not care at all for embellishing words.1 It is in this manner that Aretino describes the approach to his work in the dedication of the last of the Tre giornate. This approach is founded on the principle of “working fast, and in his own way” (“far presto e del suo”).2 The only rules that Aretino considered valid for himself and for his writings were speed of composition and freedom to create outside of the rules established by canons and models. In his chivalric poems the image of a “knot of barely sketched figures” (“groppo di figure abozzate”) fits particularly well. His final products (four attempts at four different chivalric poems) can only be defined as incomplete.3 The images are, in effect, only sketches, experiments even, which lack much more than just color. What they do contain remains insufficient for one to imagine how the final narration would have evolved. It is understood immediately, however, that Aretino was experimenting with new tones within the chivalric genre. In the coupling of ‘serious/witty’ that contrasts the pair Marfisa-Angelica to the pair Astolfeida-Orlandino, one recognizes subtle shades of style, from the epic/grotesque (Marfisa) to the romantic/elegiac (Angelica); from the comical/polemic (Astolfeida), to the satirical/comical (Orlandino).

1 “E perché i buoni pittori apprezzano molto un bel groppo di figure abozzate, lascio stampare le mie cose così fatte, né mi curo punto di miniar le parole.” 2 Al gentile e onorato messer Bernardo Valdaura, Pietro Aretino, Sei giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1975), 146. The letter of December 18, 1537 can also be read in Lettere i, 416–418. 3 The fragment entitled Opera nuova del superbo Rodamonte, which is considered a reworking of a part of The Marfisa, is not included in this volume.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_011

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“Sketched Figures”

Many years after the publication of Marfisa (1532),4 in a letter to Vincenzo Rosso (November 1545), Aretino claimed to have composed, and then burned, 3000 stanzas,5 i.e. a significant number of cantos. He later raised this number to 3500, and even 4000.6 This claim, however, was not to be taken literally, as it was considered a very common topos. However, as I will proceed to explain, the number of octaves actually written must have exceeded what was printed.7 Lorenzo Venier (or someone else) published the first two cantos of Marfisa (roughly 200 stanzas) unbeknownst to Aretino. Venier implied that these were only the beginning of a poem which was in an advanced stage of completion. The need to keep the work away from pirated and unethical publishers is what forced Venier to hastily publish it.8 This claim of Venier, like the presumed fire,

4 On a possible date “later than December 1531” for two cantos see Romei, “Nota ai testi,” in Poemi cavallereschi, 319. 5 In this letter, Aretino asks Rosso to transcribe for him his satirical poems, if he recalls them “almeno quattrocento sonetti satirici” (“at least four hundred satyrical sonnets”). Regarding the Marfisa he writes: “Avegna che non somigliano [i sonetti] le tre millia stanze che di Marfisa ho fatto dal Marcolino abbrusciare, acciò che altri non me le dileggino forse a torto” (“Since they don’t resemble the three thousand stanze of the Marfisa which I asked Marcolino to burn, so that others, perhaps mistakenly, don’t deride them:” Lettere iii, 423). In a letter by the ambassador Agnello (August 6 1530) quoted in Alessandro Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei suoi primi anni a Venezia e la corte dei Gonzaga (Turin, 1888), 97 it is said that Aretino composed 3,500 octaves and that he intended to have them transcribed. 6 In a letter dated 1545 addressed to Giovanni dei Rossi, known as Pistoia, there is mention of “not three thousand, but almost four thousand” stanzas “of the poems,” that were set on fire (Lettere iii, 416). 7 Dolce, when printing his Sacripante (incomplete, but still consisting of 10 canti), justified the hurried publication of the work as a necessary response to the attempts to take it from him: “I quali (curiosi di cose nove) havendo contra il voler mio fatto veder nelle stampe i cinque lor primi canti nella guisa che si sono veduti scorrettissimi, e lacerati in ogni lor parte sono anco stati cagione che io ho voluto mandar fuori quelli, e alcuni altri appresso” (“Such people (curious about new things), having, against my will, printed their first five cantos in such a way that they are most incorrect, and torn in each of their parts, were the reason why I printed those same cantos, and a few more others”), Ludovico Dolce, Dieci canti di Sacripante (Venice, Zoppino: 1537). He also claims to have composed it for practice, and that he thought about burning it rather than publishing it. 8 “Avendo l’altrui ignoranzia e maligna invidia per le stampe d’Ancona messa più tosto nelle tenebre che nella luce la sentenzia de i primi due canti (spregiati da voi medesimo) della vostra maravigliosa Marfisa […] mando fuori (non senza vostro sdegno, ben lo so) detti canti, tali quali vi ho con la mente involati […]. E quel che sommamente vi noiarà è lo aver io fatto imprimere il principio del libro per non esser cotal principio la eccellenzia delle invenzioni proprie vostre che sono nell’avanzo del poema” (“Having the ignorance and malignant envy

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is a topical argument that is part of the rhetoric of the genre. It is a common stylistic trait of sixteenth-century partial publications, typical of the mockheroic genre.9 The poem’s incomplete state, reported in the title (first canto, first two cantos, etc.) might have been due to external factors, narrative incompetence, a prior decision or simply the need to play it safe.10 Yet as previously stated, the rhetoric of the genre is not the only aspect that weakens the myth of the 3000 or 4000 burned stanzas, and that of the poem essentially being already written. Solid proof of the poem’s inescapable destiny—to remain unfinished—derives from the nature of the poem Marfisa itself, and from the other three fragments and their stories.11 The chivalric works of Aretino are all incomplete precisely because while he remained obsessed with extemporaneous creativity (“working fast, and in his own way”), Aretino gave his best in his dialogues, but never displayed the mental focus necessary to carry a poem to its completion. His natural inclination to experiment prompted him to contend with diverse genres, and this became his focus rather than that of bringing his poems to completion. Aretino chose to demonstrate his literary abilities rather than persist in the completion of a poem simply for achievement’s sake.

9 10

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of others, through the print of Ancona, given darkness, rather than light, the text of the first two cantos (which you yourself despise) of your wondrous Marfisa […] I am now publishing (not without your disdain, I’m aware) those cantos, in the exact way in which I stole them from you with my mind […]. And what will supremely bother you, is that I had the beginning of the poem printed, since this beginning does not represent the peak of the excellence of your inventions, which are in the rest of the poem”), Poemi cavallereschi, 319. Guido Sacchi, Fra Ariosto e Tasso: vicende del poema narrativo (Pisa, 2006), 112–119. The phenomenon is frequent, especially in the xvii century, when the imperative of originality made itself more urgent. For example, I think of Oceano by Tassoni, the epic Colombian fragment published often as an appendix to Secchia rapita. In the midst of the discussions regarding epic poems on geographical discoveries, Tassoni advances a proposal expressed in the Lettera ad un amico sulla Materia del Mondo Nuovo which acts as a preface to a work that ends at the beginning of the second canto; Alessandro Tassoni, La secchia rapita e scritti poetici, ed. Pietro Puliatti (Modena, 1989). It is necessary, nonetheless, to keep in mind that the text of Marfisa that we read does not correspond in full, as we will see, to that which we can reconstruct through the documents, and that some of the stanzas under consideration, which without a doubt were composed and sent out to be read, have been lost. Regarding Aretino’s poems, Romei, appropriately uses the definition “poemi impossibili” (“impossible poems”, Romei, “Introduzione,” in Poemi cavallereschi, 9).

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The Controversial Development of Marfisa

Marfisa, published in two cantos in 1532 in Venice, (the three cantos version dates to 1535), is the fruit of a difficult composition process, the phases of which were reconstructed through the letters of Alessandro Luzio.12 This process, which began in 1527, sheds light on the intentions of the author and on the reasons for the incomplete state of the poem, the most ambitious of Aretino’s experiments. Marfisa originally was to be a dynastic poem about the Gonzaga in much the same way that Orlando Furioso featured the Estensi (Marfisa drew its inspiration from Orlando Furioso). The year of the Sack of Rome (1527) was also the year in which Aretino established himself in Venice. Having recently lost the protection and friendship of Giovanni de’ Medici, who had died at the end of November 1526, Aretino maintained close contact with Federico Gonzaga. He amused Gonzaga by sending him his biting predictions (Iudicio per l’anno 1527).13 Aretino tried to ingratiate himself with Gonzaga using the promise of a eulogistic poem dedicated to him and to the origins of his lineage. In the same year, he sent him the initial verses (principio) of a poem entitled Marphisa disperata. The source of this information is a letter of gratitude in which the marquis declares his confidence that the poem would soon be completed, knowing the proverbial quickness of Aretino, (September 15, 1527). Shortly thereafter, Federico thanked him once more for “those two storms, one of the Earth and the other of the sea” (“quelle due tempeste, di mar l’una, di terra l’altra”) described in a series of octaves that are currently lost (October 11, 1527). It is difficult to determine where they would have been placed within the poem. One is prompted to wonder under which criteria Aretino chose these stanzas, and one may also suspect that they might have been unorganized, fragmentary drafts.14 Federico alludes, in fact, to some other initial octaves (possibly the dedication) and to the description of

12 13 14

Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei suoi primi anni a Venezia, chapts. iii, iv e v. Iudicio over pronostico de mastro Pasquino quinto evangelista de l’anno 1527, in Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 90–91. Doubts become even stronger when one reads the two letters of Bernardo Accolti (known as l’Unico Aretino) and of Giovan Pollio Lappoli, in which, only a few months apart, the two poems are referenced. In the one dated June 1, 1532, Lappoli thanks Aretino for “li doi canti” (the two canti) of Marfisa received (the two that were published in the same year); cf. lsa i, 146. In the one by Accolti from February 6, 1532, Le Lagrime di Angelica is discussed (Marfisa is not named, but could be implied) making reference to two unknown episodes: a duel between Orlando and Agramante (Romei posits that this is an error for Aspramonte), a struggle of Marfisa, “amorosa per rabbia” (in a rage-fueled passion) with Orlando and with Carlo; cf. lsa i, 144.

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the two storms. A month later, however (November 4, 1527), the marquis mentions two excellent cantari that might correspond (except for the dedication, which would be transformed and directed to a different patron) to the two cantos published some years later. It is worth noting that Federico often referred to a work that had been started. He longed to see it published and asserted that it would procure him fame even among future generations. To this end, he engaged a transcriber who would copy the parts that were already written. One can also infer that Aretino liked to keep him wondering and even make fun of him when, for example, he maintained that he did not want to send him any more stanzas for fear that he would annoy him with the excessive quantity. Furthermore, Aretino did not hesitate to blackmail Federico and to declare himself “changed in his purpose” (“mutato di proposito”). He would not finish the work because Federico, who had sent him “the summary of the genealogy of the Gonzaga family” (“il summario della genologia dei Gonzaga”) derived from the Storia di Mantova by Francesco Vigilio, so that Aretino would provide him with promised praise, was letting Aretino starve (January 27, 1529). Aretino knew that this threat would strike a nerve with Federico, who would candidly confess to be unable to “dissimulate taking pleasure in being praised” (“dissimulare che gli piaccia essere lodato, April 24 1529”). Before their final breakup, which would take place in 1531, Aretino played all his cards. He bought himself time feigning an illness (October 2, 1529), and asked Federico to intervene so that he could have the privilege of publication (December 3, 1529). Not being in the good graces of either the Pope or the emperor, he wanted Federico to mediate in exchange for praise for all of them. He threatened that if he was not given what he asked for, the Pope and the emperor would regret it. He insisted he would write “twenty stanzas, that will talk about them in a pasquinesque and denigrating way, so that, with no need for brevi and privilegi, whoever prints them will be excommunicated and screwed up.”15 The impression of an improvised writing is only strengthened, regardless of whether he actually wrote those stanzas or not. The threat applied to Federico as well, who had to be careful in order to avoid a scandal. For his part, Federico, who was by now exasperated, sent death threats to Aretino.16 15

16

“xx stanze che di loro parleranno pasquillamente et de sorte male che senza brevi o privilegi sarà scomunicato e scoglionato chi le stampa,” Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei suoi primi anni a Venezia, 85. Gian Giacomo Calandra, ducal secretary, wrote to the ambassador Agnello that if Aretino “was going to open his mouth from now on to say anything, or use his hand to write anything, even minimal, not only about his court but about Mantua, he will pay the same price as if he had spoken against His Excellence in person, so that—we swear it on the body of Jesus Christ—he [the duke] will have him [Aretino] stabbed ten times in front of

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This game of promises and threats defines the story of Marfisa right up until its final lines. In a letter from June, 1530, in which Aretino finally delivers the long-anticipated stanzas composed to honor the genealogy of the Gonzagas (“stanze composte in onor de la genologia dei Gonzaga”), he declares, with dubious humility, that he was not holding in high esteem how much of the poem he had composed up to that point, “the fire knows what I think of the poem altogether”.17 But which stanzas were these? The few that we encounter at the beginning of Opera nova del superbo Rodomonte (the pirated version of the first part of Marfisa) that contain not only an earlier phase of the text than the one that was published, but also a dedication to the Gonzaga that later disappeared from the poem?18 Or was it a much more consistent number of verses written to satisfy the requests of the vain marquis, making use of the summary that Aretino was given?19 And how reliable is Aretino’s regret regarding the language mistakes (“errori di lingua”) since he states that he had not wanted to use the language of the home country (“il sermon de la patria”), the Tuscan language (“la toscana favella”)? Is the “fire” in this case nothing more than a weapon of blackmail, like the letter in which he explicitly threatens Federico, “I swear on the body of St. Francis that if I had the book in my hands—and yet

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Rialto, because up to this point he has long tolerated his slander, but Aretino must know that the duke will not put up with this anymore” (“[SeAretino] apre da mo’ inanti la bocca a dire o la mano a scrivere pur del minimo non solo de la sua corte ma di Mantova, che ne restarà tanto offeso come se’l dicesse di lei propria [sua Excellentia]; sì che al corpo di Jesù Christo li farà dare dece pugnalate in mezzo Realto; che l’ha supportato assai la sua maledicentia, ma che se guardi che non è per tollerarlo più”) Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei suoi primi anni a Venezia, 100. “Del pensier ch’io faccio di tutto il libro insieme n’è secretario il foco.” Actually, the letter is dated June 2, 1531, but Luzio (Pietro Aretino nei suoi primi anni a Venezia, 96) claims the letter was received earlier, in June 1530. Romei (“Introduzione,” 22) who, in the wake of Luzio reconstructs the events of Marfisa in a detailed manner, accepts Luzio’s idea. On the Opera nova and on the issues of the “Ancona edition” mentioned by Venier, see Romei, “Nota ai testi,” 319–320. “M. Petro mio carissimo”, Gonzaga wrote on April 24 1529, “Le stancie che me aveti mandato per le quali in la vostra Marphisa lodate la casa mia e la lettera vostra mi sono state gratissime e hollo lette con grandissimo piacere” (“The stanzas you sent me saying that in your Marfisa you praise my family, and your letter were most grateful to me, and I read them with the greatest pleasure”, Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei suoi primi anni a Venezia, 83). If, in this letter, Federico seemed to refer to the first stanzas of the poem, in a later one, that Luzio dates appropriately to June 1530, Aretino announced that he would send “de le stanze composte in honor de la Genealogia da Gonzaga” (“some stanzas composed in praise of the Gonzaga family”, Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei suoi primi anni a Venezia, 98), that are unlikely the same. What is always striking is the timing with which, after attacking his patron, Aretino draws him back in by giving him tastes of his poem.

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I don’t have it—and if Your Excellence would not send me that money, I would burn it”?20 Now that the relationship with Federico had been broken indefinitely, Marfisa—originally intended to be an epic and dynastic poem about the Gonzaga—essentially lost the purpose of its existence, and at the very least Aretino’s motivation to finish it. Its story intersects with that of Angelica, if Angelica is that first canto that Federico was awaiting from Aretino (June 20, 1530).21 But Aretino, who evidently was not one to throw away his hard work, thought at some point to transfer his promised genealogy of the Gonzaga into a genealogy of the Medici “not without shame for Mantua” (“non senza sdegno di Mantua”), seeing a possible recipient in Alessandro de’ Medici (April 16, 1531). In the end, however, the two cantos of Marfisa were published in 1532, with a dedication to the Marquis of Vasto, who would also be the dedicatee of Angelica.22 In the meantime, Aretino completed what could be considered the comedy of the Gonzaga, and of Federico in particular. Titled Il Marescalco, it was a ruthless portrait of the court of Mantua and the difficult relationship between subjects and rulers.23 The story I have recounted is well known, and after Luzio, many scholars have retraced it.24 I could not avoid repeating it because it is essential for understanding not only the genesis, but also the structure, the tortured development, and the interruption of Aretino’s first poem. More than a poem, Marfisa is a weapon, an asset of exchange, a card to play, even before Aretino had full possession of it. Alongside the contemporary Furioso, its editorial story illustrates all the novelty and limits of Aretino and his incomplete works. The fracture with Ippolito does not prompt him to modify the dedication of the poem, which remains unchanged in its three editions. The Furioso, in fact, was not 20

21 22

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“Al corpo di San Francesco che s’io havessi il libro in mano, come non l’ho, et v. Ex. non mi mandassi tali danari, io lo brusciarei”, Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei suoi primi anni a Venezia, 87. I do not believe that this refers to Marfisa, whose first two cantos were read by Federico some time prior. See Romei, “Introduzione,” 22. The Angelica is preceded by a dedication to the Marchioness of Vasto that follows in the text to the Marquis. As Romei states (Romei, “Nota ai testi,” 320), according to Virgili the two works, identical in form, were presented on the same day to the Marquis and to the consort. The estimated year is 1535. Maria Cristina Cabani, “Introduzione,” to Pietro Aretino, Teatro comico. Cortigiana (1525, 1534). Il Marescalco, ed. Luca D’Onghia, intr. Maria Cristina Cabani (Milan-Parma, 2014), ix–cxiv. Riccardo Bruscagli, “L’Aretino e la tradizione cavalleresca,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 245–274; Antonio Franceschetti, “L’Aretino e la rottura con i canoni della tradizione cavalleresca,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 2, 1027–053; Romei, “Introduzione,”; Federica Capoferri, “ ‘De’ gesti antiqui una chimera:’ I poemi cavallereschi di Pietro Aretino,” Rivista di studi italiani, 2 (2002): 44–67.

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written for Ippolito, even though Ariosto could not avoid dedicating it to his patron. The relationship with the Gonzaga, in its shameless form of do ut des (an exasperation of the Ariostean “My debt to you I can in part repay with words, with an outlay of ink”),25 appeared, instead, to be the reason for the existence of Marfisa, and for its failure. The comparison with Ariosto is all the more significant if one considers the fact that Aretino used the Furioso as his starting point, with the ambition of continuing it with reference to the Gonzaga. One doubts if Aretino ever had the intention of effectively writing the poem, or if instead he only meant to create drafts with continuous announcements regarding the course of the writing, about which he did not really have a clear idea or any at all.

3

Narrative Fragments

The first lines of Marfisa contain no clear indication of the subject matter. Aretino expresses only a generic promise to sing “true fictions” (“veraci finzioni”) “of arms and love” (“d’arme e d’amor”) and “the undefeated immortal woman” (“la donna invitta e immortale”), intending, without saying, Ariosto’s Marfisa: I sing of the undefeated immortal woman who, as soon as Ruggiero was taken to the Heavens, so strong were in her heart grief and wrath that even truth itself has doubts in telling it.26 To find an articulated plan of the work’s focus, one needs to turn to the Opera nova del superbo Rodamonte. At the beginning of the Opera nuova Aretino announces three topics: the deeds of Aspramonte, a new hero that he has created; the anger of the desperate Marfisa; and the story of Medoro, who converted his love for Angelica into hate. These three topics were not developed in the Opera nuova are present in Marfisa. The fragment that remains relates the deeds of Rodamonte in hell and no sooner does it begin that it is interrupted by the story of Angelica, but only the third topic (that of Medoro’s

25 26

“Quel ch’io vi debbo posso di parole / pagare in parte, e d’opera d’inchiostro,” Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, i 3. “Canto la donna invitta et immortale / che, subito ch’al ciel s’alzò Ruggiero, / l’ira e il duol nel suo cuor fu tanta e tale / che dubbia seco a raccontarlo il vero”, Marfisa, i 2.

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eventual hate of Angelica) is mentioned in Angelica. In Marfisa, however, the character of Aspramonte, presented for the first time in Opera nuova, does not appear until the second canto. It is worth noting that here too, unlike in Opera nuova, Marfisa is never defined as “desperate,” even though that is the adjective that often accompanies her name in the title.27 The third topic (“the book also narrates of Medoro, who lightheartedly / drank from the spring of the strong enchantment”; “Segue anche il libro che Medor per giuoco / beve alla fonte de l’incanto forte”), which appears in the third canto of Marfisa, should have been a central point in Angelica, since the latter work seems to have been inspired by Marfisa. While hinting at Angelica’s dramatic story, the poem never addresses her, but instead makes references to background events, namely the happy love stories between Ariosto’s characters. As it has been hypothesized,28 at some point Marfisa generated Angelica, but the two drafts should have been identical according to Aretino’s confused, original project. Of the three fragments, Marfisa shows a more narratively advanced phase compared to the others, since it touches upon all three of the topics previously announced, but never developed, in the Opera nuova. Unfortunately what remains of the text is not enough to give us an idea of a coherent plot. Perhaps, as stated, not even Aretino knew. It is no coincidence that even at the beginning, Marfisa takes an unexpected turn, leaving the title character somewhat abandoned as the text concentrates on the exploits of Rodamonte in hell, the topic of the first and only canto of the Opera nuova.29 Marfisa ends with the conclusion of the third canto (added at a later time), without stating that it is finished. The narrator’s written words along with the typical closing formula of this type of work, “I will rest for a while” (“poserommi alquanto”), leads the reader to expect a continuation. Angelica also ends with an announcement of continuation. A loud noise is heard, which traditionally signifies the beginning of a new story (“but her words were interrupted / as soon as she entered the forest / by such a noise, that one would think the

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As, for example, in the previously mentioned letter by Federico Gonzaga dated September 15, 1527: “Ho letto le stantie che mi haveti mandate, principio della vostra Marphisa disperata” (“I read the stanza you sent me, the beginning of your Marfisa disperata,” quoted in Romei, “Introduzione,” 9). “La Marfisa ha generato l’Angelica,” cf. Romei, “Introduzione,” 26 (“The Marfisa generated the Angelica”). The second canto stops at octave 13. The difficulty of developing the entrelacement is openly declared, in an Ariostean manner, at the end of the second canto of Marfisa: “Io ho riposte tante cose indietro / ch’or vo raccorle e pormele dinante” (“I left so many things behind / That I now want to collect and put forward”).

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world is falling / or that the center of the earth is collapsing onto its weight”).30 The Opera nuova is interrupted at the thirteenth octave of the second canto; Astolfeida announces that there would be a fourth canto, but it was never written. In Orlandino, however, the second canto is interrupted right as it begins, stating the end of the work. Aretino was never able to go beyond the third canto, not even in what should have been his most ambitious and important work, namely, Marfisa. He freely admitted his inability to finish his works, providing clearly questionable excuses that served only to flatter himself. He wrote the following to the Marquis of Vasto (on December 22, 1537) when sending him beginning of Angelica: Here, my lord, I send you the beginning of Angelica, dedicated to you, like I dedicated to you the beginning of Marfisa. And the fault of my starting a new work every day and never leading one to completion, is in your titles, because they, with their continuous upgrading, confuse me so that, in wanting to celebrate you, I am like the painter whose Prince’s inconstancy prevents him from tracing the contour of his eyes, or the line of his nose.31

4

The Loves of Angelica and Medoro in Marfisa and in Angelica

Even though Aretino does not present them as such, his two “serious” poems were continuations of the Orlando Furioso. These, in addition to being incomplete, were also acephalous, since they presumed that the reader already knew the Furioso, and the Innamorato. As he declared in a controversy with Francesco Berni, rewriter of Boiardo’s Innamorato, Aretino did not appreciate rewriters because he felt that it was a dishonor “to put onto one’s face a mask covered in the sweat of the dead” (“porsi al viso del nome la mascara del sudor dei morti”) (16 febbraio 1540).32 It is likely that he bore some responsibility for the nonpublication of Berni’s Rifacimento in 1531 and that the controversy against 30 31

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“Ma le parole in bocca le rompea, / facendo a punto ne la selva entrata, / un rumor che direste, o cade il mondo, / o il centro ha fin sotto il terrestre pondo,” Angelica, ii 78. “Ecco, Signore, che vi mando il principio d’Angelica, a voi intitolata, come anco a voi intitolai quello di Marfisa. E del mio cominciarvi ogni dì una opra, non ve ne fornendo mai veruna, datene la colpa ai vostri gradi, i quali, con il moto de i lor continui salti mi con fondono sì che, volendovi celebrare, rimango nel modo che resta il pittore quando la instabilità del Prencipe, che egli vorria pur ritrarre, non gli lascia torre il contorno de gli occhi, né il profilo del naso,” Lettere i, 443. Lettere ii, 177. The letter is addressed to the editor Francesco Calvo.

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the rewriters was a simple consequence of his hostility towards Berni, who was faithful to the hated Giberti.33 Aretino’s opinion was unquestionably more gentle towards those who continued others’ works. Although he refused to “correct” the Innamorato, he did not hesitate to join the ranks of those who took inspiration from the Furioso. In this case Aretino took advantage of the Furioso’s success, as other writers did thirty years earlier with Boiardo’s Innamorato.34 Let us consider the title of the two fragments: Marfisa, and De le lagrime di Angelica (or simply Angelica).35 The choice of Marfisa as the protagonist of a poem that was destined for the Gonzaga is not surprising. Aretino took advantage of Ruggiero and Marfisa being twins to “make the Mantuan dynasty descend from the latter” (“far discendere da quest’ultima la dinastia mantovana”), as Ariosto had made the Este dynasty derive from Ruggiero.36 After the fracture with Federico, it was up to Dragoncino da Fano with Marfisa bizzarra—also dedicated to the Gonzaga family—to fill the void left by the defaulting and rebellious predecessor. Marfisa bizzarra came out in September 1531, precisely during the “period that coincides with the first big crisis of the relationships between Aretino and Gonzaga.”37 In the dedications, Marfisa is remembered as “the great woman” “la gran donna” who was “foremother” (“progenitrice”) of Federico’s ancestors (“degli avi”).

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We know from the same letter to Calvo that Aretino embraced the idea of “emendare lo Inamoramento del Conte” (“to correct the Inamoramento by the Count,” 177). On his part, Berni was not any less aggressive and evil regarding Aretino. One only needs to think about the sonetto Contra Pietro Aretino which dates back to 1527, Francesco Berni, Rime, ed. Silvia Longhi, in Poeti del Cinquecento, vol. 1: Guglielmo Gorni-Massimo Danzi-Silvia Longhi (eds.), Poeti lirici, burleschi, satirici e didascalici (Milan-Naples, 2001), 625–890: 829. Perhaps Aretino was not the right person to criticize re-writers, since his writings are always “una riscrittura, e nasce sempre in rapporto ad un altro testo, e specie per opposizione parodica ad un altro genere o codice letterario” (“a re-writing and always born in relation to another text, usually by means of a parodic opposition to another literary genre or code,” Bruscagli, “Aretino e la tradizione cavalleresca,” 246). It is different, in any case, to rewrite, or to continue or to parody. And one would do an injustice to Aretino if he or she did not recognize some notable creativity and a personal mark in all the fields he touched. The first edition bears in the title page D’Angelica […] due primi canti; that of 1538 De le lagrime d’Angelica (Romei, “Nota ai testi,” 353–357). This second title refers to the tradition and hagiographic tradition, as it recalls many traits of the poem. Bruscagli, “Aretino e la tradizione cavalleresca,” 147. “Periodo che coincide con la prima grande crisi dei rapporti fra Aretino e il Gonzaga,” Daniela Delcorno Branca, “La Marphisa bizzarra di Giovambattista Dragoncino da Fano,” in Johannes Bartuschat-Franca Strologo (eds.), Carlo Magno in Italia e la fortuna dei libri di cavalleria (Ravenna, 2016), 403–426: 409.

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According to Aretino’s project, Marfisa should have represented “the furors of arms” (“i furori de l’armi”), while Angelica, on the other hand, stood for “the passions of love” (“le passioni d’Amore”).38 Yet, while the choice of Marfisa as the lead character to continue the epic genre was without a doubt tied to encomiastic necessity, and not to the content of the Furioso, the choice of Angelica becomes a perfect response to Ariosto’s questioning invocation: “perhaps another will sing to a better accompaniment.”39 There will be many “plectrums” but certainly none better than Ariosto’s.40 While the voice of Boiardo inspired Ariosto, no one worth mention would continue in Ariosto’s footsteps. The distinction between epic and romance proposed in the letter to Valdaura was never realized in the two fragments of text, and was perhaps never envisioned by Aretino, who opened his Marfisa invoking the god guardians Venere and Marte, re-proposing the well-noted union of arms and love (“d’arme e d’amor”). The story begins with the conclusive duel in the Furioso and with the celebrations of the triumph of Ruggiero over Rodomonte. The same celebrations were reprised in the second canto of Angelica, coinciding with the arrival of the two lovers in Paris: It was the happy and glorious day when the celebrated unique Ruggiero triumphed with the sole help of his virtues over Rodomonte’s reckless boldness.41 Here again the events are recounted with the nonchalant transfer of octaves from one text to another (Marfisa i 37–38; Angelica ii 10–11). In both poems, the arrival of the two lovers in Paris is preceded by a description of their love (ii 11–22; i 88–103). Yet, as mentioned, Marfisa goes beyond this background information. In canto iii, which appears only in the 1535 edition—after Aretino had already started working on Angelica—the poem narrates the consequences of Medoro’s sudden change of heart, falling out of love with Angelica. This change in the narrative was simply announced in Angelica. Because of Malagigi’s revenge, Angelica is carried up and away into the air by magic, kidnapped, and dragged away from the room where, during the dance, every-

38 39 40 41

Letter to Bernardo Valdaura, Dedica to the last three days (Lettere i, 417). “Fors’altri canterà con miglior plettro,” Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, xxx 16. Regarding ‘migliori plettri’ see Ulrich Leo, Angelica ed i migliori plettri. Appunti sullo stile della Controriforma (Krefeld, 1993). “Era il giorno felice e glorioso / che l’onorato singular Ruggiero / sol trionfò con sue virtuti conte /del temerario ardir di Rodomonte,” Angelica, ii 9.

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one had been able to admire her and fantasize about her beauty. Medoro, who previously followed her desperately, ends up succumbing to jealousy and hating her. Being made a prisoner by a cruel lord (“crudo signore”), Angelica is condemned to death for her ungratefulness. The only grace she is granted is the freedom to choose her means of death from a book: stabbing, poisoning or hanging. None of these, however, seem to her sufficient to kill her, since as she explains in a heavily rhetorical soliloquy, love had already pierced her, poisoned her, and tied her up. Not even a river, fire or a lion would succeed, since she had already been submerged in a river of tears, burned in a fire of love, and had her heart devoured by a starving lion. She could not even die of hunger in prison, because cries and pain would quench and satisfy her. “I cannot die” (“morir non posso”), Angelica concludes, “and in this heart I hold / lion, prison, poison, cross, water, and iron.”42 She is invigorated, however, by the thought of falling to her death from a high tower. Yet as she is falling, the beautiful young woman is saved by the winds, which fill her clothes with air and keep her aloft, delighting themselves with her body that “they all want to touch, happy and content.”43 Enraged by the fact that he does not see her crash to the ground, Medoro collapses. Finally, he is led into the presence of the unknown persecutor of Angelica, to whom he expresses his feelings: Having regained himself, he explained the reason of his novel, unparalleled pains; he recounted that she was the daughter of king Galafrone the one who floated away, and she is his hated wife. For this reason the great prince nominates Medoro as his successor, and welcomes him with love. But since my story has been quite long with your permission I will rest for a while.44 The third canto of Marfisa ends with no mention of a possible continuation, although the possibility of a following installment, after the break, is implied. It seems that Aretino had forgotten all about Marfisa, at least until that moment.

42 43 44

“E in questo corpo serro / leon, carcer, velen, croce, acqua e ferro,” Angelica, iii 85. “Vogliono tutti palpar lieti e contenti,” Angelica, iii 97. “In sé tornato, espose la cagione / de le sue nuove incomparabil doglie; / contò ch’è figlia del re Galafrone / colei ch’è sparsa et è sua odiata moglie. / Per questo il gran signor Medor propone / successor suo e con amor l’accoglie. / Ma perch’il dir è stato lungo tanto / con grazia vostra poserommi alquanto,” Marfisa, iii 117.

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Angelica acts as a bridge between the two poems. From the moment the second one opens, there is the promise to talk about her. This seems to connect directly to octave 57 of the third canto of Marfisa, in which Angelica, in the air, asks Medoro for help (“And in the meantime he hears the voice and the cry / that keeps calling—Medoro, oh my Medoro!;” “Ecco in tanto la voce e ’l grido sente / che chiama ognor—Medor, Medoro mio!”): I want to tell of the woman who held the pride of graceful and Angelic beauty who cried for her beloved so much that she abandoned both joy and arrogance and learned to cry the same tears that her own cruelty had taught to others: she keeps calling Medoro in a feeble voice yet he does not listen, and delights in her pain.45 Aretino intended to continue, therefore, with the same theme regarding the punishment of Angelica, and with her martyrdom, similar to that of a Christian saint. This topical issue, widely employed among the followers of Ariosto, and one that Aretino had already employed in Marfisa, combined his sadistic fantasies with the “most elaborate mannerist rhetoric.”46 But instead of confronting this theme, the story harkens back to the news of the marriage of Angelica, and stops to describe each reaction of her ex-lovers. While Orlando relives with angst with the phases of his insanity (the cave, the epigram, the bed and the shepherd, to whom he tells the story of the two lovers), Ranaldo (in a way that reminds us of Boiardo) reveals all the wisdom acquired in the Furioso, stating his disdain for Angelica’s choice of a low-class husband. Unlike the two paladins, Sacripante (who had already become a leading character in the Marfisa), now moves in search of Angelica. Along the way he meets a woman “afflicted / widowed, alone, clad in dark clothes,” whose sad story we will come to know only later.47 Having fallen in love with an enemy who destroyed her family, he subjected her to a martyrdom, similar to that endured by Angelica in Marfisa. This time, the narrator speaks of “eleven

45

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“Io vorrei dir la donna ch’ebbe il vanto / di leggiadra et Angelica bellezza, / la qual l’amato ben sospirò tanto / che depose la gioia e l’alterezza, / et imparato a pianger con quel pianto / che ad altri insegnò già la sua durezza: / Medor pur chiama in suon languido e fioco, / che non l’ascolta, e ’l suo mal prende a gioco,” Angelica, i 1. “La più ricercata retorica manierista,” Sacchi, Fra Ariosto e Tasso, 168. “Afflitta, / vedova, sola, in panni oscuri avinta,” Marfisa, i 64.

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deaths” versus the “eight deaths” of Angelica, but we immediately realize that we are dealing with an evident duplication with a variatio. This unknown young woman will also be subjected to: torture with “iron, poison, and the noose” (“il ferro, il tosco ed il laccio”), “the deadly prison” (“il carcer mortal”), being tossed from a high tower, and so on. But unlike Angelica who, on a rhetorical level, thwarts the proposed attempts to kill her, declaring them all ineffective, the unknown woman will nevertheless test them one by one. But the rain puts out the fire, the lion is moved to pity by her, in prison she subsists on pain and tears, and so on. Only in the case of the tower, from which both characters fall, the destinies of the two women are identical. Faced with such a shameless variation on the same theme, the reader is left perplexed. Yet by way of a series of clues, one is led to believe that Aretino, with Angelica, wished to continue one of the branches of the story of Marfisa. It is now understood that the “regal woman” hung by her braids, who Sacripante meets in the second canto of Marfisa (ii 43), whose “harsh fate” (“l’empia ventura”) had been announced but never described (“but I now remain silent on her harsh fate”),48 cannot be “the afflicted woman / widowed, lonely […]” who in Marfisa tells her story to Sacripante (i 64). Furthermore, even though she was subjected to the same torture, that woman cannot be Angelica. In short, “neither of these sequels were to impose themselves as the definitive one: the operation is more important than the result.”49 Aretino found a story that he liked, but he was not able to choose a protagonist. It is not surprising the story of the persecuted woman in Angelica is a copy of the one told by Nanna to Pippa at the end of the second of the last Tre giornate. The fact that we are dealing with the same story is made clear not only by some verbatim quotations, but also by what has been aptly described as a form of advertising.50 Nanna interrupts the story at the best part (the point at which the young woman is made to fall from the high tower). She responds to Pippa fainting upon hearing of such cruelty as an excuse to stop her narration: But when she had recovered, Nanna, who didn’t want her to faint again, left the story dangling. In fact, she had told it on tiptoe, for she was a delicate storyteller when the fancy took her.51

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“Ma taccio ora di lei l’empia ventura,” Marfisa, ii 43. “Nessuna di queste continuazioni doveva imporsi come ultimativa; conta più l’operazione che il risultato,” Sacchi, Fra Ariosto e Tasso, 136. This seems to indicate that the two versions of the story, in verse and in prose, were written more or less at the same time. Romei, “Introduzione,” 30. Aretino’s Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Toronto, 1971), 307 (“Ma ritornata in sé, la

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In order to know the ending (after the last rescue in extremis the cruel husband falls in love with the woman but will die of regret) the reader must return to the poem that was announced providentially in the preface letter of Tre giornate: “soon will be heard the furors of arms and the passions of love” (“tosto udiriansi i furori de l’armi e le passioni dell’amore”). The narrator’s comments on the short story told by Nanna “on tiptoe” (“in punta di pantofole”) in order to prove her ability “when the fancy took her” (“quando le toccava il grillo”), also reveal the profound motivation for this game of interpretation and reinterpretation: a simple exhibition of one’s know-how (“saper fare”). The young victim, a new Griselda (as well as an Olimpia), moved by a strong drive for sacrifice, reminds the reader of the poor Angelica. The dedication to Valdaura of December 18, 153752 seems to take for granted that the canto of Angelica (in addition to that of Marfisa) had already been written, but perhaps not yet published.53 Let us recall that the third canto of Marfisa was published in 1535; at that time Aretino must have already begun work on Angelica, since in a letter from 1532 he already spoke of Lacrime di Angelica.54 It would be possible, therefore, to switch the order and imagine the sacrifice of Angelica in Marfisa as coming

52

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Nanna, per non darle più alterazione, non finì la novella contata in punta di pantufole: che ben sapeva dire, quando le toccava il grillo,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 280). This dedication is already mentioned in August 1537, in the letter to Valdaura: “Credetelo pure che vi intitolai il dialogo non per i quaranta scudi […]” (“But rest assured that I did not dedicate the dialogue to you because of the forty scudi,” Lettere i, 257). There is a detail that connects Marfisa to the story of Nanna that does not appear in Angelica. In the moment in which she is thrown from the tower, the young victim, seeing her hands being tied, screams: “Adunque le nati di re hanno a morire come serve?” (“So, will those born of kings die like servants?”). In Marfisa: “le mani in lacci d’or stringer li vuole / la gente cruda, ch’in sua morte affama. / Di ciò la donna si querela e duole / e dice altiera e non con voce grama: / ‘Le man non mi legar, turba proterva, / ch’io, de re figlia, non vo’ morir serva’” (“Her hands in golden laces want to bind / the cruel people, hungry for her death. The woman complains and mourns about this / and, arrogant, she says, and not in a grim voice: / ‘Don’t bind my hands, insolent mob, / because I am the daughter of a king, and I won’t die like a servant’,” iii 93). One should note that also the fear expressed by Angelica in the stanza “da l’altre appartata” (“separated from the others”) in which “l’auttor finge Angelica vedersi davanti morti il padre Galafrone et il marito Medoro” (“the author imagines Angelica seeing in front of her, dead, her father Galafrone and her husband Medoro”), has a correspondence in the story of Nanna: “ella si vergognava di riscontrare lo spirito di suo padre ne l’altro mondo” (“she was ashamed to meet her father’s soul in the afterlife”). See the previously mentioned letter by Bernardo Accolti to Aretino (6 febbraio 1532): “Io, che ho fatto piangere i marmi con i miei versi, mi ho lasciato uscire l’acque da li occhi, nel leggere Le lagrime d’Angelica” (“I, who made marble cry with my verses, I let the water from my eyes reading the Lagrime of Angelica”).

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after that of the unknown young woman in Angelica, and on the second day of the Tre giornate. It is evident that, starting from a certain point, both chivalrous poems proceed together.

5

Marfisa and Opera nuova del superbo Rodomonte

The story narrated to Sacripante that takes up almost the entire second canto of Angelica sends the newly-begun tale down an almost unforeseeable road. The promise to narrate the misadventures of Angelica would never be satisfied, since the same misadventures would be transferred onto the unnamed young woman. In its brevity, Angelica ends up orchestrated in almost its entirety on a pathetic lyrical note, unlike Marfisa, which, as explicit metanarrative inserts indicate, is written with a masterful alternation of tonalities. Here, beyond the poetic-love style, Aretino experiments with the epic-grotesque. The entire scene of Rodomonte in hell, which takes up most of this section, is composed in a style that reminds one of Dante and Pulci, and quite often falls into a comic and hyperbolic tone. For Aretino, this experiment seemed to be important and is demonstrated by a remarkable stylistic refinement, which at times seems to anticipate (to an exaggerated degree) Tasso’s infernal council. I do not refer so much to the peroration of Pluto to the infernal citizens, so that they will be moved to defend their own kingdom, or to the exhortation “Go back to wander in the world” (“Tornate al mondo errando”). I instead point out the almost exasperated and forced use of alliteration that prevails (in addition to the depiction of Hades) in the presentation of the grotesque character of Aspramonte: The soul of the terrible Rodomonte that had just severed Ruggiero from his body proud came to the river Acheronte and refused to cross it through its basin, without looking for a bridge or a crossing he moved along across the dark waters always cursing the heavens and the hell and threatening both the saved and the damned. Charon, who saw that furious spirit travelling across the waters contrary to the eternal law goes towards him, and threatens him, and yells in such a way that makes all of Hell resound. That weird soul looks at him, and laughs,

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and says: “If all the demons of cruel Hell are like you are, oh superb monster, for sure today I will become your prince!”55 The importance of this episode to Aretino is proven by the fact that it circulated autonomously (which also proves its gratuitousness). From a chronological point of view, the Opera nova del superbo Rodamonte re di Sarza, from 1532, preceded Marfisa. In its preface letter, Lorenzo Venier (or Aretino himself) justified the partial publication of Marfisa as a response to a pirated publication produced in Ancona. As I mentioned earlier, the Opera nova is probably a repeat of that printing. That this work represents a part of Marfisa is evident, but it is difficult to know if this “clearly degraded text” (which conforms “largely to the topic of the first canto and of the first thirteen octaves of the second canto”),56 is in this state due to simple negligence, a lack of cultural awareness on the part of the transcriber or for some other reason. Of the three topics announced in the preface, as mentioned earlier, the Opera nuova develops only the event dealing with Rodomonte in hell, and the beginning of the story of Angelica. If we compare this with the corresponding text of Marfisa, we notice that it consists of a precise deconstruction of the model that has all the elements of a rewrite. I will present here only a few select examples. In the third octave of Marfisa, Aretino wrote, invoking Marte and Cupido: “may you be pleased that my new papers” (“aggradi a voi che le mie nuove carte”). In Opera nuova, the same verse reads: “I want, in these famous papers of mine” (“io voglio in queste mie famose carte,” i i), “to rewrite the stories of Turpin” (“che rivolga l’istorie di Turpino,” i 4); becomes “to study the chronicles of Turpin” (“che le croniche studi di Turpino,” i 2). These examples are proof of the author’s continual search for a more familiar language; for example when his rewriting substitutes the phrase two months (“dua mesi”) in place of three moons “tre lune,” forget (“scordare”), in place of disremember (“obliare”), and “remained on the salty beach” (“rimaso in su la salsa arena”), with “greased on the belly and on the back” (“l’unto a la panza e la schena”). I would also cite the instance when he refuses to use the preten55

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“L’anima del tremendo Rodamonte, / che pur dianzi Ruggier dal corpo sciolse, / ardita giunse al fiume d’Acheronte, / né trapassar su la sua conca volse, / anzi senza cercar varco né ponte / per lo livido umor il passo volse, / sempre il cielo e l’inferno bestemiando, / e salvati e perduti minacciando. // Caron, che ’l spirto furibondo vide / l’acque passar fuor del costume eterno, / incontra vienli e lo minaccia e stride / tal che fa rimbombar tutto l’Averno. / Quell’anima bizarra il sguarda e ride / e disse:—Se i dimon del crudo inferno / sono come sei tu, superbo mostro, / per certo oggi sarò principe vostro,” Marfisa, i 46–47. “Testo palesemente degradato;” “grosso modo alla materia del primo canto e delle prime 13 ottave del secondo,” see Romei, “Introduzione,” 29.

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tious appeal to the Muse (“sing, oh gentle and loving Muse / sing I beg you, the woman;” “canta, Musa gentile e amorosa, / canta, io ten prego, quella donna,” ii 8), replacing these lines with a simple “I will talk of Angelica, of the one / that was most beautiful” (“dirò d’Angelica, di quella / che bellissima fu,” ii 8). Marfisa exhibits elegant, rhetorical constructions such as: “he released only the weapons from the king who had been released from his body” (“sol l’arme al re scinto dal corpo scinse,” i 10); “could he honor his honored name” (“possa onorargli l’onorato nome,” i 27); “the warm desire and the ice-cold hope” (“il desio caldo e la gelata speme,” i 14); or witticisms like “being the only one that resembles himself” (“essendo ei quel che sol sembra se stesso,” ii 6). In Rodomonte, however, we find: “only the worthy arms he released from the king of Sarza” (“sol le degne armi al re di Sarza scinse,” i 12); “could he exalt his glorious name” (“Possa essaltargli il glorioso nome,” i 21); “too much love, too much fear and uncertain hope” (“troppo amor, troppa tema e ’ncerta speme,” i 15); and “given that he is the Circassian himself” (“però che gli è il re circasso istesso,” ii 6). Corrections are also employed for ambiguous expressions which were close to profanity: “consecrating the hosts to your pious name” (“l’ostie sacrare al vostro nome pio,” i 8) becomes “your pious name alone shines” (“unico splende el vostro nome pio,” ii 19). More notable is the fact that the entire verse (Marfisa, i 31) in which Ruggiero, lauded by the public for a victory, “ardent with fervor of ineffable joy / he rose to the Heavens with no earthly burden” (“d’ineffabile gioia acceso in zelo / senza il carco terreno ascese al cielo,” i 31) is commented upon and moralized: All those who live are not worthy to see the admirable, true, immortal God. No one ascends to His kingdom who still holds thoughts of mortal life.57 A rewriting like this, with a less polished style, had to have been voluntarily carried out with knowledge of a pre-existing work, and it was not made by Aretino. In negative terms, this stylistic deconstruction brings to light one of the most ambitious aspects of Marfisa, that is, a tendency towards a sophistication and a stylistic extravagance which is almost pre-Baroque in feel.

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“Ognun che vive è di vedere indegno / el mirabile Dio vero immortale; / non sale alcuno al suo perpetuo regno / che tenga ancora mente del mortale,” Rodamonte, i 26.

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Marino and Aretino

I believe that it is not a coincidence that Marfisa captured the attention of Marino, who, with his “art of the hook” (rampino), took advantage of knowledge of that work more than once. A notable example is found in i 40, in which the body of Rodomonte is described and compared to that of Polyphemus: He resembles Polyphemus as he sleeps leaning on a rock, in a dark sport, so that the satyrs, who followed his footsteps having seen him to rest with no other care, measure with thyrses and canes his horrid fingernails and his monstrous forehead.58 which returns in the description of the sleeping Marte in Adonis: In this way, on the shores where Cariddi shrieks the cunning fauns, with thyrses and canes measure the immense bones and the shapeless brow of the shepherd Cyclops, while he sleeps.59 Moreover, the similarity of the act of falling in love as an image impressed in wax is explored: the heart approaches the close souls and stamps on her the beautiful image. Like emerald of high praise and adorned with a divine image on warm wax that, even if it is then broken its real image remains in her.60

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“Sembra ancor Polifemo allor ch’ei dorme / appoggiato ad un sasso in vista oscura, / che i satir, che seguite han le sue orme, / vedutolo adagiar, senz’altra cura / de l’orride unghie e del ciglio disforme, / prendan con tirsi e canne alta misura.” “Così su ’l lido ove Cariddi stride / soglion con tirsi e canne i fauni astuti / del ciclopo pastor, mentre ch’ei dorme, / misurar l’ossa immense e ’l ciglio informe,” Giovan Battista Marino, Adone, ed. Emilio Russo (Milan, 2013), 1386 (xiii 196). “Il cuore a la vicina alma s’appressa / e lascia in lei la bella effigie impressa, / qual suol smeraldo d’alto pregio e ornato / d’imagin diva ne la calda cera, / ch’avegna ch’ei sia poi guasto e spezzato / pur resta in lei la sua sembianza vera,” Marfisa, ii 2–3.

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Tender wax does not seal and hold onto itself the mark of a seal like a young hearth holds the image of the first beauty that it encounters.61 But most of all, it is in the exasperation of the grotesque that the two poems display an extraordinary resemblance. Here we see Aretino’s Dorione, evoking Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s Brunello, and forestalling Marino’s Barrino: This one, who has big eyes and a shady look has ruffled hair and a mangy beard of a colour verging on dark red, with a vulgar smile […].62 of a lowly heritage, a vile and treacherous man, for whose little and minute body malice and treachery compensate, with a pointy head and curly hair, and with no more than four hairs on his chin, red, but of a red verging on dark, and he has the gaze of an outlaw, and shady eyes.63 Finally, there is no doubt that the character of Serione “minister of truth in his speech” (“nel parlar essecutor del vero”), “pale, unadorned, and austere like Cato” (“pallido, inculto e qual Caton severo”),64 passed directly from Aretino to Marino, as Marino’s Serione is similarly “pale, uncouth, and as austere as Cato.”65 The art of the rampino (hook), which Marino directs toward Aretino does not begin to describe such a complex relationship; a communion of taste that,

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“Impronta di suggel tenera cera / sì salda in sé non serba e non ritiene / come un cor giovenil de la primiera / beltà l’effigie ov’a scontrar si viene,” Marino, Adone, 1445 (xiv 68). “[…] costui, ch’ha gli occhi grossi e’l guardo losco, / torti i capelli e con due peli il mento / e di color che pende al rosso fosco, / con un riso villan […],” Marfisa, ii 72. “[…] villan di stirpe, uom vile e fraudolento, / et al cui corpo picciolo e minuto / la malizia supplisce e ’l tradimento, / di capo aguzzo e di capel ricciuto / e senza più che quattro peli al mento, / rosso, ma d’un rossor che pende al fosco, / et ha sguardo fellone et occhio losco,” Marino, Adone, 1743 (xvi 169). Marfisa, ii 79. “Pallido, inculto e qual Catone austero” and “del mal, del bene esplorator severo,” Marino, Adone, 1731 (xvi 136).

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as mentioned, sheds light on the true novelty of Marfisa within an already exhausted genre. One can measure this in the use of amorous language, in the transformation of pastoral elements into refined ones, and of the natural world into the world of luxury. One can remember, for example, the description of Angelica and Medoro, described with an abundance of detail in both Marfisa and Angelica. Aretino’s Medoro is already an Adonis, as he himself declares: “a new Ganymede, a new Adonis / is Medoro, as in him both sexes shine.”66 The adjectives befitting him are “lovely” (“vezzoso”) and “graceful” (“grazioso”), “lascivious” (“lascivo”) (all words employed by Marino, as well). His beauty attracts the poet’s attention even more so than Angelica’s because within him shine both the masculine and feminine. It is this same sexual ambiguity that fascinated Marino. It is interesting to note that when Ariosto finished his description of the handsome Medoro, comparing him to an angel (“He had dark eyes and a golden head of curls—he might have been an angel, indeed a seraph”),67 the reader perceives the irony. This same detail in Aretino’s description does not appear ironic, but rather decorative and sensual: “he looks like Cupid, or better a blessed angel / he has hair of fine gold, and rosy cheeks / and the air of one who smiles without smiling.”68 The kiss becomes the act of “drinking” (“bere”) or “sipping” (“suggere”) nectar and ambrosia; the desire “overflows” (“trabocca”), the pleasure is a “life-giving death” (“vitale morir”). This is luxurious choreography, an opulent nature where gold is overabundant.

7

Narcissism and Autobiographism

This is not the place to explore affinities that extend well beyond the texts, and that involve lifestyles and the construction of personality. The instrumental use of literature was beneficial to Aretino and Marino as it allowed them to move about the world and obtain that which they desired. For both of them, literature became a way to make themselves the center of attention. From this point of view, the long insert dedicated to the character of Aspramonte in the second canto of Marfisa is remarkable. Aspramonte is the only creation of Aretino that is a hyperbolic replica of the already hyperbolic Rodomonte. A compari-

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“Un nuovo Ganimede, un altro Adone / è Medor, ch’arde in lui l’un l’altro sesso,” Marfisa, iii 28. “Occhi avea neri, e chioma crespa d’oro / angel parea di quei del sommo coro,” Orlando Furioso, xviii 213 [156]. “Cupido par, anzi un angel beato, / ha d’or fino i capei, di rose il viso / et un’aria che ride senza riso,” Angelica, i 31.

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son between the two is hinted at by the narrator: “Rodomonte was an angel compared to him” (“un angelo a par suo fu Rodomonte,” Marfisa ii 54). The details, however, that Aretino gives us about this character are notable; he is introduced as the son of Gherardo, “father of the good Don Chiaro” (“padre del buon Don Chiaro”) but is then described with obvious allusions to contemporaneity. While the character is described with grotesque traits that recall Rodomonte,69 he also appears as a mask for the condottiero Giovanni de’ Medici, as Aretino saw him, or as Aretino wanted him to be seen—that is to say, as a force of nature in need of control—a control that only Aretino, his faithful friend, could provide. When Aretino observes that Aspramonte needs the trust of a wise and true friend, one who tempers his excesses and points him down the right path, his tone is decidedly changed, because he is talking about himself. He is the only one who “sees […] what is secret” (“vede […] ciò che è secreto”) within his lord, and who can even reprimand him for his excesses: He alone has freedom to admonish the one who wants at all cost the kingdom of heaven but he employs such a sweet, playful, wise and somber manner, together with so much wisdom, that, restraining any wicked desires, the one with a healthy and worthy judgment is the one who judges.70 Aretino immediately reveals who the fictional Aspramonte and his good advisor truly are: If it was not to blame to praise oneself, I would say: someone similar lived with the great Giovanni one whom I love and hold in my heart like myself, but I am not allowed to commend my own self.71

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Death itself is afraid of him (as with Rodomonte), his ambitions extend beyond human limits, and he even wants to invert the natural order of things, mastering the game of chance, because he desires “to rule […] with a signal over the elements / have the moon appear at daytime and the sun at night” (“Dar legge […] col cenno a gli elementi, / la luna al giorno et a la notte il sole,” Marfisa, ii 67). “Sol egli libertà d’amonir have / colui che vuol del ciel per forza il regno, / ma sì dolce, gioconda, saggia e grave / usa maniera, mista in tanto ingegno, / che, raffrenando ognor sue voglie prave, / giudica chi giudizio ha sano e degno,” Marfisa, ii 86. “Se non che biasmo sé lodando fora, / direi: tale vivea col gran Giovanni / un ch’amo e tengo in cuor quasi me stesso; / ma sé proprio esaltar non mi è concesso,” Marfisa, ii 88.

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In his letters, Aretino often remembered the grandiose attitude along with the excesses of his beloved Aspramonte-Giovanni. Above all though he remembered the tight relationship which indissolubly united him—a new Salastro— to the famous leader who died as the result of injuries sustained in the Battle of Governolo at the young age of 28. If Giovanni were to have declared himself unable to live without Aretino, Aretino had already sensed that and knew he was able to exert a fundamental influence on him: “io gli fui padre, fratello, amico e servo” (I was for him a father, a brother, and a servant). With his constant presence, Aretino was much more than a servant or a friend, since “trastullava le sue fatiche” (I soothed his labours) and “confortava i suoi fastidi” (I comforted his troubles), but most of all “temperava le sue ire” (I softened his rages). These rages had turned him into “il terrore degli uomini” (the terror of men), but Aretino considered them instead “grandezze di mente, e non furori” (“greatness of his mind and not furies”).72 The prominent role that Aretino proudly claimed for himself after the death of the Medici was even recognized by the influential Francesco Guicciardini: Right honourable signor Pietro, Caccia and the man I sent to the Camp reported to me that, with regard to lord Giovanni’s rage, your intervention for his honour was the reason he did not go to Milan […]. Let the world know this, because if he had gone where he intended to, he would be the unhappiest person in the world, because he would have compromised his rank, his reputation, his merit, and everything about him. It would be good for him to have more Pietri Aretini around him, and also to have more of them now.73 and by Giovanni’s wife, Maria: I beg you, dear brother, take care [of his son Cosimo], you who were the very soul of him who had no peers in this world, since, had he not given himself to you when he was alive, I’d be desperate for sure, since you are his continuous spokesperson.74 72 73

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Lettere i, 187, 161, 101. “Messer Pietro onorando, il Caccia e l’uomo che io ho costì in Campo mandato, nel caso de le furie del Signor Giovanni, mi hanno referto come l’offizio fatto in onor suo, è suto cagione che non è ito in Milano […]. Sappialo il mondo, che se là dove si era disposto andava, sarebbe stato il più scontento personaggio che viva, imperò che pregiudicava al grado, a la Fama, al debito e a tutte le cose pertinenti a sé. Ma buon per lui, se di Pietri Aretini avesse avuti appresso già, e ora avessene,” lsa i, 38. “Di grazia, Fratello caro, pigliatene la cura voi [del figlio Cosimo], che fosti Anima di colui

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Aretino and his lord and friend are united by a special bond, exemplified in this statement by Aretino: “many Rodamonti and many Gradassi looked like Giovanni de’ Medici, but they were not. In the same way, those who try to become me end up not even being themselves” (“molti Rodamonti e molti Gradassi son paruti Giovanni de i Medici, ma non sono stati. Così chi si sforza di diventar me, ne la fine non è pur lui”).75 Born during his Mantuan period, when the pain of the death of Giovanni was still fresh, Marfisa should have been, with the creation of the Aspramonte character, a moment of celebration of that very special relationship that the war had prematurely interrupted. Perhaps this is what was expected from the ‘Spokesperson of memory’ of the mythical leader. But the sober letter to Albizi describing the death of Giovanni is as epic in tone as the description of Aspramonte is grotesque.

8

Rewriting the Tradition, Rewriting Oneself

Riccardo Bruscagli rightfully stresses the exasperated trend of rewriting that characterizes the entire chivalric production of Aretino.76 Aretino, openly following in someone else’s steps, never succeeded in finding his own voice, not even when he created his own character. Aspramonte, in fact, is no more than a duplicate of Rodomonte, even if Aretino assigned him a role that went beyond the chivalric tradition. In the short space of the two “serious” poems, Aretino revisited not only the chivalric tradition, but also the small amount that he had written. Regarding the first aspect, one notes that Ariosto is continuously recalled via flashback, which brings back in the same words but in much shorter form the scene described in Furioso. In this way the death of Dardinello is literally recalled via the image employed by Virgil and Ariosto of the cut flower, and the words with which Ariosto described it: After Medoro saw, to his immense pain his lord fading away like a beautiful flower caught by a plow […].77

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che non ebbe pari al mondo, che se non fusse che vi si diede in preda vivendo, mi disperarei per certo, da che ne sete Tromba continua,” lsa i, 39. Lettere i, 161. Bruscagli, “Aretino e la tradizione cavalleresca,” 246. “Se non che biasmo sé lodando fora, / direi: tale vivea col gran Giovanni / un ch’amo e tengo in cuor quasi me stesso; / ma sé proprio esaltar non mi è concesso,” Marfisa, ii 88; “Come

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The death of Rodomonte is recalled using almost an exact quote of the concluding words of the poem: The soul of the terrible Rodomonte that had just severed Ruggiero’s soul from his body proudly came to the shores of the river Acheron […] always cursing both heaven and hell.78 One also notes that the same characters embark on a true journey through memory. Here is how Orlando relives the moment of his insanity: He saw the cave where the woman was happy to delight the one who loved her, and read the verses with which Medoro recounted his happiness, his happiness that fill another one with burning despair, he was in the bed where the couple lay, and he heard, wasting himself in sorrow, the story of his goddess from the shepherd and saw the bracelet that she had on her arm. Such a fierce and powerful grief Overcame the heart of the lovestruck Count That, at a loss of tears and of the sad sound Of sights and of ready laments, he changed to such a violent madness that he crazily undressed all of his limbs.79

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purpureo fior languendo muore, / che ’l vomere al passar tagliato lassa […],” Orlando furioso, xviii 153. “L’anima del tremendo Rodamonte, / che pur dianzi Ruggier dal corpo sciolse, / ardita giunse al fiume d’Acheronte / […] / Sempre il cielo e l’inferno bestemmiando,” Marfisa, i 46. “Alle squalide ripe d’Acheronte, / sciolta dal corèo più freddo che giaccio, / bestemmiando fuggì l’alma sdegnosa, / che fu sì altiera al mondo e sì orgogliosa,” Orlando Furioso, xlvi 140. “Ei vide l’antro ove a la donna piacque / bear chi ell’ama, e lesse l’epigramma / in cui Medoro suoi gioir non tacque, / il suo gioir che altri a dolersi infiamma; / nel letto ei fu dove la coppia giacque; / egli udì, se struggendo a dramma a dramma, / l’istoria dal pastor de la sua dea, / vide il cerchio ch’al braccio essa tenea. // Onde sì fiero duolo e sì possente / assalse il cor de l’infiammato conte, / che, mancatogli il pianto e ’l suon dolente / del sospirare e le querele pronte, / mosse in tanto furor che follemente / scoperse ignude le sue membra conte,” Angelica, i 13–14.

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Aretino creates a summary which is also an assemblage of words and rhymes in Ariostean style. In the short span of those two octaves, the memory of Orlando transforms itself into literary parody; as we see in the epigram of Medoro (“dark, shadowy cave, pleasant and cool, where fair Angelica, born of Galafron […] often lay naked in my arms”);80 the tale of the shepherd (“The herdsman […] embarked, without asking leave, upon the story of those two lovers”);81 the excess of anger (“he was drained of every drop that was not pure hate”);82 and the initial impossibility to express it (“So possessed was he by the sorrow that he had no voice for laments, no moisture for tears”);83 and the animal-like folly (“he tore off his clothes and exposed his hairy belly”).84 In Angelica, the two lovers, headed towards Paris, travel again through the places and experience the events of Innamorato and of Furioso; and in these cases as well, the nostalgic evocation happens with the same words used by the predecessors of Aretino. Additionally, loving each other in a locus amoenus of “trees, branches, flowers, breeze and water” (“arbori, frondi, fiori, aure et acque”) (“Happy plants, verdant grass, limpid waters”),85 Angelica and Medoro find themselves repeating what had happened in Furioso: Or la sorte in un tempo ad ambo mostra, perché posin le membra pellegrine, quasi un bell’antro ne l’ombrosa chiostra. Angelica, i 91

Now chance show to both at the same time To rest their travel-weary limbs almost a pleasant cave in the shadowy forest. The game is explicit, parodic, but without controversial or corrosive intentions. The overabundant use of Petrarch in a mannerist style devoted to excess cannot be described as anything but exhibitionism: that of someone who, if and when he wanted, knew how to imitate Petrarch. To cite one example, Ferraù, furi-

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“Spelunca opaca e di fredde ombre grata, /dove la bella Angelica che nacque […] / spesso ne le mie braccia ignuda giacque,” Orlando Furioso, xxiii 108. “Il pastor […] l’istoria nota a sé, che dicea spesso,” Orlando Furioso, xxiii 118. “Che in lui non restò dramma / che non fosse odio,” Orlando Furioso, xxiii 129. “Né potè aver, che’l duol l’occupò tanto, / alle querele voce, umore al pianto,” Orlando Furioso, xxiii 112. “E poi si squarciò i panni e mostrò ignudo / l’ispido ventre,” Orlando Furioso, xxiii 133. “Liete piante, verdi erbe, limpide acque,” Orlando Furioso, xxiii 108.

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ous and impatient upon hearing the news from Sacripante of the marriage of Angelica, is tormented by contrasting thoughts: “both going and staying cause him pain,” (“e lo stare e l’andar tanto l’accora,” i 61);86 “A new thought is born in his mind / which stops him halfway in his path” (“ne la mente un pensier nuovo li cria, / il qual l’arresta in mezzo de la via,” i 54).87 But then “a thought that fights with his own thoughts / clearly shows him the foolishness of his error” (“un pensier, che coi suoi pensieri giostra, / l’insania del suo error chiaro li mostra,” i 60).88 Sacripante doesn’t dare to ask the messenger for further information regarding Angelica: Whoever saw a man eager to hear something who fears to know, and listens intently to what he’d rather not know, so that his small, hidden pain grows larger, so is good Sacripante, who dares not ask the envoy for anything more, in open words, about what pains him, and, in silence, reassures himself that knowing less is the best thing.89 And I who understand its meaning, then, turn cold as ice inside, like one who hears some news that wrings his heart all of a sudden rvf, 68, 9–1190 The ostentation contained in this overabundance of quotes shows what Aretino intended to say when he defined the pathetic story told “on tip-toe” (“in punta di pantofole”) by Nanna, who, when she wanted, “knew well how to

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“E ’l rimembrare et l’aspettar m’accora,” Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, 272, 5. “Cria d’amor penseri, atti e parole,” Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, 9, 12. And it continues: “Dice il pensiero a la sua mente,” i 61. See also “Ma con questo penser un altro giostra,” Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, 68, 5 and “L’un penser parla co la mente, e dice,” Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, 264, 19. “Chi vide uom mai vago d’intender cosa, / che teme di saperla e attento ascolta / ciò che udir non vorebbe, onde l’ascosa / picciola pena sua diventa molta, / vede il buon Sacripante che non osa / più il messo dimandar, con voce sciolta, / del suo cordoglio e tacendo s’accora, / che men certezza averne il meglio fora,” Angelica, i 33. “I’ che ’l suo ragionar intendo, allora / m’agghiaccio dentro, in guisa d’uom ch’ascolta / novella che di subito l’accora.” The English translation is quoted from Petrarch, The Canzoniere or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996), 107.

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speak” (“ben sapeva dire”).91 Here again, the impression is that he was simply trying to demonstrate that, when he wanted, he knew well “how to speak” and how to employ Petrarch’s style better than many of his contemporaries. This is ironice as Aretino, of all people, hated imitators of Petrarch.

9

The Comic Counterside

Other than being “quick and his own,” another great claim of Aretino was his ability to interpret all of the parts by himself. He took on all of the roles of a comedy and as a consequence, the comedy lost its reason to be performed. He improvised these roles, as in the prologue of Il Marescalco, only because he wanted to show that he was capable of it: And please note, my Lords, that it wouldn’t have been a mistake if, changing myself into each of the characters, I had presented all that my fellows will recite to you together; and to know that it is true that I am better than them, listen to me, and then listen to them, and judge our merits.92 In the field of narrative in octave, after having given a taste of the genre of epic story and novel, Aretino tried comic-parodic style with Orlandino and Astolfeida. This still remains in the sphere of traditional characters, but with Orlandino, Aretino abandoned the sphere of influence of Boiardo and Ariosto. He instead followed Andrea da Barberino, as Folengo had done in his Orlandino which was published in 1526 and was also dedicated to Federico Gonzaga. Yet while Folengo’s Orlandino, with its eight “capitoli,” is a complete poem, Aretino’s remains but a sketch, shorter than all his other productions in octave, consisting of a single canto and a few octaves of a second one. The most resounding aspect of the brief fragment is the disproportion between the polemic-commentary part (incipit) and the narrative part, which is almost nonexistent. In the initial polemic—directed against the traditional nonsense of the chivalric style and in the name of a new genre of ‘truth’—resides perhaps

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An evident self-parody is also the repetition, in three different occasions, of that same fable that Aretino praised at the end of the second day. As we have seen, it is narrated in an almost identical way in Angelica, and with notable similarities to Marfisa. “E sappiate, Signori, che non era error niuno a far che trasformato in ogni persona io solo v’appresentassi tutto quello che i miei sozi tutti insieme vi reciteranno; e che sia vero, che io vaglia più di loro, udite me, ed uditi poi essi, giudicate de’ nostri meriti,” Aretino, Teatro comico, 268.

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the only point of contact with its predecessor Folengo. Proposing to tell “the lies of arms and love, of which the fool world inebriates itself” (“le menzogne de l’armi e de gli amori / di che il mondo coglion si innebria tanto”), and counter proposing his own “gospel” to the “lying chronichle” (“cronica bugiarda”) of the infamous Turpino, Aretino wound up contesting even himself, while placing himself in the noble company of Pulci, Boiardo and Ariosto: Because of you, ignorant chronicler, you destitute bishop Turpino the Morgante sticks lies up our asses, and Boiardo, and the divine Furioso because of your gossip and many lies has the great Aretino speak of Marfisa, he who is an evangelist and a prophet, and of such a lie a monsignor would be ashamed,93 and then keeping his distance from the only truth-teller: This is the truth! He does not lie like Sir Pulci, or the Count, or Ariosto my one and only Aretino who flies in the skies.94 The dispute that centers on other’s lies constitutes one of the strongholds of the comic-burlesque poetic, whose principal aim is to shame them. Folengo expresses himself in similar terms: All the scraps of paper and writings that I hear being sung in shops, believe me, are nothing but bullshit far more false than all the Greek lies.95

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“Per colpa tua, cronichista ignorante, / nulla tenensis, vescovo Turpino, / drieto carotte ci caccia il Morgante / et il Boiardo e ’l Furioso divino, / per le chiacchere tue e fole tante / fa dir Marfisa al gran Pietro Aretino, / vangelista e profeta, e tal bugia / che un monsignor se ne vergognaria,” Orlandino, i 3. “Questo è la verità! Non dice fola, / come ser Pulci, il Conte e l’Ariosto, / il mio solo Aretin, che pel ciel vola,” Orlandino, i 9. “Di quanti scartafacci e scrittarie / oggidì cantar odo in le botteghe, / credeti a me, son tutte cagarie, / più false assai de le menzogne greghe,” Orlandino, i 17.

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But what does this truth consist of? For Aretino, “evangelist and prophet” (“vangelista e profeta”), to tell the truth in this context meant to shame the heroes of tradition, presenting them to us as the opposite of how we had come to know them.96 The women in particular (Ancroia, Origille, Antea, Falerina) are all similar to the “wandering whore” (“puttana errante,” i 8). This is another way to continue speaking about himself, even if the work not be his own. La puttana errante, which is attributed to Lorenzo Venier, (who prefaced Marfisa) is a short, obscene poem from Aretino’s workshop.97 After reversing the propositio, even the invocatio must oppose tradition. As an exhibitionist to the utmost degree, Aretino reminds us that he hated women (“and all the world knows it,” “e tutto il mondo sallo”) and invokes his beloved, whose identity is unknown to us (the name is uncertain, and it varies from one edition to the next): He who is more apt to me, my Lords, I know better than you so that with a penitent heart, and my head bowed down, I pray that you take me on your shoulders, my Apollus, Vincenzo Gambarino.98 After a long prologue, the story begins, at the thirteenth octave, with the usual “pasqua rosata” (Pentecost) that sees the regular paladins gathered around Carlo. But this time their plebeian entertainment is in the form of a huge banquet. The sound of a pagan horn invites them to fight, but the vile Astolfo, urged by Carlo to get moving, provides every possible excuse not to, and then tries to hide. Almost a century in advance, Aretino’s Astolfo has all the traits of the Count of Culagna in Tassoni’s Secchia rapita. In addition, the obvious intertextual contacts demonstrate that Tassoni was effectively inspired by Orlandino to create his character, especially as a way to ridicule an enemy.99 But the degradation of the chivalric genre cannot go far, unless it is associated, as in the case of Tassoni, with a reflection that directly touches contemporary facts: the ancient heroic characters are not comic, what is comic are modern characters styled as the ancient ones. Aretino seemed to share a similar view in 96

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Yet the same label appears in the contemporary Iudicio from 1527, which indicates that Aretino is capable of telling the truth always, even in the case of an uncomfortable truth for the important characters that his prophecies attack. Lorenzo Venier, La puttana errante, ed. Nicola Catelli (Milan, 2005). See also Giuseppe Crimi’s essay in this volume. “Chi fa per me, signor, me’ di voi sollo, / onde col cor contrito a capo chino / ti prego che mi pigli un poco in collo, / Apollo mio, Vincenzo Gambarino,” Orlandino, i 13. Giovanni Bruno, “Un glorioso antenato del Conte di Culagna,” in Tatiana Crivelli (ed.), Feconde venner le carte. Studi in onore di Ottavio Besomi (Bellinzona, 1997), vol. 1, 381–392.

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the preface of the second canto, where he argues against the modern “soldiers, knights, and troopers” (“soldati, cavallier e fanti”), defined as “the greatest slackers” (“arcipoltroni”), as well as against the lords who praise “the laziest, the most awkward, the worst” (“i più poltroni, i più goffi, i peggiori,” Orlandino ii 3). At the same time, he denounces “the laureate, haughty poets” (“laurati alti poeti”) that “bamboozle the brain with the nonsense about the paladins” (“stillano il cervello con le fandonie dei paladini,” Orlandino ii 5). These are the same lies that drive Don Quixote insane, and which he believes to be true. Despite the evident anticipation of polemical insights that will develop, the impression gained from the short poem is one of clarity of intent, since Aretino fluctuates between the deconstruction of the chivalric fable, denounced as a lie, and the invective against contemporaneity. A more coherent project seems to be reflected in the dedication of the more ambitious Astolfeida: A Pasquino e Marforio antichi romani amatori del vero (“To Pasquino and Marforio, Ancient Romans, Lovers of Truth”). For Aretino to say “il vero” (the truth) was associated almost relentlessly with slander (“dir male”); polemic spirit and aggressiveness went hand in hand for Aretino and were recognized as typical prerogatives of the mythical Pasquino, with whom he constantly identified. The dedication of Astolfeida appears to be associated with Marforio: The paladins were men like all other men. The world has always been the same and today, instead of paladins, we have colonels, captains, standard bearers, camp and vineyard masters, and everywhere we see plenty of Martani and—what is worse—countless Gani.100 Pasquino and Marforio, who had endured the Sack of Rome, were born before the paladins, and more so than the paladins, were “friends of the truth” (“amici del vero”). In the sonnet to the readers, Aretino, on behalf of Pasquino, lauds himself for his ability to denounce the present: Pasquin our gallant, Aretino praises, and says that today more than ever, the world has bragger men; he says that overnight

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“I paladini furono uomini come gli altri, il mondo fu sempre d’una sorte e non mancano oggi, in cambio di paladini, i colonnelli, i capitani, li alfieri, i maestri di campi e de la vigna, e per tutto c’è più Martani e—quel ch’è peggio—de’ Gani a iosa,” Astolfeida, 240.

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bitter habits grow in the world like bad weeds in a vegetable garden; he says the whores are haughtier than gentlewomen.101 The main scope of the short poem is explained through allegory, even if it sounds artificial, and by a short description of the topic. Thus, the “multitude creates confusion” (“la moltitudine porge confusione”) and a long speech (“dir lungo”) displeases: in the first canto only the paladins of France and Charles I will mention, in the second the Moors and the Saracens; in the third happy stories and tales because a short and sweet speech reaches the stars.102 This time, having defended the short speech (“dir breve”) and announced the material of the three cantos, one would believe that the poem should end with the third canto. But this is not the case, since the third canto, like the others, closes with an announcement: If whether or not Gano rode the donkey Don’t find it strange to hear in the next canto.103 The beginning of the short poem instead echoes and twists that of Ariosto, especially in the beginning of the second octave; (“I will tell of Astolfo […] things that never before [have been said] with a pen or a brush,” “Dirò d’Astolfo […] cose non mai più in penna o in pennello”), while the third goes back to accusing, as in Orlandino, the “lying poets” (“falsi poeti”) and “vain historians” (“istorici vani”):

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“Pasquin nostro galante / l’Aretin loda e dice ch’oggi assai / bravi a parol n’ha il mondo più che mai; / dice che d’oggi in crai / crescono al mondo ognor l’usanze acerbe, / come ne l’orto allignon le mal’erbe; / dice che più superbe / son le puttane che le gentil donne,” Astolfeida, 241 (“Pasquino ai lettori”). “Nel primo canto sol de’ paladini / di Francia e Carlo si farà menzione, / nel secondo de’ mori e saracini; / nel terzo liete favole e novelle, / ch’un breve e dolce dir sale alle stelle,” Astolfeida, i 9. “Se sì o no sull’asino andò Gano / ne l’altro canto udir non vi sia strano,” Astolfeida, iii 39.

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The poets are lying, and the historians are vain about Troy, and Thebes, and parta and Thessaly if compared to the story I am about to say; when speaking of the paladins, if Truth helps me, lies are like the barking of a dog. I will tell more of peace than of battles, in the face of mendacious chroniclers, the blunt truth about the French paladins.104 The coupling of truth and slander is repeated in the fourth octave “Dir male e dire il ver genera sdegno.”105 Aretino battled hypocrisy and had no intention of lauding those who did not deserve it. It does not seem that he intended to distance himself from the accusation hurled upon him by Berni, who defined him as “lingua fracida, marcia, senza sale” (putrid, rotten, and trivial tongue), and wished once again for him to be stabbed.106 We know that Aretino often attributed the name of prophet to himself; and it is for this reason, but perhaps not only for this reason, that here he invokes the help of the soothsayer Tiresia: You only I beseech, o excellent Tiresias You who had both nature and the natural, and you who were at the same time agent and patient You told the sheer truth to everyone.107 With a game of double meaning (the agens and the patiens of the Cortigiana), Aretino alluded to Tiresia’s metamorphosis from man to woman, as narrated in mythological tales. The exhibition of his own homosexuality, or rather of his being, in this environment, good for all parties, is another one of Aretino’s traits If, in Orlandino, against all protocols, he addressed the male lover, here it seems rather that he alluded to his own sexual versatility, linking it to the key motive for telling the truth. Just a few years prior, a boast of this type would not have been possible.

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“Falsi i poeti e l’istorici vani / di Troia e Tebe, di Sparta e Tesaglia / son presso a l’opra ov’io caccio le mani; / a dir de’ paladin, se ’l ver mi vaglia, / son le buggie un abbaiar di cani. / Io in pace dirò più che in battaglia, / de’ cronichisti mendaci al dispetto, / de’ paladin di Francia il vero schietto,” Astolfeida, i 3. “Slandering and telling the truth produce resentment,” Astolfeida, i 4. Berni, Rime, 829. “Tu solo invoco, o Tiresia eccellente, / ch’avesti il naturale e la natura; / tu fusti a un tempo agente e paziente, / dicesti il vero a tutti a la sicura,” Astolfeida, i 11.

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The poetic point of reference of Astolfeida is Pulci “the Florentine,” since even if Aretino seemed initially to want to reboot Ariosto (“I will tell of Astolfo, the man of good time / things that never before [have been said] with a pen or a brush” “Dirò d’Astolfo, l’uomo del buon tempo, / cosa non mai più in penna o in pennello,” i 2), his Astolfo (as well as Orlandino) has nothing to do with Ariosto’s style. Astolfo appears as he was before Ariosto: a handsome “braggart” (“parabolano”), an Englishman on horseback (because the English have little ability, “poco mestiero,” in horsemanship), a Frenchman in the kitchen, and a Mantuan in the bedroom. Having ended the idyllic life with the Gonzaga, Aretino took repeated jabs at Mantua (the people of Mantua are “fools and idiots,” “babbioni e alocchi”), and perhaps against Federico himself. The laws of repetition and rewriting triumph in the new, upside-down list of paladins: Gano the traitor, Turpino the liar, etc. But the list expands to include unexpected references which bear witness to Aretino’s dialogue with tradition as a whole. His references are that of a “Veglio de la Montagna,” of Ermelina, a “whore” (“zambracca”) for the reader who lacked the knowledge (“non lo sapesse”). In particular, the references to Morgante multiply, and from those references comes the character of Arcifanfan, King of Baldacco. Here also, as in Orlandino, the list of characters lies at the heart of a missing story that terminates in a parodic revision of the characters, some of them wellknown, others less so. The considerably refined and studied style of Marfisa and Angelica and the “natural” language of Aretino, writer of chivalric poems, comes very close to the language of theatre. The octave, which in Marfisa appears full of enjambements, twists, and rhetorical figures, here becomes simple and straightforward. The lexicon abounds with the compound words that Aretino preferred when writing comic works,108 as well as with the augmentations he likewise favored.109 Readers also encounter slang110 and Latin expressions, the latter often seasoned with a touch of ecclesiastic flavor and laced with profane, sometimes even obscene, double meanings.111 The serious-witty antagonism resolves itself, becoming a studied stylistic opposition: in addition to playing all the parts, Aretino wanted to demonstrate that he knew how to speak “on tip-toe” as much as he did “naturally.” 108 109 110 111

Such words are untranslatable: “squarta-poggi,” “squassa-pennacchi,” “purga-matti,” “belliin piazza,” “perde-giorni.” “Ipocritoni,” “arcipoltron,” “Arcivacca,” “Arcifanfan,” “arciprudentemente.” Again, these expressions are impossible to translate. “Pacchiare,” “pettinare,” “incacare,” “trempellare,” “berlingare,” “bubù,” “spaventacchio,” “cacca,” “pisciarella.” “Marum magno,” “totum mundum,” “ne nos induca,” “armorum,” “arma virumque cano.”

chapter 10

Aretino’s Theater Deanna Shemek and Jane Tylus

Pietro Aretino was one of the most inventive dramatists of the sixteenth century, even as this may be a difficult fact to appreciate today. Some of his plays are structured around barely integrated double, rather than single plots, making them confusing to follow. His characters regularly number twenty or more, some of whom speak only a few lines. He introduces contemporary events and long litanies of names—the famous as well as the forgotten—that might be said to limit his plays’ appeal as enduring works of art (a fact of which he seems to have been aware when he revised substantial portions of his 1525 Cortigiana for publication nine years later). Nor can one necessarily detect a clear pattern of Aretino’s growth as a dramatist, though he seems to have relied increasingly on ancient Roman source materials. Nonetheless, Aretino’s six plays, from the Cortigiana of 1525 to the Orazia of 1546, are indices of a particularly experimental moment in Italian theatre, as the recovery of Aristotle’s Poetics (1536) and the publication of Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio’s Discorso intorno al comporre delle commedie e delle tragedie (1546) generated “rules” not simply for comedy and tragedy but for future, “mixed” theatrical forms like tragicomedy.1

1 Citations in this chapter refer to Teatro i; Teatro ii; and Teatro iii. Also useful for extensive notes and introductions is the recent edition of Cortigiana (1525 and 1534) and Il Marescalco edited by Luca D’Onghia: Pietro Aretino, Teatro comico. Cortigiana (1525 e 1534). Il Marescalco, intr. Maria Cristina Cabani (Milan-Parma, 2014). Pietro Aretino, Tutte le commedie, ed. Giovanni Battista De Sanctis (Milan, 1968) contains all five of the comedies (with only the 1534 Cortigiana) and is especially attuned to lexical detail; while Pietro Aretino, Tutto il Teatro, ed. Antonio Pinchera (Rome, 1974) offers many elucidating glosses. Recent English versions include Christopher Cairns’ translation of Talanta in Three Renaissance Comedies (Lewiston, NY, 1991), 218–350; J. Douglas Campbell and Leonard G. Sbrocchi’s translation of the 1525 Cortigiana (Ottawa, 2003); and Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero’s translation of Il Marescalco as The Master of the Horse, in Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, and London, 2003), 117–204. English translations from these three plays will be drawn from these versions with revisions as noted. Translations from Lo Ipocrito, Il Filosofo, and Orazia are ours. Book-length studies of Aretino’s plays are relatively scarce. Mario Baratto, Tre studi sul Teatro: Ruzante, Aretino, Goldoni (Venice, 1964); and Giulio Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione: Pietro Aretino e la dissoluzione del teatro (Naples, 1977) still largely set the terms for considering the arc of Aretino’s theatrical career, while others have contributed essential chapters or articles that interpret the plays and lay out in succinct form their chronology from different

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_012

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With the possible exception of Cortigiana and Il Marescalco, which were likely first drafted, respectively, in Rome and Mantua, Aretino wrote all of his plays in Venice, his land of freedom and safety. Famously polygraph and drawn to the literary rendering of colloquial Italian, Aretino does not surprise for having taken up theatrical writing as a complement to his chatty letters and garrulous dialogues. More striking is the fact that the unorthodox Aretino participated in the specific intellectual vogue of “regular” or “erudite” comedy, a signature, Italian humanist genre aimed at reviving the classical, comic tradition of Plautus and Terence for early modern audiences. Initially interested in incorporating dialect and what Christopher Cairns has called “plebian tongues” into his plays, Aretino eventually seems to abandon such interest, in order to promote a more conservative and prestigious idea of “theatre as literature”— hence, perhaps, his growing interest in the commedia erudita.2 Giulio Ferroni sees this gravitation as a near-constant staging of the tension between Aretino’s histrionic will to speak in a solo voice—in the “theater of himself” that we find in his letters, prognostications, and dialogues—and his submission to the constraints of the conventional stage in order to attain cultural recognition and legitimacy.3 Aretino’s five comedies are typical of his social and political satire. His final dramatic endeavor—a sober tragedy drawn from a key text among early humanists, Livy’s History of Rome—coheres instead with the spirit of his ascetic works of the 1530s and ’40s, which were written with an eye to an ecclesiastical appointment that never materialized. Do his dramatic works change over twenty years, losing their satirical edge and linguistic exuberance? Or are the plays marked by a consistently experimental voice characterized by “aggressive force” and “satiric charge”?4 What seems especially striking about all of

approaches. See Richard Andrews, “Rhetoric and Drama: Monologues and set speeches in Aretino’s Comedies,” in Peter Hainsworth (ed.), The Languages of Literature in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1988), 153–168; Christopher Cairns, “Pietro Aretino e la scena: Testo, recita e stampa nella preistoria della comedia dell’arte,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 2, 959–980; and Luciana Zampolli, “La retorica in commedia: aspetti linguistici del teatro comico di Pietro Aretino,” in Christopher Cairns (ed.), Scenery, Set, and Staging in the Italian Renaissance: Studies in the Practice of Theatre (Lewiston, NY, 1996), 137–179. For Giraldi’s text, see Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinthio, Discorsi intorno al comporre. Rivisti dall’autore nell’esemplare ferrarese, Cl.i.90, ed. Susanna Villari (Messina, 2002); and in English, Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio, “Discourse or Letter on the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies,” Edited and Translated from the Italian by Daniel Javitch, Renaissance Drama, 39 (2011): 197–255. 2 This is something that Cairns finds ironic; see “Pietro Aretino e la scena,” 979. 3 Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 71–102 (73). 4 Cairns, “Pietro Aretino e la scena,” 980.

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Aretino’s plays is the fact that his characters are revealed not so much through their actions as through their words, incarnating what Cesare Segre has called “the new rhythm of the first half of the sixteenth century […] the rhythm of speech.”5 Yet the steady foregrounding of historical events, social institutions, and raw politics in Aretino’s theater demands that we see these plays as crucial commentaries on their time, and Aretino as a fundamentally political and social, as well as literary, writer. A relatively scant critical tradition belies Aretino’s productivity as a dramatist. With six plays to his name, he was both more prolific and more experimental than Ariosto, Bibbiena, or Machiavelli, who are often perceived as the leading playwrights of the first half of the Cinquecento. His resistance to Bembo’s argument for “proper” Italian allowed the linguistic richness and idiosyncracy of his early plays to anticipate the Babel of the commedia dell’arte and Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio (1582), placing Aretino in the theatrical avant garde.6 Yet no major study of Aretino’s theater has appeared since the 1970s—a surprising fact, in light of his daring exploration of issues that continue to concern readers today, including sexuality, class inequality, and the abuse of political power. The present chapter is therefore offered not only as an introduction to these remarkable texts, but also as an invitation to further scholarship.

1

Cortigiana

Until the late nineteenth century, it was frequently thought that Aretino had written what are generally agreed to be his two theatrical masterpieces, Cortigiana and Marescalco, at roughly the same time, after he departed Rome and Mantua and settled into Venice in the early 1530s. The publication record would seem to bear this out; Il Marescalco was first published in 1533, Cortigiana in 1534. But a discovery in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in the 1880s of a manuscript that one critic has called a canovaccio (sketch) of the Cortigiana alerted scholars to the earlier composition of this play. This would have been in the spring of 1525, shortly before Aretino’s near-assassination along the banks

5 “Edonismo linguistico del Cinquecento,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 130 (1953): 145–177; see particularly 164. 6 On which see Cairns, who argues for the works of Aretino as pre-cursors to the commedia dell’arte, and notes that Aretino based much of his concept of theatre on the informal comedy of mimes and buffoons present in the Roman court: “Pietro Aretino e la scena,” 961. In some ways, Aretino’s interest in ‘linguistic diversity’ pairs him with Ruzante, who experimented with Paduan dialect in his rustic plays of the 1510s and 20s.

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of the Tiber on July 24 by a henchman linked to a minister of Pope Clement vii, Giovanni Matteo Giberti.7 The differences between the two versions of Cortigiana are indeed significant, perhaps owing to what Richard Andrews proposed was an early version destined not for publication but for the stage.8 The 1534 edition was instead shaped and influenced by Aretino’s contact with writers and publishers in Venice almost a decade later.9 Given the vibrancy and originality of the 1525 version, most of the following comments will address the earlier play, although a few of the most notable changes in this biting satire of the court of Rome will be mentioned in passing. More precisely, Cortigiana is a satire not of the Roman court, but of individuals who want to be connected to it. The court of Rome is a place we never actually enter or see. As spectators, we are banished instead to its outskirts to watch those who inhabit its periphery: servants, whores, small-time courtiers, would-be courtiers, tricksters.10 Nor is there anything particularly compelling about that absent center. Indeed, several characters—among them a Florentine fishmonger who is the victim of a beffa or joke, and a servant who feels unappreciated by his master—want to leave as soon as possible. One is well reminded that this is Rome shortly before the 1527 Sack and that, save for the brief papacy of Adrian vi, the city has remained solidly in Medici hands—first under Leo x, then under Clement vii—since Aretino’s arrival in 1516. And given the Medici’s expansive cultural tastes, it also features a subculture of artistic entrepreneurs, including Aretino himself, who are all on the make.11 The best place to start with Cortigiana is its famously ambiguous title. As Bianca Calabresi notes in her essay on the play’s first appearance in England, John Florio offered this definition of the noun cortegianamenti in his 1598 dictionary, The Worlde of Wordes: “courtings, courtiers hollie-water tricks, courtesans prankes or devises.”12 As Florio informs his readers, Cortegiana is a noun meaning “a curtezan, a harlot, a strumpet, a whore.” While either noun might be appropriate for Aretino’s play, the exact title—Cortigiana rather

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For the background as well as for the first publication of the 1525 Cortigiana, see the introduction and edition of Giuliano Innamorati in Pietro Aretino, La cortigiana (Turin, 1973). As Raymond Waddington writes, Aretino must have had hopes that Cortigiana would be performed; he even includes references in the prologue to the backdrop. See his introduction to Campbell and Sbrocchi’s translation, Cortigiana, 12. Richard Andrews, “Rhetoric and Drama.” Cf. Mario Baratto’s phrase about the scene for Cortigiana as “la strada,” in Tre studi sul teatro, 90. Baratto, Tre studi sul teatro, 83. Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi, “ ‘Bawdy Doubles’: Pietro Aretino’s Comedie (1588) and the Appearance of English Drama,” Renaissance Drama (2010): 207–235 (227, n. 88).

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than La Cortegiana—argues for an understanding of the title as deriving from courtiers’—and courtesans’—“prankes or devises,” since the entire comedy consists of one such prank after another. And as the prologue to the original Cortigiana makes clear, this is a hybrid play as its double plot proceeds to target two very different victims with its numerous “prankes or devises.” One victim is the young Sienese Maco, who foolishly believes that he can become a cardinal if only he can figure out how to become a courtier first. The second is Parabolano, a Neapolitan who, according to himself and one of his servants, has already “made it” in Rome. But that achievement now pales next to his desire for the unattainable, aristocratic “Laura”—a clear reference to Petrarch’s idealized beloved. The two stories are only loosely connected: Parabolano, once hosted in Siena by Maco’s father, sends a welcome gift to the boy. But even if these minimal plots are only tangentially related, Maco and Parabolano are in effect doubles for one another in this work that places all of the power—if none of the privilege—in the hands of the underclass that supposedly serves the elites. Maco quickly falls under the influence of one Master Andrea, a pedant intent on turning that great work on “courtiership”—Castiglione’s Cortegiano, then circulating in manuscript—on its head.13 Andrea literally turns Maco upside down when he stuffs him into a Turkish bath, telling him his head must be reshaped and hence remade so he can become a perfect courtier. When Maco is handed a concave mirror, he believes that he has been deformed rather than reformed, and demands to know where the “real” Maco has gone. Parabolano, older and seemingly more savvy, is tricked by his scurrilous servant Rosso, who heard his master muttering in his sleep about “Laura.” Rosso arranges with the bawd Aloigia to bring Parabolano to a tryst in the middle of the night not with Laura but, unbeknownst to Parabolano, with the wife of a nearby baker, hoping to profit in return. Unlike Maco, Parabolano realizes he has been fooled, and his wisdom consists in laughing at his naiveté and suggesting that the entire affair be turned into a comedy: “By God, I’ve changed my mind—I’m going to laugh at this silly prank and my own stupidity!” (v.19).14 Maco, on the other hand, is left to others’ devices, manifestly clueless when it comes to figuring how to make his time in Rome productive. 13

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Campbell and Sbrocchi suggest in the notes to their translation of Cortigiana that Mastro Andrea was a friend of Aretino and a Venetian painter, “well known in Rome during the pontificate of Julius ii more for his pranks and jokes than for his art” (Aretino, Cortigiana, 145). “Mi voglio mutare di proposito e ridermi di questa così ladra burla e de la mia pazzia!”

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Maco’s stupidity is nowhere more apparent than in his tone-deafness to the variability and almost infinite resources of language—resources which other characters, such as Rosso, mine with considerable dexterity. Maco makes a jumble of Latin phrases he remembers from school to write a poem for a woman he saw leaning out of a window and with whom he professes to be in love. Unbeknownst to him, she is a courtesan. His mishmash of Virgil gives him away for the uneducated fool he is. He does not know how to use language to “tell the truth”—or to avoid telling the truth and hence to be playful—but rather employs it as decoration with no meaning. Master Andrea convinces him to put on the clothes of a Sicilian facchino (porter), prompting him to ask, like Buffalmaco in Boccaccio’s Decameron, “have these clothes turned me into someone else?” (ii.26). Parabolano’s unscrupulous servant Rosso, on the other hand, describes with such clarity the dystopian world of the lower class that we feel as though we are there. Thus, the scene with Aloigia, which depicts a dark mess hall where servants must settle for eating “a bowl of fava beans without oil or salt. Then at night five bites of bread that would break the jaws of a satyr,” served by a kitchen staff who “wouldn’t wash their hands if the Tiber was coming after them” (v.15).15 The Rabelaisian tendency to exaggerate in no way offsets what comes across in Rosso as the “truths” of a man who knows of what he speaks. For her part, Aloigia engages in vibrant homage to her “mentor” and sister, the whore Madonna Maggiorini, who has recently died: “She was the best friend anyone ever had. There was never an old woman who ate so much and worked so little” (ii.6).16 The prologue is in fact a manifesto for such verbal prowess, exemplified in the play’s use of a wide range of dialects as well as neologisms, maxims, and foreign words. One of its two combative actors (Istrione 1) characterizes Cortigiana as a linguistic hybrid of the popular and the literary, child of a “Bergamesque mother and a Tuscan father,” thus advertising Aretino’s linguistic and creative versatility.17 It is intriguing to think about this versatility with

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“Una scodella di fave senza olio e senza sale, poi la sera cinque bocconi de pane che guasterebbono la bocca a’ satiri;” “se ’l Tevere gli corressi dietro, non sariano per lavarsi le mani.” “Non fu ma’ la meglior compagna, né mai fu donna vechia di sí gran pasto e di cosí poca fatica.” If Aloigia looms larger than life in the play—a status somewhat reduced in the 1534 version where she is seen desperately praying to Raphael, Tobias, and other saints when the trick on Parabolano is discovered—her mentor is even more of a presence, although she is never seen: the real Beatrice de Bonis and protagonist of the Lamento della cortigiana ferrarese; see notes to Campbell and Sbrocchi’s translation of Aretino, Cortigiana, 141. Nino Borsellino, “La memoria teatrale di Pietro Aretino: I prologhi della Cortigiana,” in Il Teatro del Rinascimento, ed. Maristella di Panizza Lorch (Milan, 1980), 225–240.

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respect to the figure who emerges as the real genius loci of the prologue, and hence of the play: the armless statue, Pasquino, in Rome’s Piazza di Pasquino, to whom pasquinades (satiric poems and sayings) were appended throughout the Renaissance.18 The sixteenth-century version of Twitter, Pasquino’s opinions circulated throughout Rome more energetically in the 1520s than they had in the two decades before, thanks largely to Aretino’s contributions. Thus Istrione 1 invokes the statue by saying that “No one knows better than Pasquino what words can or can’t be used” (54), shortly after declaring that were it not for his respect for “Lady Comedy,” he would make everyone’s sins “a matter of public record” (52).19 On the one hand, Cortigiana becomes a lesson in how to write a comedy in Rome, where Aretino delighted in exposing just this public record. Careful to respect “Lady Comedy,” he nonetheless simultaneously unsettled his audience and his characters—effects dampened in the 1534 text, where he significantly altered the prologue. On the other hand, it suggests that how what is said is just as important as what is said. Istrione 1 notes Pasquino’s talents at speaking other tongues—“sometimes he speaks Greek, sometimes Corsican, or French, or German, Bergamese, Genoese, Venetian, Neapolitan” (55).20 He is not only polylingual but semi-divine, with a Muse for his mother and a social-climbing poet as his father. Ultimately, Cortigiana is a play in which very little happens. It dazzles instead with its verbal copiousness and confusion, as Aretino creates what Giorgio Patrizi has called a world in which “the use of spoken language” is “the all-encompassing expression of reality.”21 Rosso exemplifies this verbal resourcefulness, which is paralleled in his hilarious if gratuitous beffa of the fishmonger Ser Faccenda (Mr. Business), from whom he steals a fish to give as a gift from his master Parobolano to the would-be courtier Maco. Three acts later, explicitly calling to mind his earlier prank, he tricks the Jewish second-hand dealer Romanello into donning a friar’s costume, then alerts the police as to this infraction of a sumptuary law.22 Such pranks produce more than momentary discomfort: they lead to financial loss in the one case, imprisonment and possible torture in the other. Yet these ruses, which include the deception of 18 19

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Valerio Marucci, “L’Aretino e Pasquino,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 67–86. “Non è niuno che sappia meglio di Pasquino quello si può usare o no […] E se non ch’io ho rispetto a monna comedia che rimarebbe sola io publicarei tutti i deffetti vostri” (Teatro i, 64). “[…] E lo conferma Pasquino, che cicala d’ogni tempo greco, còrso, francese, todesco, bergamasco, genovese, venetiano e da Napoli” (65). Giorgio Patrizi, “Aretino e Boccaccio,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 143–156: 156. “Sarà meglio ch’io ne facci una a questo giudeo, come al pescatore” (“I think I’ll play one on this Jew just like I did on the fishmonger”); iv.15.

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Parabolano himself for Rosso’s financial gain, leave the perpetrator unscathed. At the end of the scene where Rosso and Aloigia are vividly describing the haunts of the poor, they hear Parabolano shouting, having discovered that the woman in his bed is not Laura, and Rosso slinks off the stage, not to be seen again. Aretino treats Rosso rather differently in the 1534 version of the play, bringing him back to surround him with his victims and have him apologize to both Parabolano and Faccenda. To an extent, such a change might suggest that Aretino came to feel that the earlier Cortigiana had lacked a moral center. Yet perhaps we should not take Rosso’s appearance at the end of the second Cortigiana to mean that Aretino was intent on punishing his most transgressive character. Parabolano’s other servant, Valerio, upset over Parabolano’s ingratitude for his many years of loyalty, closed the original Cortigiana, content that his master finally recognized that he, Valerio, “was the one servant who could discern the truth” (v.16).23 And it is Valerio who tells Parabolano that he “should have a good laugh about [everything] and people will forget your juvenile behavior that much sooner” (v.17).24 Bringing Rosso back at the end of the 1534 text in a way legitimizes his activities, as he is forgiven—and befriended—by Valerio. Rosso then remains onstage alone, to deliver the licenza (leave-taking) in a few dismissive lines: “Audience, whoever blames the length of our sermon clearly isn’t used to being in Court, because if he was familiar with it, he would know that in Rome everything takes forever—except coming to your ruin” (v.26).25 In another twist to the original plot, in the closing scene Parabolano takes out his anger on Romanello—now simply called “Giudeo”—who is complaining about having been tortured and led to jail rather than paid. Parabolano’s brutal response echoes Rosso’s earlier words and adds a markedly anti-semitic tone: “Shut up, Isaac, or Jacob, or whatever it is you’re called. And just be grateful that you’re still alive, since you’re one of those who crucified Christ” (v.25).26 Such details make one question Pamela D. Stewart’s assertion that the 1534 Cortigiana offers a “festive climate” indicative of “Aretino’s new relationship to power,” conforming to a normal comic ending that is “unequivocally happy

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“Adeso cognosco io ch’un servitor intende el vero” (v.17). “Anzi, che vi prego, l[e] faritti escan fora e ridendo ascoltiamo la burla che v’è stata fatta con nova arte, e che poi siate el primo a contarla, acciò che piú presto si domentichino le tue gioventudini” (v.18). “Brigata, chi biasimasse la lunghezza della nostra predica è poco uso in corte, perché, se ci fosse uso, sapendo che in Roma tutte le cose vanno alla luna eccetto il ruinarsi, loderia il nostro cianciar lungo, che gli andamenti suoi non si conterebbeno in secula seculorum.” “E non ti paia poco a te, che sei di quelli che crocifissero Cristo, il rimanerti vivo.”

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and universally inclusive”.27 Giulio Ferroni has argued that if anything, Aretino made Rome appear in an even more negative light in 1534—by which time he was familiar with Venetian “liberty.”28 An entirely new prologue features a Forestiere (Foreigner) and a Gentleman commenting, in subdued and far more controlled tones than the 1525 prologue, on a Rome rendered unrecognizable after the Sack. They also recite a long, annoying list of the names of famous contemporaries, Aretino among them, perhaps inspired by Ariosto’s inclusion of Aretino’s name in the final edition of Orlando furioso (1532).29 But the presence of a “foreigner” in the new prologue reminds us that by 1534 Aretino was a stranger to Rome as well. His albeit involuntary departure fulfilled the wishes of both the fishmonger and the servant Flaminio, who want to leave Rome and go elsewhere, such as Venice. Flaminio’s lavish praise of the city in iii.7 may reflect Aretino’s true sentiments.

2

Il Marescalco

Postdating the 1525 manuscript of Cortigiana but prior in publication is Aretino’s Il Marescalco (The Master of the Horse), published 1533/1534.30 Aretino likely first drafted his text while residing in Mantua, where this play is set. Following his flight from Rome, he took refuge first in Mantua where, from late 1526 to early 1527, he found congenial companions in Federico ii Gonzaga and his court artist, Giulio Romano, whom Aretino had known in Rome. Il Marescalco turns to the standard material of Italian commedia erudita— marital and erotic mismatch—but offers a bold variation on the conventional

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Pamela D. Stewart, “La diversa ‘teatralità’ delle due Cortigiane,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 2, 717–733: 732. Giulio Ferroni, “Pietro Aretino e le corti,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 23–48 (31). Marga Cottino-Jones, Introduzione a Pietro Aretino (Bari, 1983) 84. The 1534 Cortigiana also limits what had been a number of characters’ addresses to the audience, as Richard Andrews has noted, making it, Andrews surmises, more ‘literary.’ Richard Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge and New York, 1993), 67. The first edition of the play is dated February 1533, but some have argued on contextual evidence that the final digit is a printer’s error, and the true date must be February 1534. Paul Larivaille argues for 1534 in his “Nota introduttiva” to the play, Teatro ii, 11; and in Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome, 1980), 445–446. For 1533, see Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice: Researches on Aretino and his Circle in Venice, 1527–1556 (Florence, 1985), 36 n. 6; and Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 71– 72.

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disorder that must be righted so that youthful love may take its proper course. The prologue primes the audience, first with a plot spoiler. The Istrione stands before them, obliged by his companions: [to] tell you about how the magnanimous Duke of Mantua […] having in his service a certain Marescalco—who was as enthusiastic about women as a moneylender is enthusiastic about spending money—organized a practical joke on him whereby the Marescalco would have to take a wife along with a dowry of four thousand scudi. So, dragging him to the home of the well-mannered Count Nicola, […] this Marescalco was forced to marry a boy dressed as a girl. When he discovered the trick, the valiant man was happier in finding that his bride was male than he’d formerly been sad in thinking her female (118).31 Istrione goes on to profile a cast of stock characters inherited from Roman Comedy, showcasing his own acting skills by demonstrating how he would play each of these, given the chance. If he were the prologue speaker (which he claims not to be), he would show gravitas. If he were to play the procuress, he would dress up as a friar, trick his way into the lady’s house, persuade her of his patron’s riches and beauty, hand her a love note, and help her lie to her husband. In rapid succession, he embodies the prim lady beloved (“Miss Prissy,” or Madonna Schifa-il-poco), the lover, the miser, the braggart soldier, the parasite, and the old geezer, finally adding, “I must confess, however, that I’d be hard-pressed to act like a lord. For if I were a lord […] I’d never be able to ignore the faithfulness of a follower, the help of a friend, or the ties of the flesh and blood like they do. Nor would I be able, with all my muttonheadedness, to match their—I hate to say it—ignorance” (123).32 Through his solitary Istrione, Aretino shows not only that he has the conventions of comic theater firmly in hand but also, as Paul Larivaille notes, that

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“[A] dirvi come il magnanimo Duca di Mantova […] avendo un marescalco ritroso con le donne, come gli usurai con lo spendere, gli ordina una burla, per via della quale gli fa tôr moglie con nome di quattro milia scudi di dota, e strascinatolo in casa del gentilissimo Conte Nicola, […] sposa per forza un fanciullo che da fanciulla era vestito. E scopertosi lo inganno, il valente uomo ne ha più allegrezza nel trovarlo maschio che non ebbe dolore credendolo femina” (Teatro ii, 27). “Vi confesso bene che mi metteria un bestial pensiero di contrafare un signore, perché se io fossi un signore […] non saprei mai, come loro, non riconoscere fede di servitore, né beneficio di amico, né carnalità di sangue; né potrei, con la mia castroneria, aggiunger mai alla loro, io non vo’ dire, ignoranza” (Teatro ii, 30).

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there is one single creator behind this play and that actors and stage sets are hardly necessary for voicing Aretino’s art.33 He also alerts his audience to the scandalous novelty he is bringing to a by-now familiar type of plot. Il Marescalco revolves around a single practical joke. In this case, however, the object of cruel fun is not the clueless, cuckold husband (as in Bibbiena’s 1513 Calandra) or the aging, lascivious father figure (found in Machiavelli’s 1525 Clizia); and there are no young lovers whose union often provides the play’s comic resolution. Here, the butt of the joke is instead a high-ranking courtier, the master of the prestigious Gonzaga stables, whose explicit desire is to remain free of marital bonds, while the play’s comic ending is a parody of conventional nuptials, played out by a bride in drag. Il Marescalco’s version of the happy ending that brings order out of social chaos is thus a radical departure: the title character not only discovers, to his immense relief, that plans for his impending marriage were a fiction; he also gets to kiss the boy who poses as the only kind of spouse he might enjoy, a male one. The Marescalco learns, to his horror, in Act i from his boy lover, Giannicco, that his lord has decided to marry him off this very night. Thenceforth the action of the play consists in his disheartening encounters with people who convince him that the news of his impending doom is true. They taunt him, offer him advice, and share their views on married life. First comes Messer Jacopo, who observes that even the greatest courtiers of the city would feel fortunate to gain this beautiful and wealthy wife (who is never named). He warns darkly that it would be politically dangerous not to accept her (i.2). The Marescalco’s Balia (Wetnurse) gushes with gratitude and enthusiasm at this turn of events, since it will oblige her “son” to leave off his youthful vice. She then seeks to entice him with a hilariously idealized scene of quotidian marital bliss, wherein husbands return home each evening to wives who live to pamper their spouses. To this the recalcitrant Marescalco replies, “[Y]ou should talk with one of those poor dogs who must suffer with a real wife who seems to be possessed by every demon that exists, suffering her at the table, in bed, in the morning, in the evening, outside, and inside” (i.6).34 The town Pedant

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Larivaille, “Nota introduttiva,” (12–14), observing that between the publications of Marescalco and Cortigiana Aretino printed the first part of his Ragionamenti (April 1534), argues that the two prologues and the Ragionamenti together suggest Aretino’s satiation with theater and his aspiration for a type of dramatic mimesis unfettered by rules and the need for a stage. “E bisogneria che voi parlassi con uno di quelli male arrivati, che a tavola, in letto, la mattina, la sera, e fuori, e dentro, sì come tutti i demoni fossero nel corpo de la sua moglie, così è tormentato da la alterezza, da la ostinazione e da la poca carità d’essa.”

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waxes moral and quotes Scripture about the duty to marry and reproduce (i.9). Another courtier, Ambrogio, provides the flipside of the Balia’s rosy vision, replete with details from his own experience, about wives’ infidelity, their class resentment, gossip, nagging, sexual indifference, and other flaws, concluding, “Well, all I can say is that the sack of Rome or of Florence was nothing compared with the way they wreck, slash, and destroy those poor sap husbands who have faith in them” (ii.5).35 In the central act of the play, the Jew (Giudeo), urged by Giannicco, tries to sell the outraged Marescalco baubles for his bride (iii.2) and the Jeweler (Gioielliere), whom the nervous Marescalco surmises has been summoned to make rings for his wedding, converses with a Footman (Staffiere) about contemporary politics (iii.6). These scenes serve both to situate the play in its precise historical moment (for example by reference to the 1533 marriage of Henri of Orleans, future king of France, to Catherine de’ Medici) and to allow Aretino to pay nominal homage to Federico ii Gonzaga, Pope Clement vii, and François i of France through his characters’ banter.36 Act iv heightens the Marescalco’s desperation as the inevitable draws near. To the Balia’s and Ambrogio’s depictions of marriage is added the testimony of Jacopo, a happily married man whose embrace of wedlock and fatherhood has moved him to abandon the competitive atmosphere of the court altogether, but also to withdraw from society entirely: “I derived such happiness from this that I forgot the court, my service there, and my concerns about being rewarded for my merits. In sum, I was transformed from a courtier into a lover of peace and quiet. I hardly ever left home” (iv.5).37 The Marescalco, unconvinced that this instance of happiness in oblivion is representative, asks, “[D]oes one rose make a springtime?”38 Finally, the disgusted Balia disowns her beloved, intractable charge:

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“Ma la ruina di Roma e di Fiorenza è stata più discreta che non è quella con la quale disfanno, spianano e profondano i meschini mariti che gli credeno.” iii.6 also contains a reference to the gold chain Francis i sent to Aretino, which the writer wore in a number of his portraits and mentioned in many of his writings. In v.3, Aretino once again mentions Charles v and, in a typical effort to curry favor, weaves into the dialogue a list of contemporary friends and potential patrons whom, the Pedant tells him, his future son might resemble in his various talents and virtues. The series of names is so long that the Marescalco asks to sit down while hearing it. “[N]’ebbi tanta allegrezza che mi dimenticai de la corte, del servire, e de le speranze de i miei meriti, e trasformatomi di cortegiano in uno amator de la quiete e de la consolazione, di casa mai non usciva.” Giannetti and Ruggiero have chosen a colloquial phrase in English to render Aretino’s expression, “Does one basket of grapes make a harvest?” (“[P]arvi che un canestro d’uva faccia vendemmia?”).

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“[G]et this through your head, I’m no longer your Balia” (iv.7).39 Act v brings about the resolution that some, if not all, of the characters in the play have been expecting along with the audience. But before the Marescalco learns, to his great relief, that he has escaped a marriage he has equated with death by execution, a mock wedding carries him to the brink of demise; he faints with the words, “Oh, my, I’m dying, I’m about to explode … I … commen … spirtum me” (v.10).40 Only after the Marescalco’s total capitulation to the Duke’s will is the comedy of his misfortune unmasked for the farce that it is. Only once he has squirmed before the audience for five acts of the play is his role in the Duke’s public spectacle revealed to him as a charade, played out primarily for his master’s (and our) amusement. If open criticism of court life is attenuated in this comedy by comparison with Cortigiana, there is also continuity here with Aretino’s denunciation of the brutality and cynicism at the heart of the Renaissance court. Indeed, a deeper accusation against princely despotism may be discerned in the play’s backhanded praise for the Duke of Mantua’s relentless manipulation and harassment of the helpless Marescalco before the eyes of fellow subjects, some of whom know, vaguely, that they are characters in the Duke’s reality theater but are uncertain about its outcome. Ferroni sees both the Istrione and the Marescalco as figures for an intransigent Aretino, while another argument may be made for a differently subversive jab in this play, at Federico Gonzaga himself who was, at the time, resisting demands that he marry.41 In either case, this display of the Marescalco’s torments goes to the heart of the matter of selfdetermination that so concerned Aretino as a political servant himself, and that ultimately led him to flee all courts and claim the Republic of Venice as his home.42 The various arguments for and against matrimony spoken by characters in the Marescalco recall a well-known subgenre of the Renaissance dialogue, in which speakers address a central preoccupation of the times, and to which Aretino would make his own, outrageous contribution through the Ragion39 40 41 42

“[I]o men vado a casa mia; fa conto che io non sia quella.” “Oimè, io muoio, io scoppio! Commen […] spirtum me!” The italicized words in Latin signify, “Commend […] my soul!” Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 79, 85; Deanna Shemek, “Marriage Woes and the Duke of Mantua: Aretino’s Marescalco,” Renaissance Studies, 16/3 (2002): 366–380. In iv.8, for example, the Duke’s coercion of others to participate in his cruel fun is signaled by the Footman, who stomps away after his conversation with the Marescalco, saying to himself, “Well, I’ve done what the Lord wished: he ordered me to harass him. He really is suffering. But I must get back to court;” “Io ho servito il Signore, che mi commise che io lo molestassi, ah, ah, ah, che dolore egli ha! Lasciami ritornare in corte” (iv.8).

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amenti.43 But another figure in the play, the young servant Giannicco, draws attention in particular to the situation of young, unmarried men in early modern Italy. Giannicco’s language and actions attest to his own readiness to grow up. Openly acknowledged by other characters as the Marescalco’s passive sexual partner, he both taunts and urges his master to consent to the Duke’s plans for marriage, saying that he no longer wishes to stay with him (e.g. i.1, i.2, i.4, i.7., ii.5, iv.2). He abets the practical joke of the Knight’s Page (Paggio del Cavaliere) (ii.2), who lights firecrackers that explode at the Pedant’s backside (a clear reference to this authority figure’s own suspected sodomitical tendencies), provoking the Pedant to call him a boy whore (cinedulo). Giannicco tells the Balia that the Duke should hang the Marescalco, but then addresses him with affection (ii.6); and in a key exchange with the Count, he reveals his own interest in the Duke’s plan: “I’d like this, sir: he’ll have to put out for a few days after the marriage, but soon the usual handsome young guys will begin flocking around like roosters; then he can have his fill of the cocks and I’ll have my fill of the hen” (ii.8).44 If, in the end, Giannicco tells the Balia that he is happy with the outcome of the Duke’s farce because he could never bear to leave his master and live with someone else, he has nonetheless been marked emphatically in the play as a young man ready to take on the conventional, aggressive and active role expected of adult males in early modern Italy. By the play’s end, the Marescalco has won an autonomy that has been publicly sanctioned, but Giannicco’s transition to the active sexuality of his choice remains stalled.45 For all its humor and its comic ending, Il Marescalco presents one of Aretino’s most disquieting reflections on the crippling bonds of courtiership and the thwarted ideals of liberty and individualism that were (in theory) so key to the flourishing of the Italian Renaissance. The play’s prince toys with his subjects’ deepest longings and makes their lives into a comedy for his own personal amusement, but from his safe haven in the Republic of Venice, Aretino shone a critical spotlight on his former protector, the Duke of Mantua, and staged a critique of despotic power.

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For a review of this literature, see Daniela Frigo, “Dal caos all’ordine: sulla questione del ‘prender moglie’ nella trattatistica del sedicesimo secolo,” in Marina Zancan (ed.), Nel cerchio della luna. Figure di donna in alcuni testi del xvi secolo (Venice, 1983), 57–93. “[E]gli averà da spendere primamente per qualche giorno, poi ella tirerà a casa i bei giovanetti, ond’egli mangerà gli uccelli e io la civetta.” On male-male erotic relations as a normal life stage in early modern Italy, see Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York and Oxford, 1996); and Giannetti-Ruggiero, Five Plays, xxxvii–ix.

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La Talanta and Lo Ipocrito

Both La Talanta and Lo Ipocrito were written in 1542, during a flurry of activity that Aretino suggests in a letter to Piccolomini lasted “perhaps twenty nights.”46 Composed almost two decades after the original Cortigiana and fifteen years after the first draft of the impudent Marescalco, these plays are characterized by a more restrained tone, in part because of solemn male characters critical of what they see as the carnivalesque and brutal world around them. In La Talanta, four suitors attempt to woo the courtesan whose name provides the title for the play, while a father and his daughter look for two lost siblings who turn out to be slaves, given as gifts to Talanta. In Lo Ipocrito a father with five daughters tries to figure out how to marry them off. These plays revolve, in short, around familial issues, in marked contrast with Cortigiana and Il Marescalco, with their primarily masculine environments of the court. They end in multiple marriages—four in one case, five in the other—an excess that makes it seem that Aretino is exaggerating the conventions of comedy. And as Aretino highlights the role of the family, so does he highlight women: two of the five daughters in Lo Ipocrito, along with their mother, Maia, are central characters in the play, while Talanta dominates her own comedy until the third act, when her sphere of influence sharply declines. Especially in La Talanta, one finds traces of the occasional disruption associated with the courtly worlds of Cortigiana and Il Marescalco, as the courtesan Talanta presides over the only court-like environment we see. And as in Cortigiana, there are still plenty of sharp satiric edges, mostly aimed at two of Talanta’s suitors, both of them character types that later became familiar in the commedia dell’arte: Messer Vergolo, the doddering Venetian merchant, evolved as the commedia’s Pantalone and the Neapolitan Captain Tinca models the stock character of the commedia’s braggart soldier (also seen in the Sienese Gli Ingannati of 1531 and Piccolomini’s L’amor costante, written the same year as Talanta). The Prologue (here, effectively, a character in its own right) describes the fantasy of a disaffected actor who has wandered away from his cohort and dreams that he gets to choose to be whatever deity he’d like. He decides on Cupid, who takes the place of Cortigiana’s Pasquino as the presiding genius loci. Finally, Talanta unfolds, like Cortigiana, in Rome. The setting is carefully delineated in i.3 when Vergolo is given a tour that includes the Colosseum, the

46

See the letter Aretino wrote to Piccolomini in 1542 where he explains he’s written two plays “in forse venti notti,” as cited in Baratto, Tre studi sul teatro, 136.

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Obelisk, and the Column of Trajan. Another scene (iv.21) is set in a church near the Pantheon where the play’s father figure Blando, lately returned to Rome, reminisces over his friendship with the man who painted the works they are gazing at: one “Rafaello da Urbino;” and two acts earlier a character is told to see Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (ii.4). As these remarks suggest, the Rome of Talanta is a city vaster and more imposing than the scurrilous borgo of Cortigiana, and it may be no surprise that in the course of the play Talanta’s “courtesan’s devices” will fade in importance with respect to the competing plot of Blando, a respectable man searching for his two lost children. Given Aretino’s experiences in Rome, it is understandable why Blando laments that he wanted once to “emigrate to Venice, famed for its concord, justice and quiet”—but he put it off for too long and has instead arrived, after much hardship, in Rome (v.1).47 Kidnapped and sold into slavery during the days of the invasion of Sultan Suleiman—a direct if rare reference in this play to the tumultuous times—two of Blando’s three children (Oretta and Antino) are now grown slaves who were given to Talanta as gifts by their aging wooers, a knight and a merchant. Both, however, are in love with other, much younger matches. Oretta and Antino have also disguised themselves, each in the garb of the other’s gender, for reasons of sheer survival. In much the same way, during the Ottoman invasions Blando dyed himself and their sister (Lucilla) black, “thinking that if we looked like one of that nation, we might save our lives and liberty” (v.1)48—an interesting and early example of “turning Turk” in an effort to avoid enslavement or death. Blando’s at-times officious, at-times moving lines about the fate he and his family have suffered since his wife died giving birth to the triplet siblings—“the memory of my strange adversity is so sweet and pleasurable to me” (iv.26)49— provide a counter-point to the trifling adventures of the hapless suitors, such as Tinca’s desires to “find me a poet who will put all my famous deeds into verse, and then a musician to make them rhyme” so he can win Talanta (iii.12).50

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“Pensava di eleggermi per patria Vinezia, amministrata da la concordia, da la giustizia e da la quiete; ma non lo messi in essecuzione così presto come il tempo mi ammoniva a farlo.” “Con una acqua che faceva de le carni bianche nere, tinsi me e una de le mie figliuole da moro, credendomi che il parer di tal nazione ci scampasse la libertà o la vita.” Blando wants to dye the skin of his other two children, but he has no time to do so before the “vincitori,” or the Ottomans, are upon him, putting him into chains and forcing him into slavery. “Essendomi molto dolce e di gran giovamento il ricordo di sì strane avversità.” “Trovami domattina un poeta che metta i miei fatti in canto, e un musico che gli ponga in rima.”

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With its revelation of mistaken identities, the knight’s and merchant’s relinquishment of their young slaves to Blando, and Blando’s subsequent promise to all three of his children that they may marry the people they love, the ending is reminiscent of Roman New Comedy; and indeed, Aretino modeled Talanta on Terence’s Eunuchus. Aretino accumulates many more characters, although in one important instance he refuses multiplicity. Terence’s generous courtesan ends up with two lovers, while Talanta accepts her age-appropriate Orfinio alone. Largely uninvolved in the wrapping up of events at play’s end, Talanta only eavesdrops on the scene of familial revelations. Noticed by one of her former suitors, she is called onto the stage “so that [this] example of holy matrimony may be an example to her in doing good” (v.23).51 Four weddings thus close the play, as the aging Tinca magnanimously claims to Orfinio that “she [Talanta] is far more suitable for your youth than to our old age” (v.24).52 Thus we see the triumph of the young, but a youth that no longer possesses the febrile energy of the servant Rosso from Cortigiana, while Talanta’s machinations juggling her suitors are also clearly at an end. The play contains only one extended, gratuitous beffa that revolves around a Messer Necessitas (Master Necessity), who misconstrues a St. Christopher in a chapel for a Madonna. Dramatic energy in Talanta is, rather, directed toward the fulfillment of love in “holy matrimony.” Pizio, Orfinio’s articulate if whining servant, can be said to best define this matrimonial state, even as he himself is denied its rewards. Like his prototype in Terence’s Eunuchus, from the beginning he warns his master of the courtesan’s hypocrisy, as she commandeers money and gifts from multiple suitors at the end of Act 1.53 But Pizio is also more complex than Terence’s Phormio. In one of the more self-consciously theatrical scenes in Aretino’s comedies, Pizio delivers a soliloquy as Orfinio approaches, and he begs his master to wait “until I’ve finished sorting out one or two things in my mind” (ii.17).54 He then declares why he has just uttered an entire soliloquy about what, for him, constitutes true love, unlike Orfinio’s lust for a fickle prostitute: “The world today is full of strange kinds of people” who, when they gather with others, “don’t

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“Acciò lo essempio de i nostri matrimoni la riduca al ben fare.” “Ella si conviene tanto a la tua gioventù quanto si disconveniva a la nostra vecchiaia.” Where Talanta turns away from Orfinio to gleefully announce to her own servant how much she has just pocketed from Orfinio’s visit: “Se non venivi, te l’avresti veduto, però che gli nettava i puntali, come anco gli ho nettato questo annelluzzo e questo fermaglio” (If you hadn’t come along, you’d have been able to see the results; I’ve got his sword ornament just as I’ve nicked this little ring and broach); i.15. “Fin che io conferisco alcune cosettine a me stesso.”

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speak for the pleasure of it, but argue for the sake of combat […]. So, since I’ve no stomach for such affectations, when the whim to talk occurs to me, I accompany myself with Pizio […]” (ii.19).55 Orfinio’s impatient response— “I was looking for good news, not a lecture!”56—may also be ours, prompted by hearing too much about the light of his beloved’s eyes and other exaggerated Petrarchan sentiments. Yet given that the speaker of the prologue himself had launched into a fantasy about playing Cupid after leaving “this bunch of mindless idiots […] unwilling as I am to sink to their level and not wanting to get carried away with their revels,”57 it seems clear that Aretino is interested in developing a character who detaches himself from the rest of the play space. “Love” will indeed guide the play, perhaps even the kind to which Pizio gave a serious voice during his soliloquy, and perhaps facilitating the definition of comedy Pizio proffers at the close: “Since all the turmoil of this story has a tranquil ending, it may be justly termed comedy!” (v.24).58 Talanta is the only work in Aretino’s theatrical corpus for which there exist extensive references to a performance, which took place in Venice on the Cannaregio canal during carnival season in 1542. Commissioned by the Accademia dei Sempiterni, the play alludes in its prologue to the young actors, the rowdy bunch from whom the speaker quickly disassociates himself when he goes off to have his dream. Only after violently waking from his fantasy of being Cupid does he indicate his “friends back here” (i nostri compagni di dentro) and list the characters who are about to emerge. As Elena Povoledo mentions in her invaluable pages on the production of Talanta, the academy, like all of Venice’s Compagnie della Calza (Stocking Societies), featured young noblemen who delighted in organizing dinners, parties, and plays, recruiting for their members “artists and men of culture, merchants, musicians, lawyers and writers […] to talk about every kind of subject, but especially theatre.”59 The stage set was designed by none other than the painter Giorgio Vasari— albeit long before he began working for the Medici. No visual evidence survives for Vasari’s set, although he mentions the occasion in his Lives of the Artists and lists the buildings featured in his design. In his introduction to his trans55

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“Il mondo si è oggi riempito d’una razza di brigate molto strane” [che] “non ragionano per piacere, ma favellano per combattere. Onde io, che non ho stomaco da digestire sì fatti umori, subito che il gricciolo del confabulare mi cade in fantasia, mi accompagno con Pizio.” “Io cerco di sapere qualche novella buona, e non di udir proemi.” Cairns, Talanta, 219. “trebbio di teste buse da vero;” “io, stando in sul satrapo, non volsi che le chimere m’imbarcassino,” Teatro ii, 363. “Poi che il travaglio di questa novella ha tranquillo fine, si può chiamar materia comica.” Nino Pirrotta-Elena Povoledo, Li due Orfei. Da Poliziano a Monteverdi (Turin, 1975), 392.

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lation of Talanta, Christopher Cairns ingeniously pieced together these verbal descriptions with surviving sketches of the Roman Forum by the Netherlandish artist Maarten Van Heemskerck, with whom Vasari was associated.60 The physical aspects of the performance space may have challenged Aretino to come to terms with the sprawling theatrical practices of Cortigiana. Perhaps he sought to accommodate them to the elite environs of a Venetian palazzo, within which Rome was depicted not as the seedy periphery described by Rosso and Aloigia, but as the monumental center of an empire. Lo Ipocrito, the other play that emerged from those twenty feverish nights, is situated in Milan. The comedy’s oblique allusions to politics evoke not the court of the ousted Sforza princes, but Milan’s former grandeur (v.10) prior to the city’s ruin by the Spanish, French, and Germans. As though to mark the final passing of the courtesan from center-stage, Lo Ipocrito features an “exruffiana” or former courtesan, whose appearance is far more marginal than that of Talanta. The focus is rather on solid bourgeois marriages, a theme with which the padre della famiglia (father of the house), Liseo, is understandably obsessed. Two of his five daughters, Tansilla and Porfiria, command major roles. One has been promised to a man who mysteriously disappeared, and she has subsequently fallen love with someone else. Her sister, in the meantime, sent out a desperate lover on what she thought was an impossible quest—to bring back the feathers of a phoenix—only to be faced with his return after she has agreed to marry Corbeo, the man she really loves. And Liseo is tearing his hair out wondering how to cover the cost of five dowries and juggle the demands of Cupid—the reigning deity, we will recall, in Talanta—as well as speculating on what he would do should his lost twin brother ever return and demand to share his apparently slender patrimony. Predictably, Liseo’s brother Brizio does return, making his way back to Milan after many years, and expressing in his opening scene (i.9) his hope that now that he is sixty and without heirs, “If someone of my own blood might recognize in me the maternal bond, I should die content.”61 Unbelievably, even when Liseo and Brizio share the stage together after countless misunderstandings that both imitate and vastly amplify similar moments in Plautus’s Menaechmi—another play about twins who are mistaken for one another and an obvious source for Aretino—the odore de la carnalità goes undetected. The prolonged confusion generates suspicions of demonic possession, among other things, until common sense prevails and Liseo’s wife realizes that the man to 60 61

Cairns, Talanta, introduction, 210–211. “Che qualcuno del mio sangue mi sentisse a l’odore de la carnalità, chè di poi morrei contento.”

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whom she has been talking for an entire scene is not her husband, but her brother-in-law. Brizio is well-off and has no need of their parents’ money; thus when finally he is welcomed into the family, Liseo can be expected to breathe a sigh of relief. Yet this sigh is not forthcoming. One of the most curious aspects of Lo Ipocrito is the role played by the title character, described as “Ipocrito, parasito” (Hypocrite, a parasite). Like Talanta, a commanding presence early in her comedy only to be sidelined by others, the Ipocrito too starts out prominently but finds himself increasingly marginalized. The sheer force of the plot sweeps him aside as the young lovers assert themselves, Liseo’s brother returns, and destiny or chance prevail over cunning. We might expect a great deal of wicked fun from a character who, in the second scene, is already pronouncing on his supposedly sordid occupation: “If you don’t know how to pretend, you don’t know how to live, because dissimulation is a shield that deflects all weapons; indeed, it is a weapon that shatters every shield” (i.2).62 Yet as he goes on to suggest that one of his ‘weapons’ will be his constant recourse to charity and impenetrable Latin phrases, he loses his edge. Early on, Liseo is eager to count on the hypocrite’s advice regarding respectable suitors for his daughters, and Ipocrito launches into a full-blown satire of the entire world, listing all the men with whom they should not get involved, from soldiers and courtiers to painters, merchants, and musicians. But such explosive scenes soon disappear, as if Aretino quickly tired of his title character. Other than dispensing advice with the utmost seriousness and calling attention to his penchant for generating tristizia or wickedness, Ipocrito does little to advance or hinder the course of the play, with two exceptions. One is when he encourages Liseo’s third daughter (Annetta) to run off with her lover. The other, with arguably more dramatic results, is to give an increasingly frantic Liseo a “prescription […] against fortune”: “Turn everything that bothers you into a joke” (iii.17).63 After making a series of analogies with whores and wines to show how this philosophy works, Ipocrito finishes, maintaining that “every single thing you’re suffering now will be converted into games and song”—“converting” Liseo on the spot, who instantly says, “I’m no longer the man I once was.”64 As innocuous as this prescription might seem, the “game” carries Liseo off into what seems like madness, as he begins to provide a discomfiting, increasingly incomprehensible commentary on the play’s actions: “Ah, ah, ah” is all he utters in the closing 62 63 64

“Chi non sa fingere non sa vivere; perocché la simulazione è uno scudo che spunta ogni arme, anzi un’arme che spezza ogni scudo.” “Il recar d’ogni vostro travaglio in berta.” Ipocrito: “Ogni vostra doglia si convertirà in giuoco et in canto;” Liseo: “Non son più quello.”

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scene, ending a final act that is strewn with tautologies: “You want this to be the case, and you don’t want this to be the case, and that’s just fine with me.”65 Even Ipocrito becomes uncomfortable with Liseo’s verbal flourishes, criticizing him in a remarkably lucid phrase: “With respect to the flow of your words you speak clearly enough, but you don’t observe as you should the way that the facts unfold” (v.8).66 “Facts,” however, are no longer important, and Liseo’s farewell to the audience asserts how inconsequential anything of consequence is to him: “if you enjoyed this story, then the man who wrote it will value it too, and if you didn’t like it, he’ll esteem it all the more”; and he closes saying— partly in Spanish—“But since from nothing comes everything, save God who is all, I’m heading off to watch the nuptial madness” (v.24).67 Can we really believe that “God is all” when the line is uttered by a madman, who confuses—or purposefully connects—feste nuziali with pazzie nuziali (wedding feasts with the madness of weddings)? In what Mario Baratto has called a “breakdown of language,” Liseo’s unsettling and absolute detachment from his family and from the comedy itself can be interpreted as a sign of either madness or wisdom.68 On the level of plot, Liseo’s indifference mandates that his wife, Maja, and her newly-found brother-in-law must effectively become the new heads of the household, as Angiolina Melchiori has argued.69 Thus while much has been made of Aretino’s linguistic exuberance, there is a less joyful side to it as well. It can lead to misunderstanding, and while misunderstanding is integral to the origins of comedy, it also produces an unsettling darkness in Aretino’s works— the darkness with which in some ways Lo Ipocrito closes. To be sure, the linguistic richness of Cortigiana and Il Marescalco is less in evidence here, even as Aretino attempts to achieve more varied comic tonalities. If the male characters Blando and Pizio in their own ways invoked sympathy in Talanta, here it is the daughter Porfiria who does so as she becomes

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“Vuoi che sia, e vuoi che non sia, e a me va bene.” “Voi parlate bene circa lo andare de le parole, ma non servate il dovere del scappollar de i fatti.” “Se la cantafavola vi è piaciuta, l’ha caro, e se non vi è piaciuta, carissimo. […] Ma da che nada es todos, salvo Iddio che è il tutto, me ne vado a vedere le pazzie nuziali.” Baratto, Tre studi sul teatro, 143. Cairns (Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice, 193) goes so far as to argue that Erasmus’s praise of Socrates as the philosopher who knows only that he knows nothing can be seen in Liseo’s enigmatic lines. Angiolina Melchiori, Emblems of Renaissance Theatre: A Study of Aretino’s Comedies (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1988) 123. More specifically, Melchiori argues that Maja’s supplanting of her husband poses a unique threat to families traditionally based on male authority, and that Brizio’s arrival as the brother-in-law helps stabilize a tenuous situation.

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involved in a subplot worthy of Romeo and Juliet. When the lover whom she sent off to find the “impossible” suddenly returns, on the very day of her wedding to Corbeo, Porfiria delivers a moving speech saying she has no recourse other than to break faith—which she will not do—or die; she then proceeds to take a poison she has acquired from a pharmacist. Her beloved Corbeo also swears to die by her side. Yet the pharmacist, like Shakespeare’s kindly friar, delivers not poison but a sleeping potion, and Porfiria and Corbeo awaken to find that Porfiria’s former lover has agreed to settle for her younger sister instead. The perfunctory exchange of one woman for another aside, Porfiria’s lines regarding her faith and her determination to die turn what might have been a minor figure into a melodramatic heroine, perhaps looking toward Aretino’s Orazia of two years later.

4

Il Filosofo

Aretino claimed to have written Il Filosofo (1546) in just ten days in 1544, at the request of Duke Guidobaldo ii of Urbino.70 An appreciative reader of Talanta and Lo Ipocrito, Guidobaldo is also the dedicatee of this, Aretino’s last comedy. Il Filosofo takes as its principal source neither Plautus nor Terence, but rather a canonical text in the vernacular that was often mined for Renaissance comic theater, Boccaccio’s Decameron. Evident in this appropriation is Aretino’s literary rapprochement with an author he had previously shunned as too representative of the Cinquecento’s drive toward canonization and classical order; and indeed Il Filosofo seems to be one more instance of the increasing “regularization” of Aretino’s literary practice, already evident in Lo Ipocrito and Talanta.71 Yet, given that Aretino engages Boccaccio’s text in both of Il Filosofo’s plots and does so in two strikingly different ways, it is perhaps, as Alessandro Mongatti argues, less the playwright’s relation to the Decameron’s author than his experimentation with adaptation that should draw our attention. The play achieves a nuanced theatricalization of Boccaccio’s narratives, executing a brilliant exploration of genre and an impressive display of Aretino’s literary mastery.72 The play is double-plotted, but its two major actions run strictly in parallel, with no common scenes and no apparent thematic interrelations (not unlike Cortigiana). Juxtaposed but never intersecting, the segregated story70 71 72

See Alessio Decaria, “Nota introduttiva” to Il Filosofo in Teatro iii, 11–14. See Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 309–310. Alessandro Mongatti, “Il Filosofo di Pietro Aretino e la riscrittura della novella di Andreuccio (Decameron ii.5),” Studi italiani, 12/1 (2000): 27–46 (30).

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lines open a space for striking self-consciousness in characters who repeatedly express their almost desperate wish to avoid meeting each other onstage.73 For one plot, Aretino adapted Decameron ii.5, renaming as “Boccaccio” the earlier tale’s famously naïve Andreuccio da Perugia, whose adventures constitute a romance of education in the ways of the merchant world (and the underworld) of fourteenth-century Italy. Aretino wittily turns Andreuccio into the successful gem merchant “Boccaccio,” as if the Decameron’s guileless youth, who goes to Naples to buy a horse but instead comes home with a ruby ring in his pocket, has developed a successful career as a trader in precious stones. But Aretino’s Boccaccio, now a married man with children, undergoes no initiation process and no psychological development. He exhibits none of the greed or mercantile ambition of Andreuccio, and no wonder at the advances of the courtesan, Tullia. In Ferroni’s words, the actions of Boccaccio’s story appear so automatic as to resemble a dance of ghosts on the play’s dreamscape stage.74 Initiating a string of two-character scenes, the play opens with the innkeeper, Betta, and her friend, Mea, who recognizes Boccaccio, Betta’s newest lodger, as the master of the house where she once worked. Boccaccio greets Mea as a long-lost friend. Act ii unfolds Boccaccio’s entrapment by the courtesan Tullia, Aretino’s reincarnation of the “Ciciliana” of Decameron ii.5. This character, whose name recalls Aretino’s contemporary, the courtesan poet Tullia d’Aragona, also pays tribute to Aretino as author: from both her own monologue and that of her servant, Lisa (ii.7), we learn that Tullia is a careful reader of Aretino’s dialogues and intends to put her learning to use. Speaking of Aretino’s instructive, professional whore, she declares, “It would be my own fault if I had studied Nanna and didn’t know how to imitate her” (ii.3).75 In another detail added by Aretino, Boccaccio falls for Tullia’s claim that her absent husband possesses the other half of a coin matching the one Boccaccio carries, which will prove her status as the merchant’s long-lost sister. Boccaccio’s three falls reliably parallel those of the Decameron’s Andreuccio: into an infernal toilet (iii.7), into a cleansing well (iii.10), and into a tomb (iii.16), where he remains abandoned by fellow thieves who plotted with him to steal jewels off a rich man’s corpse. But Boccaccio seems almost to have read his own story already: allud-

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Baratto memorably likened the two sets of characters to separate theater companies who constantly meet, taking turns expelling each other from the stage but explicitly avoiding dialogue with each other; Baratto, Tre studi sul teatro, 151. Giulio Ferroni traces in some detail this obsessive pattern of mutual avoidances: “Lo spettacolo dell’evanescenza onirica: ‘Il Filosofo,’ ” in Le voci dell’istrione, 294–331: 302–309. Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 309–310; Mongatti, “Il Filosofo,” 36. “In mal per me ci arei studiato la Nanna, se non sapessi imitarla.”

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ing to the well-known allegorical register of Andreuccio’s tale, he refers to his escape from the tomb as a resurrection (v.1). Meeting Betta and Mea (who, in an outrageous jab by Aretino at convent life, have just delivered a nun’s baby), he promises to recount his whole ordeal (v.2–3). Boccaccio’s plot thus ends with the secular redemption readers familiar with the Decameron would expect, in a remarkably straightforward adaptation of its source text. In what might be considered the play’s main plot, the misadventures of Il Filosofo’s title character blend material from at least two of the Decameron’s tales: novella ii.10, where a scholar immerses himself in his legal studies rather than attend to the erotic needs of his young wife; and novella vii.8, in which the young wife of a merchant devises a bed trick to discredit her husband’s discovery that she has a lover. Echoing the dream of Talanta’s prologue, the Argomento e Prologo (a single speaker) opens the play with an aphorism: “Whoever laughs and makes fun of dreams is no less mad than those who rack their brains, thinking them true.”76 He then reports that he saw the play’s entire stage set in a dream the night before, wherein he witnessed both the trick played on Andreuccio in the Centonovelle (Decameron), and a prattling philosopher’s failed attempt to expose his wife’s infidelity. The tale, he avers, would split your sides with laughter. Dissolving this dream directly into the play, he points to Betta and Mea, who have just appeared on stage for their dialogue in i.1: “Oh, now here come those two gossips, yacking away. I’ll hide here to figure out whether that dream was a vision.”77 Aretino thus frames Il Filosofo as a glimpse into the workings of the dreaming imagination, through a set of literary borrowings that ring familiar to his audience but feature distortions and repetitions that challenge us to recognize what sort of textual game he might be playing and what kind of “vision” (or truth) this dream might hold. Ferroni goes so far as to see the Prologue as a figure for Aretino himself: in this reading, Aretino is both dreamer and spectator, an author who sees pass before his eyes the tools of his trade (the device of the beffa, the themes of marriage, anti-intellectualism, and the triumph of carnal “nature”) now deformed, his subversive persona neutralized and his powers of invention confined to a regularized stage.78 Among these familiar features are the parodic lover figure, Polidoro, and his servant, Radicchio, whose exchange juxtaposes the former’s language of Petrarchan vanity and affectation—his preening before a mirror, his devotion 76 77 78

“Chi si fa beffe de i sogni e ridesene, non è manco pazzo che qualunche se lo becca col dar fede loro,” Teatro iii, 31. “Or, da che vengano fuora le due petegole cicalando, mi aguatto quinci per chiarirmi se mai il sogno volesse diventar vision,” Teatro iii, 32. Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 296–297.

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to a predictably beautiful beloved—with the “lyrical visual concreteness” of the latter, a man of earthier tastes (i.3–4).79 As we soon learn, Polidoro’s lover is none other than Tessa, wife of the philosopher Plataristotile, whose name undoes the fruitful Renaissance tension between Platonic and Aristotelian thought. Aretino draws his title character as prone to muddled abstractions, a foil to the clear ardor and corporeal vitality that drive other characters. Plataristotile’s dialogue with his servant, Salvalaglio (Garlickeeper)—a former soldier now retired from battle—delivers a string of misogynist philosophical commonplaces (i.5), which are countered abundantly in a long exchange (i.6) between Tessa’s mother, Papa, and her friend, Druda. The women’s conversation is sparked by Papa’s annoyance with the penance she was assigned by a friar for criticizing Plataristitile’s neglect of his marriage bed. It expands as a full-blown tirade against husbands that recalls the complaints against wives in Il Marescalco, perhaps suggesting some balance of sympathy on Aretino’s part for the plight of women in marriage. Contrasting contemporary men with the honorable and attentive husbands of their youth, the two women cite domestic violence, profanity, male rage over miscarriages and the birth of daughters, bestiality, adultery, greed, jealousy, and sexual neglect as common flaws among the current generation of husbands.80 The philosopher, having overheard Tessa’s plans to receive Polidoro, resolves to trap the lover in his study and expose Tessa’s crimes to her family (iii.13). Of course, this plan backfires miserably, as Tessa utilizes information revealed to her by her maid, Nepitella (Catmint), and Polidoro’s servant, Radicchio (iv). In place of the adulterous lover Plataristotile thought to reveal behind the locked door of his study, the family discovers an ass, symbol of his own failure even to isdonzellare (“unmaiden”) his wife. Tessa promptly demands a divorce and moves back in with her mother (iv.9). Plataristotile, on the other hand, improbably draws appropriate lessons from his humiliation. Resolving to love his wife, he sends for her (v.4–5), but not before pronouncing on the similarities between women and wild beasts. The latter, he claims, are smarter than women because, “Fearing the rod of those who train them, [they] convert their natural ferocity into a habit of artful sub-

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“Lirica concretezza visiva,” Baratto, Tre studi sul teatro, 153. Aretino acknowledged that his thoughts on marriage, for both men and women, are conveyed in the Marescalco and Filosofo in a letter to Lattanzio Lattanzi dated January 1546. Responding to Lattanzio’s request for advice about whether he should marry and his sister should do the same, Aretino directed them, respectively, to the two comedies. See Decaria, “Nota introduttiva,” 14.

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missiveness” (v.5).81 Immediately following this insight and marking Aretino’s familiar contempt for useless philosophical discourse, Plataristotile learns that the ass in his study has defecated on his books. But he lays this affront at Tessa’s feet in a different spirit, pledging to be the husband she has needed all along, and declaring that wives, “since they are fairies, transform husbands into stags and lovers into asses” (v.8).82 Plataristotile’s conversion, like the substitution of brides at the end of Lo Ipocrito, is mechanical even within the farcical genre of Renaissance comedy: nothing surprises here. Of interest, instead, are Aretino’s deft orchestration of the elements of the genre; his ear for natural-sounding dialogue; and his evident preference for the ruffians, merchants, and servants who populate his stage and whose linguistic verve recalls the 1525 Cortigiana. Boccaccio’s speech is peppered with mild obscenities and regionalisms. Tessa’s decision to betray her indifferent husband elicits passionate expressions of solidarity from Nepitella, who flirts with Radicchio over what kind of salad they could become if they were tossed together (ii.10). Salvalaglio recalls with perplexity some complicated instructions about the proper way to sip wine, overheard in a moment when he was “about to die from a cursed thirst” (iv.5).83 As if to shift the play’s weight definitively toward his appreciation for such characters, Aretino commits Il Filosofo’s final words to a dialogue between Salvalaglio and Massara (Housewife). Left behind with instructions to search for rosary beads dropped by Papa as the rest of the philosopher’s “wedding” party exits into the house, they flirt, in spare language and gestures that contrast appealingly with both Plataristotile’s and Polidoro’s convoluted professions of love for Tessa. Salvalaglio presumably points to his own breast: Salvalaglio: Doesn’t this heart belong to you? Massara: How should I know? Salvalaglio: Of course, it does. Massara: So, what do you want me to do with it? Salvalaglio: Since women are hawks who eat nothing else, why not take a little bite? Massara [pointing to the bead]: Oh, there it is, between your feet.

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“[T]emendo la verga di quelli che gli ammaestrano, mutano la nativa ferocitade nel costume della mansuetudine artificiosa.” “[…] Per esser Fate, convertono i mariti in cervi, e gli amanti in somari.” “[…] Sono stato per crepare de la maledetta sete, udendo un non so chi che diceva al compagno che ognun che bee non sa bere.”

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Salvalaglio: Come close and pick it up. Massara: You can’t fool me. Salvalaglio: Wait, I’ll pick it up myself. Massara: I’m getting out of here. Salvalaglio: You think I won’t catch up with you?84 Salvalaglio’s final line suggests a comic world in which the erotic chase continues unabated, regardless of whether people are witless or savvy, masters or servants. Its versions are ever proliferating, its vigor undiminished. Aretino’s earlier plays and the relevant tales of Boccaccio specify and thematize their urban settings: Cortigiana and Talanta unfold in Rome, Il Marescalco in Mantua, and Lo Ipocrito in Milan, while Boccaccio’s ii.5, ii.10, and vii.8 are set in Naples, Pisa, and Florence, respectively. In contrast, Il Filosofo’s setting is unstated, reinforcing the sense that the location of this play is the terrain of literary imagination, desire, and dream.85 The parallel and separate plots of Il Filosofo might be seen to illustrate two versions of the dream work. Boccaccio’s faithful, linear recapitulation appropriates and internalizes the source narrative as if to manage it (and its father-figure author). That of Plataristotile more aggressively attempts to rearrange events into new, perhaps more desirable, configurations. As for the vision (or truth) of this play’s oneiric frame, we may find it in Aretino’s recognition of important literary, philosophical, and cultural values he ultimately shares with the author of the Decameron: pleasure in the buoyant artfulness of human speech, conviction that erotic passions are irrepressible, delight in demystifying and mocking authority, and a conception of satire as a mode that is social as well as entertaining. While many readers argue that Aretino sought increasingly to regulate and tame his theatrical plots over two decades, we can also see in his last comedy evidence of abiding interests

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“Salvalaglio: Ma non ha questo core il vostro? Massara: Che ne so io? Salvalaglio: Egli è desso, certo. Massara: E che volete ch’io ne facci? Salvalaglio: Essendo le donne sparvieri che non mangiono d’altro, perché non tôrne un bocconcino? Massara: Oh, eccola fra i vostri piedi. Salvalaglio: Accostatevi a ricoglierla. Massara: No mi ci côrrete. Salvalaglio: Aspettate, che la ricoglierò io. Massara: A Lucca ti viddi. Salvalaglio: Che non ti giugnerò?” For discussion of the adage uttered here by Massara (“A Lucca ti viddi”), see Antonio Pinchera’s note 9 in Aretino, Tutto il teatro, 541. See Ferroni, Le voci dell’istrione, 298–299; and Mongatti, “Il Filosofo,” 39. Some readers, however, argue for an identifiable city as the play’s setting. Baratto sees Naples (Tre studi sul teatro, 151, n. 33); and G.B. De Sanctis discerns Venice (Tutte le commedie, 467, 469). On Aretino’s use of cityscapes as spaces of sensory experience, see Marlene Eberhart, “Performance, Print, and the Senses: Aretino and the Spaces of the City,” Early Theater, 15/2 (2012): 179–192.

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that return us to his Cortigiana and Il Marescalco: in the lower-classes, in the body as a ground of knowledge, in the resistance to power and intellectualization.

5

Orazia

With Orazia (1546), his last play, Aretino made his single contribution to the genre of tragedy. Aretino’s contemporaries engaged critically with this ancient form as no previous generation had, producing both dramas and theoretical writings. After the publication in 1536 of Alessandro Pazzi’s Latin translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, Italians gauged their practice against that text’s descriptions; they consciously modernized their Greek and Roman models and adopted selectively, rather than formulaically, the elements of tragedy discussed by the philosopher.86 Mindful of these developments, in formal terms Aretino observed the unities of time and place, limiting all the action in his tragedy to one day and a single Roman street. He built the play in five acts, each with a final, rhymed chorus. He included a classicizing rhymed prologue but wrote Orazia’s dialogue in eleven-syllable, unrhymed lines. He employed traditional tragic messenger figures to deliver news, but eschewed the soliloquy. In short, Aretino embraced the modernism of the major tragic theorist (and tragedian) of his generation, Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio, by writing a play inspired by ancient drama but tailored to the tastes of a contemporary Italian audience.87 Like many of his peers, Aretino took his tragic subject matter from a classical source. Livy narrates in his History of Rome the legend that accounts for the peace achieved between that city and Alba Longa.88 The previously allied, now warring communities agreed to settle their conflict by delegating three champions from each side, whose fight to the death would determine the future rule of one city over the other. Representing the Romans were the Horatii brothers (Aretino’s Orazii), while the Curiatii brothers (Curiazii)—one of whom was betrothed to the Horatii’s sister—fought for Alba.

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For extended discussion of individual texts as well as the general phenomenon of tragic drama in Italy, see Marvin T. Herrick, Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance (Champaign, IL, 1965). See Giraldi Cinthio, Discorsi intorno al comporre. Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 1, ed. and trans. Benjamin Oliver Foster http://​ data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0914.phi0011.perseus‑eng1:24, chapters 24– 26.

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A principal character in Aretino’s play is the Orazii siblings’ father, Publio, who speaks its opening lines and, in dialogue with his friend, Spurio, establishes Orazia’s dramatic situation just as the six-man contest commences, offstage. Praying that his sons will not shame him, Publio yearns for a Roman victory and lends wishful faith to a prognostication that the Curiazii will perish (i.78–84). Their sister Celia, engaged to marry one of the Curiazii, provides her own, tragic perspective on this combat in the central scene of Act i, where she laments to her Nurse, “But I, I if Rome wins, shall lose / my sweet husband and my brothersin-law; / and if Alba wins (as it could), / shall lose not only my liberty, / but also my brothers. / Ah, who has ever endured a bitter fortune / that could equal even a part of mine?” (i.320–326).89 Act ii brings the news that all of the combatants have been killed but one, the Roman Orazio. Publio mourns his two dead sons and his daughter’s misery, seeking also to persuade Celia of her public duty. She is unmoved, responding: “I tell you / that when my beloved brothers fell, / I lost two of my limbs: / but with the fall of my exalted husband / I lost my very self.” (ii.482–486).90 In Act iii, all of Rome greets the triumphant Orazio, save Celia, whose Nurse warns that her tears are perceived as those of an enemy. Orazio berates his sister, drags her away by the hair, and stabs her to death for disloyalty, whereupon it falls to Publio to defend his only remaining child before the people, who see Celia’s murder as unjustified and take Orazio to the king for judgment. The disconsolate Nurse and her servant are forced to leave Celia’s body in the street, obeying the command of Publio, of whom Spurio says, “I admire Publio for facing / with the constancy of a virtuous spirit / both the deed that was done and the ensuing peril; / and he does this with such a fearless countenance / that it seems there is no pain in his heart / for things that I swear would kill another man” (iii.437–442).91 Indeed, much of Act iv is devoted to Publio’s psychological state, which he expounds to Spurio and then to the judicial duumvirs (magistrates) whom the king has appointed to adjudicate Orazio’s case. When the duumvirs sentence 89

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“Ma io, io se Roma vince, perdo / il marito dolcissimo e i cognati, / et vincendo Alba (qual vincer potria), / oltre il dominio de la libertade, / de i fratelli privata mi rimango. / Or chi provò giamai fortuna iniqua, / che la sorte mia dura in parte aguagli?” For additional, valuable notes, see Pietro Aretino, L’Orazia, ed. Michael Lettieri, con un saggio sulla storia della critica e una nota bibliografica di Rocco Mario Morano (Rovito, 1991). “[V]i dico / che, giù cadendo i miei fratelli amati, / cadder duo parti de le membra mie: / ma nel cader del mio sposo sublime / io stessa caddi.” “Io amiro di Publio che si oppone, / con la constanzia de l’animo intégro, / tra il caso occorso e il pericol seguente / (et fa ciò con un volto sì ardito, / che par che nel cor suo nulla si dolga / di quel ch’io giurarei ch’altri morisse).”

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Orazio to death, Publio reminds them that if his son had not saved Rome from Alba, there would be no king, no law, no senate and no liberty for them to perform their own office (v.250–255). As the duumvirs are deaf to his pleas, Publio appeals to the Roman people. Act v presents the debate among Publio, Orazio and the populace, which finally commutes the young warrior’s death sentence, imposing on him instead a humiliation ritual. But Orazio refuses this punishment. The standoff is finally broken by the voice of Jove, which commands that he accept the people’s decision: “[Y]ou, Orazio, bow / your head to the yoke, for bowing it on earth / will purge your sin, maintain the law, / honor the king, gratify the fatherland,/ console the fathers, exalt the people, / restore Publio, and preserve you” (v.426–431).92 Marvin T. Herrick observes that “Aretino’s tragic style is as revolutionary […] as his portrayal of characters. He all but abandoned the high-pitched rhetoric of Senecan drama, with its swarms of mythological allusions, long-drawn-out lamentations, and lugubrious complaints about cruel Fortune.”93 For Marco Ariani, Orazia is the sixteenth century’s best-structured and most harmonious tragedy, not least because it explicitly translates into theatrical terms Sebastiano Serlio’s 1545 treatise on urban design and stage scenery as projections of state power. Ariani sees in Aretino’s unusual resort to the deus ex machina an “ideological and political sign, an Aretinian message about freedom guided from above (Empire, Church, Venice)” that coheres with the play’s dedication to Farnese Pope Paul iii and with the prologue, where Fame praises Paul along with Ercole ii d’Este, Ferrante Gonzaga, Charles v, and other Catholic potentates in a display of Counter-Reformation ideology.94 Paul Larivaille considers Orazia in light of Aretino’s biography and his political career, finding in the play not the “insipid conformism” or the blatant hypocrisy that others have detected in it, but rather a political act on a new level for the “scourge of princes.”95

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“[T]u, Orazio, china / la testa al giogo, ché il chinarla in terra / purga il peccato, conserva la legge, / onora il re, gratifica la patria, / consola i padri, il popolo sublima, / ricrea Publio, e te stesso mantiene.” Herrick, Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance, 142–143. As for Aretino’s sensitivity to Giraldi’s favoring of tragic heroines, it is difficult to see Orazia as a valorization of Celia’s perspective: she exits the play in Act iii and is vituperated by her father thereafter, without opposition. “Una visualizzazione che fa del segno rappresentativo un vero e proprio segno ideologicopolitico, il messaggio aretiniano di una libertas guidata dall’alto (leggi Impero, Chiesa e Venezia),” Marco Ariani, “Introduzione,” in Il teatro italiano, vol. 2/1: La tragedia del Cinquecento, ed. Marco Ariani (Turin, 1977), xxxviii–xxxix. Paul Larivaille, “L’Orazia, Tragédie des ambitions déçues,” in Varia aretiniana (1972–2004)

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This is not only because Aretino explicitly compared the ancient Albans with sixteenth-century Protestant reformers and figured the Orazii as allegories of the Farnesi (Publius, for example, as a figure for Paul’s son Pier Luigi Farnese, in whom Aretino placed his hopes for ecclesiastical advancement in early 1546), nor because he reworked Orazia’s prologue when he perceived the weakening of Farnese power and the ascent of Charles v in Europe. Rather, more comprehensively, Orazia registers Aretino’s utopian plea for the triumph of maturity and reason over both the inevitable furors of youth and the rigidity of the law.96 Celia and Orazio, in their extreme emotion, incarnate the youth and passion that, throughout Aretino’s secular writings, appear as natural and ineluctable, while Publius, in his request for clemency, voices a wisdom and measure that restrains but also comprehends youthful rashness. Aretino attributed Publius’s virtues, importantly, not to the kingdom of Rome (where Orazia is set), but to his adopted home, the Republic of Venice. Thus, in this, his last play and (with the exception of continued work on his letters) his final literary endeavor, we may discern not just a politics, but, as Larivaille argues, a moral compass that was, in some sense, guiding Aretino all along.

6

Publication History and Influence

Cortigiana was published in twelve editions, mostly in Venice between 1534 and 1552; Il Marescalco saw nine between 1533 and 1553. Lo Ipocrito appeared in three editions, while La Talanta, Il Filosofo, and Orazia were each published just twice.97 The dedications to these individual editions reflect Aretino’s hunger for approbation and remuneration within the networks of the famous and the influential. His plays are dedicated to figures such Duke Guidobaldo ii Della Rovere of Urbino (Lo Ipocrito and Il Filosofo); Cosimo de’ Medici (La Talanta); and Argentina Rangona of Modena, member of a family closely tied to the Medici (Il Marescalco). In these dedications, mostly standard acts of flattery, Aretino insists on his lowliness before such “alti personaggi” (great personages), but he took these gestures seriously, as proved by his vacillations over which Farnese (father or son) should be the dedicatee for Orazia. (He chose

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(Manziana, 2005), 79–156. Aretino’s moniker as “the scourge of princes” may have originated with his admired friend, the condottiere Giovanni delle Bande Nere. See Larivaille, “L’Orazia, Tragédie des ambitions déçues,” 79 n. 1. Larivaille, “L’Orazia, Tragédie des ambitions déçues,” 126. Amedeo Quondam, “Aretino e il libro,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 197–230; see the “Appendice,” 221–230, for the list of Aretino’s publications.

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the father, Pope Paul iii, then laced his prologue with praise for other princes who were on the rise.) The printed and revised Cortigiana of 1534, dedicated to Cardinal Bernardo Clesio, of Trent, observes the differences between the dysfunctional situation of the Rome before his eyes on the stage—or page—and his dedicatee’s own comportment. Aretino strikes a curious analogy to make the point, suggesting that the cardinal will be like a maiden who “while playing with a Saracen girl will enjoy the utter lack of grace with which she moves, such that she herself will seem in each of her movements more lovely and more graceful.”98 Perhaps more revealing is the prefatory letter to Guidobaldo for Lo Ipocrito, in which Aretino confesses that he should not be sending such a trivial thing to so great a man as Guidobaldo, then says that to have sent it to anyone else would have been equivalent to sending “una Vergine semplice” (an innocent virgin) to an adulterer: he wouldn’t want to subject “la donzella” (the damsel) to such danger. He goes on to say that “Princes today seek nothing other than to tranquilize the souls of their subjects with festivities and spectacles, while devoting all of their energy to bombarding them with all kinds of cruel distress.” Guidobaldo, that is, will protect his donzella and perhaps, given that the title of the play is Lo Ipocrito, he will also know how to appreciate the purity of its odd wisdom about a man who withdraws from all spectacles in the figure of the father, Liseo.99 In 1557, under the new censorship policies of The Council of Trent, several of Aretino’s works were banned, including Cortigiana. Two years later, all of Aretino’s published writings were censored. What had been a fairly lively rhythm of publication—several editions of the complete plays and multiple publications of single ones, especially Cortigiana—ground quickly to a halt. But in Protestant Europe, Aretino reappeared. In 1588, the Italian John Wolfe published Quattro commedie, the first anthology of theatre in any language published in England. The Taming of the Shrew may bear a direct influence of Aretino on Shakespeare; and there are potentially other Aretinian hints in Shakespeare’s corpus.100 Perhaps of all the English dramatists influenced by Aretino, Ben Jonson is generally identified as the major beneficiary, intrigued by Aretino’s life as much as by his works. Jonson’s Epicene, with its

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“[…] Scherza con una saracina de la brutta disgratia che ella move in ciascuno atto, talché essa in ogni suo movimento appare più bella et più gratiosa,” Teatro i, 230. “[…] I principi, che oggi dì reggano altrui, non che cerchino di tranquillare gli animi de i loro popoli con la giocondità de gli spettacoli, ma pongono ogni industria in tempestargli con la crudeltà de i travagli,” Teatro ii, 173. Michele Marrapodi, “The Aretinean Intertext and the Heterodoxy of The Taming of the Shrew,” in Michele Marrapodi (ed.), Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance: Appropriation, Transformation, Opposition (Farnham, 2014), 235–256.

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extravagant beffa of Morose by his scheming nephew Dauphine is obviously derived from Il Marescalco, and the engagement with precise topographies of London makes one think of similar moments in Cortigiana.101 Volpone, on the other hand, may depend more on the person of Aretino as it was publicized throughout Europe than on any specific play. France had its own history of embracing Aretino’s texts as well. Molière’s Tartuffe may owe something to Lo Ipocrito, as Molière can be said to rescue this figure for a more prominent role in his own comedy.

7

Conclusion

When in the midst of one of the many ridiculous beffe in the Cortigiana, Maco looks into a concave glass, he sees himself reflected in a distorted mirror. This is a sly, even sinister version of Hamlet’s claim, some seventy years later, that plays hold a mirror up to nature. As a dramatist, Aretino was aware that theater required a mixture of distortion and realism for the reflection it delivers; his artful, audacious dosage of each of these constituted his brilliance. But we are still faced with seemingly imponderable questions. Were Aretino’s aims higher than the goal of his own success, and was it indeed a loss of hope in such success that moved him eventually to abandon theatrical (and most other) writing? Does he have “doubles” in the plays (Rosso, Pizio, the Marescalco, the Istrione, possibly Liseo) who know how to play and influence the action, but also to uscire dal gioco (quit the game) when necessary? This would seem to be the game invoked in Cortigiana by Parabolano, who when (in v.21) he discovers he’s been tricked by Rosso, “l’auttore” of his disgrace, says, “anch’io so’ in questo ballo” (I’m in on this dance too).102 Orazia’s Celia becomes a tragic version of someone who has “exited” the play not of her own will. In a different fashion—and with a happy

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For a classic essay on Aretino’s influence in England, see Oscar James Campbell, “The Relation of Epicoene to Aretino’s Il Marescalco,” pmla, 46 (1931): 752–762; also see the more recent essay by Andrew S. Keener, “Jonson’s Italian Riddle: Epicene and the Translation of Aretino’s Female Speech,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 65 (2014): 120–139. The line recalls the narrator’s lucido intervallo [moment of lucidity] in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which expresses his desire to leave the dance of love: “[…] [C]omprendo assai, / or che di mente ho lucido intervallo; / ed ho gran cura (e spero farlo ormai) / di riposarmi e d’uscir fuor di ballo,” Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Emilio Bigi (Milan, 1982), xxiv.3. In Reynolds’s translation, “I see the matter straight / In this brief moment of lucidity, / And I intend (if it is not too late) / To quit the dance and seek tranquility,” Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. and ed. Barbara Reynolds (London and New York, 1977).

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result—the Marescalco is able to avoid the jig of married life entirely and confirm his existence as a bachelor, while the philosopher Plataristotile joins the dance of matrimony by leaving off his studies. How might we think about Aretino himself when it comes to the dance of theatre? Did he shrewdly leave it, at just the right time? Or did his wisdom consist in staying on the stage for as long as he did, embracing his precarious roles only to learn at the end that one can never fully control the game, but only, at best, observe?

chapter 11

Pietro Aretino: Attributed Works Giuseppe Crimi

The works attributed to Pietro Aretino deserve a carefully focused analysis that takes into account their number (quite a few) and the individual reasons for each. Giammaria Mazzuchelli first addressed the issue of the attribution of works to Aretino in the eighteenth century.1 This exploration continued in the nineteenth century, especially in France, thanks to Alcide Bonneau and Guillaume Apollinaire, and in the twentieth century (particularly the work of Domenico Fusco), still useful today.2 For sure, the large number of attributions to Aretino is due both to his prolific activity (consider the case of the thousands of octaves of the epic Marfisa he claimed to have written),3 buoyed by his speed of execution,4 and to the habit of authors close to Aretino to assign their own writings to him as a way of making their works more acceptable to their fellow litterati. Aretino himself testifies to this practice in his Dialogo: “but what is wrong is that many, wanting to earn some credit, put his name on their trifles.”5 In this chapter, I intend to show several and different works attributed to Aretino and to contextualize them historically. Improper attributions probably already occurred at the beginning of Aretino’s literary career, as in the case of the Roman lampoons called pasquinate.6 Vittorio Rossi noted the difficulty of assigning the authorship of these verses, and prudently titled the volume he edited Pasquinate di Pietro Aretino e anonime per il conclave e l’elezione di Adriano vi.7 1 Giammaria Mazzuchelli, La vita di Pietro Aretino (Brescia, Pianta: 17632), 298–303. 2 Domenico Fusco, L’Aretino sconosciuto ed apocrifo (Turin, 1953), 45–49 and Paul Larivaille, “Pietro Aretino,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Enrico Malato, vol. 4: Il primo Cinquecento (Rome, 1996), 755–785: 778–780. 3 See Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1997), 160. 4 See also Aretino’s statement, according to which the was composed in eighteen mornings: Aretino, Sei Giornate, 3. 5 “Ma il male sta che molti, i quali vogliano farsi credito, pongono il nome suo ne le sciocchezze loro” (Lettera di F. Coccio) Aretino, Sei Giornate, 354. See David O. Frantz, Festum voluptatis. A Study of Renaissance Erotica (Columbus, OH, 1989), chapter 2 (“The Scourge of Princes as Pornographer: Pietro Aretino and the Popular Tradition”) and chapter 3 (“The Aretines: Imitation and Vilification”). 6 Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 164 e 431 fn. 105. 7 Palermo, 1891, pp. vii–lvi. See also Operette politiche e satiriche ii; Paolo Procaccioli,

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, new comical and satirical texts attributable to Aretino have been discovered. These could have been written during his stay in Rome, such as the Farza and the Testamento dell’Elefante (both preserved in single, anonymous manuscripts), but scholars now tend to attribute them to different authors.8 The Lamento d’una cortigiana ferrarese, a text in terza rima that tells the sorrowful story of a courtesan of Ferrara, presents a more complex situation. Its attribution still oscillates between Aretino and Maestro Andrea or Andrea Veneziano († 1527), a painter, writer, and friend of Aretino.9 Moreover, an important new discovery has been made in recent years, the Lamento de uno cortegiano, a capitolo in terza rima from Aretino’s Roman period, likely circa 1521–1522, discovered by Marco Faini.10 Preceded by a letter, the Lamento narrates in the form of a lament the fall from grace of the courtier Giovanni Lazzaro de Magistris, known as Serapica (i.e. mosquito). In addition, in the Vita di Aretino del Berna (authored by Fortunio Spira according to Enrico Sicardi, but most likely by Giovanni Alberto Albicante)

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“Due re in Parnaso. Aretino e Bembo nella Venezia del doge Gritti,” in Giorgio Patrizi (ed.), Sylva. Studi in onore di Nino Borsellino (Rome: 2002), vol. 1, 207–231: 228. On the latter, see Luca D’Onghia, “La ‘Farza’ è davvero di Pietro Aretino? Note linguistiche su un testo d’incerta attribuzione,” Scaffale Aperto, 4 (2013): 115–137. On the doubts related to the Testamento dell’Elefante see Opere di Pietro Aretino e di Anton Francesco Doni, ed. Carlo Cordié (Milan-Naples, 1976), 23 and Teatro i, 44–45; the authorship could date back to the Venetian Maestro Andrea (see Anthony W. Caswell, “‘Le paradoxe contre les lettres’ est-il un autre pamphlet de Thomas?,” in Franco Giacone (ed.), Le Cymbalum mundi, Actes du Colloque (Rome, 3–6 November 2000) (Geneva, 2003), 565–568: 557. The Testamento is included in Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 37–41. I would like to point out that the text was also published in Paolo Picca, Guida storica del Giardino zoologico (Rome, 1911), 57– 62: 47–66: L’elefante Annone: sue gesta e testamento) and Pietro Romano, Pasquino nel 500 (Rome, 1936), 52–58. See Giovanni Aquilecchia, “Per l’attribuzione e il testo del ‘Lamento d’una cortigiana ferrarese’,” (1974), in Schede di Italianistica (Turin, 1976), 127–151 and Deanna Shemek, “«Mi mostrano a dito tutti quanti»: Disease, Deixis, and Disfiguration in the ‘Lamento di una cortigiana ferrarese’,” in Paul A. Ferrara-Eugenio L. Giusti-Jane Tylus (eds.), Medusa’s Gaze: Essays on Gender, Literature, and Aesthetics in the Italian Renaissance, in Honor of Robert J. Rodini (Lafayette, IN, 2004), 49–64. It should however be noted that the oldest edition so far known of the poem, not registered by Aquilecchia, is dated 1520. It is held at the Beinecke Library at Yale (Shelfmark 1980 +22): Lamento d’una Cortigiana Ferrarese quale per hauere il mal Franzese si conduxe andare in carrecta, composto per Maestro Andrea Venitiano […] (Siena, M. de’ Libri: 1520; the copy belonged to Renzo Bonfiglioli). Marco Faini, “Un’opera dimenticata di Pietro Aretino: il Lamento de uno cortigiano,”Filologia e Critica, 32 (2007): 75–93.

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there are several works mentioned that could have been written by Aretino, yet at the moment there can be no certainty on their authorship. We read, for example: Berni: Basta mo. Dico che studiato esso quelle cose che io dissi, di dieci anni compose et fece profitto; compose una opera a suo iudicio perfetta, il titolo fu Le sette allegrezze, quelle dico io, che cantano i ciechi alle chiese. Mauro: Per Dio che l’han dello stile di Pietro; mi maravigliava ben, che altri che esso facesse queste cose sì bene. Berni: Fece Il lamento della Maddalena, Il Concilio, La pompa del Papa, et dell’Imperadore, La circoncisione del Vaivoda, fece il Capitolo del Mellone, a la comparation d’i miei, il qual Quinto Gherardo sì caldamente rubbò, con tutto quello che egli mette nella Cortigiana Comedia, sotto nome di furfante che vende le storie.11 Berni. Enough now! I say that, having studied the things I said, he profitably composed for ten years. He wrote a work—in his opinion perfect— the title of which was Le sette allegrezze: the kind of work, I say, that blind people sing in churches. Mauro. By God, this is truly in Pietro’s style! I would have been surprised if anyone other than him did such things so well. Berni. He composed the Lamento della Maddalena, Il Concilio, La pompa del Papa, et dell’Imperadore, La circoncisione del Vaivoda, he wrote the Capitolo del Mellone, imitating those of mine, which Quinto Gherardo heartily stole, and all that he lists in the comedy Cortigiana under the name of the ‘furfante’ who sells stories. Toward the end of this passage there is explicit reference to a passage in the Cortigiana of 1534 (i, 4, 1), where a street vendor cites several works, some of them by Aretino himself.12

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Giovanni Alberto Albicante, “Vita di Pietro Aretino del Berna,” in Occasioni aretiniane (Vita di Pietro Aretino del Berna, Abbattimento, Nuova contentione), ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana, 1999), 55–96: 65–66. “Furfante. Alle belle istorie! storie! storie! La guerra del Turcho in Ungheria! Le prediche di fra Martino! Il Concilio! Istorie! Istorie! La cosa d’Inghilterra! La pompa del papa e dell’imperadore! La circuncision del Vaivoda! Il sacco di Roma! L’assedio di Fiorenza! Lo abboccamento di Marsilia con la conclusione! Istorie! Istorie!”; Furfante. Beautiful stories! Stories! Stories! La guerra del Turcho in Ungheria! Le prediche di fra Martino! Il Concilio! Stories! Stories! La cosa d’Inghilterra! La pompa del papa e dell’imperadore! La circuncision

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In addition to the texts mentioned so far, there are works by Aretino that are now lost, including the Regno de la Morte and the Giardino spirituale (investigated by Angelo Romano).13 Other writings, mostly in verse, assigned to Aretino, also found in the manuscript Marciano It. xi 66 (= 6730), published with a commentary by Danilo Romei.14 Romei moreover collected a series of apocryphal erotic sonnets, written in the wake of the notorious Sonetti lussuriosi.15 More recently, Faini has focused on some unknown verses by Aretino, but urges caution especially in cases where a seventeenth-century manuscript transmits erotic texts by Aretino.16 In the following pages I will focus on some of the Aretinesque works that have enjoyed editorial success. Such texts are predominantly erotic, printed and published mostly in Venice, and produced by authors who imitated the most provocative of Aretino’s writings (e.g. La Puttana Errante, La Zaffetta).17 As we shall see, the works analysed here are all closely linked. The image of Aretino as a “pornographer”18 and heretic was disseminated by Anton Francesco Doni in his writings against him, a description that continued to find favor in subsequent centuries. This representation influenced the attributions considerably. In the late seventeenth century, for example, Gre-

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del Vaivoda! Il sacco di Roma! L’assedio di Fiorenza! Lo abboccamento di Marsilia con la conclusione! Stories! Stories!, Teatro i, 240. They are investigated by Angelo Romano, in “Paralipomeni aretiniani. Postille su due opere disperse e sul sepolcro di Pietro Aretino,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 52 (1996): 113–130. However, according to Larivaille, the Regno de la Morte should be identified with the capitolo Fermo, car viator, alquanto il passo contained in the Opera nova (Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 391 fn. 4). See Scritti di Pietro Aretino nel Codice Marciano It. xi 66 (= 6730), ed. Danilo Romei (Florence, 1987). Pietro Aretino, Sonetti lussuriosi, ed. Danilo Romei (s.l. [Raleigh], 2013), 57–69. “Bisogna dire che è opportuno adoperare una certa cautela nei confronti di testi attribuiti ad Aretino in codici del xvii secolo: soprattutto nel caso di tematiche latamente erotiche” (It must be said, that some caution should be used when dealing with texts attributed to Aretino in the xvii century: particularly, in the case of broadly speaking erotic topics); Marco Faini, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle ‘Rime’ di Aretino: le antologie a stampa (e una rara miscellanea di strambotti)”, in Dentro il Cinquecento. Per Danilo Romei (Manziana, 2016), 97–142: 126 at pp. 125 and 136–137 two compositions assigned to Aretino are published (inc. Trovai alla casa mia tragedie e morte e Fugete amanti queste donne ingrate). See Massimo Ciavolella, “La produzione erotica di Pietro Aretino,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 49–66. For cogent reflections on the use of the term “pornography”, see Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, 1999), 103–104.

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gorio Leti wrote in the Teatro gallico that the name of Aretino was associated with texts that revolved around courtesans, who were favoured mostly by clergymen: Mi riccordo d’haver viaggiato con un certo Prete, anzi Canonico che in tutto il viaggio di 15. giorni non mi parlò mai d’altro che delle giornate dell’Aretino, della Puttana errante di Cortigiane, e di mille cose lascive, e dissoneste.19 I remember having travelled with a certain priest, or canon, who throughout that fifteen-day trip talked to me of nothing else than of Aretino’s Giornate, of the Puttana errante, of courtesans, and of a thousand dishonest and lewd things. To better grasp Aretino’s influence on contemporary production and the reasons for some of the attributions to him, we need to start from one of the most famous works of Aretino: the Sonetti lussuriosi (written between 1524 and 1525 in Rome). Aretino arrived in Venice in 1527; behind him are those obscene, provocative verses, which together with other satirical texts, like the previously mentioned Lamento de uno cortigiano, but also the first draft of the Cortigiana of 1525, and along with a behaviour clearly unaligned with the dictates of the Curia, almost cost him his life. In Venice, Aretino surrounded himself with young writers dedicated to composing works that reflected the influence of his writings, particularly the Sonetti. One intriguing example is the Puttana errante (1531) by Lorenzo Venier, a text in ottava rima, constructed as a parody of chivalric poems that focuses on the adventures of the famous courtesan Elena Ballarina. The editio princeps of this work does not include the author’s name and opens with a sonnet by Aretino to Venier, “Se di messer Virgilio e mastro Homero”.20 Aretino functions as a model for erotic, parodic writings, and, at the same time, as the tutelary deity of the young scholar:

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Gregorio Leti, Teatro gallico, part 4 (Amsterdam, Guglielmo de Jonge: 1694), 496. In Lorenzo Venier, La puttana errante, ed. Nicola Catelli (Milan, 2005), 36. See Paul Larivaille, “1525–1534: L’Arétin, de la pornographie ouverte au camouflage métaphorique,” in Élise Boillet-Chiara Lastraioli (eds.), Extravagances amoureuses: l’amour au-delà de la norme à la Renaissance. Stravaganze amorose: l’amore oltre la norma nel Rinascimento, Actes du colloque international du groupe de recherche Cinquecento plurale (Tours, 18– 20 September 2008) (Paris, 2010), 191–208; Isabel Rubín Vázquez de Parga, “I viaggi di una

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If the embellished and gallant poetry of Virgil and of Master Homer was in the style of the Puttana Errante, the world would give it an enema of ink: since good slander, id est blunt truth, makes the Muses become maids, and Apollo a servant, and all the rhymes become the porters of the amazing mind of Veniero. What else? For being Pietro Aretino I thought I was a giant, but compared to him I am dumber than a priest in comparison to Pasquino: whoever composes verses is just jerking off as if he tried to convert Friar Martin, because this is the true nature of writing. So rush to imitate him, or may you be stricken by a blood-shitting ill that will be the fortune of the charlatans.21 Even Venier, in the opening lines, invokes Aretino instead of the usual Muses or Apollo, the god of poetry (i, 3–4): Supplico te, grandissimo Aretino, Plusquamperfetto, da bene e cortese, Pel tuo spirto diabolico e divino, Che tienti al nome torce eterne accese,

21

I beseech thee, great Aretino, More than perfect, honest and gracious, For you divine and diabolical spirit, That keeps eternal torches burning to your name So that today I honour you with my head bowed,

cortigiana: una parodia del Cinquecento italiano. La puttana errante di Lorenzo Venier,” in El tema del viaje, un recorrido por la lengua y la literatura italianas (Cuenca, 2010), 957– 976. “Se di messer Virgilio e mastro Homero / La poesia riccamata e galante / Fosse in lo stil de la Puttana Errante, / Gli faria ’l mondo d’inchiostro un cristero: / Perché in dir ben male, id est ben vero, / Son le muse massare, e Apollo è fante, / E fachine le rime tutte quante / De lo stupendo ingegno del Veniero. / Che più? Per esser io Pietro Aretino / Mi teneva un gigante, e seco resto / Maggior bestia, ch’un prete con Pasquino: / E chi compone si mena l’agresto / Come chi vol convertir fra Martino, / Ché ’l vero andar di far i versi è questo. / Sì che imitatel presto, / Altramente il caccar il sangue vostro / Sarà de’ ciaratani il paternostro,” Venier, Puttana, 36.

pietro aretino: attributed works Ch’a me ch’oggi t’onoro a capo chino Presti tanto di lingua, che palese Faccia da l’Arsenal fin a la Tana L’opre poltrone d’una gran puttana. Io ten prego, Aretin, per quel terrore, Che ne’ vitii de’ prencipi ognor metti Pel re, pel pappa e per lo ’mperatore, Che temon l’ombra de’ tuoi gran Sonetti. Son, di te privo, in banco un ciurmatore Senza serpi, triaca e i bossoletti; Son in pergamo un frate senza voce, E paio un crucifisso senza croce.22

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Lend to me just enough languages that I clearly Make the dishonest deeds of a great whore. I pray thee, Aretino, for that terror, that you always put in the vices of the princes, For the king, for the pope, for the emperor, Who are scared by the shadow of your great sonnets. Without you, I am like a mountebank on his bench Without snakes, treacle, and perfume boxes; I am like a friar on a pulpit without voice And I look like someone crucified without a cross.

Venier’s poem was also mentioned by Aretino in the Ragionamento (1534),23 and it is also likely (as pointed out by Guillaume Apollinaire and by Paul Larivaille)24 that Aretino intervened directly in another poem by Venier, La Zaffetta (1531). Like the Puttana errante, La Zaffetta is a poem in ottava rima with an obscene, scandalous topic: it depicts the gang rape of the Venetian courtesan Angela Zaffetta.25 The first two ottave of the Zaffetta clearly illustrate Aretino’s influence as well as how his authorship of the Puttana errante had been assigned, which Venier categorically denies:

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Venier, La Puttana errante, 38–39. “Antonia. Per che ragione? Nanna. Per le ragioni che allega la leggenda della Puttana errante di Vinegia,” Pietro Aretino, Sei giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1969), 12. See also Pietro Aretino, Filosofo, ii, 7, 2: “Lisa. […] Dice il libro de l’Errante che in capo de l’averci studiato sette anni, de i mille uno se ne addottora con il sapere due acche, de gli studianti, ma nel puttanesimo, in sei giorni non ce n’è veruna di fallo” (Teatro iii, 51). See Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 156, 199. See Daniella Rossi, “Come tenere sotto controllo le cortigiane: il ‘Trentuno della Zaffetta’ di Lorenzo Venier e la politica veneziana nei confronti del sesso,” in Allison Levy (ed.), Sesso nel Rinascimento. Pratica, perversione e punizione nell’Italia Rinascimentale (Florence, 2009), 229–244; Courtney Quaintance, Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice, Toronto, 2015, 33–35.

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Poich’ogni bestia in volgare e in latino, Con giuditio di pecora ignorante, Ciancia che il famosissimo Aretino Habbi composta la Puttana Errante, Per mentirli dov’entra il pane e ’l vino, E per chiarir che un furfante è furfante, Vengo a cantar sì come la Zaffetta Ne l’utriusque in Chioggia hebbe la stretta.

Because every beast, in vernacular and in Latin, With the judgment of an ignorant sheep Prattles that the most famous Aretino Composed the Puttana Errante, To show that they are shameless liars And to make clear that a scoundrel is a scoundrel I will sing of how the Zaffetta In Chioggia was screwed in the utriusque

Che bisogna stupir, o goffi, s’io Ho in un tratto lo stil fatto famoso? Un Aretin, mezz’huomo e mezzo Dio, Mi presta il favor suo miracoloso. Chi vuol in ciel balzar per chiamar Clio, Vuol guarir in un dì dal mal francioso. Invochi l’Aretin, vero profeta, Chi si vuol far, come son io, poeta.

Why are you amazed, you fools, if I, Have suddenly made my style famous? One Aretino, half man, half God, Lends my his miraculous favour. He who wants to jump to the sky to call Clio Wants to recover from syphilis in just one day. He who wants to become a poet, like me, Should invoke Aretino, the true prophet.

[…]

[…]

Se l’Aretin la mia Puttana havesse Composto, come dite, babuassi, Credete voi ch’altro suon non tenesse, Altri soprani et altri contrabassi? Le rime sue parrebbono papesse, Et i suoi versi parrebbon papassi; E poi Pietro, al mio dir ferma colonna, Mai non ha visto camiscia di donna.

If Aretino had composed my Puttana, As you fools maintain, Don’t you believe that the sound of it would have been different, Different sopranos, different contrabasses? His rhymes would look like popesses And his verses would look like popes. Besides Pietro, the firm column of my writing, Has never seen a woman’s shirt.

Ma dir potrete: Ei t’ha fors’aiutato A finir l’opra, acciò riesca eterna. Dico di no, perch’io non son sfacciato, Com’è il ladron prosuntuoso Berna, Che per haver l’Orlando sconcacato Con rimaccie da banche e da taverna,

But you could argue: Did he perchance help you To finish your work, in order to make it eternal? I say no, because I am not insolent Like the presumptuous robber Berni

pietro aretino: attributed works Il nome suo c’ha scarpellato sopra, Come se del furfante fusse l’opra.26

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Who, for having crapped all over the Orlando With bad tavern- and mountebank-rhymes Has chiselled his name on it As if it were that rascal’s work.

Moreover, Venier adds the following verses later in the poem (7, 1–4): “Per due raggion, Zaffetta, in stil divino / Vengo a cantar l’historia de’ tuoi fatti: / Una per dimostrar che l’Aretino / I versi de l’Errante non m’ha fatti” (Because of two reasons, Zaffetta, in a divine style / I come to sing the story of your deeds: / The first is to show that Aretino / Did not write for me the verses of the Errante). As noted by Alessandro Luzio, this brief work was sent by Aretino to the Duke of Mantua along with Aretino’s capitolo Stando un miglio l’altr’ier di là da male,27 and likely delivered after March 1530, confirming that the Puttana errante at that point had already been composed. There are moreover several letters addressed to Aretino that provide further evidence on the text’s authorship, however, they mention the work but not the author. On February 12, 1531, for example, Girolamo Bencucci, Bishop of Vaison, praises the Marfisa and the Puttana errante and defines them as very enjoyable.28 Further evidence can be gathered from three other letters: Bernardino Arelio’s to Aretino of October 17, 1531 (“Ho veduto di novo una Puttana errante, condotta in sino qua a Turino; ah la bella festa che li fanno queste madonne intorno!” I saw again a Puttana errante brought here in Turin: oh what pleasure the ladies here take in it!);29 Giovanni Alessandro Zanchi’s of March 26, 1536 (“scrissi a quel dotto omo [i.e. Girolamo Verità], a cui furon gratte oltra modo l’offerte di vostra Signoria, per quanto mi scrisse in una sua, pregandome vi volessi io di novo chieder la Zaffetta corretta e la Errante, con le più

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Lorenzo Venier, La Zaffetta, ed. Gino Raya (Catania, 1929), 3 and 5 (octaves 1–2 and 4–5). Alessandro Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni a Venezia e la corte dei Gonzaga (Turin, 1888), 46. (“Ma perché io sento il presente all’odore / Un’operetta in quel cambio galante / Vi mando ora in stil ladro e traditore / Intitolata La Puttana Errante / Dal Veniero composta mio creato / Che m’è in dir mal quattro giornate inante”, But because I sense the present from its smell / A little work as a gallant exchange / I send you now, in the style of a thief and of a traitor / Entitled La puttana errante / Composed by Veniero, my pupil / Who is four days ahead of me in bad mouthing). “Ma ci avete tanto satisfatto con la bravura del vostro Rodamonte, e con quella errante Signora, che ci fate andare pazzi noi e tutto il Mondo” You have satisfied us so much with Rodamonte’s bravery and with that Wandering Lady, that you made us and the world go crazy, lsa i, 83. lsa i, 119.

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onorate parole che di bocca mai uscissero di persona vivente” I wrote to that learned man [Girolamo Verità], who greatly appreciated your Lordship’s offers, as he wrote to me in a letter, requesting that I ask you again for a corrected version of the Zaffetta, and the Errante, with the most respectable words that ever came out of the mouth of a living person);30 and that of Lelio Filomarino of April 26 of an unspecified year—probably datable to the 1530s (“da parte de vostra Signoria le ho mandate tutte alla Signora Marchesa di Pescara, la quale ne farà parte a sua Signoria, ma la Errante la mandarò per altra via” on your Lordship behalf I sent them all [the stanze addressed to the Marquis of Vasto] to Her Ladyship, the Marchioness of Pescara, who will let his Lordship have them; but I will send the Errante through a different channel).31 It is possible that Aretino had circulated La Puttana errante for promotional purposes and for the benefit of his protégée Lorenzo Venier and that his excessive involvement thus gave rise to doubts about the true authorship of the work.32 Finally, a direct attack on Aretino comes from Medoro Nucci, in a letter of July 17, 1555, which lists a series of works that theoretically came from Aretino’s pen and included the Zaffetta: Io sto smarito come il mondo sta tanto addorarti per i meriti delle tue opere: prima, per i sonetti de’ fotistori che tu facesti sotto le figure di Raphaello da Orbino; 2a, per il Trentuno che tu componesti, che fu datto alla Zafetta; 3a, per la P… Errante; 4a, per le 6 giornate che insegnano a ruffianare a tutte le qualità delle persone; oltre a molti sonetti ch’io ho appresso di me, scritti buona parte di tua mano.33 I am bemused of how the world adores you for the merits of your works. Firstly, for the sonnets of the fuckers you made for the drawings of Raffaello from Urbino; secondly, for the story of the Trentuno that was given to the Zaffetta, which you composed; thirdly, for the Wandering W…; fourthly, for the Six days that teach all kinds of people to be a pimp; besides the many sonnets, which I possess, written in large part by your hand.

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lsa i, 280. lsa i, 329. See Folke Gernert, Francisco Delicados Retrato de la Lozana Andaluza und Pietro Aretinos Sei giornate: zum literarischen Diskurs über die käufliche Liebe im frühen Cinquecento (Geneva, 1999), 62–63. Alessandro Luzio, “La famiglia di Pietro Aretino,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 4 (1884): 361–388 (385).

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In short, as regards the composition of the Puttana errante and the Zaffetta, one must remember that Aretino was most likely working on the Ragionamento in the early thirties—it was published in 153434—and therefore he may have been able to make draft of the text available to other less experienced authors. Some evidence suggests that the Puttana errante author saw the first version of the Cortigiana, which was never printed. See, for example, the Prologo e Argomento from the 1525 Cortigiana, 11: “Et perché Apollo fu ceretano, come per la lira si può cognoscere, e molti anni cantò in banca, tutti e figlioli e figlie che gli ebbe fur poeti e poetesse” (And because Apollo was a charlatan, as his lyre makes clear, and for many years he sang on banks, all the sons and daughters he had were poets and poetesses) and Puttana errante, i, 2, 5–6: “Tirati, Apollo ciaratan, da parte / con donne Muse, e non vi date affanno” (Apollo, you charlatan, go with lady Muses and don’t bother);35 or Cortigiana (1525), Prologo e Argomento, 8: “Però non vi maravigliate s’ella non va su per sonetti lascivi, unti, liquidi cristali, unquanco, quinci e quindi, e simili coglionerie” (So do not be surprised if she [the comedy] does not rise with lascivious sonnets, oily, liquid crystals, nevermore, here and there, and such bullshit) and Puttana errante, ii, 4, 2–3: “Di soventi, lascivie e vaghe erbette, / D’unquanchi isnelli e liquidi cristalli” (Oftentimes, lasciviousness and gentle grass / Of nevermore, slender, swift, and liquid crystals).

1

The Tariffa and the Ragionamento del Zoppino

The year after Aretino published the Ragionamento, the Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia was published, probably thanks to Niccolò d’Aristotle de’ Rossi, known as the Zoppino (according to Guglielmo Libri).36 The Tariffa is an anonymous poem in the form of a dialogue in terza rima between two interlocutors: Gentleman (Gentiluomo) and Foreigner (Forestiere). Structured as a list, the text recounts in a denigrating manner the performances of sex workers in Venice, along with their prices, referring to them as “whores”.37 Venice was, according 34 35 36 37

See Scritti di Pietro Aretino nel Codice Marciano It. xi 66 (= 6730), 86–89. In addition, an interesting parallel was observed between Puttana errante, iii 2 and Ragionamento, i (Aretino, Sei giornate, 52). See Lorenzo Baldacchini, Alle origini dell’editoria in volgare. Niccolò Zoppino da Ferrara a Venezia. Annali (1503–1544) (Manziana, 2011), 285 (n. 352). See Leone Dalla Man, Un discepolo di Pietro Aretino. Lorenzo Venier e i suoi poemetti osceni. Contributo alla storia del costume veneziano nella prima metà del secolo decimosesto (Ravenna, 1913), 46–49, 95–108, 116–123, and Paolo Pucci, “Decostruzione disgustosa e definizione di classe nella ‘Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia’,” Rivista di letteratura italiana,

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to the Gentleman, the city with the largest number of prostitutes: “Che quante rane ha in sé palustre fondo / E la terra formiche o fiori i prati / Quando l’aprile è più vago e giocondo, / Tante sono puttane in tutti i lati, / De’ quai veggiam talor più folta schiera / Che di vacche e di buoi per li mercati” (For as many frogs are on the bottom of a pond / and ants on earth, or flowers in the fields / / when April is most swift and delightful / so are everywhere whores / of whom we see a multitude larger / than that of cows and oxen at the market).38 And their nature is wicked, he continues: “Piene d’ogni malizia e falsitate / Son le puttane e come statue a punto / Dentro hanno il fango e son di fuora ornate” (Full of malice and falsehood / are whores and exactly like statues / are made of mud inside, and adorned on the outside).39 The same topic is already present in the Zaffetta, octave 12: “Signor, sono in Venetia, gratia Dei, / Tre legioni o quattro di puttane, / Ruina de’ patritij e de’ plebei, / Parte in gran case, parte in carampane; / Ma fra tante migliaia un cinque o sei, / A forza di belletti e d’ambracane, / Cuopronsi sua bruttezza stomacosa, / Che le poltrone paion qualche cosa” (My Lords, there are in Venice gratia Dei, / three or four legions of whores / Who ruin the patricians and the commoners / Part in great houses, part in slums. / But among those thousands, five or six / By virtue of their makeup and perfumes / Cover their disgusting ugliness / So that those whores look a little something).40 The Tariffa reflects a literary movement typical of the sixteenth century, widespread mainly in Rome and Venice, that aimed to discredit the figure of the courtesan, not solely out of misogyny, but for social purposes as well. Marisa Milani explores the topic in her Contro le puttane, an anthology of misogynist texts.41 More recently, Paola Ugolini analyzed the Purgatorio delle cortegiane, a short capitolo in terza rima authored by Maestro Andrea, which dates to the first half of the 1520s and was possibly performed in Rome during carnival.42 The Purgatorio is a clear satire against courtesans, whose physical decay is mercilessly described similar to Lamento d’una cortigiana ferrarese. Of course,

38 39 40

41 42

28/1 (2010): 29–50. The text of the Tariffa is quoted by La Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia, ed. Danilo Romei, s.l., 2020. All traces of the editio princeps seem to have been lost. In La Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia, 21–22. La Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia, 23. Venier, La Zaffetta, 11. See also Venier, La Puttana errante, iv, 5, 1–4: “Ad ogni modo c’è maggior divitia / A Venetia e per tutto di puttane, / Che non è nel Bronzon ladro malitia, / Menzogne e giuntarie fra le roffiane” (“Anyway, there are more whores in Venice and everywhere, / than malice in the thief Bronzone / and falsehoods and frauds among the pimps”). Contro le puttane. Rime venete del xvi secolo, ed. Marisa Milani (Bassano del Grappa, 1994). See Paola Ugolini, “The Satirist’s Purgatory: ‘Il purgatorio delle cortegiane’ and Writer’s Discontent,” Italian Studies, 64/1 (2009): 1–19.

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popular literature, too, helped to disseminate this theme: see, for instance, the booklet Scudo d’amanti. Dove si contiene l’astutie, e l’inganni, che usano le cortigiane alli poveri gioveni innamorati. Con alcune ciciliane belle, e sententiose, poste in luce per Trastullo di Succio Muccio di Castrocucco,43 or the Historia da fugir le putane.44 Naturally, at the same time defenses of courtesans also circulated: see, for example, the Stanze del Poeta in lode delle più famose cortegiane di Venegia by Marco Bandarini, published more or less than ten years after the Tariffa.45 The Tariffa was assigned to Aretino in some older bibliographies, but without foundation,46 an assumption that Apollinaire revived in the early twentieth century.47 The attribution was based most likely not only on the text’s content, but also on a series of citations made by Aretino himself, the first lines of the letter that precedes the poem L’autore alla sua signora: Chi dubita che non vi fosse più caro dono, Signora, un vaso, quantunque piccolo, pieno del venerabile metallo di san Giovan Boccadoro, che queste rime impiastrate sopra la tariffa delle puttane che io vi mando? Tuttavia, perché forniscono in vostra laude, vi devranno elle esser grate, nella guisa che è grato alle donne, se bene hanno il volto di simie e gli occhi simili ai Baronzi del Boccaccio, di sentirsi dagli uomini recar il titolo di belle, di giovani e di buone robbe; che, come dice il Flagello de’ Principi, tutte nelle lor laudi gongolano più che non gongola una ghiotta femina nel representarsi dove più importa la forma d’un ben grosso e sodo priapo.48 43

44

45

46 47 48

The work has no typographical notes but is attributable to the 16th century. Known copy: Biblioteca Angelica of Rome (Shelfmark: rr.3.99/3). See also the Opera nova dove si contiene una bellissima stanza dell’Ariosto, con la trasmutatione. Le malitie delle cortigiane. La pastorella con la sua trasmutatione tutti sugetti da pigliarsi spasso, et piacere. Composta et stampata nuovamente, without typographical notes (which dates, however, the sixteenth century); known copy: Vatican Library, Shelfmark Stamp. Cappon.v.681(int.52). The oldest edition is without typographical notes but can be dated to the 16th century, not after 1513. Known copy: Biblioteca Colombina of Seville, Sala Hernando, Shelfmark 6-3-24(18). The work is preserved in a sole copy at the British Library (Shelfmark C.62.a.12). There is also a nineteenth-century edition (Venice, 1835). See Fabien Coletti, “Aux antipodes de la littérature antiputtanesca vénitienne: Les ‘Stanze in lode delle più famose cortigiane di Venegia’ de Marco Bandarini,” Revista internacional de culturas y literaturas, 15 (2014): 1– 34. See François Ignace Fournier, Dictionnaire portatif de bibliographie (Paris, 1805), 19. Aretino’s authorship was previously denied by Dalla Man, A disciple of Pietro Aretino, 47. L’ oeuvre du divin Arétin. Les Ragionamenti. La vie des nonnes, la vie des femmes mariées, la vie des courtisanes; Sonnets luxurieux, ed. Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris, 1909), 13–14. La Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia, 17. See Gernert, Francisco Delicados, 65. I maintain that

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Who can doubt, Lady, that a vase, however small, full of the venerable metal of St John Golden Mouth, would have been dearer to you than these plastered [also in the sense of: affected with the French disease] verses on the Tariffa delle puttane that I am sending to you? Yet, because they eventually praise you, you should hold them dear, in the same way that women—despite having faces like monkeys, and the eyes similar to those of the Baronzi by Boccaccio—are pleased hearing men praising them as beautiful, young, and as good stuff. Because, as the Scourge of Princes says, all women are overjoyed by their praises more than a gluttonous woman rejoices in fancying the shape of a big and sturdy cock where it matters most. And later in the poem, “La burla in questo loco io vo tacendo / Che scritto v’ha del pover genovese / Il Flagello de’ principi tremendo” (I’ll say nothing here about the joke / That wrote to you about the poor Genoese / The terrible Scourge of Princes).49 There is also the example of the Foreigner, who in commenting on a story told to him by the Gentleman, thinks it might have come from Aretino’s pen: “O gran sciagura! o odor di gentil vino! / Questo è un bel caso e non indegno forse / De la penna immortal de l’Aretino” (Oh great disaster! Oh smell of gentle wine! This is a funny story indeed and perhaps not unworthy / of Aretino’s immortal pen).50 And finally, Aretino is remembered in his usual role as punisher of vices: Quel che di tutte lor guida il squadrone, Perché in tal arte mai non ebbe pare, È il poltron e gaglioffo Saratone, Al quale ogni puttana dee recare Grazie maggior che a l’Aretino mio Non deve il Dragonzin per il mangiare: L’Aretino, nel mondo un mezzo dio, Che fa tremar i vizii e insegna a noi Tutto quel bel per cui si poggia a Dio.

49 50

The one who is leading their squad, Because in such art never had peers, Is the slacker and scoundrel Saratone To whom each whore must be thankful More than to my Aretino Must Dragoncino be for his food, Aretino, a half-god on this world Who makes the vice shake, and teaches to us All that is good to reach Heaven.

the reference is to Marescalco, Argomento e Prologo, 4: “e poi con mille novellette rallegratola, le entrerei ne le sue bellezze, ché tutte gongolano ne lo udir lodare i loro begli occhi, le loro belle mani e la lor gentile aria” (Teatro ii, 28) “and then, having cheered her up with a thousand little stories, I would start praising her beauties, because they [the women] all rejoice in hearing praised their beautiful eyes, their nice hands, and their kind look.” La Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia, 29. Perhaps the reference is to Francesco da Castiglione Ligure, better known as Ceccotto Genovese, quoted in the Cortigiana (draft i and ii). La Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia, 33.

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These verses corroborate the belief that Aretino—here also referred to as the protector of Giovanbattista Dragoncino—represented a model for the anonymous author. Closer attention to the text reveals that the author of the Tariffa knew Venier’s production, and in particular the Puttana errante, which is explicitly mentioned.51 Some of the characters mentioned in the Tariffa are present in Aretino’s works as well, such as, for example, Gian Manente,52 a musician at the court of Leone x who appears in the 1525 Cortigiana (Arg. 2 and iii 9, 2). In the Dialogo Aretino recalls the Tariffa just one year after its publication, comparing it to Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso: “e tu mostrati allegra ed entra in ragionar del Turco che dee venire, del papa che non crepa, de lo imperadore che fa miracoli, e del Furioso e de la Tariffa de le cortigiane [sic] di Vinegia, che dovea dir prima” (and you, look merry, and talk about the Turk who is coming, of the Pope who does not kick the bucket, of the Emperor who does miracles, of the Furioso and of the Tariffa de le cortigiane di Vinegia, which I should have mentioned before).53 That is, in Aretino’s point of view the Tariffa was a text as important as the Furioso. As for the authorship of the Tariffa, a letter by Antonio Cavallino, a Paduan lawyer, to Aretino, suggests that Cavallino wrote the poem: “Per ora non mando la Tariffa delle Puttane, perché non l’ho potuta riavere; per la prima mia la manderò” (For now I am not sending the Tariffa delle Puttane because I could not have it back; but I will send it along with my first letter).54 Although this hypothesis, which dates back to Alessandro Luzio, has been embraced by scholars of Aretino (most recently by Paul Larivaille),55 on closer inspection the document does not appear decisive for confirming the attribution. It may simply be that Cavallino had a copy of the poem with him, not that he was the author. Some, on the other hand, have considered Lorenzo Venier as a possible author.56 51

52

53 54 55 56

“Elena Ballarina è cara e bella, / ma la sconcia il cervel sciocco e leggero, / e sempre gelosia l’urta e martella. / Questa è quella gentil, per dir il vero, / Puttana Errante, che di cazzi ingorda, / già spogliò questo e quell’altro emispero” Elena Ballarina is beautiful and kind / but she is spoiled by her foolish and light brain / and jealousy always troubles and torments her. / To say the truth, she is that gentle / Wandering Whore who, hungry for cocks / pillaged this and the other hemisphere, La Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia, 36. “Importa ancor ch’aggiuntarebbe Cristo, / E di ciò dimandate Gian Manenti, / Uomo per altro accorto e assai provisto”, Besides she would dupe Christ / And, go ask about this to Gian Manenti / A wise man, in other respects, and very smart, La Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia, 25–26. Aretino, Sei giornate, 174. lsa i, 244. Luzio, Pietro Aretino, 121 fn. 1 and Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 428 fn. 86. Giovanni Scarabello, Meretrices. Storia della prostituzione a Venezia tra il xiii e il xviii

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It is also interesting that the first sonnet of the Sonetti lussuriosi (Questo è un libro d’altro che sonetti) appears at the beginning of the Tariffa, demonstrating the practice of recycling characteristic of Aretino’s workshop, the “officina aretinesca”, to quote Danilo Romei.57 The sonnet also appears at the beginning of the Chantilly manuscript, which transmits Il piacevol ragionamento de l’Aretino. Dialogo di Giulia e di Maddalena, a piece I will discuss later.58 One year before the Tariffa, the anonymous poem in terza rima Trionfo della Lussuria di maestro Pasquino (Venice: F. Bindoni and M. Pasini) was printed.59 The poem is a sort of parody of Petrarch’s Triumphi, in which the storyteller Zoppino appears to the protagonist in the role of guide and introduces some characters who are notoriously prone to lust, including some famous Roman courtesans.60 The Triompho and the Tariffa are fundamental to understanding the genesis of the anonymous Ragionamento del Zoppino fatto frate e Lodovico puttaniere (printed by a close friend of Aretino, Francesco Marcolini, in 1539), a work closely related to the Ragionamento (1534) and the Dialogo (1536). The Ragionamento del Zoppino is a dialogue set in Rome, in which Zoppino— according to some, the Ferrarese printer, according to others a different character—,61 who has repented for his previous dissolute life and now embraces the religious life, tries to prevent Lodovico from associating with courtesans by emphasizing the danger of consorting with them and denouncing their faults. As Robert Buranello has pointed out, “Beyond questions of its paternity, the Ragionamento del Zoppino provides a detailed portrait of the practice of prostitution in Renaissance Rome and entices the reader through its fluctuation between desire and disgust, lust and loathing”.62

57

58 59

60 61 62

secolo (Venice, 2008), 85. See Des Lorenzo Veniero gereimte Preistafel von der venedischen Huldinnen Liebesgunst nebst venezianischem Sittenspiegel. Mit Holzschnitten von Eduard Ede (München, 1924). See Danilo Romei in Aretino, Sonetti lussuriosi, 144–145. Probably also the Ficheide by Caro alludes to the sonnet: “Imperò ve ne rimetto a quel libro d’altro che Sonetti,” in Annibal Caro, Gli Straccioni—La Ficheide—La Nasea—La statua della foia (Milan, 1863), 146. See Il piacevol ragionamento de l’Aretino. Dialogo di Giulia e di Maddalena, ed. Claudio Galderisi-Enrico Rufi (Rome, 1987), 43–47. The text can be read in Pasquino e dintorni. Testi pasquineschi del Cinquecento, ed. Antonio Marzo (Rome, 1990), 103–121. See now Simona Pignalosa, “Di una cinquecentina ritrovata. ‘Il triompho della lussuria di maestro Pasquino’,” Paratesto, 10 (2013): 47–60. A second edition was printed in 1537. It is not a sixteenth-century invention. Consider, for example, the fifteenth-century poems by Stefano Finiguerri known as the Za. See I poemetti, ed. Antonio Lanza (Rome, 1994). See Teatro ii, 338. Robert Buranello, “The Zoppino Dialogue: Malice, Misogyny, and Meretricious Misrepresentation,” Rivista di studi italiani, 23 (2005): 45–62 (46). See also Gernert, Francisco Delicados.

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The anonymous author describes Rome and its people very precisely and in vivid, colourful language,63 just as in Aretino’s Ragionamento and Dialogo, texts to which the Ragionamento del Zoppino owes much. Rome is described as an infernal city, a violent Babel that has fallen into perdition; it is a citation of an image employed earlier by Aretino in the first Cortigiana.64 Also here, the distinction between a cultured courtesan and a low-class prostitute is no longer present.65 In the text—which can be considered a long tirade in dialogue form—the prostitutes are condemned not only for their physical degradation66 and their shameful actions,67 but also for their cunning, their wiles, their greed, and their betrayals. The Ragionamento del Zoppino is mentioned in Grappa’s Cicalamenti along with other works by Aretino.68 This association was also made, perhaps inde-

63

64 65

66

67

68

See, for example, the review of the harlots in Francisco Delicado, Ragionamento del Zoppino fatto frate, e Lodovico puttaniere, dove contiensi la vita e genealogia di tutte le cortigiane di Roma, ed. Mario Cicognani (Milan, 1969), 24–25. Teatro i, 63. “Zoppino Le puttane dunque, o cortigiane che tu dir le vogli, Ludovico mio caro, son mala cosa” Zoppino. The whores, or courtesans, if you like to say so, are, my dear Ludovico, a nasty thing, Delicado, Zoppino, 17. “Hanno il corpo, per il soverchio maneggiar, rugoso e crespo; le lor zinne fiappe, che paian vessiche sgonfie che gli cascano” Their body is wrinkled and rugged because of their excessive sexual activity; their boobs are saggy and hang loose like empty blisters, Delicado, Zoppino, 27. “L’ho viste la sera andando al cesso fare un romor, che parea si desse fuoco a tutte l’artegliarie di Castel Sant’Angelo, ovvero alla girandola: e questo era il gran strepito delle anime non nate, che gli uscivan del culo”, I saw them at night going to the crapper letting out such noises that it seemed that all the artillery of Castel Sant’Angelo, or a pinwheel, was firing. And this was the huge uproar of the unborn souls coming out of their asses, Delicado, Zoppino, 29. “Quanti, per Dio, crediamo noi ch’habbino letto i ricordi del prefato Tullio al figliuolo? Et quanti, che non habbiano riletto quelli del Piccardo et del Giustiniano al Coccio? Di Flaminio a Sempronio? Della Nanna all’Antonia? Della ’stessa alla Pippa? Della comare alla balia? Et del Zoppino a Lodovico?”, By God, how many do you think have read the teachings of the above mentioned Tullio [Cicero] to his son? And how many did re-read those by Piccardo and Giustiniano to Coccio? Of Flaminio to Sempronio? Of the Nanna to Antonia? Of the same to Pippa? Of the godmother to the nanny? Of the Zoppino to Lodovico?, Il Grappa, “Cicalamenti intorno al sonetto ‘Poi che mia speme è lunga a venir troppo,’ dove si ciarla allungo delle lodi delle donne et del mal francioso,” in Ludi esegetici iii. Il Grappa, Cicalamenti intorno al sonetto ‘Poi che mia speme è lunga a venir troppo’—Comento nella canzone del Firenzuola ‘In lode della salsiccia,’ ed. Franco Pignatti (Manziana, 2009), 132– 133. Note that also the Cicalamenti were attributed to Aretino: see Mazzuchelli, La vita di Pietro Aretino, 301–302.

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pendently, by the English publisher John Wolfe, who placed the small work after the more famous Ragionamento and Dialogo in the London edition of 1584,69 hence forming a sort of triptych on the life of the Roman courtesans. In the nineteenth century, Alcide Bonneau—followed by Guillaume Apollinaire and Gino Lanfranchi—rejected the notion of Aretino’s authorship of this work, identifying the author as the Spaniard Francisco Delicado instead, even if convincing evidence on the matter has never been brought to light.70 According to others, however, the author is again Lorenzo Venier.71 Even the Ragionamento, like other pseudo-Aretino works, has enjoyed some fortune because of its subject matter and perhaps also because of its depiction of an infernal Rome. Moreover, in addition to various modern editions in Italian, beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century, the text has been translated into French, German, and recently also into English.72

2

The Dialogo di Giulia e di Maddalena (or La Puttana errante)

The Dialogo di Giulia e di Maddalena, a work that in some printed editions has the title La Puttana errante (as the poem by Lorenzo Venier), has been attributed to Aretino and circulated in different versions, first in manuscript (from second half of the sixteenth century) and then in print (starting from 1660).73 Admittedly a fairly thin plot, the dialogue narrates the sexual initiation of the protagonist Maddalena in the printed edition, Giulia in the handwritten one and her arrival in Rome, which results in her living as a courtesan and eventu69 70

71 72

73

See Aretino, Sei giornate, 396–399. See Gernert, Francisco Delicados, 68–69. Attribution to Delicado also appears on the title page of the edition by Mario Cicognani. Carlo Cordié denied Aretino’s authorship, but he didn’t suggest any other possible names (Opere di Pietro Aretino, 16). I add that, according to Domenico Fusco, even La Lozana Andaluza, a work by Delicado, was assigned by some to Aretino (Fusco, L’Aretino, 48). Francisco Delicado, La Lozana andaluza, ed. Carla Perugini (Sevilla, 2004), xl. See Le Zoppino. Dialogue de la vie et généalogie de toutes les courtisanes de Rome (Paris, 1883); Dialogue du Zoppino devenu Frère, et Ludovico, putassier, où sont contenues la vie et la généalogie de toutes les courtisanes de Rome, attribué à Francisco Delicado, […], Première traduction entièrement conforme au texte italien placé en regard. Introduction, essai bibliographique et notes par Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris: s.n., s.a.); Dichtungen und Gespräche des Göttlichen Aretino (s.l., 1904), 287–352; Pietro Aretino, Der Zoppino (München, 1988); Duncan Salked, “History, Genre and Sexuality in the Sixteenth Century: The Zoppino Dialogue Attributed to Pietro Aretino,” Mediterranean Studies, 10 (2001): 49–116 (89–116). See Mazzuchelli, La vita di Pietro Aretino, 235–243.

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ally giving advice to a younger woman (Giulia in the print edition, Maddalena in the handwritten one). The most recent editors of the dialogue, Claudio Galderisi and Enrico Rufi, published the text as transmitted from the manuscript 677 in the Bibliothèque du Musée Condé in Chantilly (copied probably between 1550 and 1572); they have identified a number of stylistic and intertextual similarities (primarily an erotic lexicon) between the Ragionamento and the Dialogo and in the Dialogo di Giulia e di Maddalena, which points to Aretino’s authorship of the latter text, too.74 Galderisi ad Rufi note that, in conclusion, the Chantilly manuscript transmitted an early work by Aretino, created during the Roman period and therefore before the two dialogues of the Sei giornate. A comparison between the printed and handwritten editions reveals that references to ecclesiastical characters absent in the latter appear instead in the former. In addition, the printed edition excluded portions of the text present in the handwritten one. The attribution to Aretino had already been proposed by Mazzuchelli75 and Cordié, who only accessed the printed edition.76 Yet the evidence used by Rufi does not appear entirely convincing. The erotic lexicon used in the Dialogo di Giulia e di Maddalena presupposes the Sonetti lussuriosi as well as the Ragionamento and the Dialogo. According to some scholars the attribution should be denied because the literary style, lexicon, and plot in the Dialogo di Giulia e di Maddalena may be attributed to an anonymous imitator.77 This hypothesis seems the most reasonable one. A similar influence of Aretino’s style can be seen in a few erotic sonnets—collected by Romei—that show a clear imitation of the Aretino of the Sonetti lussuriosi or even of the Ragionamento del Zoppino; this would have been inconceivable without the publication of the Ragionamento and of the Dialogo. Galderisi and Rufi say that one historical fact to support Aretino’s authorship was identified in a chronicle. In 1577, Giuliano de’ Ricci, referring to a comedy performed in Florence, wrote: “che delle più dishoneste [i.e. commedie] non si è mai visto in scena né letta negli scrittoi, et la Nanna et la Pippa dell’Aretino

74 75 76 77

Il piacevol ragionamento de l’Aretino. Mazzuchelli, La vita di Pietro Aretino, 243. See Opere di Pietro Aretino, 977. See Giovanni Aquilecchia, “Presentazione,” in Il piacevol ragionamento de l’Aretino. Dialogo di Giulia e di Maddalena, ed. Claudio Galderisi-Enrico Rufi (Rome, 1987), 7–15: 8–9, the reviews by Danilo Romei, Esperienze letterarie, 12/4 (1987): 112–117, now in Danilo Romei, Minima litteraria, (s.l. [Raleigh], 2014), 86–93, and Angelo Romano, rr Roma nel Rinascimento, 3 (1988): 148–150.

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et Giulia et Maddalena del medeximo si possono recitare in un convento di monache” (a most dishonest [play] has never been seen on stage or read in a study, and the Nanna and Pippa by Aretino and Giulia and Maddalena by the same are allowed to be performed in a convent of nuns).78 The memory of this event, as noted by Angelo Romano, is to be treated with some caution, as it probably cannot be traced back to the year 1577 and is perhaps inaccurate. In any case, it is possible that at that time the text was attributed to Aretino, and that Giuliano de’ Ricci simply reported a commonly accepted notion. It is remarkable that no one ever mentioned the Dialogo di Giulia e di Maddalena while Aretino was alive. Another curious fact, unrelated to Aretino, should also be taken into consideration: no historical data on the characters mentioned in the text has ever been found; I am referring to La Tortora, Carlo Manzino, Angela Grassa, Lucrezia da Forlì, and Nero di Giano.79 The same cannot be said for the Ragionamento and the Dialogo. Aretino’s works are usually characterised precisely by constant references to historical reality. The title of the Chantilly manuscript (Il piacevol ragionamento de l’Aretino) parallels that of the Ragionamento del Zoppino contained in the 1584 editions of the Ragionamenti, namely Il piacevol ragionamento de l’Aretino, nel quale il Zoppino fatto frate, e Lodovico puttaniere trattano de la vita, e de le genealogia di tutte le Cortigiane di Roma;80 one might hypothesize that the title of the handwritten draft was modelled after that of the print draft. After Galderisi and Rufi’s edition, the history of the Dialogo is further complicated by the discovery—thanks to Ottavio Besomi—of two other manuscripts that offer substantial variations from the Chantilly manuscript.81 This leads me

78 79

80 81

Giuliano de’ Ricci, Cronaca (1532–1606), ed. Giuliana Sapori (Milan-Naples, 1972), 209. See Opere di Pietro Aretino, 977. Lotto del Tignoso (p. 90) and Anfiano Spinola (p. 91) are, as stated in the text, respectively from Pisa and Genoa. Anfiano is a literary character name; see Marco Villoresi, La fabbrica dei cavalieri. Cantari, poemi, romanzi in prosa fra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Rome, 2005), 46, 66 e 117. See Aretino, Sei giornate, 396–399. See Ottavio Besomi, “Nuovi testimoni manoscritti di un dialogo attribuito all’Aretino,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 405–452. In the catalogue of the Floncel library, n. 4708, one finds “Dialoghi due di Ginevra & Rosana, composti da M. Parten. Etiro. in-4°. Mss.” (Catalogo della libreria Floncel, i [Paris, G.G. Cressonier: 1774], 336), while in a later catalogue one reads the description of a manuscript in 4°: “Aretino (Pietro) Dialoghi Due di Ginevra et Rosana, a very neatly written ms.” (Thomas Thorpe, Catalogue of the most extensive, valuable, and truly interesting collection of curious books in most languages and every department of literature containing Numerous Articles of the greatest Interest and Rarity […] [London, 1829], 10, n. 118). There are reports of an edition, probably lost: Guillaume François Debure, Bibliographie instructive ou Traité de la connoissance des livres rares et singuliers,

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to suspect the existence of a handwritten tradition that modified the text. The Dialogo was disseminated after the Council of Trent and the illegal circulation of manuscripts may have facilitated its multiple rearrangements.82 The Dialogo, too, has enjoyed a certain popularity, probably more for its supposed authorship and subject matter than for its literary quality, as can be inferred from its numerous translations and reworkings.83 In any case, its attribution to Aretino seems to have been commonly accepted, as noted by Gregorio Leti in the seventeenth-century Puttanismo moderno.84

82

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84

7 vols. (Paris, chez De Bure: 1763–1768), vol. 2, 216 (n. 3960): “Dialoghi doi di Ginevra e Rosana, comp. da Messer Pietro Aretino detto il Divino. Stamp. in Bengodi, l’anno 1584. in-8°. Ouvrage fort rare: c’ est un petit in-8°. De 121 pages, après la derniere desquelles, doit suivre un feuillet séparé, qui contient un portrait de l’Arétin, gravé en bois, avec la Souscription que voici: Stampata con buona licenza (toltami) nella nobil Citta di Bengodi ne l’Italia altre volte piu felice, il viggesimo primo d’octobre m.d. lxxxiv” (This last print indication is also identical in La seconda parte de ragionamenti di M. Pietro Aretino, 401). Moreover, in the Catalogo de’ libri italiani o tradotti in italiano proibiti negli Stati di Sua Maestà l’Imperatore d’Austria (Venice, 1815), printed in two hundred copies, is included Aretino’s “Dialoghi di Ginevra e Rosanna, s.l. e s. d. (damnatur)”, cf. Giampietro Berti, Censura e circolazione delle idee nel Veneto della Restaurazione (Venice, 1989), 16 fn. 78. For example, there is an eighteenth-century manuscript of the text with the title Storia e vita di Pietro Aretino, dialogo tra Giulia e Maddalena; see Maria Antonietta Anzillotta, “Fondo manoscritto ed edizioni cinquecentine della biblioteca privata ‘G. Cesare Donnaperna, Marchese di Colobraro’,” in Studi Lucani, Atti del ii Convegno Nazionale di Storiografia Lucana (Montalbano Jonico-Matera, 10–14 September 1970), part 2, ed. Pietro Borraro (Lecce, 1976), 309–311: 310. For the German translation: Dichtungen und Gespräche des Göttlichen Aretino, 211–283. For the French translation: La Putain Errante ou Dialogue de Magdeleine et de Julie, attribué à l’ Arétin, in Œuvres priapiques (Paris, 1970), 11–51. For the reworking in English: John Garfield, The Wandring Whore, 5 parts (London, s.n.: 1660–1661). In 1663, still in London, Peter Aretine, The sixth part of the Wandring-whore revived, a dialogue, was published. It should also be noted that under the pseudonym Peter Aretine, Strange & true nevves from Jack-a-Newberries six windmills, or, The crafty, impudent, common-whore (turned bawd) anatomized and Strange nevves from Bartholomew-Fair, or, the wandring-whore discovered, were published in London in 1660. “Valdambrina. Io non so perché difende l’Inquisitione con tanto rigore la lettura dell’Aretino, e soprattutto della Puttana errante, e permette per contro quella del Toledo, e di tante altre Somme di Casisti che sono al doppio più lascive dell’Opera d’Aretino. // Ciccia. Amica cara, gli Eclesiastici non cercano che il loro profitto, perché in loro la prima carità comincia da loro. La Puttana errante, e le altre opere d’Aretino sono state composte per nostra instrutione, come ancora quella delle Gentil Donne, della Gioventù, e di tutti Maritati Maschi, e femine, et al contrario il Toledo, e le altre Somme di Casisti, servono per l’instrutione d’essi Eclesiastici, che però difendono quello ch’è buono per gli altri, e tengono pretioso quello è buono per loro. Ma quel che più importa, che tutti questi Libri di Casi di conscienza in quella parte dove si parla de’ matrimoni, e copula carnale se n’è tirato

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A different text, the Parlatorio delle monache (1650), also mentions the dialogue in connection with other works: “Suor Marzia. Oibò! Se qui si legge tutti li discorsi ed opere de l’Aretino, cioè la Pipa, la Nana, la Giulia, l’Antonia, Madalena e Giulia, i sonetti del Franco, quelli sotto le figure dell’Aretino, perché non potrò udire un sonetto grasso?” (Sister Marzia. Oh dear, why shouldn’t I be allowed to hear a licentious sonnet, if here one reads all Aretino’s dialogues and works, i.e. the Pippa, the Nanna, the Giulia, the Antonia, the Maddalena and Giulia, Franco’s sonnets, those by Aretino under the figures?).85 A seeming reference to the text is also mentioned in Giorgio Baffo’s canzone Col destin me lagno spesso, vv. 77–80: “In adesso el so mestier / Xe de leger per morbin, / Oltre i libri de Volter, / La puttana d’Aretin” (Now their [the women’s] job / is reading with great joy / Besides Voltaire’s books / The Puttana by Aretino).86 Notable in Leti’s remarks is the specific reference to “tutti questi Libri di Casi di conscienza” (all these books of cases of conscience) and the definition of Aretino as “il primo Casista di tal materia” (the first casuist in this subject): these are two elements that recall another famous pseudo-Aretino work popular at the time, the Dubbi amorosi.

85 86

il sugo dalla Puttana errante, e poi gli Auttori per non far vedere agli occhi di tutti i loro ladronecci, ne hanno procurato la difesa con tanto rigore, però è certo che l’Aretino è stato il primo Casista di tal materia”, Valdambrina. I don’t understand why the Inquisition prohibits with such rigour reading Aretino, and especially the Puttana errante, while it allows the reading of Toledo and of many other manuals of casuistry which are two times more lascivious than Aretino’s works. / Ciccia. My dear friend, churchmen seek nothing but their own profit, because for them charity begins with themselves. The Puttana errante, and all other Aretino’s works, have been composed to instruct us as well as to instruct Ladies, the youth, all the married men and women. On the contrary, Toledo and all the casuistry manuals are necessary for the instruction of churchmen themselves, so they prohibit that which is good for others, while they hold dear what is good for them. But what is most important, all these books of cases of conscience drew from the Puttana errante for the sections concerning weddings and carnal conjunctions. Then, their authors, ordered that the book be prohibited with such rigour to hide their thefts. It is thus certain that Aretino was the first casuist in this subject. Gregorio Leti, Il puttanismo moderno con il novissimo parlatorio delle monache. Operetta piacevole, e curiosa dedicata al lettore istesso (s.l., s.n., s.a. [but xvii century]), 43–44. Ed. Danilo Romei, (s.l. [Raleigh], 2015), 67–68. Edited in Giorgio Baffo, Raccolta universale delle opere, ed. Elio Bartolini, vol. 2 (Milan, 1971), 368.

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The Manganello, the a.b.c. dell’Aretino, and the Dubbi amorosi

The notorious Sonetti lussuriosi continued to serve as a model and provide an impetus for later erotic poetry, particularly with regard to linguistic matters, as seen in such collections as the Priapea by Niccolò Franco (Turin: Guidone, 1541). Aretino was considered the author of the Manganello, a text in terza rima that can more accurately be considered an anonymous work of the fifteenth century. The attribution was made plausible by two verses in Giovan Paolo Lomazzo’s Rime (1587) that seemed to provide evidence of Aretino’s authorship of the text: “Di modo che li versi manganelli / De l’Aretino con industria rara / Manifestâr di questi i gran cervelli” (iii, 83, 12–14 So that truncheonesque verses / By Aretino, with rare ability / let their great minds be known).87 Moreover, in eighteenth-century catalogues this brief work is quoted, without typographical notes, as xiii Capitoli di messer Pietro Aretino intitolati il Manganello, for which no information exists.88 In the second half of the sixteenth century the poem L’a.b.c. dell’Aretino, a sort of “erotic” alphabet structured as a variation on the popular amorous alphabets, transmitted in two different handwritten drafts (in couplets and quatrains) was ascribed to Aretino.89 In the first draft of the text, at the letter

87 88

89

Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Rime ad imitazione de i Grotteschi usati da’ pittori, ed. Alessandra Ruffino (Manziana, 2006), 224–225. Debure, Bibliographie instructive ou Traité de la conoissance des livres rares et singulairs, vol. 2, 213 (n. 3957); the information passes to the subsequent bibliographies. The attribution is opposed by Gaetano Melzi, Dizionario di opere anonime e pseudonime di scrittori italiani, vol. 2 (Milan, 1852), 154, and, despite this, the name of the Scourge appears in Il manganello [attribuito a] Pietro Aretino, ed. Riccardo Reim-Isabella Donfrancesco (Rome, 1984). On the Manganello see the edition by Diego Zancani (Exeter, 1982); one should add also Diego Zancani, “Misoginia padana del Quattrocento e testi scurrili del Cinquecento: due nuovi testimoni del ‘Manganus’ ovvero ‘Manganello’,” Schede Umanistiche, n.s., 1 (1995): 19–43. Curzio Mazzi, La congrega dei Rozzi di Siena nel secolo xvi, 2 vols. (Florence, 1882), vol. 2, 271 mentions the manuscript Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, Cod. H xi 5, cc. 203–205, which contains an Alfabeto amoroso, composed of twenty-six stanzas of four verses each. See the Alfabeto amoroso con alcune partenze, capitoli, villanelle et canzoni amorose […] (Verona, B. Merlo: 1630), preserved in the Riccardiana Library in Florence (Shelfmark nua 320); see also the song of the troubadour Cadenet Amors, e com er de me? (xii–xiii century). In the sixteenth century an Alfabeto alle puttane was drafted, which is held in the manuscript Marciano It. ix.173, fols. 22 r-v (published in Contro le puttane. Rime venete del xvi secolo, 75–77). The two versions of the abc can be found in Giuseppe Crimi, “Per l’edizione dei ‘Dubbi amorosi’ attribuiti ad Aretino: nuove acquisizioni e qualche indizio di paternità,” Filologia e Critica, 40 (2015): 3–46 (37–41).

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O, there is even room for a parody of a famous verse from the Orlando furioso: “O gran bontà de’ cavalieri antichi, / fottean sempre in cul per casi obliqui” (Oh! goodly truth in knights of old! / They always fucked in the arse through oblique cases).90 The Dubbi amorosi, written in the wake of the Sonetti lussuriosi consist of stanzas of eight verses, and parody a scholastic and juridical genre by addressing dilemmas of an erotic nature that involve mostly men and courtesans of the sixteenth century, and ecclesiastics.91 A solution is then provided for each doubt. Here is an example: Dubbio i Porzia fedel s’avea fatta chiavare Molt’anni, co ’l consenso del marito; Ma perché non potè mai figli fare, Ell’era da ciascun mostrata a dito: Un astuto villan fece chiamare, E fè de figli un numero infinito: Hor il marito l’ha per vituperio. Utrum poss’accusar la d’adulterio?

First Dilemma Faithful Porzia had herself fucked For many years, with her husband’s consent. But, as she never could have children Everyone was pointing his finger at her. She summoned a cunning peasant And she had an infinite number of children. Now her husband holds this for an insult. Utrum, can he charge her with adultery?

Risoluzione i La legge adulter, singolare testo, Dice, ad legem Juliam de adulterio: Quando il marito non accusa presto La moglie, non gli sa gran vituperio Già sa ch’ella molt’anni in dishonesto Modo, si dà con altrui refrigerio, Più non la può de crimine accusare E a tutta briglia si può far chiavare.92

First Resolution The law on adultery, a peculiar text, says, ad legem Juliam de adulterio: If the husband doesn’t not accuse quickly His wife, it is not a great vituperation for him. He knows that she, for many years in a dishonest Way, has sought some relief with others. He can no longer charge her with any crime And she can have herself fucked unbridled.

The fortune of the Dubbi is a consequence of their racy language coupled with their erudition. As can be seen in the eighth line of the Dubbio quoted here—

90 91

92

Crimi, “Per l’edizione dei ‘Dubbi amorosi’ attribuiti ad Aretino,” 38. See Ariosto, Orlando furioso, i, 22, 1. See Paolo Cherchi-Paolo Trovato, “Per il testo dei ‘Dubbi amorosi’ attribuiti all’Aretino. Note sulla tradizione più antica e sulle “auctoritates” giuridiche,” Filologia italiana, 5 (2008): 139–177 and Crimi, “Per l’edizione dei ‘Dubbi amorosi’ attribuiti ad Aretino.” The text comes from Cherchi-Trovato, “Per il testo,” 152.

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which can also apply to other Dubbi—the Latin particle utrum (whether) is used, which generally introduces the “cases of conscience”, and thus recalls to Leti’s remarks above in the Puttanismo moderno.93 It should be noted that in the Marucelliano C 214, the eighteenth-century manuscript that transmits the Dubbi with an attribution to the Tuscan poet Marco Lamberti (perhaps the true author), one reads at c. 1r: “I Dubbi, O Siano i Casi di Coscienza”. Yet legal language was already used for parodic purposes in erotic conterxts in the first decades of the sixteenth century, such as in Venier’s Puttana errante, where the protagonists of sexual relations there described were ecclesiastics (iii, 17–18): Come tutta Maremma ebbe sfoiata, Deliberò tener disputa in Siena, Dove fu per puttana dottorata Sol per chiarire qual cazz’ha più schena, E qual militia è più in chiasso approbata: De i cazzi, dico, ch’hanno membro e lena, Ché vol saper parlar col naturale, Qual cazz’è più fottente e più bestiale.

As soon as she screwed all the Maremma She decided to dispute in Siena Where she received a doctorate in whoredom Just for making clear what cock is stronger And what kind of soldiering (i.e. militia amoris) is most approved in the brothel: Of cocks, I mean, which have strength and power —Because she prefers to speak in natural terms94— Which cock fucks the most and more beastly.

Pors’ella in Siena tal conclusione: «Utrum chi ha più militante cazzo, Il prete o ’l frate, o del frate il poltrone O ’l secular che vive su lo spazzo?». Inteso questo, due vacche stallone Vennero a la disputa per solazzo. E ragunata ogni turba roffiana Incominciò così la mia puttana.

This was her conclusion in Siena: “Utrum who has the most hard-fighting cock The priest, the friar, or the friar’s novice Or the layman who lives on the floor?” Having understood this, two breeding cows Came to the disputation for their own fun. And, having gathered a dishonest crowd, My whore thus began.

Octaves 19–24 continue on the same tone. Note that these first examples of legal language that give the tone to the rest of the text are also placed within octaves, as in the Dubbi. 93 94

See Margherita Palumbo, Conscientia, casus conscientiae, in Coscienza nella filosofia della prima modernità, ed. Roberto Palaia (Florence, 2013), 203–233. Here the pun between ‘naturale’ (natural) and ‘naturale’ (phallus) gets lost in the translation.

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The pseudo-Aretino Dubbi amorosi is probably the best-known work of this kind and has enjoyed the largest dissemination and seen the greatest number of editions published, though such editions are unreliable philologically. The handwritten tradition is also intriguing: the Dubbi, due to their obscene content, were often copied in anthologies of erotic poetry.95 The author of Dubbi amorosi had expertise in the legal field and was familiar with the literature about Roman courtesans. For example, Portia of Dubbi, i, 1, could be the famous Lucrezia Portia, known as Matrema-non-vuole (see the already mentioned Trionfo della Lussuria di maestro Pasquino, ii, 61 and iii, 98– 99). The Dubbi are accompanied in both the printed and manuscript drafts by the so-called Altri dubbi, texts in quatrains that deal with erotic matters, but devoid of the references to Roman law and canon law present in the Dubbi. Scholars tends to consider the Dubbi a collective work.96 As for their authorship, the name Niccolò Franco has been mentioned, yet without any certain proof.97 Cherchi and Trovato have noted that the references to some characters in the texts allow us to date the work to the years after Aretino’s death. The oldest indirect testimony known at this point dates back to 1618. On October 2 of that year, Giovanni Falaschi declared to the Inquisition in Venice that he had read and even copied the Dubbi by Aretino.98 The princeps, which dates back to the early seventeenth century, can in all probability be identified with the edition (now destroyed) mentioned in the correspondence of Alessandro Gregorio Capponi.99 Such a late testimony allows us to reject the notion that the text is the result of Aretino’s pen.100 Further confirmation of the fortune of the Dubbi is noted by its translation into foreign languages such as Spanish and German.101 95

96 97 98 99 100 101

See the case of manuscript Cambridge, Trinity College Library, ms. R.3.28, c. 47r (Suor Marta andò per vin, rompé ’l boccal); the manuscript dates to xvi–xvii century (Zancani, “Misoginia padana del Quattrocento,” 38). This is the text of Altri dubbi, iii: cf. Pietro Aretino, Dubbii Amorosi, altri dubbii e sonetti lussuriosi (s.l.: Nella stamperia del Forno alla Corona de’ Cazzi, s.a.) 39. Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome, 1980), 442 fn. 70. Riccardo Reim, Il corpo della musa. Erotismo e pornografia nella letteratura italiana dal ’200 al ’900. Storia, antologia, dizionario (Rome, 2002), 127 fn. 1. Romano Canosa, Sessualità e inquisizione in Italia tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Rome, 1994), 178–179. Crimi, “Per l’edizione dei ‘Dubbi amorosi’ attribuiti ad Aretino,” 44–46. See also Cherchi-Trovato, “Per il testo,” 139–140. See Pietro Aretino, Liebeszweifel andere Liebeszweifel und lustvolle Sonette (Hamburg, 1968); Pietro Aretino, Sonetos lujuriosos & pasquines del Aretino. Seguidos de otros sonetos lujuriosos, dudas amorosas y otras dudas amorosas de autores anónimos de tradición aretinesca y de un soneto de Giorgio Baffo (Montevideo, 1991); Pietro Aretino, Casos de amor,

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Other Works Attributed

There have been other cases of attribution to Aretino. In the sixteenth century, for example, a letter from Raffaello Sanzio to Baldassarre Castiglione, in April– May 1514, was wrongly assigned to Aretino.102 Aretino’s fame as a playwright caused him to be considered the author of the comedy Fortunio (actually by Vincenzo Giusti), preserved in the manuscript in Milan at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, af. ix.47, fols. 1r–61v, which transmits a slightly different version of the previous printed edition of 1593 (Venice: N. Moretti).103 In the nineteenth century, after an incomplete bibliographic entry, Aretino’s name was assigned to the Comedia nova di Phylogenia intitolata I quattro giochi (Siena: N. Gucci and A. Mazzocchi, 1536), which is actually the work of Ventura Brolio, as can be easily inferred from the dedicatory letter on cc. Aiir-v.104 Recently Antonio Sorella has put forward the theory that Aretino may be the author of the play I tre tiranni, which was attributed to Agostino Ricchi in the Venetian edition of 1533. Sorella’s theory, however, has not been accepted by the most recent editor of the text, Cristiano Luciani.105 In line with a more established tradition, Aretino becomes the author par excellence of immoral and erotic texts.106 For example, in 1623 two different

102 103

104

105

106

ilustraciones de Perico Pastor, traducción de José Antonio Bravo, prefacios de José Antonio Bravo y Mirko Visentin (Salamanca, 2010). See Raffaello, Gli scritti. Lettere, firme, sonetti, saggi tecnici e teorici, ed. Ettore Camesasca, with the collaboration of Giovanni M. Piazza (Milan, 1994), 154–167 (text n. 36). See Apostolo Zeno’s letter of May 14, 1750 to Atanasio Peristiani in Lettere, vol. 6 (Venice, F. Sansoni: 1785), 401–402. See Bartolomeo Gamba, Serie dei testi di lingua (Venice, 1839), 368 and Giorgio Sinigaglia, Saggio di uno studio su Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1882), 207–333. The indication comes from the Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu M. le comte Jacques Manzoni (Città di Castello, 1892), vol. 1, 145, n. 1281, and it was accepted by Francesco Ravagli, “I fratelli Gucci e l’origine dell’Arte della Stampa in Cortona,” Erudizione e belle arti. Miscellanea, 2/12 (1884): 221–236 (223), and Andrea Capaccioni, “«Impressum in Civitate Castelli». Libri e società a Città di Castello nel Cinquecento,” Annali dell’Università per Stranieri di Perugia, 18 (1993): 309–322 (318). Aretino’s name was proposed because of the engraving that appears on the title page and at c. Dviv of the print of the Comedia, which depicts a profile figure very similar to those of Aretino that circulated in those years (I consulted the copy in the Riccardiana Library in Florence, St. 16614.3). See Antonio Sorella, “Tipofilologia e problemi di attribuzione: I tre tiranni (1533)”, in L’autore sotto il torchio. Saggi di tipofilologia (Pescara, 2004), 129–215 and Agostino RicchiNicola Sofianós, I tre tiranni (secondo la redazione del cod. lucchese 1375), ed. Cristiano Luciani (Manziana, 2012). Moreover, ms. Cologny (Geneva), Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Autographen, contains the unpublished comedy Ciringo frate attributed to Aretino. See Quinto Marini, “Pietro Aretino nel Seicento: una presenza inquietante,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 479–499.

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editions of the Pornodidascalus, seu colloquium muliebre (Frankfurt: Wechel) were published and attributed to Aretino. As indicated on the title page, the text was a Latin translation by Kaspar von Barth of the Coloquio de las damas, which was in turn a translation by Fernán Xuárez of the third day from the Ragionamento.107 In the seventeenth century Aretino was frequently confused or associated with Marino.108 He was also considered the author of the Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, a brief work in praise of pederasty that had a semi-clandestine circulation and was published with incorrect bibliographical information (Orange: J. Vvart, 1652; it was actually printed in 1651). Aretino was suggested not only because of the content of the work, but also because of the initials that appeared on the title page (under the title of the work) “d.p.a.”, erroneously interpreted as “Divi Petri Aretini” or “Di Pietro Aretino.”109 The letters should have been interpreted instead as “Di Padre Antonio”, i.e. Father Antonio Rocco. A rare eighteenth-century book, Componimenti erotici del cavalier Marino e di altri celebri autori,110 features a few erotic sonnets111 assigned to Aretino as well as to the poet Giorgio Baffo (1694–1768), while the volume L’Erotiade (Rome: no publisher, 1854) includes the pseudo-Aretino erotic poem entitled I campioni del fottisterio (pp. 237–239).112 In the early nineteenth century Aretino is listed, incorrectly, as the author of the Accademia delle dame (L’ Académie des dames, ou les Sept entretiens galants d’Alosia), which was actually written by Nicolas Chorier (1612–1692); the attribution to Aretino is derived from the false imprint (probably datable to the eighteenth century): “A Venise chez Pierre Arretin”.113 Aretino’s name, due to suspicions of heresy, was even put forward in the seventeenth century for the authorship of the atheist treaty De tribus impos107 108 109

110 111 112 113

See Fernando Xuárez-Pietro Aretino, Coloquio de las damas / Dialogo, ed. Daniela Gagliardi (Rome, 2011). See Clizia Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra Inquisizione e censura (Rome-Padua, 2008), 76. August Beyer, Memoriae historico-criticae librorum rariorum (Dresden and Leipzig, F. Hekel: 1734), 70–71. See Achille Neri, “Il vero autore dell’‘Alcibiade fanciullo a scola’,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 12 (1888), 219–227 and Laura Coci, “L’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola. Nota bibliografica,” Studi secenteschi, 26 (1985), 301–332. Already in the eighteenth century the authorship was denied (Mazzuchelli, La vita di Pietro Aretino, 260– 261). See now Antonio Rocco, L’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, ed. Laura Coci (Rome: 2003). Geneva: no publisher, no year. See pp. 63–75. There is also an edition printed in 1848 (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Shelfmark Xn 9394), which I could not consult. Berti, Censura e circolazione delle idee nel Veneto della Restaurazione, 16 fn. 78.

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toribus magnis, a text in Latin (a language that, as we know, Aretino never mastered) against Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.114 The attribution of such an antireligious work is in line with the defamatory statements of Anton Francesco Doni, who in his pamphlets had called Aretino a heretical writer.115 This summary confirms the perception that throughout the centuries Aretino is characterized not only as a successful but also as a controversial, licentious, and heretical author. Already in the eighteenth century, thanks to Mazzuchelli, there was an attempt to delete the spurious works from the catalogue of Aretino’s works. Yet, it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that scholars began to analyse Aretino’s literary production as a whole without bias, locating it instead in its historical context. Without a doubt, as regards incorrect attributions in the history of Italian literature, no case is comparable to that of Pietro Aretino in both quality and in quantity.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Julia L. Hairston for her helpful comments and suggestions. 114

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See Mazzuchelli, La vita di Pietro Aretino, 187–188. Giuliano Innamorati, Pietro Aretino. Studi e note critiche (on the front cover: Tradizione e invenzione in Pietro Aretino) (MessinaFlorence, 1957), 19 and fn. 27; Bruna Conconi, “Lettura di due leggende incrociate: Pietro Aretino e l’autore del ‘Cymbalum Mundi’,” in Franco Giacone (ed.), Cymbalum Mundi, Actes du Colloque de Rome (La Sapienza, 3–6 November 2000) (Geneva, 2003), 273–297; Bruna Conconi, “Sulla ricezione di Pietro Aretino in Francia,”Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, 59 (2006): 29–58. See, for example, Teremoto (Anton Francesco Doni, Contra Aretinum—Teremoto, Vita, Oratione funerale, Con un’appendice di lettere, ed. Paolo Procaccioli, Manziana, 1998, 25–55).

part 5 Religion

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chapter 12

Aretino’s “Simple” Religious Prose: Literary Features, Doctrinal and Moral Contents, Evolution Élise Boillet

In 1551 and 1552, Pietro Aretino had his religious works re-edited and printed in Venice by Paolo Manuzio. The first volume included Genesi, Umanità di Cristo and Sette salmi della penitenzia di David, while the second contained Vita di Maria Vergine, Vita di santa Caterina and Vita di san Tommaso. The author dedicated the two volumes to Pope Julius iii, who had just been elected, in the hope of obtaining a cardinal’s hat. What was at stake, the culmination of a career spent in Venice without renouncing to be rewarded by Rome, justified this ambitious editorial project, which consisted in offering, during the Tridentine period, a set of religious works published for the first time between 1534 and 1543, in order to display its importance and coherence. These works, criticized by Aretino’s enemies during his lifetime, banned by the Roman Catholic Church just after his death, and for a long time severely judged by the historians of Italian literature, suffered more than the rest of his production from the author’s damnatio memoriae. However, after the 1970s, they aroused a new interest among scholarship, the moral and aesthetical prejudices being progressively abandoned. This contribution will first underline the importance of Aretino’s religious works in his oeuvre and career. Secondly, it will show, concentrating on the biblical paraphrases, their significance in the landscape of Italian religious literature. Thirdly, it will deal with the issue of the evolution of Aretino’s religious prose from the “biblical” to the “hagiographic” works, paying attention to some neglected literary and religious elements of continuity.

1

Aretino’s Biblical Works in the Context of His Career

The dark legend of the author, depicted as a licentious and impious man by his enemies, had long hung over the study of his life and production. In 1870, it determined the severity of Francesco De Sanctis’ evaluation, which preceded the statement on Aretino’s lack of morality by scholars such as Arturo

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Graf, Pierre Gauthiez, Giuseppe Toffanin and Francesco Flora.1 In their view, Aretino’s religious works were deprived of the sincerity and the genuine inspiration which are necessary to a successful literary work. In the early 1970s, however, Paul Larivaille replaced Aretino’s literary production, including the religious works, in the specific context of Aretino’s career and time in order to clarify its purposes, importance and impact.2 This path was then also undertaken by Giovanni Aquilecchia, Christopher Cairns, Andrea Gareffi, Paolo Procaccioli, Raymond Waddington, and other critics, who paid attention to the religious works as an important part of the production of the most famous among sixteenth-century polygraph authors, contributing to define their religious and literary outlines.3 The first important fact which has to be underlined is that Aretino’s religious works corresponded neither to a distinct phase in the author’s career nor to a separate field in his production.4 The 1530s, during which the biblical paraphrases were published in alternation with the two dialogues on the three states of women (Ragionamento, 1534) and on prostitution and procuring (Dialogo, 1536), and with the first comedies (Cortigiana, 1534, and Marescalco, 1536), were the years of the “conquest of the press” with the collaboration of the editor and printer Francesco Marcolini.5 The triumph of the polygraph author was publicized by the first volume of Aretino’s Letters, printed in January 1538, and including the famous letter of 6 December 1537 to Gian Iacopo Leonardi. This letter described a vision in which Apollo crowned Aretino for his various literary skills, the crown of thorns being given to him for his “Christian books.”6 At that time, he had released the Passione di Gesù (June 1534) and the Sette salmi della penitenzia di David (November 1534), the Passione being re-elaborated 1 Francesco De Sanctis, “Pietro Aretino,” Nuova antologia 15 (1870): 524–535; Arturo Graf, “Un processo a Pietro Aretino,” in Attraverso il Cinquecento (Turin, 1888), 87–167; Pierre Gauthiez, L’ Italie au xvie siècle. L’Arétin (1492–1556) (Paris, 1895), 409–411; Giuseppe Toffanin, “Pietro Aretino,” in Storia letteraria d’Italia, vol. 5, Il Cinquecento (Milan, 1960; 1st ed. 1927), 284–309; Francesco Flora, “Aretino e il mestiere della parola,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 2/1: Il Cinquecento (Milan, 1952; 1st ed. 1940), 486–532. 2 Paul Larivaille, L’ Arétin entre Renaissance et Maniérisme (1492–1537) (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Lille, 1972); Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome, 1980). 3 Their contributions will be mentioned in the course of this essay. See also the re-evaluation by A. Gareffi, P. Procaccioli and G. Aquilecchia in the debate included in Paolo ProcaccioliAngelo Romano (eds.), Cinquecento capriccioso e irregolare. Eresie letterarie nell’Italia del classicismo (Manziana, 1998), 180–184. 4 See Cinquecento capriccioso, and Élise Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible (Geneva, 2007), 25–42. 5 Paul Larivaille talked about “l’assalto alla stampa,” in Pietro Aretino, 177. 6 Lettere i, 389.

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in the longer Umanità di Cristo (May 1535). After the first issue of the Lettere, Aretino went on with publishing a variety of profane and sacred works, including the Genesi (1538) and three hagiographic works, the Vita di Maria Vergine (1539), the Vita di santa Caterina (1540) and the Vita di san Tommaso (1543).7 In fact, Aretino promoted his religious works as complementary to his satirical ones. He viewed his literary activity as that of a writer involved in a constructive socio-political criticism, describing himself as “keenest revealer of vice and fervent preacher of virtue” (“acerrimo dimostratore del vizio e fervido predicatore della virtù”): this expression, first used in the dedicatory letter of the Sette salmi, also appeared as a Latin inscription above the author’s portrait reproduced at the end of the first volume of the Lettere.8 This identity ennobled that of “scourge of princes,” also based on the complementary use of blame and praise as a tool for encouraging the princes to behave as such.9 From 1538, having to defend his image against attacks intended to reduce him to no more than a malicious and backbiting man, Aretino came to declare his activity as a religious writer as more valuable than that as a satirist, the idea of a hierarchy between satirical and religious writing pervading the author’s printed correspondence, including the letters sent to him and printed in two volumes in 1550–1551.10 That Aretino did not consider, however, these two veins as separated ones in his production appears in the editions of his works. Indeed, from the 1530s to the early 1550s, the editions of his profane and sacred works printed by Francesco Marcolini showed successive common editorial features, which were not conditioned by the specific profile of the works: the author’s portrait and the typographical mark changed in connection with the evolution of an editorial strategy aiming at creating, defending and promoting his literary and moral 7 8 9

10

The three hagiographic works are edited in Opere religiose ii. The four biblical works are edited in Opere religiose i. «divvs p. aretinvs / acerrimvs / virtvtvm et / vitiorvm / demonstrator» (Lettere ii, 548). On the different expressions qualifying Aretino’s activity as both a profane and religious writer, and on their uses and combinations in the editions of his printed works, see Élise Boillet, “L’autore e il suo editore. I ritratti di Pietro Aretino nelle stampe di Francesco Marcolini (1534–1553),” in Harald Hendrix-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Officine del nuovo. Sodalizi fra letterati, artisti ed editori nella culture italiana fra Riforma e Controriforma (Manziana, 2008), 181–201. Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 40. In 1538, Giovanni Alberto Albicante published a libellous biography of Aretino (Giovanni Alberto Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane (Vita di Pietro Aretino del Berna, Abbattimento, Nuova contentione), ed. Paolo Procaccioli [Manziana, 1999], 9–12). In 1542, Nicolò Franco published his Rime contro Pietro Aretino. On Aretino’s and Marcolini’s reactions, see Boillet, “L’autore e il suo editore,” 190–197.

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personality, valorized as unique in its very plurality.11 In the same way, Aretino’s dedicatory and promotional strategy of his religious works was not determined by their literary genre, but by the evolution of his relations with the princes, both lay and ecclesiastical, with the use of the same techniques and protocols than those used for the profane works.12 In his attempt to achieve his clerical ambitions, relying more and more on the valorization of his growing religious production, Aretino managed to substantially maintain his strategy as “keenest revealer of vice and fervent preacher of virtue” until the early 1550s.13 Moreover, Aretino’s profane and sacred works are characterized by common stylistic features, particularly the large use of similes and stylistic devices such as binary and ternary rhythm, enumeration, anaphor, chiasmus, oxymoron; furthermore, intertextuality is not rare, appearing in single sentences and short passages, as well as in entire episodes.14 It can play with both external and internal sources, displaying the author’s skill for variatio. For instance, the Virgilian episode of Dido’s death after being abandoned by Aeneas was revisited by Aretino three times, in the farewell scene between Jesus and his mother in 11

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On the successive phases of Aretino’s and Marcolini’s collaboration with their specific motivations and aims, and on the promotion of Aretino’s literary personality through them, see Boillet, “L’autore e il suo editore.” See Élise Boillet, “L’adaptation des ambitions romaines de l’Arétin aux événements de 1533–1534: du Pronostic de l’ année 1534 aux lettres de dédicace des Psaumes,” in Pierre CivilDanielle Boillet (eds.), L’ actualité et sa mise en écriture (Espagne, France, Italie et Portugal xve–xviie siècles) (Paris, 2005), 169–189; Élise Boillet, “L’Arétin et l’actualité des années 1538–1539. Les attentes du ‘Fléau des princes’,” in Danielle Boillet-Corinne Lucas (eds.), L’ actualité et sa mise en écriture dans l’ Italie des xve–xviie siècles (Paris, 2005), 103–117. On the detailed circumstances of the publication and promotion of the four biblical works, see Élise Boillet, “Introduzione,” in Opere religiose i, 31–72: 34–53. On Aretino’s clerical ambitions, see n. 12, and Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 338–356; Paolo Procaccioli, “Due re in Parnaso. Aretino e Bembo nella Venezia del doge Gritti,” in Giorgio Patrizi (ed.), Sylva. Studi in onore di Nino Borsellino (Rome, 2002), vol. 1, 207–231; Paolo Procaccioli, “Un cappello per il divino. Note sul miraggio cardinalesco di Pietro Aretino,” in Paolo Procaccioli-Angelo Romano (eds.), Studi sul Rinascimento italiano—Italian Renaissance Studies: In memoria di Giovanni Aquilecchia (Manziana, 2005), 189–226; Paolo Procaccioli, “1542: Pietro Aretino sulla via di Damasco,” in Chrysa Damianaki-Paolo Procaccioli-Angelo Romano (eds.), Il Rinascimento italiano di fronte alla Riforma: letteratura ed arte. Sixteenth-Century Italian Art and Literature and the Reformation, Atti del colloquio internazionale, London, The Warburg Institute, 30–31 gennaio 2004 (Manziana, 2005), 129–154; Élise Boillet, “L’Arétin et les papes de son temps. Les formes et la fortune d’ une écriture au service de la papauté,” in Florence Alazard-Frank La Brasca (eds.), La Papauté à la Renaissance (Paris, 2007), 325–363; Paolo Marini, “Introduzione,” in Opere religiose ii, 9–68: 45–55; Boillet, “Introduzione,” 40–53. See Andrea Gareffi, “Doppi sensi di Roma Cortigiana,” in Stefano Colonna (ed.), Roma nella svolta tra Quattro e Cinquecento (Rome, 2004), 95–104: 101–102; Boillet, L’Arétin et la Bible, 34–36.

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the Passione di Gesù (1534), in the story of the lady abandoned by her unscrupulous lover in the Dialogo (1536), and in the scene of Abraham leaving Sarah in order to go accomplish the sacrifice of their son in the Genesi (1538).15

2

Aretino’s Biblical Works in the Panorama of Religious Literature

Aretino’s biblical works can be separated neither from the rest of his production nor from the panorama of religious literature. Indeed, they are clearly part of the Venetian context of the 1530s, occupying moreover a significant place in the whole landscape of sixteenth-century Italian literature. Giovanni Aquilecchia underlined the close situation of Antonio Brucioli and Pietro Aretino in Venice, being both laymen involved in spreading the Word of God in the vernacular for the benefit of a large audience, the former offering translations and commentaries, the latter paraphrases.16 On the other hand, Giorgio Petrocchi evoked the duel at a distance between Aretino and Teofilo Folengo, a Benedictine monk, author of La Umanità del figliuolo di Dio, which was printed in Venice in 1533, and whose title anticipated Aretino’s Umanità di Cristo.17 I deepened these parallels between Aretino and Brucioli, and between Aretino and Folengo, showing intertextual links in publications which valorize the notion of evangelical “purity” and “simplicity”.18 Indeed, in the 1530s, Brucioli and Aretino were both following Erasmus in his call of universal access to the Bible and his promotion of the “philosophy of Christ”, a non speculative philosophy directly drawn from the Scriptures. On the other hand, for Aretino and Folengo, who had strong literary ambitions, the faithfulness to the purity and simplicity of

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See Élise Boillet, “Riscrittura sacra e riscrittura profana dell’Eneide in Pietro Aretino,” in Antonio Corsaro-Harald Hendrix-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Autorità, modelli e antimodelli nella cultura artistica e letteraria tra Riforma e Controriforma (Manziana, 2007), 227–242; Élise Boillet, “Rewriting the Bible in Pietro Aretino’s Genesi (1538),” in Helmut PfeifferIrene Fantappiè-Tobias Roth (eds.), Renaissance Rewritings (Berlin-Boston, 2017), 253–272. Giovanni Aquilecchia, “Pietro Aretino e la Riforma cattolica,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 2 (1996): 9–23 (15). After his monography on Pietro Aretino (see n. 52), Christopher Cairns added Brucioli to the circle of Aretino’s friends in “Some Absent Friends from the Circle of Aretino: Antonio Brucioli, Gian Pietro Carafa and Ortensio Lando,” in Il Rinascimento italiano di fronte alla Riforma, 115–127. Giorgio Petrocchi, “Aretino e Folengo,” in Saggi sul Rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1990), 51–56. Élise Boillet, “L’ Écriture traduite, commentée, réécrite: Antonio Brucioli, Teofilo Folengo, l’ Arétin,” in Danielle Boillet-Michel Plaisance (eds.), Les années Trente du xvie siècle italien (Paris, 2007), 163–181.

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the Gospels did not mean that the freedom to create a literary rewriting should be compromised, the author—whether he was lay or cleric—being divinely inspired. Aretino emulated not only Folengo, but also Jacopo Sannazaro and Marco Girolamo Vida, who renewed the genre of the sacred poem in Latin, being encouraged in their enterprise by Pope Leo x. While Sannazaro’s De Partu Virginis appeared in 1526, Vida’s Christias was released in 1535 after a manuscript circulation. Choosing to simply follow the chronological order of the evangelical story, and thus rejecting classical devices such as beginning in medias res and the frequent insertion of recollections and predictions, Aretino nonetheless divided his Umanità di Cristo in books, using this division to compete with the well-known high models of the sacred poems. Emulation is particularly striking in the initial narrative sequence of the first book, in which God in heaven takes the decision to save humanity, sending Gabriel on earth to visit Mary,19 and in that of the fourth book,20 in which Jesus goes down into the underworld, where he frees the Patriarchs and the Holy Innocents from limbo, putting them in the elysian field, and where he chains Satan in the depths of hell. This latter sequence, which echoes the epilogue of the Slaughter of the Innocents, plays with Latin and Italian models from Virgil to Sannazaro and Vida, and from Dante to Folengo, trying to offer a literary representation faithful to the Christian doctrine regarding Redemption.21 Some biblical passages lent themselves to the deployment of inventio, the author drawing inspiration from other sources than the canonical Gospels, in order to recount some grand episode (like the aforementioned visit to the underworld), or to create some large fresco (like the description of the magnificent architecture and riches of the Temple of Jerusalem). On the other hand, other biblical passages, in particular Jesus’ speeches, such as the Sermon on the Mount and the Pater Noster, were not suitable for this kind of expansion. The Pater Noster, faithfully repeated in the liturgy and the devotional life for centuries, and abundantly commented by exegetes, was to be carefully paraphrased. In this passage, Aretino chose to follow the model of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s exposition, from which he took several comments, adding the

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See the analysis of this sequence in Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 487–501. It is the third book in the 1535 version, where the second book includes both Jesus’ ministry and passion, while these two phases of Jesus’ life occupy respectively the second and the third book in the 1538 version. See Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 443–448, and Élise Boillet, “David, personnage et masque de l’ Arétin entre xvie et xviie siècle,” in Élise Boillet-Sonia Cavicchioli-Paul-Alexis Mellet (eds.), Les figures de David à la Renaissance” (Geneva, 2015), 329–362: 337–340.

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mention of the value of the good works with regard to salvation.22 Aretino had already drawn inspiration from devotional literature in the Passione di Gesù, published a year before the Umanità di Cristo, which expanded from it. Indeed, the opening of the work established an immediate connection with the literature on meditation and prayer. It begins with the account of a vision that the author had in a church during the Lenten mass listening to the priests’ voices and contemplating Jesus on the cross: the four Evangelists appeared to him, holding the Gospels, in which he could read all about Jesus’ passion, exploring new meanings of it; by the time the vision ended, he was inspired to write down what he had just witnessed right away. Interestingly enough on behalf of an author who called himself “fifth evangelist”,23 this vision actually anticipates that of John in the episode of Lord’s Supper, during which the beloved disciple sees what is laying ahead for Jesus and the apostles. After the account of the vision provided by the author, the narrator draws the attention of the reader to the central theme of the story he is about to narrate: the suffering of Christ for the love of humanity. The description of Christ’s suffering starts with the very first episode, the farewell scene between Jesus and his mother, inspired by an apocryphal episode included in the Meditationes vitae Christi, which also circulated widely in Italian versions and appeared in several sacre rappresentazioni.24 The theme of the reading of the Gospels as an aid for meditation on God’s love, as well as the importance given to the initial farewell scene, and to Mary as a primary and active character, clearly connect Aretino’s Passione di Gesù to the Italian devotional literature, which developed from the Trattato dell’amor di Gesù Cristo by Savonarola (1492) and the Arte del ben pensare e meditare la Passione del nostro Signor Gesù Cristo by Pietro da Lucca (1525).25 The Sette salmi, published a few months after the Passione, shares common features with this first biblical paraphrase. Both works are relatively short, with a strong unity due to the focus on a set of biblical texts, fundamental in Christian exegesis, liturgy and devotion. Indeed, while the four Gospels of the passion are fused into one single narration (like in any Gospel harmony), the seven psalms of the penitence are gathered so as to form one long prayer divided in 22 23

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Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 457–461. It was the author of astrological prognostications who announced the birth of the religious writer: in the 1534 prognostication, Aretino described himself as “scourge of the princes and fifth evangelist” (Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 90, 172). Forty-eight editions of the Meditationes in Italian were printed before the publication of Aretino’s Passione di Gesù, cfr. Erminia Ardissino-Élise Boillet, Repertorio di letteratura biblica in italiano a stampa (ca 1462–1650) (Turnhout, in press). See Élise Boillet, “Il congedo di Cristo dalla madre dipinto da Lorenzo Lotto e narrato da Pietro Aretino,” Venezia Cinquecento, 25 (2003): 99–130.

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seven moments. Moreover, both works are narrative, as the Sette salmi reconstructs the story of David’s penitence, not only through the psalms, whose rewriting defines a spiritual itinerary from despair to hope, but also through their insertion in a narrative framework, which describes how King David, after having committed adultery and murder, and after having been warned by Nathan about the gravity of his sins, chose to enter in an isolated and obscure cave in order to pray God and ask forgiveness. The framework shows him having meditative breaks after each hymn, and benefiting after the sixth from a vision which encourages him to keep on doing penance, obtaining mercy in the end and being able to come back among his subjects with a renewed heart and soul.26 The theme of meditation and prayer, central in the Passione and the Umanità, is thus essential in this work too. Also fundamental in this work is the connection with Italian religious literature. In the dedicatory letter to Gian Pietro Carafa, Agostino Ricchi describes Aretino’s Sette salmi as a “simple paraphrase upon the penitential psalms”, using the notion of “simplicity” recurrent in the Passione and the Umanità. Aretino maintains the psalms in the mouth of David, each biblical verse being reformulated and developed in a paragraph written in prose, the reformulation being rather close to the translation so that the biblical verse remains identifiable within the paragraph.27 From this point of view, Aretino’s paraphrase of the psalms is close to Savonarola’s exposition of the Miserere, written in Latin by the author before dying in 1498, with an immediate and large circulation also in the Italian vernacular.28 As for the intention to arrange the seven penitential psalms in one long prayer, Aretino’s psalms show resemblance with the Psalmi penitentiali di David composed by Girolamo Benivieni—who was an ardent follower of Savonarola—, and printed only once, in Florence in 1505. This work combined a translation in verse with a commentary in prose, which the author intended as “a perpetual and continuous prayer,” viewing it more as “a simple narrative speech” than as a commentary.29 This simple narration recounts a spiritual itinerary which anticipates Aretino’s paraphrase, where the 26 27 28 29

See Boillet, “David, personnage et masque de l’ Arétin,” 334–336. See Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 319–373. Ten editions in Italian were printed before the publication of Aretino’s Salmi, see Ardissino-Boillet, Repertorio di letteratura biblica. Girolamo Benivieni, Psalmi penitentiali di David tradocti in lingua fiorentina et commentati (Florence, Antonio Tubini and Andrea Ghirlandi: 1505), f. a2v. On Benivieni’s Psalms, see Élise Boillet, “Vernacular Biblical Literature in Sixteenth Century Italy: Universal Reading and Specific Readers,” in Sabrina Corbellini-Margriet Hoogvliet-Bart Ramakers (eds.), Discovering the Riches of the Word. Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden-Boston, 2015), 213–233: 217–219, 227.

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complex relation between God’s justice and mercy leads to the superior notion of divine equity, and the problem of human freedom finally results in the idea of a servitude freely chosen by the penitent who becomes son of God.30 Here, like in the paraphrase of the Pater Noster, Aretino, who wrote after the roman condemnation of Luther’s doctrine, included the mention of the value of good works, not present in the aforementioned texts by Savonarola and Benivieni. The definition of Aretino’s Sette salmi as a “simple paraphrase” also reminds of the exegetical experiment conducted by Erasmus on the psalms. After having written paraphrases upon the Gospels, and after having applied this genre to Psalm 3, Erasmus chose the commentary and the sermon as more suitable genres for rendering the multiple meanings of the psalms. Indeed, maintaining the purpose of enhancing piety, these two genres allowed him to comment the biblical text taking into account the notion of persona, which enables to distinguish which verses are to be interpreted as said by King David, and which ones as said by Christ, the Church, or the faithful. The word “paraphrase”, found in the Sette salmi but not in other Aretino’s biblical works, highlights that Aretino met the challenge of providing a paraphrase in the first person without renouncing to a rich interpretation of the biblical text.31 Indeed, Aretino’s psalms contain prophetic passages regarding the story of the Salvation, which alter neither the continuity of David’s penitence, as these ecstatic moments are granted to him as a reward for his penance, nor the fluidity of his prayer, as David himself specifies when he is speaking on behalf of God or of the Church, all these specific passages included in the psalms iii to vi coming to progressively constitute one long prophecy.32 The pattern of the vision and the prophecy, present in the Passione and in the Sette salmi, went back again in the Genesi, Aretino’s fourth biblical publication. As the complete title of the work—Il genesi di M. Pietro Aretino con la visione di Noè ne la quale vede i misterii del Testamento Vecchio e del Nuovo, diviso in tre libri—emphasizes, the free invention of Noah’s vision is indeed a powerful and defining point in the text.33 In the first book, which recounts the story from the creation to the last judgment, the events which occur after the flood are narrated through the vision granted to Noah in the ark while he is waiting for the water to recede. Contrarily to the detailed narrative of the rest of the work,

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See Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 232–233, 240, 243, 258, 297–319. See Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 240–241. See Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 286–297. See the analysis of Noah’s vision in Élise Boillet, “La visione di Noè nel Genesi dell’Aretino (1538),” in Gabriele Cingolani-Marco Riccini (eds.), Sogno e Racconto. Archetipi e funzioni (Florence, 2003), 174–190.

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the part dedicated to Noah’s vision consists in an historical compendium that runs from the life of Moses to the end of the world and the last judgment, also retracing briefly the life of Christ and of the apostles. In the second book, the narrative takes up from the flood and goes on to the life of Jacob, while the third book recounts the story of his son Joseph. As we said, in the Umanità, loyalty to the “simplicity” of the evangelical story had determined, against Sannazaro’s and Vida’s models, the choice of a chronological narrative. Here, the revisiting of religious history in its entirety accompanies variations which, without breaking away from the preceding arrangement, allows the author to emphasize the close tie between the history of the Old and the New Testaments.34 In this work again, the connections with Italian religious literature are multiple. Noah’s vision includes precise intertextual links with literary works such as Dante’s Paradiso, Petrarch’s Trionfo dell’Eternità, and Sannazaro’s De Partu Virginis,35 as well as the clear influence of the literature of meditation, Noah being able to spiritually “see” and “hear” all the events as real ones, which determines his strong emotional and moral reactions.36 In the line of the Passione (the farewell scene between Jesus and his mother) and the Umanità (the conversion of Mary Magdalene),37 the influence of the genre of the sacra rappresentazione is also a clear trait of the Genesi. The episode of the sacrifice of Abraham can indeed be connected with Feo Belcari’s Rappresentazione di Abramo e Isacco, appeared in 1485 and released in various editions during the sixteenth century.38 Like Belcari but in a much freer manner, Aretino exploits both the biblical indication of the three days before accomplishing the sacrifice, as well as the dramatic potential tied to Sarah’s involvement, which is not mentioned in the Bible in this episode.39 The reference to the pastoral codes is another trait of the Genesi, a more specific one since this work especially deals with the representation of an ancient world of shepherds and herdsmen. In particular, the romance between Jacob and Rachel is amplified at the point of constituting a true love story in the second book of the Genesi. Jacob’s innocent

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Besides the invention of Noah’s vision, Aretino accomplishes a minor modification in the organization of the Biblical material, moving a genealogy. Apart from that, he follows the order of the Biblical story within Noah’s vision, as well as in the rest of the work. See Boillet, “Rewriting the Bible in Pietro Aretino’s Genesi,” 254–255. See Boillet, “La visione di Noè,” respectively 178, 188–189, and 174–175. See Boillet, “La visione di Noè,” 183–184. See the analysis of this episode in Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 512–526. Among these editions, one was presumably printed in Florence in 1536 (Max Sander, Le livre à figures italien depuis 1467 jusqu’ à 1530 [Milan, 1942], vol. 1, n. 6110). See Boillet, “Rewriting the Bible in Pietro Aretino’s Genesi,” 265–266.

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behaviour is represented through a variety of gestures: we see him kissing the flowers touched by Rachel, writing and then removing the name of his beloved on the trees, and picking up a stone but not daring to throw it into the river where she is washing her feet. In a work in which the ethics of love and sexuality is extensively developed, Aretino uses the codes of pastoral idyll to build a model of Christian chastity.40 Replacing Aretino’s biblical paraphrases in the panorama of Italian biblical literature, which largely circulated in urban literate areas through the printing press since the end of the fifteenth-century, particularly highlights their major trait: the author’s capacity to simultaneously refer to different genres in order to offer the reader a polyvalent text which is needed to visualize the biblical story concretely, to contemplate it spiritually, to take the prayers from it, to understand its doctrinal implications, and to extract its moral ‘fruit’, all at once. This explains their editorial success, as well as their large and long-lasting influence. They indeed aroused an immediate interest in different spiritual milieus: in Italy, the Passione was echoed by Vittoria Colonna’s Pianto sopra la Passione di Christo (1539),41 and the Umanità by the Canon Regular don Cherubino’s homonymous work;42 in France, all Aretino’s biblical paraphrases were translated by Jean de Vauzelles in the entourage of the Queen of Navarre and were printed in Lyon between 1539 and 1541.43 They also forecasted the adaptation of Italian biblical literature to ecclesiastical censorship after the Council of Trent. Indeed, the programming choice of rejecting poetry in favor of a “simple paraphrase” of the penitential psalms anticipated Flaminio Nobili’s and Francesco Panigarola’s choice of a simple paraphrase in prose intended as a devotional aid made in the years 1580s, these two texts being the only rewritings of the

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See below pp. 318–319. See Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 119–123. Fascicolo della mirrata, redentrice e salutifera Umanità di Cristo (Ferrara, Francesco Rosso: 1538). See Mario Chiesa, “Poemi biblici fra Quattro e Cinquecento,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 179 (2002): 161–192 (165). See Pietro Aretino, Trois livres de l’ humanité de Jésus-Christ, Extrait de la traduction de Jean de Vauzelles (1539), ed. Elsa Kammerer, intr. Marie-Madeleine Fontaine (Paris, 2004), 129– 208; Élise Boillet, “Tra sacro e profano: Jean de Vauzelles traduttore dell’Aretino sacro,” in Philiep Bossier-Harald Hendrix-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Dynamic translations in the European Renaissance. La traduzione del moderno nel Cinquecento europeo (Manziana, 2011), 169–206; Elsa Kammerer, Jean de Vauzelles et le creuset lyonnais (1520–1550) (Geneva, 2013), chap. iv, 155–176; Elsa Kammerer, “Marguerite de Navarre et la Bible: batailles pour la langue française,” in Élise Boillet-Maria-Teresa Ricci (eds.), Les femmes et la Bible de la fin du Moyen Âge à l’ époque moderne. Pratiques de lecture et d’écriture (Italie, France, Angleterre) (Paris, 2017), 77–89.

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Psalms in Italian authorized by the Roman Church after the 1596 Index.44 In the same way, the lively survey of the whole biblical history in the Genesi, after the publication of which, in 1540, the Florentine man of letters Niccolò Martelli said that he found it as enjoyable as the Bible was boring,45 announced the success, starting from the 1570s, of the genre of the historical compendium, limited to biblical history or including it. In particular, Bartolomeo Dionigi, a cleric from Fano, published in 1586 a very successful Compendio istorico del Vecchio e del Nuovo Testamento, intended as a means of overcoming the difficulty in gaining access to the vernacular Bible because of ecclesiastical censorship. This work, comparable to Aretino’s Genesi in its literary mould and continuous narrative form,46 found itself included in the list of banned books delivered to bishops and inquisitors in application of the 1596 Index.47 Later, the program of re-edition of Aretino’s biblical works conducted by Marco Ginammi in Venice at the end of the years 1620s48 preceded the new literary experiments by Giovan Battista Marino, whose sacred poem La Strage degli Innocenti (1632) was inspired by the correspondent episode in Aretino’s Umanità, and Ferrante Pallavicino, whose career and production had much in common with Aretino’s, being also the author of sacred novels dedicated to Joseph, Suzanne, Samson and Bathsheba (1636–1639).49

3

From Biblical to Hagiographic Works: The Evolution of Aretino’s Religious Prose

Following the suggestion offered by the two volumes of the 1551–1552 complete edition of Aretino’s religious works, modern criticism established a distinction between the group of the “biblical works” and that of the “hagiographic works”. As we said, Aretino’s biblical works share recurrent themes (biblical 44 45

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Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo. La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605) (Bologna, 1997), 204, 303, 307. “Aretino’s Genesi is enjoyable because it is clear and beautiful, while the Bible is boring because it is long and incomprehensible” (lsa ii, 72). See Boillet, “La visione di Noè,” 189– 190, and Boillet, “Rewriting the Bible in Pietro Aretino’s Genesi”, 253–254. See Boillet, “Rewriting the Bible in Pietro Aretino’s Genesi,” 264. See Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo, 109, 290–292, and Gigliola Fragnito, Proibito capire. La Chiesa e il volgare nella prima età moderna (Bologna, 2005), 110–112. The biblical works were re-edited under the name Partenio Etiro (see Élise Boillet, “Nota ai testi,” in Opere religiose i, 609–762), the Sette salmi being also re-edited as Aretino pentito in Lione in 1648 (see Boillet, “David, personnage et masque de l’Arétin,” 357–361). Jean-François Lattarico, “Du Livre au livre libertin. La Bersabee de Ferrante Pallavicino (Venise, 1639),” in Les figures de David à la Renaissance, 449–471.

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reading, meditation and prayer) and structures (visions, compendia, theatrical dialogues, and long rhetorical speeches). They are also characterized by recurrent figures: Christ is indeed present not only in the Passione and the Umanità, but also in the Sette salmi through David’s prophecy and the Genesi through Noah’s vision. In the same way, David is present in the Sette salmi, but also in the Umanità in three passages mentioning the underworld and dealing with the mystery of Redemption, and in the Genesi, Noah’s vision reconstructing the lineage of the patriarchs from Noah to Moses and David.50 These common patterns of Aretino’s biblical works illustrate religious contents which are not abandoned in the hagiographic works, but adapted to them in order to balance old convictions with new requirements. After a quick overview of the state of the art regarding the issue of the evolution of Aretino’s religious production, we will give examples of this continuity, focusing on the relation between prose and theology. The distinction made by modern criticism between the biblical and the hagiographic works was related to the study of the individual and historical context in which they were produced. Paul Larivaille interpreted the evolution of Aretino’s religious production in the context of the author’s career and relations with the princes, underlining growing opportunistic and utilitarian motivations.51 Christopher Cairns interpreted it in the context of the “religious restlessness” of the 1530s and 1540s: he spoke of a “confessional phase” of enthusiastic adherence to new religious ideas of Erasmian origin, followed by a “hagiographic phase” during which the author aligned himself with the emerging culture of the Counter Reformation.52 Deepening this line of research, Paolo Procaccioli shed light on two essential turning points in this evolution, 1542 and 1545–1546, arguing that most probably the author played a part in the evangelist movement, having then to progressively adjust his activity to the new Roman injunctions.53 While Giulio Ferroni had caught in the first biblical works the influence of Juan de Valdés’ thinking,54 Raymond Waddington

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Boillet, “David, personnage et masque de l’ Arétin,” 337–343. Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 206, 210, 340. Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice. Researches on Aretino and his Circle in Venice 1527–1556 (Florence, 1985), 121–122. The expression coined by Paul Grendler appears in the title of the two chapters which describe these two phases: iv. “Religious restlessness i. From the Opere sacre to the Corte del Cielo, 1534–1539,” 69–96; v. “Religious restlessness ii. From Clerical ambitions to the Council of Trent,” 97–124. Paolo Procaccioli, “1542: Pietro Aretino sulla via di Damasco,” 129–154. See also Paolo Procaccioli, “Un cappello per il divino,” 189–226. Giulio Ferroni, “Introduzione,” in Carlo Serafini-Luciana Zampolli (eds.), Pietro Aretino (Rome, 2002), iii–xxvii: xxi; Giulio Ferroni, “Premessa,” in Opere religiose i, 9–28: 15.

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described Aretino as probably heretic, viewing the evolution from the biblical to the hagiographic works as the result of a “prudent nicodemism” more than as the adaptation to the renewal of Catholic orthodoxy.55 Drawing from Paul Larivaille’s and Christopher Cairns’ analysis, Paolo Marini described the Vita di Maria Vergine as holding “an intermediary position” in Aretino’s religious production, being at once the last biblical and the first hagiographic work.56 He defined the last two lives of saints as forming a “hagiographic diptych” which suffered from the difficult relationship with their sponsor Alfonso d’Avalos.57 Being considered as more genuinely inspired (because spontaneously written in line with deep personal convictions), the biblical works were evaluated as more successful than the hagiographic works also from a literary point of view. After the Passione, Paul Larivaille declared the increasingly mechanical exploitation of religious material for opportunistic means to be a trend already noticeable in the latest part of the Sette salmi and in the Umanità and a distinctive characteristic of the successive works.58 However, the Umanità was generally considered as the highest result of Aretino’s religious project, while the Genesi, often ignored altogether or mentioned merely in parentheses, was deemed long and repetitive: the judgment expressed in 1948 by Giorgio Petrocchi, one of the first critics to have taken Aretino’s religious writing seriously,59 was substantially corroborated in 1995 by Mario Scotti during the Italian-North American conference dedicated to the author.60 Whereas the three hagiogra55

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Raymond B. Waddington, “Pietro Aretino, Religious Writer,” Renaissance studies 20–23 (2006): 277–292: 278, n. 7, and 291–292, and in Pietro Aretino: Subverting the System in Renaissance Italy (Farnham-Burlington, VT, 2013), chapt. 7. See also Raymond B. Waddington, “Aretino, Titian, and La Humanità di Cristo,” in Abigail Brundin-Matthew Treherne (eds.), Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Aldershot, 2009), 171–198, and in id., Pietro Aretino, chapt. 8. See also Marco Faini, “Pietro Aretino, St. John the Baptist and the Rewriting of the Psalms,” in Renaissance Rewritings, 225–251: 230, 248–249. Marini, “Introduzione,” 11, 56. Marini, “Introduzione,” 61. The two lives of saints were gathered in a modern edition by Flavia Santin: Pietro Aretino, Le vite dei santi: Santa Caterina vergine, San Tommaso d’Aquino, 1540–1543 (Rome, 1978). They were also the object of Paolo Fasoli’s contribution “ ‘Con la penna della fragilità.’ Considerazioni sull’Aretino ascetico,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 2, 619–639. Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 210 e 340. “[…] Son rari momenti (assieme con il Diluvio universale, la visione di Noè, e, all’inizio, il Paradiso Terrestre) che rompono la noiosa parafrasi del Genesi biblico”, Giorgio Petrocchi, “Intorno alle prose sacre,” in Pietro Aretino tra Rinascimento e Controriforma (Milan, 1948), 264–297: 295. “[…] Salvo l’impennata di qualche capitolo e paragrafo, il libro del Genesi […] offr[e] di sé, nel suo insieme, l’immagine di una monotonia sbiadita”, Mario Scotti, Gli scritti religiosi, in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 121–143: 139.

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phies generally received more attention than the Genesi, they were nonetheless also deemed as inferior with regard to the first biblical works. However, Paolo Marini qualified this appreciation indicating that the Vita di Maria Vergine should be recognized as holding “an objective pre-eminent position” for its length and superior quality, while the last two lives of saints suffered from a forced process of creation.61 He also underlined the importance of the hagiographic works, regardless of the fact that they correspond to the “crepuscular phase” of Aretino’s religious project, since they represent “the completion of a stylistic route” which consisted in the novelty of applying “a modern and versatile prose” to the sacred matter.62 Though historically justified, the distinction inspired by the division offered in the 1551–1552 edition must not prevent to better specify, as did Paolo Marini for the group of the three hagiographies, the evolution of Aretino’s religious production. In the biblical works, I have observed that the modifications introduced as early as in 1535 in the re-editions of the biblical works sponsored by the author show linguistic and stylistic tendencies, such as the preference for subordination over coordination, as well as reinforced literary and religious requirements, such as the attention to decorum in the representation of the deeds of the holy characters, which will all be accentuated in the Genesi and in the three hagiographic works.63 I have also observed that the Genesi can be placed in the “intermediary position” which Paolo Marini discussed regarding the Vita di Maria Vergine appeared a year later.64 Indeed, while the Genesi anticipates characteristics of the subsequent religious works, especially the extension of the speeches pronounced by the principal characters,65 the Vita di Maria Vergine relates directly to the recent Genesi, as illustrated more particularly by two correlated passages. The first passage concerns Mary’s youth, spent in the Temple in Jerusalem with other virgins of noble ascendency. Aretino describes their life as that of a monastic community, emphasizing the familiarity with the Holy Scriptures and imagining that Mary read and interpreted the Genesi and the other books of the Bible for her companions, making its essential truths clear to them. The second passage concerns the episode of twelveyear-old Christ amongst the doctors of the Temple of Jerusalem. In the Passione 61 62 63 64 65

Marini, “Introduzione,” 61. Marini, “Introduzione,” 10. Boillet, “Nota ai testi,” in Opere religiose i, 726, 729. Boillet, “Rewriting the Bible in Pietro Aretino’s Genesi,” 255–256, and Boillet, “Introduzione,” 71–72. Marini, “Introduzione,” 58, 60–61, 66; Boillet, “Nota ai testi”, 725. See an example of this tendency already in the revision of the Passione di Gesù in the Umanità di Cristo: Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 397.

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and the Umanità, Aretino paraphrased and in part invented the words spoken by God, the angels and Jesus himself, in this emulating Sannazaro and Vida, however introducing qualifying terms such as “he said similar words” or “he perhaps said these words”.66 Yet in the extract under attention, the “fifth evangelist” proves himself to be particularly audacious, in that it is no longer Aretino taking the liberty of making Jesus speak, but Jesus himself quoting word by word Aretino’s grandiose opening of the Genesi. So the “true interpretations” which were attributed to the Virgin in the first passage, in which the centrality of the Bible, in this instance the Old Testament in so far as it prefigures the coming of Christ and is a source of Christian ethics and wisdom, was reaffirmed, are demonstrated concretely in this second passage, which offers a literary representation of the abstract idea of the eternal and immutable presence of God.67 The Genesi and the Vita di Maria Vergine can be also compared for the valorization of family bonds, especially between spouses (but also between parents and children, uncles and nephews, and between brothers or cousins). Several couples are indeed represented in the Genesi, Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Rachel, while in the Vita di Maria Vergine the couple formed by Joachim and Anne anticipates that formed by Joseph and the Virgin. Moreover, the Genesi expressly represents a world regulated by a sexual ethic based on chastity, contrary to the concupiscence that leads to lust, even within marriage, and to adultery.68 In line with this work, the successive lives of saints extol a superior, virginal level of chastity, Mary being the incarnation of a virginity which remains inviolate through motherhood and marriage, St Catherine of Alexandria entering into a mystic marriage to the infant Jesus, and St Thomas Aquinas withstanding steadily carnal temptation. On the other hand, the representation of prostitutes and luxurious women assimilated to prostitutes, which were central figures in the Ragionamento and the Dialogo, is a recurrent pattern, used as counter-example of Christian chastity, in Aretino’s religious works: in the Umanità, Mary Magdalene is compared, before her conversion, to the goddess Venus; in the Genesi, Potiphar’s wife is driven by her lust to seduce Joseph, whereas Tamar seeks redress after her father-in-law deprived her of a new husband against the custom; in the Vita di san Tommaso, the enemies of the saint try to tempt him introducing a prostitute in the monastery, but he pushes her off with a firebrand, provoking her conversion and decision

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Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 382–383. See the detailed analysis of these two passages in Boillet, “Rewriting the Bible in Pietro Aretino’s Genesi,” 256–258. See Boillet, “Rewriting the Bible in Pietro Aretino’s Genesi,” 266–269.

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to be entombed in a wall of the church.69 The distance between the conversion of this prostitute and that of Mary Magdalene in the Umanità, where the saint engages in self-flagellation and her sister Martha, finding her almost dead, evokes the more moderate penitence she should practice, results from a tendency, common to Aretino’s last two lives of saints, to stretch the representation of the contemptus mundi.70 We have here the illustration of a continuity between profane and sacred works (to which we already refer speaking about intertextuality and common stylistic features), as well as between biblical and hagiographic works. These observations support the idea of a progressive evolution in Aretino’s religious production rather than that of a sudden change of direction producing a break between a first and a second group of works. From this point of view, a closer look at the relation between prose and theology reveals strong elements of continuity. During the 1540s, while the Roman Inquisition was reestablished and the Council of Trent was finally opened, Aretino gave account in his letters of the suspicions of the clergy against his religious works.71 In 1542, he assured his editor Francesco Marcolini that he was not paying attention to the “cawing of the friars” who say that he does not know how to discuss faith.72 But, in 1545, after three cardinals of the Roman curia asked Pope Paul iii to ban his religious works, he wrote to Paolo Giovio in order to defend their orthodoxy, declaring that he was neither a “Chietino” (papist) nor a Lutheran.73 In 1548, he reported that some friars came to his house to ask him to justify in his Genesi a sentence of his Genesi containing an illogic statement on the relation between God and the nature (“God is the nature, and the nature is not God”) and that he was able to answer just by using common sense.74 In 1556, not much before his death, Girolamo Muzio denounced the Umanità to a member of the 69 70 71 72 73

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Vita di san Tommaso, ii, § 49–64, in Opere religiose ii, 512–522. Marini, “Introduzione,” 67. See the analysis of these suspicions and attacks in Boillet, “L’Arétin et les papes de son temps,” 350–362. “Che è a me, o Compare, il gracchiar de i frati, che dicono che io non so disputar de la fede?,” Lettere ii, 447–448. “Tre Prelati (forse per obviare il Concilio) han mosso querela a n.s. acciò la sua beatitudine gli conceda potestade sopra lo incendio de le mie cristiane, religiose, e catoliche scritture […] io di continuo rendo a Cristo grazie, che né Chietino mi sento, né Luterano […],” Lettere iii, 160. “Ecco arrivarmi in casa non so quanti dal capuccio in testa e da i zoccoli in piedi […] e mi dicano: ‘Aretino, tu scrivi nel principio del Genesi, che Iddio è la natura, e la natura non è Dio […].’ Io, che son meno dotto che la ignoranzia, non sapendo rispondere per lettera, gli dissi in vulgare: ‘O voi da le cappe e da i cordoni fate sì che la natura, come Iddio, risusciti un morto, e poi confessarò che l’uno è l’altra, e l’altra l’uno’ […],” Lettere iv, 247.

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Inquisition pointing out blasphemy concerning the nature of Christ and the incarnation of the Word.75 These attacks aimed at pointing out the inadequacy of a religious prose written by a layman with no theological training. However, Aretino’s self-definition as being neither a “Chietino” (papist) nor a Lutheran was taken seriously by modern critics who interpreted it as the position of who was taking part in the promotion of a “third way”, in connection with the myth of Venice intended as a place of political and religious freedom and with the philosophical influence of Erasmus.76 Following this line of interpretation, it can be observed that the position taken by Aretino in the mid-1540s, that is after the release of all his religious works, relate not only to the first biblical works, in which the link with Erasmus’ philosophy is evident, but also to the hagiographic works, in which, as we will see now, the ideal of a simple prose faithful to the biblical truth is still promoted. The choice of prose, and more specifically of a “simple” prose, is a polemical one: according to the dedication letter signed by Agostino Ricchi in the Passione, the author refused to turn the “true story” into “vain poetry”, in order not to remove the Gospel from its “simplicity”.77 The choice of a simple prose is made not only against poetry but also against “science:” the account of the vision at the beginning of the Passione is followed by an apostrophe to the reader in which the narrator announces that, Christ being “pure and simple,” he will talk about him “in a pure and simple manner,” as Christians are so sure of what they believe that they do not need other scriptures than the Gospels, unlike the arrogant minds who try to “put a veil on the eyes of the truth with the confusion of science.”78 In the Umanità, the author repeated this assertion in

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“La Santa chiesa […] ha in vita sua determinato che lo sterco della lingua de’ suoi scritti sia, et sieno, per esservi mille detti heretici maledichi, dannati, et la parola de’ suoi libri abruciata, per havere con lucifera pronuntia (due bestemmie sole voglio farvi udire, et intendere) affermato che la divinità dalla humanità, del salvator nostro Giesù Cristo, per le battiture de’ ladroni fu separata, et che la divina colomba (l’altra) prese carne humana in Maria Vergine sempre,” Girolamo Muzio, Battaglie per la diffesa dell’italica lingua, ed. Carmelo Scavuzzo (Messina, 1995), 71. Michele Di Monte-Francesco Mozzetti-Giovanna Sarti, “Pietro Aretino 1992. Proposte e propositi,” Venezia Cinquecento, 2 (1992): 139–161 (142). “La bontà di Messer Pietro non ha ardito di torre il puro al latte e il bianco a la neve, che così arìa fatto traendo lo Evangelo de la sua semplicitade, e ciò facendo sarìa stato un convertire la Istoria vera in Poesia vana,” Al vescovo Palavicino Agostino Ricchi, §2, in Opere religiose i, 588. See the analysis of this passage in Boillet, “L’Écriture traduite, commentée, réécrite,” 165–167. “E per esser egli un atto puro e semplice, parlarò di lui puramente e semplicemente. E sol co ’l testimonio dell’Evangelo vi rappresenterò il martiro della bontà divina. Perché siamo tanto chiari di Dio, che senza altre scritture e senza altri miracoli abbiam certezza di quello

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the final sentences of the first book, saying that Christ did not choose authors of “mendacious and haughty stories,” full of style and color, to write about his truth and humility, but he selected “pure and simple” authors to write about his purity and simplicity, as men need to believe in Christ with pure and simple minds and hearts.79 In the second book, Aretino paraphrased the Sermon on the Mount making Christ bless the simple believers who do not let the “foolhardiness of science” corrupt their minds.80 In both passages, the recommended attitude is to “content” oneself with a simple faith. In the second one, like in the above-mentioned apostrophe to the reader in the Passione, maintained in the Umanità, “science” is guilty of introducing “doubt” in the faithful’s mind and therefore of threatening their faith. Thus, in these works, Aretino states that, the point for a religious writer is not to discuss faith, but to assert it without leaving space for doubt. This can be achieved through neither complicated argumentations nor scholarly references, but only through the simple narrative of the life of Christ or the simple paraphrase of the penitential psalms composed by David. If the repeated statement about simplicity brought Aretino close to Brucioli, the opening of the Passione with both the initial account of the vision and the apostrophe to the reader valorized immediately the literary nature of Aretino’s new enterprise, as did then the elaborate incipits of the books which make up the Umanità and the Genesi. In the same way, the dedication letter of the Sette salmi signed by Agostino Ricchi underlined Aretino’s stylistic skills, to which are connected both Aretino’s “goodness” and “doctrine.”81 As we said, even if Aretino wanted to offer the new model of a simple prose, he emulated in many ways the authors of sacred poems, like them entrusting the disclosure of doc-

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di che non fur mai in dubbio, se non alcuni intelletti, che, per acquistar nome filosofando, cercano malignamente di por la benda dinanzi a gli occhi del vero con la confusione della scienza, della quale gli pare esser pieni,” Passione di Gesù, §8, in Opere religiose i, 517. See the analysis of this passage in Boillet, “L’ Écriture traduite, commentée, réécrite”, 168–169. Here is an extract of this rather long passage: “Si maraviglia forse alcuno come Cristo non elegesse scrittori eguali al merito de le opre sue: sciocchi, se pensano che Cristo consentisse che l’istorie mendaci e superbe parlassino de la sua veritade e de l’umiltà sua! […] La semplicità e la purità di Cristo ha voluto puri e semplici scrittori, i quali hanno ritratto il suo vero puramente e semplicemente. […] E beati coloro che vivano ne la purità e ne la semplicità natia, e credendo si contentano in quella credenza verace che fa pro a l’anima con piacere disusato,” Umanità di Cristo, i, § 192–193, in Opere religiose i, 307–308. “ ‘Beati coloro il cui spirito mendico di argomenti si sta contento ne la credenza sua, e ciò che vede, e ciò che spera, e ciò che possiede tiene dono d’Iddio, né sa confondersi nel dubbio in cui pone la temerità de le scienze’ […],” Umanità di Cristo, ii, §171, in Opere religiose i, 352. Boillet, “L’ Écriture traduite, comentée, réécrite,” 167, 169; Boillet, “Introduzione,” 56–57.

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trinal contents to literary means. Indeed, in the Passione, the doctrine on the human and divine nature of Christ is progressively exposed through the narration of his sufferings: before the passion, the perfect beauty of Jesus reveals his divinity; during the passion, while this external beauty is altered by the beatings, Jesus’ divine nature interiorizes completely, so as to become invisible externally; after his death, a supernatural light, sign of the triumph of his divinity over death, emanates from his body.82 This visual representation of the doctrine of the double nature of Christ was one of the contents of the Umanità incriminated by Girolamo Muzio.83 In the same work, the doctrine on the holy communion is exposed through the use of a comparison first with modern liturgy and then with everyday objects and situations which make this mystery familiar for readers: as they can have no “doubt” about the concrete examples provided by the author, they cannot have doubt about the reality of the presence of Christ in the holy bread.84 In the Sette salmi, the doctrine on penitence and salvation is exposed through the literary use, based on repetitions and variations, of a range of theological terms (justice, mercy, grace, merit, confession, contrition, correction, etc.), which unfolds progressively a doctrine influenced by the idea of the infinite mercy of God.85 Giulio Ferroni underlined the “gigantic paradox” of an author who succeeds in conveying the Gospels’ simplicity only through the complexity of a style based on the use of a profusion of stylistic devices.86 So, what can be the difference with “vain poetry,” or with the sacred poems from which Aretino distinguished his own narratives, nonetheless emulating them in specific episodes? The author declares that his style serves a simple prose which conveys truthful doctrinal and moral contents with the only aim to exalt God and convert readers. In the Passione, the initial apostrophe, in which the narrator uses the tone and style of a preacher, suggests that this spiritual conversion of the reader is more emotional than intellectual, and that it requires the persuasive eloquence of a preacher more than the argumentative ability of a theologian. As

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See the treatment of the doctrinal question of the double nature of Christ in Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 164–174. Boillet, “L’ Arétin et les papes de son temps,” 360–362. The apostles are like the penitents who receive the sacrament from the priest (later, during the washing of the feet, Christ is compared with the pope); the holy bread, through which Christ enters in each believer, is compared successively with a mirror broken in many pieces, with several open balconies receiving sun light, and with the multiple images reflected by the water when one throws a piece of wood in it. See Boillet, L’Arétin et la Bible, 151–156. Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 297–319. Ferroni, “Introduzione,” xxi; Ferroni, “Premessa,” 17–18.

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we will now expose, the inspiration drawn from predication is indeed an essential aspect of Aretino’s religious production from the Passione to the Vita di san Tommaso. At the end of the 1530s, Aretino preserved his self-image as a free “tongue,” not silenced by the ambiguous gift King Francis i offered to him, and as a loud “voice,” spoken by the man whose portrait appeared in every edition of his books.87 While the “fifth evangelist” of the satirical pronostici became the divinely inspired author of the Passione, his prognostications regarding the princes became in the Sette salmi Nathan’s warnings to King David, echoed and enlarged by the final authorial declaration directed to all modern princes.88 The latter work valorized the figure of “keenest revealer of vice and fervent preacher of virtue,” while in a letter dated 1537 Aretino declared to be a “prophet” more than a “poet”.89 This self-promotion as a divinely inspired preacher is what allowed Aretino to combine the ideal of a simple prose, far away from both poetry and science, with the freedom of the literary writer. What were Aretino’s models in this? Between 1537 and 1548, the author took a stand on ecclesiastical predication. In 1537, writing to Antonio Brucioli, he criticized the obscure speculative preaching of the Florentine Dominicans who vociferate from the pulpit quibbling over difficult questions, whereas who is a simple believer with no doubt about the coming of Christ can easily handle all connected issues such as the Virgin birth, the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead, all issues which are narrative objects in Aretino’s biblical works.90 In 1538, writing to the Augustinian Andrea Ghetti, he praised the ability of the Capuchin Bernardino Ochino to bring out the simple truth of the Scriptures.91 In 1542, writing to Francesco Marcolini, he expressed his disdain for the friars who vociferate against him;92 as a defense, he included in the reedition of the first volume of his letters the positive evaluation of his Genesi by Ochino.93 Besides these well-known letters dated between 1537 and 1542,

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Élise Boillet, “Service courtisan et liberté du lettré: Castiglione, l’Arioste, l’Arétin,” in MarieLuce Demonet (ed.), Hasard et Providence xive–xviie siècles: http://umr6576.cesr.univ​ ‑tours.fr/publications/HasardetProvidence/fichiers/pdf/Boillet.pdf (12 February 2008), 1– 12: 5–7. Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 284–286. Lettere i, 347. The last letter in the second volume of letters written to Aretino printed in 1551 is by the friar Giovan Battista Diedo, who declares that Aretino, who was first a poet, became a prophet (lsa ii, 387). Lettere i, 220. Lettere ii, 65. Lettere ii, 461. Lettere i, Lettere diverse a l’autore, xliv.

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other letters dated 1548 also deal with the merits and limitations of ecclesiastical predication. In March, Aretino wrote to Captain Giovan Francesco Faloppia, saying that he does not listen to the fathers who cried out from the pulpit penetrating into the believer’s mind with theological and philosophical doctrines and no moral teaching.94 Also in March, then, he wrote the above-mentioned letter to the friar and preacher Andrea Ghetti, present in Venice for Lent, referring to him that observant friars came to his home to question his Genesi.95 In April, he wrote to another friar, Paolo Antonio, offering him his support, after Andrea Ghetti had informed him that this man had been imprisoned.96 In May, he wrote again to Andrea Ghetti, praising his preaching,97 and to Captain Nicolò Franciotti, discussing the limitations of many friars, with the exception of Andrea Ghetti and other preachers like the Franciscan Cornelio Musso who thus appears amongst the good examples of preaching.98 This reference to Cornelio Musso, to which modern criticism did not pay attention, deserves a closer look. Between 1539 and 1542, Musso delivered sermons in Rome where Pope Paul iii had called him. The sermon on the second penitential psalm, Del peccato e della penitentia, was preached in 1541 and included in the Terzo libro delle prediche published in 1562.99 In the dedication letter to Cardinal Borromeo, Musso explains that, despite the fact that most preachers embellish their sermons before publishing them, his own printed sermons are faithful to “the accent of the words” he pronounced, underlining the natural virtue of his preaching, quite similar to that of the first oracles of the Holy Spirit.100 He also exposes an ambitious literary and editorial program, announcing the forthcoming fourth volume of his sermons, in which the life of Christ, largely addressed in the third volume, will be completed with the addition of the Last Judgment. Musso concludes: “The world will thus finally have from the printing what I always desired, an entirely depicted Christ from his First to his Second Com-

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Lettere iv, 375. See n. 74. Lettere iv, 485. Lettere iv, 562. Lettere iv, 577. I have been able to check out the edition printed in 1563: Predica del peccato, et della penitentia sopra il salmo, Beati quorum remissae sunt iniquitates fatta in Roma nella Chiesa di San Lorenzo in Damaso, l’anno. m d xli. […], in Il terzo libro delle prediche del reverendiss. monsignor Cornelio Musso vescovo di Bitonto […] (Venice, Gabriele Giolito De Ferrari: 1563), 53–142. All’Illustrissimo, et reverendiss. Monsig. il Cardinale Borromeo, in Il terzo libro delle prediche, fols. 2v–3r.

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ing, in all his deeds portrayed from nature with the brush of the Scriptures.”101 In the edition of Musso’s sermons printed in 1554, Bernardino Tomitano had called him a “Michelangelo of words.” It thus appears that both Aretino and Musso had the ambition to offer the world a complete overview of sacred history, centered on the figure of Christ, in the form of a lively and moving representation. Moreover, they both wanted the believer to simply receive the clear doctrine contained in it. Indeed, in his sermon on the second penitential psalm, Musso addresses the difficult issue of predestination. After having mentioned the definition by St. Augustine and referred to other sources, he comes to this conclusion: “Consider the predestination the way you want, it cannot be that predestination obliges the predestinate.”102 Then he enlarges on the incredible force of the Davidic psalms which “moves, fires, ravishes, and almost with violence urges the sinner to do penance.”103 He underlines the poetic nature of the psalms whose force he tries to transpose in his own prose, using many stylistic devices, and he declares that what David teaches through his moving psalms is “one unique big fundamental point, which can be seen and touched by everyone:” “one can discuss pros and cons,” he says, “arguments, answers, imagines, as a lot of high intellects have done, but the truth is clear, everybody can prove it and nobody can deny it. What is it? That every man is first of all a sinner and needs penitence.”104 These simple statements which leave no space for doubt, associated to a strong rhetoric which moves the heart and the mind, are very close to Aretino’s approach of religious writing. It is worth noticing that the last two lives of saints remain in the line of the biblical works and the Vita di Maria Vergine, which all valorize the reading of the Bible and the clear and easy preaching, by speech or by pen, of its doctrinal meanings and moral teachings. Indeed, the opening of the first book in the Vita di santa Caterina describes the young noblewoman as a superior mind more interested in reading books than in doing needlework.105 One night, she hears a divine voice urging her to read the Holy Scriptures.106 Soon after, she meets an old hermit who presses her to disdain Plato’s philosophy in favor of Christian truth.107 Convinced by his speeches, she prays the divine wisdom to

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All’Illustrissimo, et reverendiss. Monsig. il Cardinale Borromeo, fol. 4r–v. Predica del peccato, et della penitentia, 67. Predica del peccato, et della penitentia, 78. Predica del peccato, et della penitentia, 83–84. Vita di santa Caterina, i, § 3–4, in Opere religiose ii, 305–306. Vita di santa Caterina, § 12, 308. Vita di santa Caterina, § 13–24, 308–311.

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make her understand the mystery of his son Christ in order to “transform herself in him, to act for him and to relate to him.”108 She actually receives from above the clear comprehension of all the obscure passages of the Bible, understanding the truth regarding Jesus’ birth and the reason of his coming on earth, and asking forgiveness for the days she spent studying “useless and doubtful doctrines.”109 Like in the Passione, the conversion ensured by the reading of the Bible and the divine illumination of its true meanings lead to the faith in Christ and the imitation of his life and virtues. After her conversion, Catherine herself delivers many speeches in order to convert the members of her family and then her torturers. The Vita di san Tommaso valorizes the saint more than the philosopher, focusing on his private praying and public preaching.110 While a hermit urged Catherine to contemplate Christ in order to understand him as did Moses and Paul, a hermit now reveals to Thomas’ parents the greatness of their son, who will be able to comprehend the incomprehensible essence of God as did Moses and Paul.111 Like Catherine, Thomas will have “the inherent knowledge of [God]” and his writing will illuminate any “doubt,” so that “the malice of unbelief” will not be able to “confuse” human minds anymore.112 Thomas will understand God’s “simplicity” as well as all his other divine qualities,113 and “he will talk, dictate and write about Moses’ books, the psalms, the gospels, [and] Paul’s letters” in such a way that “his writing will be confirmed by Christ’s voice.”114 The second book is particularly explicit about the ideal of the simple exposition of the message of the Bible. At its beginning, Thomas’ brothers, who live in a different part of the kingdom, are notified that their father is dead and their mother is gone to Rome, where she hopes to convince Thomas to leave the Dominican order. They decide to go to the monastery where Thomas has found protection and, before taking him away by force, they formulate harsh accusations against monastic rule and life. Even if they are said to be part of an “illicit speech,” these accusations, to which the father superior will answer acknowledging that the friars do not always live the perfect life they should, echo the generic attacks formulated at the beginning of the Passione against 108 109 110 111 112

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Vita di santa Caterina, § 27, 311. “Dottrine disutili e incerte” (Vita di santa Caterina, §28–29, 312). Marini, “Introduzione,” 66–67. Vita di santa Caterina, i, § 20, 310; Vita di san Tommaso, i, §21, 463, and §24, 464. “[…] la perfezione de le sue scritture per consenso divino rischiarerà di sorte i dubbi e di qualità illuminerà le loro iscuritadi, che la nequizia de la incredulità non è per istamparci punto de le sue confusioni […]” (Vita di san Tommaso, §25, 465). Vita di san Tommaso, § 26, 465. Vita di san Tommaso, § 30, 466.

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philosophers and theologians and the more specific ones expressed in the letter written in defense of Antonio Brucioli: the Dominican preachers use science to put “confusion” and “doubt” in the minds of their audience, while “it is much better to believe well in Christ than to preach him badly.”115 In a later episode, just after the conversion of the prostitute who tried to tempt him, Thomas has the great desire to read the Bible. Three angels appear to him holding a cloth, a white belt and a book. They dress him and put the book in front of him.116 While he starts to read this Bible whose letters are illuminated, he feels “his mind moved by a sudden inherent knowledge,” which stimulates him to profess his faith in God, who punishes the men he created “with the means of his justice,” but do not leave them “without the hope of his mercy.”117 In Paris, while he is teaching on Salomon’s proverbs what a good life is,118 he is interrupted by a man, who first declares that because of God’s prescience men cannot have free will, but then, thinking of the grave consequences of such a statement for social order, affirms that men do have free will.119 Thomas answers to this doubt addressing the double issue of divine prescience and human free will and arriving to a conclusion whose style can be compared to Musso’s rhetoric: “It is thus clear, certain and resolved that men sin with the will to do so, and that without this will they do not sin, although their will, bad and good, is foreseen by God.”120 At the end of book two, before leaving Paris to go to Bologna, Thomas gathered his students for a last lesson, warning them against science and urging them to abandon philosophy in order to learn exclusively the doctrine of Christ, whose “wisdom measures everything with justice and judges everything with kindness.”121 So, in the line of Aretino’s precedent religious works, even the life of the major theologian of Christian Tradition, printed one year after the re-establishment of the Inquisition in Italy, clearly maintained the connection with Erasmus’ “philosophy of Christ.” Aretino’s religious production surely deserves further enquiry from a literary and religious point of view. Considering it as a whole, from the biblical to the hagiographic works, studying it in connection with the author’s profane 115

116 117 118 119 120 121

Here is an extract of this passage: “[…] essi empiono i lor detti di confusione, perché lo auditore gli tenga dotti nel dubbio. Onde è assai meglio di sapere ben credere a Cristo che mal predicarne […],” Vita di san Tommaso, ii, § 12, 509–510. Vita di san Tommaso, § 65–68, 522–523. Vita di san Tommaso, § 69–70, 524. Vita di san Tommaso, § 175–181, 551–552. Vita di san Tommaso, § 182–183, 552–553. Vita di san Tommaso, § 192, 555. Vita di san Tommaso, § 204–207, 558–559.

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production, and putting it into perspective in the panorama of Italian religious literature seem necessary to understand this specific production, as well as the author’s position in the political, religious and cultural framework of sixteenth-century Italy before and during the Council of Trent. The ideal of biblical “simplicity” cannot be interpreted as a mere excuse that Aretino used to defend himself from the accusation of being ignorant. In its various formulations from the Passione to the Vita di san Tommaso, this ideal clearly and simultaneously resonates with Erasmus’ philosophy of Christ, Valdés’ teaching about individual enlightenment, Ochino’s but also Musso’s preaching, in different ways centered on Christ and connected to the Scriptures, the doctrine of the infinite mercy of God but also that of the value of sacraments and good works. In the same way, a plurality of inspirations characterizes the literary profile of Aretino’s religious works, which simultaneously refer to different genres from the spiritual meditation to the historical compendium, from the Gospel harmony to the sacred poem, and from the sacra rappresentazione to the sermon, offering the reader an enjoyable and polyvalent text.

chapter 13

The Three Hagiographies: Writing about Saints in the Age of the Council Paolo Marini

The starting point for a comprehensive reading of the hagiographies is provided by Aretino himself in his letter to Girolamo Verallo, the apostolic legate in Venice. The letter is included as an afterword at the end of the Marcolini first edition of the Vita di Maria Vergine (Life of the Virgin Mary). Having finished the “confessional phase” of his sacred writings with the Genesi (Genesis, 1538), Aretino begins the “hagiographical phase”1 that will lead him in the short span of four years to the publication of the three Vite—the Life of Mary (1539), the Life of Catherine of Alexandria (1540), and the Life of Thomas Aquinas (1543)— and launches the series with a sort of preventive self-defense directed to a minister of the Church (that was, by then, headed toward the period of the Council). The letter is, on the one hand, a courageous declaration of the poetics of a literary figure who, a few years prior in the dedication to Valdaura in the Dialogo (1536), boasted an all-encompassing catalogue of “devout or entertaining works, according to the subject;”2 on the other hand, it is insurance against the attacks of those who, precisely from within ecclesiastical hierarchies, could have raised reservations in relation to an operation of rewriting the sacred orchestrated with such ease by a layperson with the reputation of an irregular ante litteram: And since everything that is thought, spoken or written in praise of the Lord is authentic, I have done my utmost to extol the deeds, the loveliness and virtues of Our Lady, using all the words at my command to enhance my devotion and meditation.3

1 According to the articulation proposed by Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice: Researches on Aretino and His Circle in Venice. 1527–1556 (Florence, 1985), 122–123. 2 “Volumi divoti e allegri, secondo i subietti,” Pietro Aretino, Sei giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1969), 146. The English translation is from Pietro Aretino, Aretino’s Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1971), 154. 3 “E perché ogni cosa pensata, detta e scritta in lode del Signore è autentica, tutto il mio sforzo è suto in estollere le azioni, le bellezze e le virtù de la Vergine con ogni sorte di parole atte a

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The italics above signal the fundamental terms of the issue. The most important point is the authenticity of the prose of the writer of pasquinades who presents himself as the one who sets the standards of the truth, and claims for himself the role of fifth evangelist. Through these assertions, Aretino intends to raise his work above the uncertain domain of literary fiction in order to make it an absolute work, worthy of being on the same level as the vulgarizations of his contemporary Antonio Brucioli or perhaps even a step above, because of Aretino’s ability to enliven the biblical message.4 While the validity of the undertaking is inherent from the beginning in his choice of the ultimate subject (God), Aretino’s artistic effort consists in nothing other than applying the rhetorical process of amplificatio to both the account of the saint’s life and works, and his own “meditation.”5 This is similar to the very successful Meditationes Vitae Christi by Pseudo-Bonaventure. That is, the author aims to restore scenes from sacred history so that through contemplation the reader-believer becomes emotionally involved in events that are distant from his own sensibilities as a modern person. These are dynamics that, already active in biblical paraphrases, nevertheless seem to take on even greater importance in the hagiographies particularly when confronted with the risks Aretino encounters in relation to repetitions in writing the Life of Mary, which overlaps with that of Christ for long stretches, or when confronted with the shortage of sources for the subject of Saint Catherine, which were indeed scarce even in the tradition of conversio and passio. It is not surprising, therefore, that analogous reflections reappear precisely in the

ringrandire il religioso de le meditazioni mie” (Opere religiose ii, 605–606, emphasis added). The translation is that of George Bull, Selected Letters [of ] Aretino (Harmondsworth UK, 1976), 187, emphasis added. See also Paolo Marini, “Le agiografie di Pietro Aretino e la riscrittura del sacro nell’età del Concilio di Trento,” in Michela Catto-Adriano Prosperi (eds.), Trent and Beyond. The Council, Other Powers, Other Cultures (Turnhout, 2017). Citations from the hagiographies are drawn from Opere religiose ii, and are indicated by the following abbreviations: M = Vita di Maria Vergine (Life of the Virgin Mary), C = Vita di santa Caterina (Life of Saint Catherine), T = Vita di san Tommaso (Life of Saint Thomas); each abbreviation is followed by book and paragraph numbers. 4 The concept, central in the economy of the sacred works by Aretino, is repeated in analogous terms in the concluding paragraphs of the first book of the Vita of the Virgin: “Everything that is thought, that is spoken, and that is written in the glory of He who gave us existence like stones, life like plants, sensation like animals, and understanding like angels is authentic” (“Ogni cosa che si pensa, che si parla e che si scrive in gloria di Colui che ci ha dato l’essere come a le pietre, il vivere come a le piante, il sentire come agli animali e lo intendere come agli angeli è autentica,” M 2.288). 5 For articulate reflection on the concept of amplificatio (amplification), see Gérard Genette, Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln, 1997), 262–269.

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dedicatory letter to Alfonso d’Avalos, the Marquis of Vasto, in the Life of the Alexandrian martyr: Behold, my writing, always in the midst of anger, threats, imprisonments, fear, torments, and death, supports itself almost entirely on the back of invention, however, besides the fact that everything that results in the glory of God is authentic, the work, which in itself is little, would be nothing without the help that I gave it meditating.6 The issue is delicate, as Aretino well knows. So much so that in 1542, when republishing the letter to the Marquis in the second book of his Letters, he substituted the term autentica with ammissa (permissible).7 The variation dampens the tone of what is certainly a bold statement: from the level of authenticity, we move down to the less high-sounding one of legitimacy. This precautionary expedient does not change, however, the underlying assumption that this is a passage to be read as a profession of style that can be extended to all three of the hagiographies. Forced by the legally binding obligations of his commission from the court in Milan to take on the burden of textual materials that in themselves were far from enticing and make them appealing to the taste of the time, Aretino shifts the challenge to the literary plane, seizing the opportunity to take a step forward in linguistic experimentation with a modern vernacular prose capable of recounting the lives of Christ and of the saints in forms never before practiced. Today the resulting text seems weighted down by a pervasive, and sometimes suffocating, rhetorical style. Its outcome, however, should be reconsidered, in light of the fairly broad circulation of the three hagiographies during the author’s lifetime—even following the placement of his opera omnia on the Index in 15598—and after his death. In particular, his fame in the

6 “Ecco, lo scriver mio, sempre ne l’ire, ne le minacce, ne le prigioni, negli spaventi, nei supplizii e ne le morti, si sostien quasi tutto in sul dosso de la invenzione, però che, oltre che ogni cosa che risulta in gloria di Dio è autentica, l’opera, che in sé stessa è poca, sarebbe nulla senza lo aiuto che io le ho dato meditando” (Opere religiose ii, 607). These passages have been taken into consideration by Marco Faini, “La poetica dell’epica sacra fra Cinque e Seicento in Italia,” The Italianist 35, no. 1 (2015): 27–60: 31–32. 7 Lettere ii, 238. 8 Many are the testimonies that prove the underground circulation of Aretino’s sacred writings in the second half of the 1500s. See, for example, Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia. 1520–1580 (Turin, 1987), 449. The hagiographies’ fortune is even reflected in episodes of direct imitation like those studied by Eleonora Carinci, “Una riscrittura di Pietro Aretino: la Vita di Maria Vergine di Lucrezia Marinella e le sue fonti,” The Italianist 33, no. 3 (2013): 361–389. Carinci returns to the issue in the essay published in this companion, as well.

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Baroque period is evidenced by the numerous reprintings of his works under a pseudonym that were prepared by the Venetian typographer Marco Ginammi.9 Describing briefly the content and history of the texts, I aim to show how that stylistic resolution is the foundation of the sacred writings and the primary driving force of Aretino’s inspiration.10 It coexists, apparently without friction, with the explicitly experimental use that Aretino makes of these compositions both in the showdown with Alfonso d’Avalos, who between chronic delays and targeted deferments paid Aretino an annual pension of 200 ducats awarded in 1536 at the request of the emperor Charles v, and in his relationship with the Papal Court, in whose presence Aretino’s hagiographic prose is touted as tangible proof of active militancy on the Catholic front against the spreading of heresies beyond the Alps.

1

The Texts: Content and Narrative Solutions

Before moving on to the stylistic strategies adopted by Aretino, a preliminary comment must be made about the lack of attention nineteenth- and twentiethcentury criticism has given to the three Vite, which are even less studied than the biblical paraphrases. After the harsh criticism by De Sanctis and Croce, we had to wait for the monograph on Aretino by Giorgio Petrocchi11—whose work then inspired the edition of the Vite of Catherine and Thomas by Flavia Santin12—for a constructive reflection on the sacred writings, and on the hagiographies in particular. Few significant contributions appeared in the following years,13 until the con-

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The hagiographies’ complex rhetorical plot is shrewdly investigated by Paolo Fasoli, “‘Con la penna della fragilità’. Considerazioni sull’Aretino ascetico,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 2, 619–639. Ginammi republished each hagiography a good three times under the pseudonym Partenio Etiro during the years from 1628 to 1642 (a detailed description of the individual editions is in the Nota ai testi in Opere religiose ii, 629–634, 648–653, 656–662). This is the, still valid, theory proposed in 1961 by Giuliano Innamorati, “Le Opere sacre e l’unità storica dell’opera aretiniana,” in Gli strumenti del dubbio. Studi letterari fra Trecento e Novecento ed. Danilo Romei (Florence, 1990), 47–65. Giorgio Petrocchi, “Intorno alle prose sacre,” in Pietro Aretino tra Rinascimento e Controriforma (Milan, 1948), 264–297. Pietro Aretino, Le vite dei santi. Santa Caterina Vergine, San Tommaso d’Aquino. 1540–1543, ed. Flavia Santin (Rome, 1977). Among these, see, certainly, George Weise, “Manieristische und frühbarocke Elemente in den religiösen Schriften des Pietro Aretino,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 19, no. 2 (1957): 170–207, translated into Italian and included in George Weise, Il Rinascimento

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ference organized for the five hundredth anniversary of the author’s birth14 and the publication of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pietro Aretino (National Edition of the Works of Pietro Aretino). The philological organization of the texts has led to renewed interest in an area of Aretino’s literary production that has long remained in the shadows, perhaps precisely because it did not appear compatible with Aretino’s reputation as an “irregular,” according to the anticlassicist perspective that mainstream criticism continues to perpetuate.15 1.1 The Life of Mary It is not only for chronological reasons that the Life of Mary is assigned an intermediate position, as a work of transition, at the end of the decade in which the first phase of the elaboration of Aretino’s religious prose is completed. The use of amplificatio is exercised here on materials drawn from the Legenda aurea and the Infancy Gospel, but also from the New Testament regarding the participation of the Virgin in numerous episodes from the life of Jesus and the apostles. Mary’s life is presented, therefore, as a biblical hagiography, full of points of contact with the Umanità di Cristo (Humanity of Christ) on the level of both form and content. On the other hand, the process of dramatization that sharply characterizes the figure of the saint in an Aretinian key is already evident in this first Vita. Shrewdly capturing a characteristic of the religious sensibility that was common in the period leading up to the Counter-Reformation, Aretino conceives, in fact, his own rewriting of the vicissitudes of Mary, Catherine, and Thomas as the exaltation of heroic virtues of the saint, whose stature rises above common mortals due to the commitment to asceticism and a contemptuous rejection of worldly logic; even when that logic involves the most natural sentiments, like affection between blood relatives within the family unit. What results from this is a continual friction between human sentiment and faith, between the reasons of the heart and those of the spirit, which characterizes this segment of Aretino’s sacred production in a particular way. On the literary level, the advantages are clear: the extension or insertion ex novo

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e la sua eredità, ed. Pompeo Giannantonio and Francesco Pugliese Carratelli (Naples, 1969), 513–564. See the aforementioned contribution of Fasoli, “ ‘Con la penna della fragilità’.” See also, Mario Scotti, “Gli scritti religiosi,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 121–143. For an extensive bibliography (last updated November 5, 2010), see the one prepared by Élise Boillet, Pietro Aretino. Opere sacre, online at http://www.nuovorinascimento.org/​ cinquecento/aretino_sacro.pdf; to be completed with the bibliography in Opere religiose i, 73–87.

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of elements of contrast gives psychological depth to the characters and adds vitality to a narration that, in itself, is not very lively when left to merely the source text. The Life of the Virgin opens with the account of the vicissitudes of Anne and Joachim, which takes up a vast part of the first book up to the birth of Mary (M 1.1–104). It is essentially another hagiographic sequence encapsulated within the macrostructure of the hagiography itself. A description of Mary’s childhood up to her offering at the Temple of Jerusalem follows (M 1.105–149). The little girl, who “had nothing childlike about her except her features,”16 is portrayed in her daily activities with the typical features of the puer senex, the same that in the second book characterize the figure of young Jesus. Her separation from the family nest represents the first dramatic scene that Aretino does not fail to develop artfully (M 1.150–165). Between the poignant pathos that permeates the exchange of words between Mary and her parents and her steely determination that obliges all the protagonists not to obstruct the divine plan, the reader is ably led to experience a passage of sacred history otherwise distant from his modern perception. It is a rhetoric of movere that, here as elsewhere, accompanies the function of crying, employed to mark the height of pathos in crucial passages of the Vita. The extended picture of Mary’s sojourn among the virgins of the Temple (M 1.166–263), full of descriptive postponements and concluded by her marriage to Joseph (M 1.264–327), takes up the rest of the first book, which concludes with the passing of Joachim and Anne (amply watered by the tears of their daughter and of the dying themselves, M 1.328–354) and the prophecy of the advent of the Child that will unleash the wrath of Lucifer (M 1.355–360). The episodes from the life of Christ in which Mary also takes part, directly or indirectly, are condensed in the second book. The objective is, after all, neither absolute comprehensiveness, nor, on the literary level, a tight and compelling plot given the subject matter. The challenge is in accompanying the reader in the contemplation of a long series of juxtaposed scenes through a new, more direct view of the evangelical path. Determined to avoid slavish repetitions of the Umanità, Aretino resolves the narrative issue by devoting more space to the amplification of passages that are less developed in biblical paraphrases and concentrating those already treated into the course of a few paragraphs. The protagonist of a good part of the book is the Holy Family: the triad Anne-Joachim-Mary is succeeded with obvious parallels by that of Mary-Joseph-Jesus. In the foreground are the events in which the Virgin is the

16

“Non aveva di bambina se non la effigie” (M 1.107).

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protagonist: from the Annunciation with the Incarnation of the Word (M 2.1– 44), to the Visitation of Elizabeth that ends with the birth of John the Baptist (M 2.45–67), up to the extensive section dedicated to the events of the nativity of Christ (M 2.74–158) and the meeting with Simeon (M 2.159–188). Much attention is given, here as in the pages dedicated to the flight into Egypt and the return to Nazareth (M 2.189–250), to the characters’ daily life, restored with a particular taste for realistic detail that confers a human dimension on figures and situations otherwise indistinct in the eyes of the reader. These are aspects of the same rhetorical strategy of making things topical that, as we will see, Aretino also pursues through systematic use of the device of simile. This, for example, is how Aretino describes Joseph’s awakening from the miserable cot where he received in a dream the instruction to leave Egypt: the excellent old man, having received such an embassy in a vision, gathered in himself every spirit and every feeling, and, having spent some time in the usual prayer, he rose up from his poor bed and, having removed some pieces of straw that had gotten tangled in his beard, he washed his hands and face.17 Further on, Joseph is described again, old and gaunt, on his deathbed: whoever had seen him huddled and, his chest wrapped in a coarse and rough piece of cloth, extend his weak arms, on the wrinkled skin of which the desiccated veins were emptied of their usual blood, could have portrayed with what faith, with what constancy, and with what zeal the family members of God Most High die. He remained there quite some time with his wrinkled and grizzled face, girded by a shaggy, white beard, raised to Heaven, praying to God; finally, his almost entirely bald head laid back on his poor pillow, he wore out what remained of his voice and his speech […].18

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18

“Ricevuta il vecchio ottimo sì fatta imbasciata in visione, ridusse in sé stesso ogni suo spirito e ogni suo senso e, stato alquanto di spazio ne la solita orazione, si levò suso del povero letticiuolo e, toltisi alcuni fili di paglia che se gli erano intricati ne la barba, si lavò le mani e il viso” (M 2.219). “Chi l’avesse veduto ranicchiato e, rivolto il busto in un pezzo di lenzuolo grosso e ruvido, distendere le debili braccia, su la grinza pelle de le quali erano diseccate le vene vote del solito sangue, avrebbe potuto ritrarre con qual fede, con qual constanza e con qual zelo moiano i famigliari di Dio ottimo massimo. Egli stette un pezzo col viso rugoso e crespo cinto d’inculta e canuta barba sollevato al Cielo orando a Dio; a la fine, riposto il capo

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The dispute in the Temple signals Jesus’s first separation from Mary and Joseph. The parents’ dismay in momentarily losing their son in the crowd of the faithful triggers again the disconnect between the spontaneity of family affections and the need for divine fulfillment that Aretino never misses the opportunity to examine in depth (M 2.251–269). After moving to the desert Christ begins preaching and then the key moments of the Passion and the Resurrection are summarized at the end of the book (M 3.289–298). After the Ascension the Virgin becomes the point of reference for apostles and disciples of Christ, playing a mediating role that can already be appreciated in the episode with Mary Magdalene (M 3.31–41).19 The extreme choice of the redeemed sinner who decided to withdraw into the desert sets off the women’s emotional reaction. This time it is Mary who becomes the bearer of celestial needs in the name of a contemptus mundi that requires her to support and promote Mary Magdalene’s plan. In expressions like “do not cry for she who leaves the world […] but cry for she who comes into it,”20 common in the sermon of the Virgin, and in turn a reflection on the hagiographic theme particular to another great saint of the Christian tradition, the path toward the totalizing asceticism of the Life of Catherine is already underway. A good part of the third book is taken up by a long pilgrimage divided into the two stages of the passages on preaching and the Passion of Christ (M 3.42–95, 147–195). From the narrative point of view, it might be the most interesting solution in the entire work. The Gospel story that is contained in the ending of the second book is thus recovered sub specie Mariae in a contemplative sequence full of homiletic inserts uttered from both the mouth of the protagonist in the presence of his faithful followers, and that of the author who addresses the readers directly. Between the two phases of the pilgrimage a series of miraculous events attributed to Mary’s intercession is set (M 3.96–146). The ending is centered on the description of the dormitio Virginis and the Assumption (M 3.195–274). The announcement of her imminent death, between the pain of the apostles and Mary’s aspiration to asceticism, represents the last dramatic turn of a crescendo of pathos in which Aretino aims to involve his ideal audience:

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20

quasi tutto calvo nel povero capezzale, consumò l’avanzo de la voce e de la favella […]” (M 2.280–281). The figure of the Magdalene and the story of her conversion were amply developed in the Umanità di Cristo (Humanity of Christ). See, Élise Boillet, L’Arétin et la Bible (Geneva, 2007), 512–526. “Non si pianga colei che si parte dal mondo […] ma piangasi quella che ci viene” (M 3.39).

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If I who am writing what I imagine the Virgin could have said to the apostles in entrusting her most noble body to them cannot abstain from the tears that those who read it perhaps also shed, how is it possible that the righteous men who heard Mary’s own words would have abstained?21 1.2 The Life of Catherine The same dramatic mechanisms are put into action, though much less dynamically, in the thin plot of the Life of Catherine. Conditioned in its narrative profile by the rigid determination of the saint, who had decided from the moment of conversion to “go on with loyalty, continue with servitude, persevere with steadfastness, and to conclude with death” on her path of asceticism,22 the hagiography is heavily burdened on the stylistic level by the “domination of elocutio” observed by Paolo Fasoli in comparison with the sacred works of the first phase.23 Indifferent to the calls of “human sensuality,”24 even when it involves bonds of the most intimate affections, Catherine immediately converts her father Costo and all the household servants, compromising herself, then, in open support for Christians forced to worship idols (C 1.33–73). Public testimony begins with an apology for the “passion for martyrdom” that the young woman even celebrates as “the aim of pleasure, the object of miracles, a guide to health, the teacher of patience, and the shelter of life.”25 When Catherine is brought before the emperor Maxentius, who is enraged by her behavior, we witness the first in a series of confrontations between radically opposed parties that characterize the development of the hagiography (C 1.74–89). Nevertheless, the saint’s lines are extended in such a way that it creates in the reader the sense of a sequence of juxtaposed monologues rather than normal dialogic exchange between protagonist and antagonist. Frustrated by the failure of every attempt at persuasion, the emperor vents his anger by having Catherine and Costo locked up and ordering the burning of their house with all the

21

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24 25

“Se io che scrivo ciò che mi imagino che potesse dire la Vergine agli apostoli nel raccomandargli il corpo suo nobilissimo non posso astenermi dal pianto che anche chi ciò legge forse isparge, come è possibile che i giusti uomini che udirono le proprie parole di Maria se ne astenessero?” (M 3.228). “Seguitar con lealtà, continuar con servitù, perverar con fermezza e fornir con morte” (C 1.32). Fasoli, “ ‘Con la penna della fragilità’,” 625–627, where he notes in particular the enormous escalation in the frequency of the use of and in the measure of rhetorical devices like enumeration and rapportatio. “Sensualitade umana” (C 1.45). “Fine de i diletti, termine de i miracoli, guida de la salute, maestra de la pacienza e albergo de la vita” (C 1.72).

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servants inside (C 1.90–110). The servants’ martyrdom is followed by the much more spectacular one of the Christians persuaded by Catherine not to make sacrifices to idols and of the temple priests converted by Costo (C 1.111–146). In the “new hell”26 designed by Maxentius’s perverse ingenuity the martyrs, incited by the words of Catherine who is present to comfort them in their good death, are tortured by every form of torment. Aretino’s attention to gory details can be traced back to the same penchants for representing the macabre, as observed by Harald Hendrix in the Umanità di Cristo (Humanity of Christ).27 It is a stylistic feature that is far more pervasive particularly in a work like the Life of Catherine, whose narrative development, in fact, is modulated by a relentless succession of tortures culminating in the final one of the saint herself. Catherine’s imperturbability in the face of the horrors that were supposed to terrorize her and her renewed professions of contemptus mundi (“We are still healthy in our souls, though the rest are worms and mud!”)28 foment the wrath of Maxentius, who decides to punish her by sending Costo to his death (C 1.155–166). The martyrdom of her old father takes up the final part of the book (C 1.167– 190). It is, in fact, a fiction Aretino develops beyond the strict perimeter of the Legenda aurea in the clear intention to confer a minimum of human depth on the otherwise emotionless profile of the saint.29 This brings back the pathos of the drama that sees filial sentiments in Catherine’s heart clash with religious imperatives, she being only occasionally “won over by carnal humanity.”30 The second book begins with the grandiose vision of the mystical marriage, performed by the Virgin, between the young saint and Christ (C 2.3–12), another episode that is absent from the Legenda aurea where Catherine, nevertheless, proclaims herself the bride of Christ.31 Meanwhile, Maxentius, calmed down by his barons, summons to Alexandria all “the learned men scattered throughout the circle of the machine of the world”32 so that they can challenge Cather26 27

28 29

30 31 32

“Nuovo inferno” (C 1.120). Harald Hendrix, “Pietro Aretino’s Humanità di Christo and the Rhetoric of Horror,” in Chrysa Damianaki-Paolo Procaccioli-Angelo Romano (eds.), Il Rinascimento italiano di fronte alla Riforma: letteratura ed arte. Sixteenth-Century Italian Art and Literature and the Reformation, Atti del colloquio internazionale, London, The Warburg Institute, 30–31 gennaio 2004 (Manziana, 2005), 89–114. See also, Boillet, L’Arétin et la Bible, 506, 512. “Siami pur salute ne l’anima, ché il resto son vermini e fango!” (C 1.165). In Iacopo da Varazze’s Legenda aurea, in the revised critical text edited and with comment by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, with Italian translation coordinated by Francesco Stella, we read, simply, that Catherine is “Costi regis filia” (Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni [Florence-Milan, 2007], 1350). “Vinta da la carnale umanitade” (C 1.189). “Ego me Christo sponsam tradidi” (Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1354). “I sapienti sparti nel cerchio de la machina del mondo” (C 2.21).

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ine in a dialectical confrontation and persuade her to return to the worship of pagan idols. By tradition, it is one of the most famous, and most represented in iconography, passages of Catherine’s hagiography, which, in Aretino’s rewriting, is broadly developed from the moment the wise men arrive at court to the end of their longed-for martyrdom (“the passions of martyrdom […] are desired by us”33), the inevitable consequence of their conversion (C 2.21–127). The emperor then attempts to change his strategy, trying in vain to corrupt Catherine with the offer of a throne and consecration in the temple of idols (C 2.136–138). The attitude of Maxentius, who first looks at the young woman “with an eye half of pity, showing that he feels pain over her age rather than disdain over her obstinacy”34 and ends up appealing to her sense of compassion (“Bend, girl, to our wishes and have respect for the human beings whose lives are extinguished because of your magical cunning”35), creates a paradoxical effect that at times makes it seem that the cruel persecutor of Christians is less inhuman than the saint herself. The emperor’s words count for nothing and the incomprehension between the characters remains as total as the irreducibility ad unum of the opposing visions of the world they represent. Offended by Catherine’s renewed rejection, Maxentius has her tortured by his executioners and condemns her to fast in jail for twelve days (C 2.150–165). It is a singular sequence complete with voyeuristic elements. The description of her lovely, tortured body alternates with lines in which the young woman expresses disdain, with an almost furious harshness, for that same body she perceives as an obstacle to asceticism: What have I to do with such flesh? And what are bones? And my body, what is it? Vanity, dust, and shadow are my body, and my bones, and my flesh; and being shadow, vanity, and dust the one, the other, and the last, what use to me is their fragility? […] Alas, vile body, alas, feeble body, alas, fragile body! Suffer, hope, and be silent, aware that what draws sorrow from you while you live can be my bliss. Do be silent, hope, and suffer!36 33 34 35 36

“Le passioni del martirio […] son desiderate da noi” (C 2.100). “Con l’occhio d’una meza pietà, mostrando d’aver più tosto dolore de la sua etade che disdegno de la sua pertinacia” (C 2.136). “Piegati, fanciulla, al voto nostro e abbi rispetto a le creature umane, le cui vite si spengono per colpa de i tuoi magici artificii” (C 2.139). “Che ho io a far di queste carni? E che cosa son l’ossa? E la mia persona che è? Vanità, polvere e ombra sono e la mia persona, e le mie ossa, e le mie carni; et essendo ombra, vanità e polvere queste, quelle e quell’altra, a che mi servano le fragilità loro? […] Ahi corpo vile, ahi corpo debile, ahi corpo fragile! Soffrisci, spera e taci, consciosia che la cagione la quale ti trae dal vivo i ramarichi può bearmi. Sì che taci, spera e sofferisci!” (C 2.159, 162).

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A new deferment of Catherine’s martyrdom takes over. Obliged to leave Alexandria for several days, Maxentius leaves control of the State in the hands of the empress and of Porphyry, a faithful man of arms and leader of his army (C 2.166–178). After the sovereign’s departure the two regents, inspired by God, go to visit Catherine. And thus begins a long path of conversion that will inevitably lead both to martyrdom (C 2.179–3.178). At the beginning of the third book Catherine receives the empress and Porphyry in prison and begins to catechize them, presenting them with a detailed decalogue of the ascetic (C 3.1–30), a sort of brief treatise “on the subject of earthly vanity.”37 The two leave the saint completely renewed, to the point that Porphyry succeeds, in turn, in his undertaking to convert all the cavalrymen placed in his command (C 3.45–59). Struck by the prisoner’s miraculous state of health on his return, Maxentius ascribes it to the disloyalty of the jailers, who have already converted to Christianity. They are immediately sentenced to die before Catherine’s eyes; she accompanies them to their martyrdom with meditations centered on the theme of detachment from the world (C 3.69–106). In the final scene of the gallows, set among the ruins of ancient Alexandria, the author gives free rein to that taste for ekphrastic digression that represents one of the functions of the descriptive style typical of sacred works (C 3.92–97). The increase in conversions convinces the emperor not to further postpone Catherine’s punishment (C 3.108–133), but the spoked wheel prepared for her torture is disintegrated by the angels. The explosion strikes the bystanders in a powerful scene that includes examples of a particularly macabre realism: It was such that the blood mixed with brains and the brains mixed with blood and the blood and brains and broken-open heads and torn flesh were the lesser darkness that showed itself there, because the sum of all the destruction of bodies was seen in there appearing here a trunk without the rest of the limbs, and there a limb without the rest of the trunk. Here you would see a body with a leg or an arm, and there a chest retaining on its neck nearly half of a head without anything else.38

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“Ne la materia de la mondana vanitade” (C 3.20). “Talché i sangui mescolati con le cervella e le cervella miste coi sangui e i sangui e le cervella con le teste aperte e con le carni lacere erano la minore oscurità che si dimostrasse ivi, però che la somma di tutta la destruzione dei corpi appariva nel discoprirsi là un busto senza il resto de le membra e qua un membro senza il resto del busto. Qui si vedeva il corpo con una gamba e un braccio e quivi un petto ritenente in sul collo quasi la metà d’un capo senza altro” (C 3.129).

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Disgust for the nefariousness carried out by her consort drives the empress to confess her own faith in Christ. The woman’s death sentence is shortly followed by that of Porphyry and of his cavalrymen (C 3.134–177). We arrive, thus, at the climax of the martyrdom of Catherine (C 3.187–200), who nevertheless still has time before being decapitated to pronounce an encomium of the Marquis of Vasto in the form of a prophecy (C 3.196–198).39 The work ends with the saint’s elevatio animae and with the miraculous transportation of her body to Mount Sinai (C 3.201–209). 1.3 The Life of Thomas In writing the third hagiography Aretino faces a subject whose sources are far more extensive than those available for Saint Catherine. The selection of the episodes destined for amplificatio, however, closely follows that which was already presented in prior compositions, and it certainly cannot be said that Aretino, in his Life of Aquinas, presents the titular character simply as a philosopher or as an orthodox Catholic theologian.40 Aretino always looks to the saint’s prodigious virtue, to the often-dramatic encounters with other characters from which emerges his superhuman ability to not yield to the temptations of the flesh and to emotions. The encounter between Landolfo d’Aquino and the hermit Buono who prophesies the birth and glorious destiny of his son Thomas is staged in the “memorable and grand site”41 of the temple of Apollo and the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae (T 1.1–32). The work begins, therefore, under the sign of ekphrasis with a digression that confirms the taste for describing ruins already noticed in the description of ancient Alexandria that we read in the Life of Catherine (C 3.92–97). A vision makes the prophecy known to Theodora as well, the future mother of the saint whom Aretino does not hesitate to compare to Maria d’Aragona (T 1.44–45). With the account of his baptism and of the miraculous acts that mark the puer senex’s childhood complete (T 1.48–70), young Thomas undertakes his studies in the monastery of Montecassino to then move on to the Dominican monastery in Naples where his vocation for the religious life matures (T 1.71–127). The Dominican fathers come together, then, in council and decide to welcome him into the order, proceeding immediately to the consecration ceremony (T 1.128–145). The spread of the news immediately triggers the wrath of Aquinas’s Neapolitan relatives, who are placated only by divine 39 40 41

It is not surprising that in the 1552 edition, prepared six years after the death of the Marquis of Vasto, this encomiastic insert is considerably reduced. On this, see Petrocchi’s remarks, “Intorno alle prose sacre,” 291. “Sito memorabile e grande” (T 1.2).

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intervention (T 1.146–158). It is a prelude to the heartrending family drama that will shortly set Thomas against his mother and his brothers, who are determined at all costs to bring him back to secular life. Even though the situation is attested to by sources, it is inflated disproportionately by Aretino who dedicates the last part of the first book and a good part of the second book to it (T 1.173–2.95). Meanwhile, the Dominicans secretly move their newly consecrated member to their Roman location of Santa Sabina (T 1.168), where Theodora nevertheless arrives without much trouble, sustained by the inexhaustible energy of her maternal instinct (T 1.182). Another ekphrastic parenthesis dedicated to a picture with scenes from the life of Saint Dominic (T 1.183– 187)42 precedes the encounter between the mater dolorosa moved by the “fire of carnality”43 and the friar who denies her the chance to see Thomas, unshakeable by then in his desire to free himself from every worldly tie. Aretino thus sets back in motion the dramatic engine that ignites the hagiographic prose in its hyper-pathetic characterization of the figure of Theodora. Her agitation, marked by lines in which the mimesis of speech increases the level of realism, is designed to attract readers’ human sympathy and predispose them to participatory contemplation of the sacred affair: But because the heart, which keeps the entire body alive, never resting in its uniform circular motion, was destroying the lady with throbbing emotion, she was forced to exclaim: “Where is my Thomas? My Thomas, where is he?” And the father to her: “Your son is leading a heavenly life on earth […]. We would have presented him to you if it were permissible to abandon contracts with God to satisfy the compassion of relatives. Certainly, whoever abandons Christ for man is unworthy of Him.”44 The beginning of the second book is marked by the harsh anti-monk invective of Lando, one of the saint’s brothers, which turns out to be, in the end, a diver-

42

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The insertion of hagiographic microsequences within the hagiography itself has already been seen in the Life of the Virgin, first with the development of events related to Anne and Joachim and then with the figure of the Magdalene. “Fuoco de la carnalitade” (T 1.192). “Ma perché il cuore, il quale tiene in vita tutto il corpo, né mai riposandosi nel suo moto uniforme e circolare, distruggeva la donna con palpitanti alterazioni, le fu forza di esclamare: ‘E dove è il mio Tomaso? Il mio Tomaso dov’è?’ E il padre a lei: ‘Il figliuolo vostro mena in terra vita celeste […]. E lo avremmo presentato a voi se fusse lecito di lasciare i negozii di Dio per compiacere a la pietà de i parenti. Certo che chi abandona Cristo per l’uomo è indegno di lui […]’ ” (T 1.193–194).

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sion to distract the friars so he can abduct Thomas (T 2.1–28).45 Deaf to the prayers of his mother who implores him to back down from a stubbornness “more suited to one born to a beast rather than a descendent of a prince,”46 the young man is locked up in the castle in Roccasecca. There he is tempted in vain by a prostitute that Aretino describes as an outlet for all his pictorially inspired erotic tendentiousness, such pictorial inspiration always ambiguously presented as a useful device for highlighting the extraordinariness of the figure of the saint (T 2.49–70). The family ultimately accepts Thomas’ vocation after his sister’s final attempt at convincing him otherwise (T 2.71–95). The narrative caesura marks the beginning of the account of the saint’s peregrinations about the continent on the path of theological teaching and preaching: from Naples to Rome, Cologne, and Paris (T 2.95–143). At the French court he instructs King Louis ix with a series of precepts on the Catholic prince that echo Erasmus’s Institutio principis Christiani more than Aquinas’s De regimine principum (T 2.150–171).47 Among the warnings the one that stands out is that regarding the relationship with the pontiff, the authority before which all rulers must humble themselves, and the only authority delegated by Christ for the remission of sins and the interpretation of Scripture (T 2.168–169). The theological lessons given in Paris include a long list of maxims pronounced by Aquinas on the model of Solomon’s proverbs (T 2.175–180)48 and the refutation of a heretic that touches on the most delicate theme of free will (T 2.182–193). At the end of the book the saint repels the double assault of the devil who first attempts to lead him to despair by telling him the news of Theodora’s death, and then flatters him with news of his appointment as a General of the Dominican order (T 2.194–198). 45

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The friar’s reply softens the polemical excesses of Lando’s speech, in which it is nevertheless impossible not to hear the echo of other polemical tirades Aretino assigns to the pages of his Sei giornate or Letters. They thus appear to be the usual prudent obedience with regard to institutions (T 2.7), but also contemptuous criticism of bad homiletics that are good only for confusing the simple minds of the faithful with theological doubt (T 2.12– 13). “Più conveniente a un nato di fera che disceso di prencipe” (T 2.36). Aretino could have read the Institutio in Francesco Coccio’s translation published by Marcolini in 1539 (see Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice, 153–156). The importance of the passage is duly underscored by Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino fra Rinascimento e Manierismo (Rome, 1980), 229–230. The passage is examined in Paolo Marini, “ ‘Più pro fa il pane asciuto in casa sua […]’. Formule proverbiali e sentenziose in Pietro Aretino,” in Giuseppe Crimi-Franco Pignatti (eds), Il proverbio nella letteratura italiana dal xv al xvii secolo, Atti delle giornate di studio, Università degli studi Roma Tre, Fondazione Marco Besso, Roma 5–6 dicembre 2012 (Manziana, 2014), 67–111: 95–99.

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The beginning of the third book is marked by Thomas’s return to Italy. Attention is centered on the catechism and homiletic activity that punctuates Thomas’s stays in various cities. These are remarkable rhetorical developments of themes that are not reflected in the sources and that are essentially Aretino’s inventio. Thus, in Bologna his Dominican brothers are instructed on the subject of contemptus mundi so that they embrace the choice of absolute asceticism inspired by the example of martyrs (T 3.34–56). The sermon held in Rome at the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva is preceded by a lively crowd scene where Aretino describes the throng of the faithful gathered to listen to the saint (T 3.71–74). In the indictment against the damage caused by bad homiletics—against which Aquinas implicitly sets his own and, therefore, indirectly, Aretino’s sacred rhetoric itself—it is striking to read a deprecation of theological disquisitions that drag simple people into sterile contests of doubt (T 3.75–92).49 After the miraculous episode of the dialogue with the crucifix (T 3.101–112), the meeting with his brothers introduces an encomiastic sequence that glorifies the Avalos-Aquinas genealogy contemplated by Thomas in his powerful prophetic vision of a tree made of human flesh (T 3.121–138). At the end, in agony on his deathbed, the saint still has the strength to address the friars of the abbey in Fossanova with a last profession of detachment from the world, convinced as he is of the fact that “the longer you live the more you sin,” to the paradoxical point that the tomb becomes “a castle in which we fortify ourselves against the discomforts of life.”50

2

The Texts: The “Style of True-to-Life Comparison” Compared with the Figurative Arts

Some thoughts should be given, finally, on the value of simile in the hagiographies, perhaps the most pervasive of the rhetorical devices employed by Aretino in the stylistic amalgam of his sacred prose.51 With a long tradition of being

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50 51

This is the perspective of a “natural” Christianity, originating in ancient Erasmus, with which various literary figures sensitive to the demands for renewal coming from within the Church would identify. See, for example, Vittoria Colonna’s sonnet Il Sol, che i raggi Suoi fra noi comparte in Rime, ed. Alan Bullock (Rome-Bari, 1982), 167. “Più si vive più si pecca”; “un castello nel quale ci fortifichiamo contra i disagi de la vita” (T 3.149–150). Larivaille has written about the “inextricable abundance of similes” (“inextricable foisonnement de similitudes”) in the Umanità di Cristo (Humanity of Christ) in L’Arétin entre Renaissance et Maniérisme (PhD diss., Université de Paris iii, 1972), 418. Boillet has also

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used to great advantage “to embellish or prove or clarify or vivify,”52 the figure of simile is perfectly suited to a rewriting of sacred history that aspires to bring a centuries-old subject before the more immediate sensibilities of a sixteenth-century reader.53 This is why the most effective images are drawn from a patrimony of experiences that belongs to the reality of everyday life. This, for example, is how the multitude leaving Mary’s house laden with the gifts of her grace is described: Whoever has seen in its season the innumerable hordes of ants hauling great seeds and great berries with the force of industry to support their natural hunger has seen the dense multitude laden with the weight of the profound favors obtained from the Virgin’s charity.54 The opening formula “Whoever has seen”—in Italian here as chi ha visto, like the analogous chi si ha mai visto, chi mai vidde, and chi l’avesse vista—is intended to involve the reader in the narrative fictio by stimulating the activation of shared visual memory. The figurative force of the simile is often entrusted with insight into the state of mind of the characters, whose vital depth Aretino attempts to restore throughout. The feelings of loss of Mary’s parents when they leave their daughter at the Temple are linked to the feelings of those who set one of their own blood relatives on the path of monastic life: Were there not indignity in the simile, I would say that Joachim and Anne returned to Nazareth like those fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, and relatives who, after having led them there with worldly splendor, return to

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dwelled on comparisons in the biblical paraphrases in L’Arétin et la Bible, 185–201, 334– 352. “Aut ornandi causa aut probandi aut apertius dicendi aut ante oculos ponendi,” Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.59. The English translation is from Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge MA, 1954). Furthermore, as Claudia Berra reminds us, unlike metaphor, simile is “a figure of thought of ornatus facilis used for the purpose of amplificatio” (La similitudine nei “Rerum vulgarium fragmenta” [Lucca, 1992], 15). The function of this figure is examined in specific reference to the Sei giornate by Enrico Testa, Simulazione di parlato. Fenomeni dell’oralità nelle novelle del Quattro-Cinquecento (Florence, 1991), 78. “Chi ha visto in sua stagione le innumerabili schiere de le formiche traendo con le forze de la industria gran semi e grandi acini per sostegno de la natural fame vede la folta moltitudine carica dal peso de le profonde grazie ottenute da la misericordia de la Vergine” (M 3.3).

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their homes after leaving their daughters, nieces, and cousins to a life of observance at a convent named after a virgin, or a martyr, or this or that saint.55 Then there is the powerful image of Lucifer’s fury upon hearing the news of the advent of the Savior, when he exclaims “with a thunderous tone like that which would shake a tomb if from inside its cavity there wailed someone in agony.”56 Just as effective is the image employed to depict the astonishment of the shepherds who witness the Nativity: Being certain, then, that the great Child was born, they turned the color that usually paints the faces of those lowly people drawn forcibly and by necessity before the king, their discretion naturally dictating some of those words that belong to the dignity of the great and the humility of the small.57 Simile is, then, a fundamental component of both the homiletic inserts—as in the passage in which Aquinas launches himself against the vice of fornication, “to be likened to a candle stuck in the wall that, though it does not burn the wall, it does not refrain from staining it”58—and the passages of the densest theological content, where the urgency to avoid the risk of abstraction is understandably more pressing. Thus, the Word becomes flesh “not differently than seeing the sun through a cloud and the candle in a lantern.”59 Aretino has such confidence with the rhetorical device that he does not hesitate, when necessary, to contend with complex structures. The solemn moment when, after having finally decided to act on Thomas’s vocation, the Dominican fathers, bent in prayer, prepare to welcome him is marked by an allusion to 55

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“Se non fosse indegnità ne la similitudine, direi che tali si ritornarono in Nazarette Giovacchino e Anna quali vediamo ridursi a le abitazioni loro quei padri, quelle madri, quei zii, quelle zie e quei parenti che, dopo l’avercele menate col fausto de la pompa mondana, lasciano le figliuole, le nipoti, le cugine e le consobrine ne l’osservanza del monisterio intitolato a quella vergine, a quel martire, a quella santa e a quel santo” (M 1.161). “Con un tuono di accenti simigliante quello che scuoterebbe una tomba, se dentro al suo concavo deplorasse alcuno commosso dai tormenti” (M 1.359). “Sendo poi certi che il gran Bambino era nato, ivi diventarono del colore che suol dipingere il volto de le persone basse tirate da la forza e da la necessità dinanzi a la faccia del re, la discrezion de le quali si fa dettar da la propria natura alcune di quelle parole che si appartengono a la degnità dei grandi e a l’umiltà dei piccoli” (M 2.124). “Da simigliarlo a la candela attaccata nel muro, che, se ben non l’arde, non si rimane di tignerlo” (T 3.45). “Non altrimenti che si vegga il sole ne la nube e la candela ne la lanterna” (M 2.30).

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Dante the pilgrim in the end of the second canto of the Inferno where he is encouraged by Virgil’s words.60 What follows is a series of concatenated similes, with affected praeteritio contortions grafted on, that develops over several paragraphs (T 1.138–141): That way, with their heads bent toward the ground in a sign of humility, they looked like flowers bent upon their stems. And they resembled them even more with Thomas’s arrival, since no differently did the aforementioned fathers raise their faces than the aforesaid flowers straighten upon their leaves as soon as the rising sun shakes from them the dew congealed by the chill that night begets. Were I able to show with truer comparisons the motions that the hearts of the righteous fathers made inside the caverns of their chests, would I not liken them to waves that, stirred by the sudden murmur of the wind, reverberate on the farthest banks in such a way that they seem to crash both running toward them and away from them […].61 When the “style of true-to-life comparison,” as it is called in a passage of the Life of the Virgin,62 involves the universe of the arts in a game of mirrors between the figurative and the figured, an emulative tension emerges, that is at the origin of the sacred prose experience where, perhaps more than anywhere else, Aretino’s word aspires to become an image capable of rivaling those produced by the greatest painters and sculptors of the time. This also explains the space and formal care reserved in the hagiographies for the ekphrastic sections.63 At the beginning of the third book of the Life of Catherine the scene of Porphyry 60

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“As little flowers, bent down and closed by chill of night, straighten and all unfold upon their stems when the sun brightens them” (“Quali fioretti dal notturno gelo / chinati e chiusi, poi che ’l sol li ’mbianca, / si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo,” Inferno 2.127–129). The English translation is from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, vol. 1, Inferno (Princeton, 1970). “Così facendo, col capo chinato in terra per segno di umiltade, parevono fiori ricaduti sopra i loro steli. E più simigliarono a loro ne lo arrivar di Tomaso, imperò che non altrimenti i predetti padri alzar suso il viso che i prefati fiori alzino su le foglie tosto che il sole nascente scuote da quegli la rugiada rappresa dal gielo che procrea la notte. Se io sapessi dimostrare con più conforme comparazione i moti che i cuori dei padri giusti gli fecero dentro a le spelonche del petto, non gli simigliarei a l’onde che agitate da l’improviso fiatare del vento, si ripercuotono in maniera ne le loro ripe estreme, che paiono rompersi e nel correre a quelle e nel fuggir da loro” (T 1.138–139). “Stile de la viva comparazione” (M 2.114). See Paolo Marini, “La ‘vaghezza del vedere’. Aretino ecfraste e il caso delle agiografie”, Atti e Memorie dell’Arcadia 8, (2019): 49–76.

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and the empress listening raptly to the saint is depicted with direct reference to the two artists closest to Aretino in the context of the Serenissima: The Empress and Porphyry, who listen attentively the true and useful discourse of humble and sincere Catherine, look like figures painted in the true-to-life style of the eminent Titian Vecellio or perfectly sculpted by the illustrious chisel of the excellent Jacopo Sansovino.64 Titian’s style of painting and Aretino’s rhetorical style are thus joined by the adjective vivo (true-to-life), a meaningful term that in Aretino’s poetics is associated with the cardinal categories of the vero (true) and the naturale (natural).65 It certainly is not the first time nor, much less, a hapax legomenon. The competition with the arts, and primarily with Titian’s painting, was already evoked in a prefatory space of utmost importance: the dedication to Valdaura in the Dialogues, where he declares, without mincing words, his desire to “describe other kinds of characters with the same vividness that the admirable Titian portrays this or that face.”66 Not to mention the real gauntlet Pietro throws down before his friend in the famous May 1544 letter dedicated to the description of the Grand Canal.67 There is, however, special care on the part 64

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“Due figure uniche dipinte da lo stil vivo de lo egregio Tizian Vecellio o vero iscolpite da lo scarpel chiaro del singulare Iacopo Sansovino, le quali con immobile attitudine tenghin tese le orecchie ai detti che sogliono uscir de la bocca altrui, parevano la Imperatrice e Porfirio attenti ai discorsi utili e veri di Caterina umile e sincera” (C 3.20, emphasis added). The connection between the three concepts in the poetics of Aretino scriba Naturae is made explicit in a crucial passage of his Letters where, not by chance, his reasoning develops in a parallel with the pictorial arts: “Learn a lesson from my story about that shrewd painter who when asked by someone what he was copying pointed to a crowd of men with his finger, meaning to suggest that he found his models in life and truth, just as I do when I speak and write. Nature herself (to whose simplicity I act but as secretary) tells me what to compose” (“Sì che imparate ciò ch’io favello da quel savio dipintore, il quale nel mostrare a colui che il dimandò che egli imitava, una brigata d’uomini col dito, volse inferire che dal vivo e dal vero toglieva gli essempi; come gli tolgo io parlando e scrivendo. La natura istessa, de la cui semplicità son secretario, mi detta ciò che io compongo,” Lettere i, 231, emphasis added). The English translation is Bull’s (Aretino, Selected Letters, 103, emphasis added). “Ritrarre le nature altrui con la vivacità che il mirabile Tiziano ritrae questo o quel volto” (Aretino, Sei giornate, 146, emphasis added). The English translation is Rosenthal’s (Aretino’s Dialogues, 154). Lettere iii, 78–80. For English translations of this letter, see Bull’s translation, Aretino, Selected Letters, 225–226; see also, Pietro Aretino, The Letters of Pietro Aretino, trans. Thomas Caldecot Chubb (Hamden, CT, 1967), 195–197. The importance of this letter has already been noted, in 1935, by Fritz Saxl, “Tiziano e Pietro Aretino,” in La storia delle immagini (Rome-Bari, 1982), 105–118.

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of Aretino in rendering the attitudes and gestures of the characters, the protagonists and first audience of the sacred event that should ideally inspire the contemplation of the readers of the Lives themselves. Care that, in the face of an iconographic theme with a long tradition like the Assumption of Mary, automatically triggers comparison with the great contemporary artists: The stupendous, marvelous, and ineffable vision had so engulfed the brows, eyes, sight, mouths, arms, and minds of Peter, Matthew, John, and the other brothers in Jesus Christ that, abstracted by the miracle, the apostles appeared to be moved by those admiring gestures that, after the very great Michelangelo Buonarroti and the singular Titian Vecellio, the illustrious style of the renowned young man the eminent Giorgio Vasari would be capable of creating.68 The consistent references to Titian, which similarly occur in the hagiography of Aquinas with the descriptions of the painting with scenes from the life of Saint Dominic (T 1.187) and of the talking crucifix (T 3.101), leaves no doubt that they shared the same poetics of the sacred, as evident in the directorial role assumed by the figure of Aretino/Pilate in Titian’s Ecce Homo in Vienna.69

3

The Genesis of the Hagiographies: Commissions and Political Balance between Venice, Milan, and Rome

Having considered the substance of the texts it is now possible to examine the web of political relations that animate the context from which such texts originate, and their editorial development influenced by the cumbersome presence of the dedicatees.

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“La stupenda, la maravigliosa e la ineffabile visione aveva rapiti in modo le fronti, le ciglia, le luci, le bocche, le braccia e le menti di Pietro, di Mattia, di Giovanni e degli altri fratelli in Cristo Giesù, che, astratti nel miracolo, parevano gli apostoli commossi da quei gesti ammirativi che dopo il grandissimo Michelangelo Buonaroti e il singular Tiziano Vecellio sapria fare lo illustre stile del chiaro Giorgio Vasari [‘Francesco Salviati’ in the first edition], giovane celeberrimo” (M 3.269). See Flavia Polignano, “I ritratti dei volti e i registri dei fatti. L’Ecce Homo di Tiziano per Giovanni d’Anna,” Venezia Cinquecento 2 (1992): 7–54. The terms of the fellowship between Titian and Aretino are explored in depth by Augusto Gentili, “Tiziano e Aretino tra politica e religione,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 275–296. See also Cottrell’s and Gentili’s essays in this volume.

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3.1 The Life of Mary The commission for the Life of Mary probably dates back to the end of 1538. This was, therefore, a few months after the double denunciation for blasphemy and sodomy that in the spring of that year had threatened to indelibly undermine Aretino’s public profile as a literary figure central to the Serenissima’s system that he had worked on tirelessly since his arrival in Venice.70 The commission is mentioned in a note dated January 8, 1539, in which the Marquis of Vasto thanks Aretino for sending a volume and states that his wife, Maria d’Aragona, “awaits the other book with incredible desire.”71 Some time later, in a letter from March 1, 1539, the Marchioness herself, the designated dedicatee of the Life of Mary, says that she is waiting: “The work on the Virgin, when it comes to me, cannot but be very dear to me and greatly satisfying, as the others that come from you are wont to be.”72 It is immediately clear that the composition of the hagiographies is perversely intertwined with Aretino’s collection of the installments from his imperial pension: Maria d’Aragona’s brief missive is thus aimed at apologizing to Aretino for the “tardiness” of a payment.73 The completion of the text was accomplished between the spring and the summer: this is clear from the letters to Ugolino Martelli and to Bernardo Cles, the cardinal of Trent, on May 5, 1539, and May 29, 1539, respectively, in which the author describes himself as being engaged in writing;74 and from the request for a ten-year printing privilege dated on July 9. The work was undoubtedly already completed by September 21, when Aretino addressed the Marquis with these words: It is a great thing, Sir, that I, between two terrors, have safely composed the work that I send to you and to your wife. Who would not be daunted in writing the history of the mother of Christ, and in dedicating it to the Marchioness of Vasto?75

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See Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1997), 315. “Aspetta l’altro libro con desiderio incredibile” (lsa i, 127). “L’opra de la Vergine, quando mi verrà, non potrà essermi se non carissima e di molta soddisfazzione, come sogliono le altre ch’escono da voi” (lsa i, 126). “Tardanza” (lsa i, 126). Lettere ii, 108. “Gran cosa, Signore, che io tra due spaventi abbi sicuramente composto l’opera che a voi e a la moglie vostra mando. Chi non sarebbe sgomentato nel far l’istoria de la madre di Cristo, e ne lo intitolarla a la Marchesa del Vasto?” (Lettere ii, 138).

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On the surface these seem to be statements of deference to one of the most munificent couples in the panorama of Italian patronage of the time,76 mixed with examples of the topos of humility by a literary figure who is measuring himself against a lofty sacred subject. However, within a more public context these statements take on meaning that is different from that of the Lettere. By paying homage to the Avalos, Aretino obliges them coram populo to respect the contract of the commission now that the hagiography has been completed; furthermore, responsibility for the choice of subject is implicitly placed on them. The Life of Mary was published with a colophon dated October 1539, in a very refined octavo edition printed in italics by Francesco Marcolini. The typographical format of the volume, embellished with woodcuts attributed to Francesco Salviati, attests once again to the mastery of the Aretino-Marcolini partnership in creating targeted dedicatory products. There have even been lists made of specific copies where variations were introduced into the paratextual areas to revise the dedications of the entire work and of the individual books. It was thus no longer dedicated only to Maria d’Aragona, but also to the king of Hungary, John Zápolya, and to Marguerite de Navarre, Francis i’s sister.77 In the original version, the text is accompanied by a dedication that celebrates the generosity of the Marchioness who was always ready to help others. The comparison between Maria d’Aragona and the Virgin Mary is striking: they are similar in their ability to intercede with Alfonso d’Avalos and with God, respectively, on behalf of the needy. At the beginning of the letter, delivery of the Life of Mary is presented, without minced words, as the fulfillment of a task and a promise made by the author to his high-ranking patron: A circumspect soul must give special consideration to the promises made to princes, since they have the quality of vows made to God. And just as failing the saints does injury to the souls of those who nevertheless fail them, so lying to princes does harm to the bodies of those who nevertheless lie to them. I speak of this in relation to having dedicated to you the Life of the Virgin, which I now, in order to avoid your disfavor and in support of my word, present to you with great reverence.78

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It suffices to remember that the patronage of these spouses who governed Milan from 1538 to 1546 was called upon by two greats like Titian and Ariosto. For more details, see Opere religiose ii, 21–24, 618–621. “Un animo circunspetto […] dee riguardare sopra tutto a le promesse fatte ai prìncipi, percioché tengano de le qualità dei voti che si fanno ai dei. E sì come il mancare ai santi è pregiudizio de l’anime di coloro che pur gli mancano, così il mentire ai signori è danno dei corpi di quegli che pur gli mentano. Io favello ciò in proposito de l’aver detto d’intitolarvi

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In light of such an incipit we see how, completely unlike the biblical paraphrases, the hagiographic triptych is marked ab origine as an obligation. This does not mean that Aretino does not know how to make a virtue out of necessity; indeed, this first Vita was well-received by exceptional readers. For example, in a letter from September 25, 1539, Vittoria Colonna thanks Aretino for having sent her the gift of “such a beautiful and dear work.”79 This is an important gesture of appreciation from an authoritative figure within the Avalos clan who may have even played a role in facilitating the commission of the other two hagiographies.80 Niccolò Martelli also wrote to Aretino on Ascension Day (May 6) in 1540: That Bible that went on at length and beat about the bush before getting to the point, and then made it in such a way that others would mock it, you (thank God), have reduced to brief and true maxims with such a way of presenting them and driving them into the souls of others that not only do your words seem to have living voices, and the spirit of truth, but it seems that you are still in that time. And as long and odious as that other is, your Genesis delights and is beautiful and praiseworthy. […] the Life of the Virgin Mary, which by the gracious gift of her piety you have been writing, I will hold dear when I see it, whenever that may be good for you, and were you to send it first to he who desires it most, I would undoubtedly be the first to see it.81 For those, like Martelli, who recognize the value and novelty of Aretino’s venture into sacred works within his unique style, the expectations raised by the publication of the first hagiographic composition were high. The skill demon-

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la Vita de la Vergine, che ora, per fuggire la disgrazia vostra e per sostener la parola mia, vi porgo con molta riverenzia” (Opere religiose ii, 603). “Sì bella e cara opera” (lsa ii, 24). The missive could be read as early as 1542 in the addition introduced into the Marcolini edition of the first book of Letters (Lettere i, 473–474). This hypothesis is proposed by Alessandro Luzio, “Vittoria Colonna,” Rivista storica mantovana 1 (1885): 1–52: 36. “Quella Bibbia ch’era una istoriata lunga e menava il can per l’aia un pezzo innanti che proferisse il senso, dipoi lo proferiva in un certo modo che altrui se ne faceva beffe, voi (la Dio mercé) l’aveti ridotta in breve e vere sentenzie con un modo di porgerle e di conficarle ne l’Anima altrui che non solamente par che le vostre parole abbino voci vive, e spirito di verità, ma par che ancora voi fussi in quel tempo, e quanto è lungo e odiosa quella, tanto il vostro Genesi diletta et è lodato e bello. […] la Vita di Maria Vergine, che per grazioso dono della pietà di lei andavi scrivendo, quella arò caro di vedere io, quando vi verrà bene a voi, e se voi l’avessi a mandare prima a colui che più la desidera senza alcun dubbio saria il primo a vederla io” (lsa ii, 72–73).

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strated by Aretino in implementing the principles of brevitas and utilitas, which make his Genesis a well-made abridged version of the immense biblical source, was then expected from the Life of the Virgin when confronting a mass of heterogeneous material that ranged from pages of the canonical and apocryphal Gospels, and the mare magnum of literature on miracles, to the most successful recent adaptations like Antonio Cornazzano’s tercets in the vernacular (Vita della Vergine Maria [Life of the Virgin Mary], 1471) and Jacopo Sannazaro’s hexameters in Latin (De partu Virginis [On the Virgin’s Childbearing], 1526).82 The Marcolini first edition closes with the letter to Verallo and presents a declaration of Aretino’s poetics, which I examined above. But the text also contains a calculated resumption of the encomium of the Marquis of Vasto that attempts to involve Charles v himself in settling the account for the commission (“Truly the high regard in which he is held by the fortunate Emperor is only his due, since he above all has a spirit worthy of praise”83). In addition, there is a particularly polemical explicit that builds upon three questions in order to shift the target of the speech from Milan to Rome. Given its placement at the end of the volume, its message is strongly emphasized: Now, most reverend Monsignore, […], how long must I wait for Rome to take notice, not of all the years of servitude she has stolen from me, but of the many books I have composed in honor of God? Look at the Psalms of David, look at the Genesis of Moses, look at the Humanity of Jesus, look at the Life of Our Lady, all ignored by Rome, since I am not approved in the catalogue of hypocrisy. But where are the writings composed about Christ by those who draw so many honors, benefits and revenues from His Church? Knowledge and speech did not satisfy Paul, Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Bernard, Gregory and Ambrose; for they wanted what they had written in their theology to be read. But if I, though made desperate by the cruelties of the court, do not fail to show that I am a Christian, what should I not do were Rome to show some gratitude?84 82

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Adapting them to the case of Aretino’s sacred writings, I refer here to the thoughts on time in relation to writing and completing a text in the 1500s proposed by Maria Cristina Figorilli in her essay, “Machiavelli. I ritmi del segretario e i tempi dello scrittore,” in Chiara Cassiani-Maria Cristina Figorilli (eds.), Festina lente. Il tempo della scrittura nella letteratura del Cinquecento (Rome, 2014), 135–163: 159. “Veramente il pregio nel quale lo tiene il fortunato Imperadore se gli conviene, percioché egli solo ha l’animo degno di laude” (Opere religiose ii, 605). The English translation is Bull’s (Aretino, Selected Letters, 186). “Ora, Monsignor Reverendissimo, […] fino a quanto debbo io aspettar che Roma guardi non ai molti anni che ella ruba a la mia servitù, ma molti libri da me composti in onore di

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Aretino’s bitterness is provoked by the ingratitude of a papal court that persisted in not taking seriously the “conversion” that he published in his letter to pope Paul iii on April 21, 1539.85 It is the court from which he had to flee after the attempt on his life in 1525, at the time of Clement vii, and to which he would nevertheless forever look to with deep nostalgia even once he had arrived in the safe refuge of the Serenissima. This is a very familiar theme within Aretino’s vis polemica that runs throughout the entire corpus of the letters: the hypocrisy of religious men who are incapable of translating into text their expertise in matters of faith.86 Aware that they do not have the skills to follow the example of the Church Fathers, they convert their own frustrations into envy of those who, like Aretino, even in this later period, could produce a remarkable number of devout writings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no addressee is attached to this letter, but it is likely that the intended recipient is the “chietino” (Theatine) Gian Pietro Carafa, a cardinal since 1536, future leader of the Holy Office, and eventually pope Paul iv during the time when the Index condemning the entirety of Aretino’s work was drawn up.87 Incidentally, the display of gratitude Aretino expected from the Holy See was nothing less than a cardinalate, as had been granted to Pietro Bembo on November 10, 1539.88

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Dio? Ecco i Salmi di David, ecco il Genesi di Moisè, ecco l’Umanità di Giesù, ecco la Vita di Nostra Donna non è vista da lei, perché io non sono approvato nel catalogo de l’ipocrisia. Ma dove sono le scritture che han fatto di Cristo quegli che ritranno cotanti gradi, cotanti fausti e cotante rendite de la Chiesa sua? Non bastò il sapere né il dire a Paolo, a Origene, a Crisostimo, a Girolamo, ad Agostino, a Bernardo, a Gregorio e ad Ambrosio, ma volsero che si leggesse ciò che ne la teologia hanno saputo scrivere. Ma se io disperato da le crudeltà de la Corte, non manco di mostrar di esser cristiano, che farei io tuttavia che ella me si mostrasse grata?” (Opere religiose ii, 606). The English translation is Bull’s (Aretino, Selected Letters, 187–188). Lettere ii, 106. Also worth noting on this topic is the invective against Gian Matteo Giberti that we read in Paolo Procaccioli, “Il fiele dopo il miele (e il pugnale). Aretino contra Giberti,” in Giuseppe Crimi-Cristiano Spila (eds.), Le scritture dell’ira. Voci e modi dell’invettiva nella letteratura italiana, Atti del convegno, Roma, Fondazione Marco Besso, 16 aprile 2016 (Rome, 2016), 51–66: 62–66. On this, see Opere religiose ii, 20. Pietro Aretino’s vain pursuit of a cardinalate is reconstructed in Paolo Procaccioli, “Un cappello per il divino. Note sul miraggio cardinalesco di Pietro Aretino,” in Angelo RomanoPaolo Procaccioli (eds.), Studi sul Rinascimento italiano. In memoria di Giovanni Aquilecchia, (Manziana, 2005), 189–226.

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3.2 The Life of Catherine The success of the first hagiography is seemingly confirmed by the client’s request for the Life of Catherine, likely in the fall of 1539. Although Aretino could hardly refuse the request, he describes the commission as an obligation and an “imposition” in his letter to Paolo Giovio on February 1, 1540. There, he recounts the moment when the Marquis of Vasto “imposed [on him] the writing of the holy virgin Catherine’s story.”89 It is, significantly, the same verb (imporre) that recurs in two other missives from February addressed to Francesco Gritti (February 11) and the Duke of Mantua (February 16), in which Aretino describes himself immersed in writing the new Vita.90 According to what he stated in the letter to Federico Gonzaga, the text would have been completed and even printed “before Easter.”91 The immediate completion of the composition is impeded, however, by unspecified obstacles, though we can deduce that delays in payments from Milan were involved, given the complaints included in his letter to the Marquis on October 25, 1540. In that letter, it is Aretino the free man liberated from courtly logic, who claims his rights with a certain harshness: Surely it has pleased God that through me the story you imposed on me was completed; but it has not already appeared to men that I have, I do not say the two hundred scudi awarded to me by imperial compassion […], but the meagerness of my usual pension.92 Aretino goes so far as to accuse Alfonso d’Avalos of being guilty of delaying the payment of “things that do not belong to him.”93 Having reached the breaking point in their relationship, however, Aretino stops himself and changes his tone, without losing sight of the real objective of his outburst: he does not want the Life of Catherine to create problems with the imperial party; on the contrary, 89 90

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“Impose il fare l’istoria di Caterina vergine santa” (Lettere ii, 171). “The credit, my fellow, that the Marquis del Vasto’s high merits have with my lowly virtue […] keeps me so occupied with the composition of a work imposed on me by his excellency” (“I crediti, o figliuolo, c’hanno gli alti meriti del Marchese del Vasto con la bassa virtù mia […] mi occupano talmente d’intorno a la composizione d’una opra impostami da sua eccellenza […],”Lettere ii, 175, emphasis added); “the religious Alfonso d’Avalos gave me a reason for by imposing on me the life of Saint Catherine” (“[…] per avermene dato cagione il religioso Alfonso d’Avalos, con lo impormi la vita di santa Caterina,” Lettere ii, 178, emphasis added). “Inanzi pasqua” (Lettere ii, 178). “Certo egli è piaciuto a Dio che per me si compisca l’istoria che mi imponeste; ma non è già paruto a gli uomini che io abbi, non dico i ducento scudi donatimi da la pietà Cesarea […], ma la pidocchiaria de la solita pensione” (Lettere ii, 226). “Cose che non vi appartengono” (Lettere ii, 226).

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he wants it to serve as a catalyst for payment of what he is due. We therefore see a more playful, rather than mocking, smile behind the threat to vindicate himself with the Vita which he would present to the Marquis along with the small statue of the martyr cast especially for the occasion by Jacopo Sansovino: But I am happy, nevertheless, for as soon as you see the figure, and immediately once you read the life of your protectress, I am vindicated. Aware that seeing it and reading it, moved by the artistry of the statue and by the sweat of my labors, you will feel as much compassion for having endured making me suffer, as the discomfort I had in suffering. Now if you are the friend to good deeds that the world considers you to be, command that I be sent both my pension and the two hundred scudi, for I ask no other previous courtesy. And as for the book composed for you, I want no other new payment.94 Aretino concludes with the promise that “the volume will be released in print soon,” to show “with what true praise he was able to discuss Alfonso d’Avalos, Maria d’Aragona, and the children bestowed on their worthiness by the grace of Christ.”95 According to the colophon, the Marcolini first edition was published in December 1540: the typographical format in octavos with woodcuts attributed to Giorgio Vasari follows that of the Life of Mary almost identically. All things considered, it is impossible not to recognize the exceptionality of a dedicatory product in whose completion Aretino manages to involve two firstclass artists like Sansovino and Vasari, along with the famous literary figures Daniele Barbaro and Lodovico Dolce who prepared two sonnets in praise of

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“Ma io sto allegro peroché tosto che vediate la figura, e subito che leggiate la vita de la avvocata vostra, son vendicato. Conciosia che nel vederla e nel leggerla, commosso da lo artificio di cotale statua, e dal sudor de le mie fatiche, sentirete tanta compassione per aver sofferto che io patisca, quanto io ho avuto disagio patendo. Or se voi sete quello amico del ben fare che vi tiene il mondo, comandate che mi si mandi e la pensione e i ducento scudi, che altra vecchia cortesia non chieggio. E circa il libro compostovi, altro nuovo pagamento non voglio” (Lettere ii, 226–227). “Il volume uscirà presto de le stampe”; “con quante vere laudi ho saputo ragionare di Alfonso d’Avalos, di Maria d’Aragona, e de i figliuoli concessi da la grazia di Cristo a i meriti loro” (Lettere ii, 227). Actually, beyond the dedication to the Marquis, the hagiography includes an encomiastic digression delivered from the mouth of the saint in the ultimate moment of her martyrdom. The celebration of the Marquis and his family, which in the first edition is placed in a position of maximum emphasis among the last pages of the volume, is later partially expunged from the Aldine collection published in 1552, when Alfonso had been dead by then for six years (see the relevant apparatus criticus in C 3.198).

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Catherine for the occasion, printed at the end of the volume.96 It was a collaborative effort without precedent that does justice a posteriori to the boldness with which Pietro said he was certain he would affect the Marquis’s sensibilities, thus punishing his carelessness in fulfilling his role as client. The conflict with Alfonso d’Avalos seems to reemerge in the dedication to the Life of Catherine, where Aretino lays on him the responsibility for the choice of a subject so lofty and, conversely, so poor in themes to develop, starting with the short text of the Legenda aurea: […] blame Alfonso d’Avalos, who wanted me to shape an entire book from a legend that does not fill half a page, so that I wish the sterility of that story had been assigned to the attention of anyone else. What could the stupendous artistry of the divine Buonarroti ever do painting an apostolic consistory in a short space of time were he not permitted to dress the seated pope nor the sitting cardinals in anything but red and purple?97 These parallels with the universe of the visual arts are characteristic of the style of the hagiographies. It is not surprising to come across such a sentence in the midst of a dedication which reaffirms a sacred poetics based on amplificatio. Modelled on the letter to Verallo at the end of the Life of Mary, the letter to the humanist Francesco Priscianese included as an afterword resumes the polemic against members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy that, far from celebrating Aretino’s merits, oppose him—a successful literary figure—precisely for being the author of religious writings. In their upside-down world dominated by hypocrisy and envy, we thus reach a paradox in which writing hagiographies becomes a more dangerous practice than writing pasquinades: […] they abhor me not for the embellishments that the justness of my pen has made on the surface of their names, because they, who have never held a title of praise, know well that I have duly disgraced them, but for having introduced reading Christ’s works there where the temerity of the hypocrisy that exalts them is not suited to introducing them. It is clear

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See Opere religiose ii, 611. “[…] Datene la colpa ad Alfonso Davalo, il quale ha voluto che io formi un libro intero d’una leggenda che non empie un foglio mezzo, talché io vorrei che la sterilità di cotale istoria fusse stata imposta a lo studio di qualunche si voglia […]. Che potria mai fare lo stupendo arteficio del divin Buonaruoti nel dipignere in poco spazio un concistoro apostolico, non gli essendo lecito di vestire lo assiso pontefice ne i sedenti cardinali d’altro che di rosso e di pavonazzo?” (Opere religiose ii, 607).

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that it would be a small thing to kneel at the feet of those chosen instruments who have achieved their position for having pretense on their faces, mendacity on their tongues, and fraud in their hearts even if one page of the volumes that God inspires me to compose were to slip out marked with the dignity of those arrogant men who, rather than love those who are good, persecute those who do not hate the good. Thus, I feel more fear in writing sacred stories than I felt pleasure in singing the faults of those men, aware that with one style I made them known, and with the other I make them infamous.98 We have, thus, confirmation of what was already evident in the well-calibrated outburst in the letter to Verallo: in the politics of balance that Aretino was pursuing in this phase of his career, the new experience of composing the hagiographies was instrumentally conceived with one eye on Milan—which meant Alfonso d’Avalos, but also Charles v—and the other fixed on Rome in the hope that a change in the Holy See’s internal dynamics would allow the prolific author of sacred works to enter into the pope’s good graces. This explains his request that Priscianese show the letter to two high-placed prelates, “Ravenna and Ridolfi, cardinals without defects and gentlemen without avarice.”99 Benedetto Accolti, the cardinal of Ravenna, and Niccolò Ridolfi were both figures whose good fortune dated back to the reign of the Medici popes, since the time of Leo x and Agostino Chigi, that aetas aurea of papal patronage longed for in the nostalgia-laden conclusion where the theme of the fall of Rome, first caput and now coda mundi as well known to the readers of the Cortigiana from 1534,100 is recovered and transformed into the wish for a renovatio of the magnificence of the recent past: 98

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“[…] Mi aboriscono non per i fregi che il giusto de la mia penna gli ha fatto in su la faccia del nome, perché eglino, che non ebber mai titolo di lode, sanno bene ch’io gli ho debitamente vituperati, ma per avere introdotto il leggere le cose di Cristo là dove il temerario de la ipocrisia che gli essalta non è atto a introdurle. Egli è chiaro che saria poco lo inginocchiarsi ai piè di quei vasi di elezione assunti in grado per avere la simulazione nel volto, la menzogna ne la lingua e la fraude nel core, se pur una carta dei volumi che Iddio mi spira a comporre uscisse fuora segnata con la degnità di quegli arroganti che, in vece di amare i buoni, perseguitano chi non gli odia; onde ho più paura ne lo scrivere le istorie sacre che non ho avuto piacere nel cantare i lor vizii, conciosia che con l’uno stile gli feci noti e con l’altro gli faccio infami” (Opere religiose ii, 609). “Ravenna e […] Ridolfi, cardinali senza menda e signori senza avarizia” (Opere religiose ii, 609). It is a pairing chosen with great strategic wisdom, as shown by the profile of the two figures outlined by Elena Bonora, Aspettando l’imperatore. Principi italiani tra il papa e Carlo v (Turin, 2014). This is the formula found in the incipit of the first act (see the notes to this passage in Pietro

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But I hope […] that Rome, no longer the refuge of the people, no longer the mother of virtue, no longer the patria of generosity, no longer head of the world, no longer the abode of the saints, and no longer the seat of Christ, will become again, while we are alive, the seat of Christ, and the abode of the saints, and the head of the world, and the patria of generosity, and the mother of virtue, and the refuge of the people. For which reason the righteous shall rejoice in the happiness of that day.101 Only then will the “righteous” Aretino have the chance to rush back to the site of his first success—“running to the court that I now flee from” are his words— 102 strengthened, however, by his new public profile as a literary figure that the biblical paraphrases and, most recently, the Life of Mary and the Life of Catherine also contributed to consolidating. 3.3 The Life of Thomas The reaction of the couple ruling the Milanese court to the publication of the second hagiography is established in two letters from January 5, 1541, printed sequentially in the first book of Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino (Letters Written to Pietro Aretino). The homage paid to him by great rulers, especially when accompanied by a tribute, remains among the letters that Aretino most willingly exhibits in his collection. Not by chance, the expressions of gratitude in these two letters coincide with detailed promises of compensation and payment of the installments of his imperial pension. First from the Marquis: Magnificent Sir, your erudite and most devout composition on Saint Catherine is so dear to me that, not yet as a premium but as a sign of my will to compensate you for such beautiful and noble efforts, I have commissioned Messer Gioan Francesco del Sarracino, with the attached, to pay you in my name one hundred scudi; I want that these funds be an assured beginning and a pledge of the comfort of as much more, aside

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Aretino, Teatro comico. Cortigiana (1525, 1534). Il Marescalco, ed. Luca D’Onghia, intr. Maria Cristina Cabani [Milano-Parma, 2014], 502). “Ma spero […] che Roma, non più rifugio de le genti, non più madre de le virtuti, non più patria de le generosità, non più capo del mondo, non più albergo dei santi e non più seggio di Cristo, ritornarà, noi vivendo, e seggio di Cristo, e albergo dei santi, e capo del mondo, e patria de le generosità, e madre de le virtù, e rifugio de le genti. Per la qual cosa i giusti essulteranno ne la felicità di cotal giorno” (Opere religiose ii, 609). “Correndo a la corte che or fuggo” (Opere religiose ii, 609).

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from the other matters that must be done for you, that I promise, for your merits, will be regularly paid to you each year from this moment forward.103 Then from the Marchioness: Magnificent Sir, the composition on Saint Catherine that you sent to the Marquis was so dear to us all, as it should have been given the subject of the work and the Author. I attest that he remains greatly obliged to you, as you will also see from what my aforementioned Lord writes to you, and your pension, which his Majesty commands be paid to you in this state, has already been assessed in such a way that I persuade myself that you will find it a good expedient.104 That was Maria d’Aragona, always ready to guarantee her own intercession with her husband. But Alfonso d’Avalos’s letter goes much further. It includes not just displays of gratitude and confirmation of the release of payment, but, in a sort of perpetual cycle of commissions, the immediate introduction of the commission for a third hagiography and new promises of future compensation. The Marquis’s words recall, perhaps not coincidentally, an argument already used by his illustrious relative Vittoria Colonna in a letter from November 6, 1537, in which she reproaches Aretino for employing his “great genius […] in things other than Christ’s works,” showing himself to be “less grateful to God and less useful to the world”:105 And so that your rare genius, in devoting itself to similar works, may become very accustomed to speaking about God’s works, and so that 103

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“Magnifico Signor, m’è stato tanto cara la sua dotta e devotissima composizione di Santa Caterina, ch’in segno non già di premio, ma de la volontà ch’io tengo di ricompensargli sì belle e alte fatighe, ho commesso a Messer Gioan Francesco del Sarracino, con l’alligata, che gli paghi in mio nome cento scudi; e questi vo’ che sieno per un certo principio e pegno de la commodità d’altrettanti, che senza le altre cose dee farsi per voi, prometto ogn’anno, da questo vanti, fargli pagare ordinariamente” (lsa i, 128). “Magnifico Signor, la composizione di Santa Caterina c’ha mandato al Signor Marchese è stata a tutti noi tanto cara, come doveva essere, riguardandosi al suggetto de l’opera e a l’Autore. Lo certifico che gliene resta in grande obligo, sì come vedrà ancora per quello che il detto Signor mio gli scrive, e de la sua pensione, che sua Maestà comanda che se gli paghi in questo stato, è già stato ragionato di sorte, ch’io mi persuado che se ci torrà buon ispediente” (lsa i, 129). “Buono ingegno […] in altre cose che in quelle di Cristo, mostrandovi men grato a Dio e meno utile al mondo” (lsa ii, 24).

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worldly things are forgotten as much as possible, with the surety with which I commissioned from you the aforementioned composition [i.e., the Life of Catherine], I pray you now want to toil in describing likewise the life of Saint Thomas Aquinas, in which, as you may consider it a wider subject, I persuade myself you will have a field on which to display, with even more fervor, were it possible to have more, the abundance of your own words, with which Nature has miraculously endowed you.106 This is almost a response to the complaints that Aretino had the audacity to set out in the dedication to the Life of Catherine when he insisted on the arduous effort faced in assembling “an entire book from a legend that does not fill half a page.”107 The Avalos family boasted of their family ties to Thomas Aquinas. With the Life of Thomas, Alfonso imposes a richer subject for which Aretino can make use of much more substantial sources, beginning with the fourteenth-century biography prepared by the Dominican Guglielmo da Tocco in view of the saint’s canonization.108 Also available to the author were materials from Naples with information about the saint’s genealogy that the Marquis passed on to Aretino without missing the opportunity to press him from the first months of 1541. From the letters on February 10 and March 21, it appears that any further payment was conditional on the completion of the recentlycommissioned Vita.109 The circumstances are confirmed on May 10, when the 106

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“E acciò ch’il suo peregrino ingegno con il destinarsi a simili opere si assuefacci tanto al parlar de le cose de Iddio, che de le mondane si dismentichi il più che si pò, con la sicurtà che l’astrinsi de la detta composizione, lo priego ora voglia affatigarsi nel descriver parimente la vita di San Tomaso d’Aquino, nella quale, come che si tenghi forse più largo soggetto, mi persuado che con più fervore, se con più si potessi, arà campo di mostrare quella abondanzia del proprio dire, di che miracolosamente volse dottarlo Natura” (lsa i, 128). “Un libro intero d’una leggenda che non empie un foglio mezzo” (lsa ii, 607). Guillaume de Tocco, Ystoria sancti Thome de Aquino (1323), édition critique, introduction et notes par Claire Le Brun-Gouanvic (Toronto, 1996). “Hasten yourself, Sir, with the work on that Holy Doctor, while the information you want about those who share his blood comes to me from Naples; I hope you will do something that will be welcome to the universe of people who adore Christ, and I will remain obliged as one should for such praiseworthy efforts” (“Sollicitatevi, Signor, alla opera di quel Dottor Santo, mentre di Napoli mi venghi la notizia che desiderate di coloro che parteciparono del sangue suo; che spero farete cosa grata a l’universo del populo ch’adora Cristo, e io vi restarò in quello obligo che si doverà a sì lodate fatighe,” lsa i, 129–130); “Magnificent Sir, I did not receive the enclosed writings from Naples until today, which I thought to send to you immediately in order to not lose any more time than what has already been lost. I persuade myself that they will help in some way as to the context of the work. I pray you will put upon yourself the haste that the subject, your satisfaction, and the satisfaction of

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Marquis apologizes for a delay in payment, likely the regular installments of Aretino’s pension. The subsequent request for patience while waiting for new liquidity in Milan’s coffers is accompanied by a virulent remark, bordering on blasphemous, with which he makes it understood that delivery of the hagiography would facilitate the procedure that had come to a halt: Let you be content and resolve yourself to be patient, and persuade yourself that yours and mine will not be lacking; and meanwhile do not forget the work on Saint Thomas, for Saints work miracles, as perhaps he would have if you had made greater haste in writing.110 Alfonso d’Avalos’s insistence on moving forward are, actually, the first symptoms of the troubled progress of the third Vita if compared to the previous ones. It is impossible on the basis of surviving documentation to reconstruct the development of the situation in detail, but it is clear that at a certain point Aretino’s relationship with Milan degenerates to such a point that he decides to insert into the second book of letters (published by Marcolini in August 1542) the extremely harsh letter to the Marquis dated March 15, 1542. The crux of the conflict is financial once again, but the direct connection between collection of the installments of his imperial pension and the writing of the hagiographies, which has also not been paid according to their contract, has perhaps never been made as clear as it is here: Here is why I have not provided you with the Saint Thomas in two days’ time, not only is there being withheld from me that which with the evidence of a public contract you owe me for the Saint Catherine, but my imperial pay as well. […] Let you change your ways and let it be by your discretion and by your conscientiousness that I am given what Caesar gave me, and I am paid for the hardships imposed on me.111

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others must put upon you” (“Magnifico Signor, non prima ch’oggi ho avuto le alligate scritture di Napoli, le quali mi ha parso di mandar subito, per non perdere più tempo di quel che s’è perso. Mi persuado che aiutaranno in qualche cosa, quanto al contesto de l’opera. Priegovi a darvici da voi stesso quella prescia che vi dee dare la materia e la satisfazzion vostra e de gli altri,” lsa i, 130). “Sì che sarete contento ne l’accomodarvi ad aver pazienzia, e persuadetevi che ’l vostro e il mio non ha di mancarvi; e tra tanto non ve dismenticate de l’opera di San Tomaso, che da gli Santi si fanno de gli miracoli, come avria forse fatto se avesti dato maggior prescia al comporre” (lsa i, 131). “Ecco perché io non vi ho fornito il San Tomaso in due dì, non pur mi si ritiene ciò che col testimonio d’un contratto publico mi devete per la santa Caterina, ma le mercedi Cesaree

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Back in play again is the issue of the short amount of time for writing that, with the pace imposed by the printing industry and from the point of view of an author who built his own literary myth on his prodigious speed of execution, represents a matter to take into the utmost consideration. With good reason the proverbial “two days” were not sufficient for Aretino to complete the Life of Thomas: the extension of the time for delivery was certainly not connected to his inability or laziness, but to a precise calculation of do ut des on which a relationship of patronage by then in crisis was held in precarious balance. “The vengeance of ink”112 threatened at the end of the letter and, in fact, already implemented in the epistolary composition itself foreshadows the entrance on the scene of Bernardino Ochino who, in September 1542, would escape to Switzerland in the midst of general dismay. From the point of view of Aretino as a writer of the sacred, it is an implicit recognition that the hagiographies receive from one of the masters of the homiletic art, as well as of a figure who in 1542 could still boast of notable connections to high levels of the Italian cultural and political world. So Aretino makes public the fact that Ochino intervened with Alfonso d’Avalos on his behalf and, in the absence of a reply, even wrote another letter to check if the Marquis’s religiousness “is in the show or in the spirit;”113 that is, was it only an external display or was it truly lived. The failed attempt to publish the Vita in 1542 with Francesco Marcolini, even though Marcolini had already obtained a license and printing privilege,114 and the eventual publication in December 1543 through the Farri brothers in an editorial format in no way on par with that of the two previous hagiographies, are further proof of the rough path that under normal conditions would have been over within a few months. More than a dedication, the letter we read at the beginning of the Life of Thomas is both Aretino’s statement of self-defense, in which he has an easy time presenting the delay in delivery as an act of prudence in the face of so great a subject, and an open accusation against the Marquis: Behold, Sir, that just as the commandments of your beseeching had me write the story of Catherine, blessed soul and Queen of Alexandria, so the

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ancora. […] sì che mutate proposito, e sia di vostra discrezione e di vostra conscienza il darmi ciò che mi ha dato Cesare, e il pagarmi de le fatiche impostemi” (lsa ii, 351). “Le vendette de gli inchiostri” (lsa ii, 351). “È ne la dimostrazione o ne lo spirito” (lsa ii, 351). On the delicate question of a “phantom” Marcolini first edition indicated in the 1763 biography by Giammaria Mazzuchelli but currently without conclusive confirmation among known copies, see Opere religiose ii, 37–38, 669–671.

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violence of your indignations has now had me write the Life of Thomas, saint and Prince of Aquino.115 The difference between the original forze (force) that was present in the first version of the text, published in the second book of Letters, and the eventual violenze (violence), is notable. A similar change in tone can also be seen in the controversial rebuke introduced in the conclusion to replace the neutral formulaic envoi of the original version: May you take this book as it is and not as you deserved it to be. Meanwhile, your highness will be pleased to forgive me for the mistake I made through your own fault.116 More than an invitation to enjoy the gift, this is an outright attack against the client to place all responsibility for the choice of subject and the quality of the composition on him. In tune with this dedication is the letter dated June 8, 1544, in which a quite irritated Alfonso d’Avalos finally decides to compensate Aretino, reaffirming nevertheless that any future threat of revenge in print on the part of the Scourge of Princes will be disregarded. As in the letter from May 10, 1541, the intercession of the saints is mockingly called upon: Saint Thomas and Saint Catherine still wanted to make the miracles I told you about, and you must think that the enclosed exchange note for 300 scudi comes from them, which you must accept with the obligation to say of me what you like, and not to be astonished that I will take it into account as the free condition of my Nature instructs me.117 The rift between the parties is no longer repairable.118 Shortly thereafter, the rapid decline of the Marquis’s political career would ensue, and the ruler would 115

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“Ecco, Signore, che, sì come i comandamenti dei vostri prieghi mi fecero già fare la istoria di Caterina, e beata e Reina di Alessandria, così le violenze de le vostre indegnazioni mi hanno fatto ora scrivere la Vita di Tommaso, e santo e Principe di Aquino” (Opere religiose ii, 612). For the first version of this letter, see Lettere ii, 339. “Sì che pigliate il libro quale egli è e non come meritavate che fusse. Intanto a la vostra altezza piacerà di perdonarmi il fallo da me commesso per causa de la colpa sua” (Opere religiose ii, 612). “Ma San Tomaso e Santa Caterina hanno pur voluto fare delli miracoli ch’io vi dissi, e avete di pensare che da lor vi viene l’inclusa poliza di cambio di ccc scudi, quali avete di accettare, con l’obligo di dire pur di me ciò che vi piace, e di non maravigliarvi ch’io ne tenghi quel conto che m’insegnarà la libera condizione della mia Natura” (lsa i, 131). In the letter to Ferrante Montese from July 1543, Aretino describes meeting with Charles v

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die in 1546, closing the book on the matter. This is not the reason, however, why the hagiographies would be shelved. With the channel that led to the Milanese court definitively closed, the one leading to the Roman Curia would be traveled by an Aretino who in the meantime, leveraging his body of sacred writings produced, was consolidating his new profile as a literary figure in his Lettere.

4

The New Life of the Hagiographies: From the First Accusations of Heresy to the Aldine Collection of 1552

Far from being reducible to self-serving, polemical outbursts, the preventive statements of self-defense entrusted to the paratexts preceding the Vite find a serious raison d’être a posteriori in the attack documented in the letter written to Giovio in February 1545, a few months before the Council of Trent.119 Three prelates, unnamed but likely members of Cardinal Carafa’s circle, asked Pope Paul iii for permission to burn Aretino’s “Christian, religious, and Catholic writings,”120 including the hagiographies. Aretino’s reaction leverages the connections of patronage under whose protective shield his sacred works were published. He points out that burning the Vite would be an insult to the dedicatee and, by extension to Charles v: About the story of the blessed Aquinas or the Saint from Alexandria I do not speak; since the just Prince of Vasto imposed those compositions on me, and for such praised efforts compensated me, it is to be esteemed that they are of merit […]. What wickedness of unfaithful spirit, what disbelief of treacherous heart, and what impiety of a lost soul would risk even thinking of taking the Life of the Virgin Mary with the intention of burning it?121

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in Peschiera, and even speaks of an attempt at reconciliation initiated by the emperor on that occasion (Lettere iii, 64). The content of this important missive is examined in depth in Procaccioli, “Un cappello per il divino,” 204–205; and Marini, “Le agiografie di Pietro Aretino”. “Cristiane, religiose, e catoliche scritture” (Lettere iii, 160). “De l’historia del beato d’Aquino e de la Santa di Alessandria non parlo; peroché l’avermi imposto cotali composizioni il giusto Principe del Vasto, e di sì lodate fatiche ristoratomi, è da stimare ch’elle siano di merito […]. Ma qual malvagità d’infedele spirito, quale incredulità di perfido core, e quale impietà di perduta anima, si arrischiarà di pur pensare di pigliar la Vita di Maria Vergine con intendimento di arderla?” (Lettere iii, 160).

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At the origin of everything, Aretino continues to see envy toward him by men of the Church who are intolerant of the fact that he, “[a] layperson[,] wrote about Jesus and the Saints, what they, the Most Reverend, are obliged to write about,” even though they do not have the talent to do so.122 In the conclusion of the letter, he appeals to the Roman court to finally use him “as a servant,” and enlist him among its ranks.123 Aretino’s self-nomination was not accepted by the court of the Farnese Pope, but the three prelates’ threats, whether wellfounded or not, fell on deaf ears. Thus, in 1550 when his countryman Julius iii del Monte ascends to the papal throne and Aretino sees his own chance for a cardinalate within reach,124 his sacred works could be re-published in a prestigious new editorial format entrusted to the Aldine press of Paolo Manuzio, who created a dense collection in two volumes with a dedication to the pope. The second volume is reserved for the three hagiographies, which appear in 1552 in an elegant quarto in Roman type. It was the opportunity for a full revision of the texts. During the 1540s, the Life of Mary and the Life of Catherine were reprinted several times in underground editions apparently free from Aretino and Marcolini’s direct control; the Life of Thomas, on the other hand, remained as it was in the 1543 first edition. The 1552 collection saw the renewed participation of the author in preparing the texts for printing and took shape as the second and definitive draft of the hagiographies that, in fact, were subject to a thorough stylistic revision primarily aimed at recalibrating the balance of the syntactical arrangement with a sharp reduction in paratactic structures and an increase in hypotaxis. This seems to confirm the fact that, beyond any political motivations, the undertaking of the sacred works was founded on a basic literary urgency that endured over time and drove Aretino to practice a labor limae aimed at the refinement of a new linguistic medium. We remain disappointed, however, if we examine the 1552 versions with the aim of singling out changes, revisions, or even self-censorship in theological and doctrinal matters. Seven years after the beginning of the Council of Trent, however, it is surprising to see the scarcity and especially the nonsystematic nature of these kinds of substantial interventions.125 This is not

122 123 124 125

“Secolare abbia scritto e di Giesù e de’ Santi, ciò che eglino Reverendiss. sono obligati di scrivere” (Lettere iii, 161). “Per servo” (Lettere iii, 161). The substantial illusoriness of Aretino’s ambitions is noted by Massimo Firpo, La presa di potere dell’Inquisizione romana. 1550–1553 (Rome-Bari, 2014), 113. I attempted to examine the question of the different versions of the texts in Opere religiose

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because Aretino’s hagiographies were initially conceived of to convey heterodox ideas, and the author was obliged to perform a radical expurgation of them. Rather, it was because of the changed conditions and the publication of the first Tridentine decrees, which could have led to greater prudence in the treatment of increasingly sensitive content. Thus, for example, passages bordering on the obscene are not touched, like the one in the Life of Thomas in which the prostitute’s failed attempt at seducing the saint is described with a wealth of detail (T 2.52–58), or the passages that could have irritated sectors of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in a different way, like the bitter anti-monk tirade that one of Thomas’s brothers utters against the Dominicans in the cloister of the Roman basilica of Santa Sabina (T 2.7–13). Nor does he raise the issue of revising the part of the Life of Mary where the author admits that the episodes drawn from the endless literature on Marian miracles could be uncorroborated by the text of the Gospels: “Now let us suppose that the records of such great miracles are apocryphal and are not written by the evangelical pen […].”126 After all, this nonchalant attitude toward using sacred sources is typical of Aretino’s religious prose. Aretino is aware he does not possess the technical means for a philological-scholarly approach to the subject,127 and is interested, rather,

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ii, 667–678, and in Marini, “Le agiografie di Pietro Aretino.” The cases studied include the one related to a passage of the Life of Mary (M 1.192) where a long list of biblical books is revised in the Aldine collection with the elimination of the Letter of Aristeas (removed from the biblical canon on the basis of the Council decree from April 8, 1546) and the insertion of the final formula “and all others” (“e altri tutti”), introduced as a safeguard against any possible oversights occurring in the list; or, in the Life of Thomas, the revision of Aquinas’s statement “So our wills are” (“Adunque le nostre volontadi sono,” T 2.190) to “So our wills are free” (“Adunque le nostre volontadi sono libere”), clearly to specify the concept of free will. “Or poniamo che gli atti di cotanti miracoli siano apocrifi e non iscritti da la penna evangelica […]” (M 3.128). It is certainly not in the wake of the great hagiographic repertoires, from Bonino Mombrizio on, that Aretino operates. In the letter to Alessandro Citolini dated February 1545 (immediately following the aforementioned letter to Giovio), Aretino’s admission of ignorance in biblical matters becomes the pretext for asserting the simplicity of spontaneous faith in Christ that does not in itself need textual support, much less theological lucubrations: “To me is it injury to honor, or danger to the soul, to say to myself, arguing with you others in my room, that I did not extend myself much into understanding sacred writings? Dear friend, I am such that when it comes to religion I would grieve to be different than I am; because it is certain that I believe in Christ, and without seeking any further, I find peace in such true belief” (“Che è a me di pregiudicio a l’onore, o di pericolo a l’anima, a dirmisi, disputando voi altri in la camera mia, che io non mi estendevo molto ne la intelligenzia della scrittura sacrata? Amico caro, io sono tale, che in quanto a la religione mi dorrei di essere altrimenti; perché egli è certo, ch’io credo a Christo; e senza cercar più oltra mi acqueto in sì verace credenza,” Lettere iii, 161). It is known that in order to access

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in offering the reader a real rewrite that is effective, first of all, on the formal level.128 The letter from June 1552 that accompanies Aretino’s gift of the hagiographic collection to the pope’s influential brother, Baldovino del Monte, is revealing. With the aim of keeping his relationship with the papal court alive, Aretino even suggests himself for a full rewrite of Iacopo da Varazze’s Legenda aurea, whose obsolete style is specifically pointed out: I have already said to Your revered Excellency that I would like to rewrite that so badly written book of legends of the saints, were I to be given a bit more financial assistance; Your supreme Excellency has deigned to assure me that were I to do so, as a benefit of it, I would not be lacking friends around to ensure me from every discomfort in my old age. So that you believe me, I address the present volumes to You, as Your Most Illustrious, Praiseworthy, Catholic Lordship.129 There is no trace of scruples or reverential fear about the subject matter that the advent of the Council might have instilled in the character of someone who was normally very respectful of institutions, albeit inclined, through an innate habitus for pasquinades, to attacks ad personam against individual representatives of those same institutions.130 Rather than consider it an unlikely underestimation of the epochal change taking place, we should perhaps think about the sense of security produced in Aretino by the clearly well-justified perception of unconditional support by Julius iii’s entourage. This is confirmed by the content of the dedication to the 1552 volume that, at the end, evolves into the enthusiastic tones of a prophecy:

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the Latin sources that were indispensable to the writing of the hagiographies, Aretino used the help of literary figures who were active in his circle, like Niccolò Franco (on this, see Alessandro Luzio, “L’Aretino e il Franco,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana 29 [1897]: 229–283: 236–237). On this literary line, however, the distance both from Sannazaro’s and Vida’s refined Latin compositions and from Cornazzano’s, Battista Spagnoli’s, and Folengo’s elaborations is clear. Nor is it possible to set Aretino’s prose alongside the lyrical experiment of Girolamo Casio de’ Medici’s Vite de santi. “Io già dissi alla v. reverita Eccellenza che volevo rifare il sì mal fatto leggendario de i santi, caso che mi si desse un poco più di sussidio a la vita; in profitto della qual cosa degnò rispondermi la somma bontade sua, che se ciò facessi, non mi mancarebbero amici, circa lo assecurarmi da ogni disagio in vecchiezza. Onde a ciò mi si creda indirizzo i presenti volumi alla di Voi, come Illustrissima, catolica signoria laudabile” (Lettere vi, 121). This is the still valid argument of Mario Baratto, “Commedie di Pietro Aretino,” in Tre saggi sul teatro (Venice, 1971), 71–155: 119 n. 2.

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[…] the longed-for time of the righteous approaches, true faith returns. So that I seem to see Peter who, before the much-lamented Council, the sect of the errant destroyed, nearly crying with joy, closes the doors on war and with inextricable chains binds the arms and hands of terrible fury and of weapons.131 Finally victorious over the heresies that tore Christianity apart, Peter’s successor, who had reconvened the Council in May 1551, would begin a new season of peace in which the “righteous” like Aretino would see their merits recognized for their efforts in defense of the Church. With such a preamble it is not difficult to understand his later disappointment when Aretino would realize bit by bit, with the great expenditure of resources and energy,132 the actual impracticability of a course that should have led him back to Rome, in pursuit of that “strange chimera”133 of the most coveted reward: a cardinalate.

Acknowledgements The author wants to thank Lindsay Eufusia for translating this essay from Italian. 131

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“[…] Il tempo bramato dei giusti si approssima, la fede vera ritorna. Onde parmi veder Pietro che nel conspetto del cotanto esclamato Concilio, destrutta la setta degli erranti, quasi di letizia piangendo, serra de la guerra le porte e con inestrigabili catene lega le braccia e le mani del furore tremendo e de l’armi” (Opere religiose ii, 88). In the same span of years, Aretino is involved, in fact, in a complex editorial operation that includes, beyond the two volumes of his religious prose, the preparation of the fifth book of Letters (1550), dedicated to Baldovino del Monte, the two volumes of the Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino (1551), dedicated to the pope’s two nephews, Innocenzo and Giambattista del Monte, and the Ternali in gloria di Giulio Terzo (1551). The expression “strange chimera” (“strana chimera”) can be traced back to a letter to Ersilia Cortese Del Monte from December 1552, in which Aretino, reviewing his unhappy history with the Roman court from the time of Leo x and Clement vii, remembers that, in spite of everything, he is not lacking “baptized belief in the church. Which has been turned into public faith by the books I wrote about Christ and about the Saints, awaiting the reward for them that should be presented to me on earth, with double reward in Heaven” (“battezzata credenza a la chiesa. Del che fanno publica fede i libri che di Cristo ho composto e de i Santi, aspettandone il guiderdone che mi si devria porgere in terra con doppia ricompensa nel Cielo,” Lettere vi, 165).

chapter 14

The Figurative Rhetoric of Pietro Aretino’s Religious Works Augusto Gentili

1. To speak of rhetoric in Venetian religious painting of the sixteenth century, especially the second half of the century, requires certain methodological premises that will inevitably need formulation into rather artificial parameters. To expect an absolute equivalence between texts and images means contending with an illusory experience of mechanistic iconography. With respect to a textual source, the painter does not perform a translation but an interpretation, prescribed and conditioned by time period, by context, and by function: specifically, by expectations of the patron and eventually of a wider audience, if and when that is anticipated, as in the case of the altarpieces or of teleri (large scale paintings) for the larger confraternities. It is clear throughout history that no one—neither the patron nor the painter—is primarily concerned with the literal translation of a supposed textual basis (for example, a gospel, or a patristic commentary, or a devotional manual—or one of Aretino’s writings that now concern us) into an image. What is interesting should be the meaning or meanings of a story: which vary according to time period, context, and function, and are drawn from a wide array of possible meanings. The texts are important, but the readers and the reading of those texts are even more significant. With the collaboration as well as the guidance of one or more advisors, who are usually the patron and his or her circle, the painter conducts a visual exegesis that refers to his or another’s reading which has either already been elaborated or takes place right then: the painter does not render a book or books in the form of an image, but one or more unedited readings of a book or books, including—if the painter takes the opportunity—solutions, cues, and details suggested or confirmed by that book or books.1 The traditional path and the repertoire of the profession no longer suffice for this painter; he or she needs formidable rhetorical tools to navigate between ever renewed readings and to communicate all the complexity of the 1 For the passage cited with this note, I follow the convincing theorization set forth by Paolo Berdini, The Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano. Painting as Visual Exegesis (Cambridge, 1997), 1–35.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_016

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chosen meanings. The communication of meanings allows the direct intervention of the image in reality and in the historical moment. Painters and patrons care rather more about this communication of meanings than they do about decorative value, given that their interests have something to do with history, politics, and religion, and not simply with aesthetics. For this reason, the most widespread rhetorical figure in use was at that time no longer the symbol, which had been too stuck in a fixed repertory and immutable concepts, but the metaphor, which does not require such stability, neither a long tradition (even if sometimes it establishes such a tradition), nor an erudite codification (although sometimes it internalizes such a codification). The metaphor can be invented for a particular instance, and thus its content is quickly recognizable in that instance, in that specific situation, in that precise context. The most relevant consequence is the frequent alteration of the narrative structure with the effect of concentrating various moments of a story—various in terms of time and space—in a unique image exclusively united by a metaphorical logic (and thus non-narrative, non-sequential); or rather, on the contrary, it is the selection of a unique moment of a story strengthened by a visual metaphor such that it could bear the weight and the meaning of all that remains unrepresented. It should be noted that this rhetoric of images is not only the practice of a system of construction modeled on the established rules in the realm of oral and written discourse, but the invention of a set of communicative and meaningful tools that relate or isolate, that hide or show, that attenuate or reinforce every individual element of visual discourse, that indicate the sometimes difficult or even unintentional lines of a visual path. In addition to the tools already established by literary rhetoric and easily transferable to the realm of images (symbol, metaphor, allegory, analogy and antithesis, synecdoche, prolepsis), it is also necessary to analyze visual language’s specific rhetoric, which is often innovative and experimental. This includes actions, but also intentions, which are represented through posture and gesture, expression and gaze, either isolated or entwined, that function as indicators of discourse and of itinerary. One must study an image for a considerable length of time, with infinite patience and insistence, for the same span of time as the painter who conceived and produced it, in order to reconstruct the artist’s itinerary, to grasp the painter’s intentions. One must accept the challenge of organizing and articulating the discourse of images to contemplate the action, execution, complete “performance” and to get back to the invention, namely the determination of the subject and the original definition of the meaning or meanings, which for the painter and the patron was the point of departure, but which for us inevitably becomes the end point. This challenge can be answered in the meantime by

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another rhetorical tool: description, which is fundamental for highlighting critical details in an image, even more than in the corresponding description entrusted to a written text.2 Here I want to emphasize that any communication, including of course my own, is structured according to a rhetorical system; and that one must respond to the maniacal organization exhibited by painters with a similarly maniacal attention and openness. So I will perform an experimental technique of fragmented, intertwined, and sometimes rough citation: a technique, moreover, that our friend Pietro practiced free from the hindrance of quotation marks. 2. Rather often Aretino describes and recounts by making explicit reference to paintings and sculptures, ranging from well-known to little-known works. It is certainly not the case that Aretino goes on an indiscriminate search for more or less plausible comparisons in antiquity or elsewhere to find Apollos, Venuses, Cleopatras, and Archangels Michael and Gabriel. The first thing to point out is his iconographic and iconological competence (just to put back together the Panofskian couple, which, in the face of much opposition, I continue to believe to be indissoluble) namely his particular inclination to boil down the vast repertory of image-memories into concept and meaning. Aretino’s frequent and detailed recourse to the great humanist theme of melancholia merits a fuller excursus than I can devote to it here. Melancholia was illustrated in an unparalleled manner in the preceding century:3 I will nonetheless follow it between texts and images, between description and meaning, respecting biblical chronology, and thus beginning from Abraham and the story of the sacrifice of Isaac: Abraham went to sit, and put his cheek in the palm of his hand, with his head down. He proceeded to examine the righteousness of all the facts in his conscience, simply to pull out of his confession the reason God punished him with such an extreme punishment […]. While Abraham tried to inflict the stroke, he felt someone take his arm, and turning away his face where the miracle began, he saw in a circle of many rays the Angel of God […] and he heard the angel’s voice emanate from the light: “do not stretch out your hand over the innocence of your little boy, but rejoice in the strength of your obedience […].” The old man, worthy of glory, remained 2 I have paraphrased here these standard rhetorical terms, in order: dispositio, elocutio, actio, inventio, descriptio. 3 See the seminal study by Raymond Klibansky-Erwin Panofsky-Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London, 1964).

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for a long moment frozen in the gesture in which he began to act according to the desire to do what he believed that the Lord wanted him to do, since there was so much joy that it overcame the senses and the spirits, that seemed transformed in the image that we see of him when the sculptor carves him in the act to which he was led by the effect that had no effect. The venerable beard spread across his entire breast shone in a thin line of silver, his noble face in its native gravity gave majesty to the air in which it arose. The mouth slightly open, full of the aura of life, accorded with the eyes’ fixed gaze […]. The short robes revealed his naked legs and the entirety of the arms, thanks to the sleeves rolled up and hung over his shoulders.4 Firstly, my italics in the passage above mark the typical gesture of melancholia, which is valid in certain contexts for many other physical and psychic conditions: tiredness, sleepiness, sleep, dream, or vision; sadness, incomprehension, doubt. Then comes the frozenness that the analogy introduces with a seen or imagined sculpture. This is followed and concluded, after the rhetorical boutade or quip, with the term effetto, a description of Abraham’s persona and his clothing, detailed enough to conform to the demands of the story and to the constructed nature of movement; in short, to a tradition of images with innumerable examples. But this description and the gesture it characterizes, contrary to what might be imagined, are not useful or sufficient for Titian when he is called upon to execute, probably between 1542–1544, the three “ceilings” with Old Testament subjects—among them the Sacrifice of Isaac [Fig. 14.1]—for Santo Spirito,

4 “[Abramo] si gittò a sedere, e recatosi la guancia in su la palma de la mano, co ’l viso fitto in giuso, andava con la essamina de la giustizia ricercando tutti i fatti de la conscienza, solo per ritrarre da la sua confessione il perché Iddio lo puniva con sì possente supplicio […];” “Nel voler Abraam declinare il colpo […] sentì prendersi il braccio, e rivoltatosi co ’l viso donde nasceva il miracolo, vidde nel cerchio di molti raggi l’Angelo di Dio […] e a la luce udì sonare da la sua voce: «Non distendere la mano sopra l’innocenzia del figliuol tuo, ma rallegrati ne la fortezza de l’ubbidienza […]». Rimase il vecchio degno di gloria un gran pezzo immobile nel gesto in cui si recò nel voler fare ciò che si credette che volesse che egli eseguisse il Signore, perché fu tanta la letizia che gli oppresse i sensi e gli spiriti, che parve transformato ne la figura che di lui vediamo quando lo scultore lo intaglia ne lo atto nel quale lo recò lo effetto che non ebbe effetto. La venerabile barba spartagli per tutto il seno, splendeva nel sottile del suo argento. La faccia altera ne la gravità natia dava maestà a l’aria a la quale si alzava. La bocca un poco aperta, piena de l’aura de la vita, si accordava co ’l fisso de gli occhi […]. L’abito succinto gli copriva alquanto de le gambe ignude, e tutte le braccia, bontà de la maniche rivolte su ’l confine de l’una e de l’altra spalla,” Opere religiose i, 166, 171–172.

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Titian, The Sacrifice of Isaac, Venice, Santa Maria della Salute, sacristy

transferred long ago to the sacristy of Santa Maria della Salute.5 The description and gesture could not be useful or sufficient because they do not touch upon the complete and compact meaning of the three stories, which is unthinkable in a public commission for an ecclesiastical setting with clear doctrinal claims. Against the background of a sky covered with dark smoke that rises from the side of the altar of the unwelcome sacrifice, Cain beats the unarmed Abel with a cudgel. Abel bathes the dry ground with the blood from his head wound: Abel, the chosen shepherd in the City of God, the holy city of Zion, is set in opposi5 Madlyn Kahr, “Titian’s Old Testament Cycle,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29 (1966): 193–205; Flavia Polignano, Tiziano, Lotto e il dibattito religioso a Venezia, 1540–1545 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza,’ 1992), 118–190; Augusto Gentili, Tiziano (Milan, 2012), 189–194.

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tion to Cain the farmer, representing the city of men, the barbarous Babylon inhabited by demons;6 Cain, predestined to evil, could be saved using free will, but evidently his will either is constrained or has freely chosen to be confirmed in evil.7 Against the background of a blue sky broken by a few light clouds, the flying angel quickly stops the patriarch Abraham in extremis, ready to sacrifice his young son: Isaac, who has carried the wood for the altar to the top of the mountain, is the image of Christ who carried the wood of the cross to Calvary; the ram, rising from a corner with its head caught in the brambles, is an image of Christ with the crown of thorns;8 and Abraham, who has accepted the terrible divine order without too much hesitation, is an image par excellence—and in a foundational Pauline reference—of a person who is justified by faith.9 Against the background of a celestial gray sky opened in a supernatural manifestation of a great golden clearing, David, after having decapitated the enemy he had knocked out, raises a prayer of thanksgiving toward the light: David, the chosen one, went to meet Goliath, armed only with faith and grace10—as well as the rustic sling, of course—after having refused Saul’s cumbersome weapons;11 so that, in order to complete the deed, he had to use the Philistine giant’s sword.12 The program was in all likelihood prepared by the hermit Agostino Museo, the famous preacher protégé of the doge Andrea Gritti, Cardinal Marino Grimani, and Giovanni Grimani, the patriarch of Aquileia, accused of heresy by the terrible Capuchin, Giovanni da Fano after his Lenten sermon in Siena in 1537, “examined” by Rome in 1538 but acquitted of the accusation and returned to his duties. He finally arrived in 1542 at the “rival” convent of the canons regular on the island of Santo Spirito to teach sacred letters and theology, right at the time the restructuring and decoration of the complex were getting underway. In the Apologia written during the Venetian imprisonment in 1537, the brother had organized his own defense along the lines of perfect Augustinian orthodoxy, confirming the predestination of the elect through grace, faith, and perseverance, defending free will and cooperation of humans in attaining grace, and

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Genesis 4:1–15; Augustine, City of God xv: 1.2. This opposition is literally visualized in the frontispiece of the Latin edition of De Civitate Dei produced in Venice by Boneto Locatelli for Ottaviano Scoto in 1489 (Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Inc. E 376). Augustine, City of God, xv: 5–7. Genesis 22:1–19; Augustine, City of God, xvi: 32.1. Romans 4:1–22 and Galatians 3:6–14; Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 31: ii, 2–4. 1 Samuel 17: 41–51; Augustine, “David and Goliath and Contempt of the World,” in Sermons, vol. 2, On the Old Testament, Sermon 32, trans. Edmund Hill, o.p. (Hyde Park, New York, 2009); pl 38: 196–207; Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 143:2. 1 Samuel 17:39–40. 1 Samuel 17:51.

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emphasizing the complementary nature of works together with faith in achieving justification. The same questions are projected on the episodes of biblical “prefiguration” in three of Titian’s paintings; but they are the same burning, unresolved questions that Saint Augustine discussed and Luther took over in his own way, incorporating the final legacy of Saint Paul’s thought and writing. The arrival of religious reform in Italy presented two opposing modalities of the reception of the same terms, and at the base of the controversy was this very Augustinian notion, capable of opening two very different paths. This awareness is clear in the provocations of Museo’s Apologia: “If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong with Augustine, Paul, Christ, and the saints […]. Is Augustine one of Luther’s disciples? […] Is Augustine a heretic?”13 Unless one agrees with those who believe that a painter does not know what he or she is painting (a rather strange hypothesis, typically motivated by the equivocal report of Paolo Veronese’s farcical trial),14 Titian must have been broadly aware of the general contents of the Pauline/Augustinian project that Museo had put together. In fact, Aretino had already shown on another occasion his own detailed knowledge of the burning questions of his day, recalling in Salmi (iv) the example of justification by faith in Abraham who had sacrificed “his heart, and not his son,” within his “commentary” on Salmo quarto, which was entirely devoted to the themes of mercy and grace, without naming the themes as such.15 I return now to the description of Genesis to reveal an important detail. Despite what Aretino says, in Titian’s painting [Fig. 14.2], the angel does not by any means stop Abraham’s arm, but probably speaks to him and blesses him. Titian’s depiction further emphasizes the conceptual and non-narrative meaning of the episode: the perspectival effect is much more evident in the view from below (that of its original as well as current placement), while in flattened-

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Apologia Augustini Musaei Tarvisini Theologi Augustiniani adversus eos qui eundem falso apud Sanctam Sedem Apostolicam accusarunt, quod praedicans in Civitate Senarum haeresim praedicarit, ostendentis, se non nisi catholicam professum fuisse Doctrinam. Ex eminentissimo Sanctae Ecclesiae Doctore Augustino (Venice?, 1537): “Si erravi, cum Augustino erravi, cum Paulo erravi, cum Christo et sanctis viris erravi” (fol. Aivv); “Nunquid ergo d. Augustinus est Lutheri discipulus? […] Nunquid Augustinus haereticus?” (fol. Iiir). For the entire sequence of events, as well as a more detailed biography of Museo, see Mario Rosa, “Agostino da Treviso,” dbi, vol. 1 (Rome, 1960), 489–491; Polignano, Tiziano, 124–129. A complete study of the (so-called) Cena in casa di Levi or The Feast in the House of Levi and the sham trial of Veronese, with many new documents and interpretations, can be found in the recent book by Maria Elena Massimi, La Cena in casa di Levi di Paolo Veronese. Il processo riaperto (Venice, 2011). Opere religiose i, 485–486; 477–487.

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Titian, The Sacrifice of Isaac, detail. Venice, Santa Maria della Salute, sacristy

out reproductions, it actually seems that the angel is in danger of being cut by grabbing the patriarch’s arm. In fact, the interruption of the “blocked arm” is not that frequent in images: we find it however, though with a relatively timid gesture, in the most consistent “follower” of Aretino’s texts, who is (almost) obviously Jacopo Tintoretto, in the oval The Sacrifice of Isaac on the ceiling of the upper room of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco [Fig. 14.3]. If this is not

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Tintoretto, The Sacrifice of Isaac. Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, sala superiore

the only “alternative story,” it is certainly a story from many years later, when Aretino no longer lives but his texts certainly do. I will tell this story, at least in part, later. 3. The iconography of the melancholic is detailed by Aretino with particular care in the portrait of Joachim—a portrait often likened to sculpture for the immobility of its figures—sitting apart to ruminate his doubts at the moment of Mary’s birth: “Swallowed up by a coat the color of a nearly ripe hazelnut, with his left hand on his cheek, and his elbow on his left thigh, stretching out his right leg, raising his right palm, fallen into the abstraction of contemplation, he looked in this gesture like a statue carved from a deep knowledge of the art.”16 In the iconographic tradition, however, the unease of Joachim for 16

“Ristrettosi in un manto di color di nocciuole quasi mature, con la mano sinistra a la guancia, e col gomito in su la coscia mancina, stendendo la gamba destra, alzando la palma dritta, caduto ne lo astratto de la contemplazione, pareva una statua intagliata dal sapere de l’arte in cotal gesto,” Opere religiose ii, 108–109.

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the timing of Anna’s pregnancy, happening as it does in her old age, correctly anticipated in the episode of his retirement among the shepherds, is resolved in a deep slumber and is clarified with the angelic consolation; while at the moment of childbirth, his presence (when he is in fact present) is quiet and sometimes supportive. The case is quite different for Joseph, initially bothered by Mary’s singular pregnancy: “while he was confused by the falsehood of suspicion, Sleep, which spread the tacit water of oblivion over him, arranged his left arm over a table he sat next to; and letting his head fall opposite his elbow, he forgot the fantasies that bothered him in sleep.”17 The arm flexed to support the palm of the hand is not a gesture of melancholy, despite its similarity to the iconography of Joseph’s doubt as a specific moment in the sequence of events before the angel intervenes with a timely explanation.18 Moreover, in spite of its meanings in the massive figural tradition of the Nativity of Christ, here this gesture becomes the simple attitude of a person who decides to lean on something for a moment, and inevitably falls asleep. If however we want to find it in its most expansive original version—the frustrating effort of coming across a series of important events without ever understanding them at all—we can look for it in a kind of multi-part saga on our character staged by Jacopo Bassano in the mid-1540s.19 In The Adoration of the Shepherds at Hampton Court [Fig. 14.4], Joseph struggles to keep his eyes open and one arm props up his face, while the other falls heavily between his legs. In the Rest on the Flight into Egypt at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana [Fig. 14.5], he is even more exhausted: in contrast to the mother’s unending patience, the father seems stunned by the child’s agitation, chaotically nude (even if for good and proper symbolic reasons),20 despite the whole basket of available fabrics and clothes.

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“Mentre Giuseppe era confuso da le falsità del sospetto, il Sonno, che tutto lo sparse de l’acque tacite de le sue oblivioni, gli acconciò il braccio mancino sopra un desco al quale egli sedeva a lato e, lasciatogli cadere il capo in sul rovescio del gombito, dimenticò le fantasie che lo molestavano, nel dormire,” Opere religiose ii, 184. From the first illustrations of the meditations of Pseudo-Bonaventure: Meditations on the Life of Christ. An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms Ital 115), ed. and trans. Isa Ragusa-Rosalie B. Green (Princeton, NJ, 1961), 26– 29, figs. 21–22. Augusto Gentili, “Il viaggio e il destino. La religione di Jacopo Bassano,” Venezia Cinquecento, 18 (2007): 107–122. For an account of these reasons, it is sufficient to reference Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York, 1983; 2nd ed., revised and expanded: Chicago, IL, 1996).

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Jacopo Bassano, The Adoration of the Shepherds. Hampton Court, Royal Collection

Finally, in countless representations of the Last Supper, John is at least drowsy if not fast asleep on the table, nearly always beside Christ, often collapsed at his side or even in his lap. Aretino, without much imagination, gives him a premonition in a dream and has him awakened by fear: “veiled in sleep, he did not even see in a vision what Jesus had to suffer, but only heard the words that he said to the Father while he was praying in the garden; and, awakened by the fear that awakens a person who dreams of horrible things, and with the look of terror that he had in his face for the things he had seen, he filled his brothers with fear.”21 In fact, John is physically and morally prostrate from the pain brought on by the announcement of Jesus’ betrayal and the weight of the secret revealed to him alone: the traitor’s identity. It is Jacopo Bassano—in the Last Supper, made between 1546 and 1548 for Battista Erizzo, a young Venetian patrician,22 now in Rome’s Galleria Borghese—who recaptures the full sense

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“Velato dal sonno, non pur vidde in visione quello che doveva patir Giesù, ma udì fino a le parole che disse al Padre orando ne l’orto. E destatosi con la paura che si desta chi sogna cose orribili, con l’orrore ch’aveva nel sembiante per le cose vedute, empié di terrore i fratelli,” Opere religiose i, 376. Il Libro secondo di Francesco e Jacopo dal Ponte, ed. Michelangelo Muraro (Bassano del Grappa, 1992), 88 (= 18v).

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figure 14.5

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Jacopo Bassano, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana

of his fatigue with the portrait of the youngest melancholic man in the history of images [Fig. 14.6]. 4. The Crowning with Thorns, now housed at the Louvre [Fig. 14.7] was carried out by Titian between 1540 and 1542 for the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan and in particular for the chapel of the confraternity called the Santa Corona or Holy Crown, which was dedicated to the holy thorn, and, it seems, had a relic of it. The governor of Milan at the time was Alfonso d’Avalos, and Titian was preparing the Allocuzione (The Allocution, or Alfonso d’Avalos Addressing his Troops), which is today at the Prado, and was delivered in August 1541 to celebrate the entrance of Charles v into the city, and was highly praised by Aretino.23

23

Lettere ii, 231–233, 20 November 1540.

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Jacopo Bassano, The Last Supper, detail. Rome, Borghese Gallery

It is quite plausible that the Coronation generally has in mind the narrative of Pietro Aretino’s Umanità di Cristo (The Humanity of Christ) in the wake of success attested by three editions Francesco Marcolini printed annually between 1538 and 1540, after the princeps edition in 1535. Within an accentuated crossdiagonal structure and artificial positioning, Christ, who has an expression of tangible suffering on his face and who seems to hint at some reaction to his torments by the movements of his body and legs, would be exalted precisely because of his earthly humanity, according to Aretino’s model: these movements and expression, for a change, come directly from Laocoön and His Sons. Since the moment of flagellation that precedes the derision, Aretino appears to be interested in the physiognomic characterization of the jailors, a push towards an almost Lombrosian “criminal” typology: A person would have to be cruel indeed to not be scared by the appearance of these two. The one who approached from the right side had a face replete with all the defects nature can accord. A small forehead, bulging eyes, thick lashes, a leonine nose, thick, angry lips, from which two tufts of beard hung […]. Under his chin, some of the hairs were similar to

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figure 14.7 Titian, The Crowning with Thorns. Paris, Musée du Louvre

the bristles of a wild boar. He was covered down to his knees with a piece of green cloth, leaving the rest of the body completely naked; his hair looked like wool just recently taken from the flock, with a few pieces of straw lying across it. The other one, standing on the left, was full of all the diseases that the world gives to those who live a life of sin. In addition to the close-cropped head, he has a missing eye, a scar that cut straight across his nose, and his ears have been cut off by justice, which transformed him into a monster. In the cheeks he has a Jewish look, and

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Greek traits in the forehead, with as much beard as old eunuchs are said to have had.24 Titian directs the characterization of Christ’s persecutors to denounce the political complicity that caused the passion of Christ in ancient history, as well as that of Christians in modern history: in addition to the usual antiSemitic stereotypes, though not overly caricatured, which are about the three rogues placed higher in the image, there is the disconcerting fraternal embrace between the two soldiers, the first with the coat of iron mail typical of Turkish infantry, and the second with the green waistcoat with a metallic coating typical of Roman infantry, that is, “imperial” dress. Other more common elements, present without commentary in Aretino’s description and clearly in evidence in Titian’s construction, make use of the traditional metaphorical meanings in other contemporary devotional writings: the sterile cane of the torturers symbolizes the ancient Hebraic law, but, placed in the hand of Christ, it becomes the powerful scepter of judgment, image of a new covenant; the honorific purple garment, given to him to mock him, denotes the blood of the sacrifice and of redemption.25 Above the entrance to the court is a bust of a Roman emperor, as if it were a required element of the painting [Fig. 14.8]. The inscription identifies him as “tiberivs caesar,” which would be historically accurate; but the chubby face with an infantile mouth and curly hair is unequivocally that of Nero, which has been handed down through several ancient and modern “portraits” [Figs. 14.9– 14.10], including Titian’s, in a series of twelve emperors for display in the cabinet in the Mantuan ducal palace of Federico Gonzaga. The original paintings are 24

25

“E fu ben crudele chi non ispaventò a la sembianza de i due! Quello che si era acconcio al lato destro aveva la faccia con tutti i difetti che può dar la natura: la fronte picciola, gli occhi schizzati, le ciglia folte, il naso leonino, le labbra grosse e livide, da cui pendevano due fiocchi di barba […]. Sotto il mento gli spuntavano alcuni peli simili a le setole de i cinghiali. Lo ricopriva un pezzo di straccio verde fino a le ginocchia, restando lo avanzo del corpo tutto ignudo. La chioma, che pareva di lana pur allora tolto da la greggia, si stava attraversata d’alcuni fili di paglia. L’altro, posto al lato manco, era pieno di tutte le disgrazie, che suol dare il mondo a chi ci vive tristamente. Oltra il capo raso, uno occhio che gli mancava ne la fronte, un fregio che gli rigava il naso per il dritto, e le orecchie perdute dietro a le ragioni de la giustizia, lo avevano trasformato in un mostro. Ne le gote aveva il conio ebreo, e ne la fronte i caratteri greci, con tanto di barba quanta ne sogliono avere gli eunuchi vecchi,” Opere religiose i, 394–395. This description is commented upon and contextualized with respect to iconography by Tommaso Casini, “Cristo e i manigoldi nell’Incoronazione di spine di Tiziano,” Venezia Cinquecento, 3 (1993): 97–118. Opere religiose i, 398. A detailed exposition may be found in Antonio de Guevara, La prima parte del Monte Calvario (Venice, Gabriele Giolito de Ferrari: [1555], 1570), 20–40.

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figure 14.8 Titian, The Crowning with Thorns, detail. Paris, Musée du Louvre

figure 14.9 Head of Nero. München, Staatliche Antikensammlungen

now lost, but much evidence of their historical existence survives, including drawings and engravings. Since it is unthinkable that Titian could have made an error on the subject, the substitution must have been intentional and functional: this time the key is in

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figure 14.10 Gillis Sadeler after Titian, Nero. Rome, Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe

a passage of the Umanità di Cristo, where the evil Caiaphas, the high priest of the Jews, and the principal figure responsible for the martyrdom of Christ, is said to be “of a nature and likeness similar to Nero’s.”26 Three historical enemies of Christ and Christians are in this way magnificently synthesized in a single image: Nero through the physical likeness, Tiberius through the inscription, and Caiaphas through the analogy. In these years, Titian’s best homage to his old friend is the interpretation of the Ecce homo of Vienna,27 finished and signed in 1543. The story of the presentation to the people depends largely on the Umanità di Cristo, especially for material on Pilate, an entirely positive character, a just man who uses every method and art to save Christ but in the end is trapped both by fate and the insurmountable furor of the Jews. He is neither uncertain, weak, nor vile, but a peaceful man who refrains from violent and indiscriminate use of authority,

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“Di natura e di effigie simile al conio di Nerone,” Opere religiose i, 389. I do not have here space to analyze in detail the fundamental painting, about which there is now a wealth of scholarship: Flavia Polignano, “I ritratti dei volti e i registri dei fatti. L’Ecce Homo di Tiziano per Giovanni d’Anna,” Venezia Cinquecento, 2 (1992): 7–54; Gentili, Tiziano, 166–177, 186–189.

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who tries courageously to follow a middle path of reconciliation when it would be much easier to side quickly with the stronger party.28 In modern times, Pilate’s position corresponds to a specific Nicodemite attitude, as a clear choice to seek pacification; it also corresponds in particular to the personal position of Aretino, which he declared many times in his letters.29 Clearly Titian directly entrusted him, through the perfect tool of a portrait, with the role of Roman governor. 5. It is true that Magdalene was a confirmed sinner, dedicated not only to luxury but to an unbridled lust for jewels, perfumes, clothes, and banquets: a characterization common in the church fathers that Pietro Aretino employs to describe her in the Umanità di Cristo, where all the citations that follow are taken from.30 But after her sudden conversion in the public square, after the self-mortification of her body with a whip tellingly made of “a belt studded with jewels and sharp with diamonds” (“sparkling discipline”),31 after her interruption of Simon Peter’s dinner, when she sought to wash Christ’s feet “with bitter and hot tears,” to wipe them “with wild, unbound hair” and to anoint them “with alabaster ointment,”32 after being his beloved company for the entirety of the journey of the Passion, after the completion of her service to Christ with blood that tinges the gold of her hair with purple (“Now, if only I could wash away my sin with that”),33 after the “tough and tender”34 lament at the empty tomb and the extreme desire she confessed to the feigned gardener (“I want to

28 29

30 31 32 33 34

Opere religiose i, 390–393, 398–401. An example among many is the letter to Paolo Giovio in February 1545 (Lettere iii, 159– 161) in which Aretino, denouncing the machinations of certain unnamed prelates to burn “Christian, religious, and Catholic writings” (“cristiane, religiose, e catoliche scritture”) declares: “I perpetually give thanks to Christ, since I do not feel I am either a Chietino nor a Lutheran” (“Io di continuo rendo a Cristo grazie, che né Chietino mi sento, né Luterano”). As a reminder, “Chietino” was at that time a term in use among communities of dissent to designate the exponents of a rigorist wing of the Roman curia, followers of Cardinal Giovan Pietro Carafa, bishop of Chieti, and later Pope Paul iv (1555– 1559). Opere religiose i, 342–347. In this section I place the individual references in the notes so as to avoid constantly interrupting the text with abbreviations and numbers. “Cinture scropulose per le gioie e acute per i diamanti;” “disciplina lucente,” Opere religiose i, 349. “Col pianto amaro e caldo;” “co i capegli scompigliati e disanellati;” “con l’unguento de lo alabastro,” Opere religiose i, 373. “Ora sì, che io fornisco di lavare con questo il mio peccato,” Opere religiose i, 415. “Sì duro e sì tenero,” Opere religiose i, 431.

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go take him, and make my lap and arms into his bed and tomb”):35 after all this, what kind and how much penance should Mary Magdalene still have to do? The new typology of Penitent Magdalene (Maddalena nel deserto) that Titian invented at the beginning of the 1560s—which I illustrate here with the Ermitage version [Fig. 14.11], the one that was so perfect that the painter never sold it, instead keeping it for himself—is not in line with the disciplinary and penitential requirements of the so-called Counter Reformation, but is instead precisely opposite to those requirements, accompanied of course by certain prudent iconographic precautions. Now detached from Christological support, Magdalene confronts the difficult experience of asceticism with complete autonomy. Half-clad but not entirely exposed, since the potential erotic impact is first presented, only to be negated afterward, the solitary Mary Magdalene substitutes the vase of perfume with the transparent glass carafe, usually reserved for images of the Annunciation as a symbol of chastity:36 a signal sufficiently eccentric and scandalous to cause some to think that in certain of the more extreme versions—for example that of Capodimonte for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese [Fig. 14.12]—the return to opaque materials to depict the alabaster (but without regaining the plausible form of a vase of ointment, which would require a lid) does not arise from an inclination toward variation, nor from distraction or incomprehension, but on the contrary, from a precise awareness that recommends functional ambiguity and cautious modification. The skull and the book, objects commonly associated with meditation on the vanity of earthly matters, may have served their purpose up to a certain point in time, but now are no longer worthy of much regard. The “hottest tears” (Aretino’s words, still)37 in the veiled and reddened eyes, turned toward the heavens, indicate that, at the end of the “experimental” way of penitence, the Magdalene has reached the condition of total repentance and contemplative ecstasy, obtaining complete redemption through mercy and grace. In times

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37

“Io il voglio andare a torre e fargli letto e sepolcro del mio grembo e de le mie braccia,” Opere religiose i, 432. Carafes, pitchers, vases, bottles, ampules (etc.) of glass, empty or filled with water to various levels, with or without various flowers, are common images whenever Mary is the protagonist, and in particular in Annunciation scenes: it seems superfluous to me to go over this huge iconographic tradition, which metaphorically employs the transparency of containers and cleanliness of their contents to signify purity. In Titian’s Annunciation in the church of San Salvador, the bulky branch in the carafe obviously makes the glass less transparent and the water less clean: this is likely also an element of ambiguity that expresses reservations on Mary’s virginity, enunciated in the painting, all the more in the absence of a vase in Titian’s other versions of the Annunciation: Gentili, Tiziano, 330–339. “Lagrime caldissime,” Opere religiose i, 348.

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figure 14.11

Titian, Penitent Magdalene. Saint Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum

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Titian, Penitent Magdalene. Naples, National Museum of Capodimonte

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of organized, disciplined, and constrained religiosity, the clamorous success of this typology is in fact the success of the appeal to individual spirituality, with the prospect of a “broad path” to forgiveness and salvation.38 To support this claim, I would like to provide some further evidence from both texts and images. In the Umanità di Cristo, of course, the apparitions of the Magdalene are rather frequent: but—after the long and detailed episode of her conversion and the more concise story of the breaking of the vase of ointment at Simon’s meal, both described in terms of repentance and mercy39—her role becomes ever more that of a simple and occasional background character, squashed by the weight of the protagonist’s progressive “crescendo.” So her last, surprising entrance on the scene in the concluding section of the Vita di Maria Vergine, when all is finished, occurs when Mary Magdalene takes her leave of Mary before retiring to the desert: O Mother of our Redemption, regard with the eye of your counsel the debts that I have and the compassion of God, and then hold me back if you think I can atone while remaining in the world, and let me go, if you judge otherwise. The few days that I served him, they are not worth the many years that I did not. Although I was fortunate, and blessed by luck and by nature, with my shamelessness and lust for riches and beauty, I brought insults to Christ’s name, but they are now expiated by the mercy of your son. His goodness punished me with forgiveness and not with punishment; neither was it sufficient for his mercy that he received me in his

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“Via larga.” These terms, favored by both open and closeted members of the Evangelical movement, are characteristic of the “spiritual” reaction to post-Tridentine control of religious thought and to its restrictive and selective conception of access to salvation. On “general forgiveness” (“perdono generale”) and the “broad path” (“via larga”) in the works of Juan de Valdés, see: Massimo Firpo, Tra ‘alumbrados’ e ‘spirituali.’ Studi su Juan de Valdés e il valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del Cinquecento italiano (Florence, 1990); Juan de Valdés, Alfabeto cristiano, ed. Massimo Firpo (Turin, 1994), 39–45; Juan de Valdés, Lo Evangelio di San Matteo, eds. Carlo Ossola-Anna Maria Cavallarin (Rome, 1985), 146, 161, 213–214, 224, 347–348. In the latter volume, the introduction by Ossola lingers for a good while (82–93) over the recurrence of these terms in the spiritual canzoniere by Vittoria Colonna (Rime, ed. Alan Bullock [Rome-Bari, 1982], S1 115 n. 61, S1 132 n. 94, S2 193 n. 33). On connections with the Beneficio di Cristo: Carlo Ginzburg-Adriano Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza. Un seminario sul Beneficio di Cristo (Turin, 1975). On the diffusion of the term “open heaven” (“cielo aperto”) among the exponents of dissent in Italy: Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia 1520–1580 (Turin, 1987), 143–167. On all these themes: Adriano Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande. Storia di Giorgio Siculo e della sua setta (Milan, 2000). Opere religiose i, 341–352, 372–373. On the episode of Mary Magdalene’s conversion: Élise Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible (Geneva, 2007), 512–526.

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own arms, allowing that I anoint his sacred feet, and wet his feet with tears, and having wet them, dried them, and having dried them, kissed them with this mouth, from whose lips a word of his praise had never escaped; but beyond that (O the vast and unique clemency of God), he accepted me as his servant, even as a daughter of grace; nor did he allow me to be his mere disciple, but he permitted that, under the wood of the cross, I wash the hands of my sin in the innocence of his blood.40 My italics in the citation above demonstrate that in these few lines, Aretino repeats fundamental concepts and terms current in the culture of the “spirituals” of Valdesian inspiration: compassion, pity, forgiveness, mercy, grace, cross, blood. Let us read again the praise of Calvary pronounced by Mary during the final pilgrimage to important places in her life and in the life of her son: O mountain, more illustrious than any other and above every height […], may you live in the reverence of the faithful in the future ages. Let the peoples of every region and on every shore come to you with the gifts of their hearts. May the tears of those redeemed by the pity of my son be the dew of your grass. May the tears of all people wash the blood spilled for the benefit of all creatures.41 Even if these terms are already in themselves rather “compromising,” it does not seem to me that Aretino would ever use—at least not for Mary Magdalene—

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“O Madre de la comune redenzione, risguarda con l’occhio del tuo consiglio ai debiti che io ho a le compassioni di Dio, e poi ritiemmi, se ti pare che io gli possa iscontare stando al mondo, e lasciami andarne, giudicando tu altrimenti. I pochi giorni che io l’ho servito non pagano i molti anni che io l’ho diservito. Le ingiurie che il suo nome ha ricevuto da la temerità de le ricchezze e de le bellezze di che, malgrado de la mia anima, mi fu sì larga la fortuna, e la natura sono state sconte da la pietà del tuo figliuolo. La bontà di lui me ne punì col perdono e non con la pena; né bastò a la sua misericordia il ricevermi ne le braccia proprie, sostenendo che io gli ungessi i piedi sacri e unti gliene bagnassi col pianto e bagnati glieli asciugassi e asciutti glieli basciassi con questa bocca, da le cui labbra non era mai uscita nota de la laude sua, ma oltra ciò (o immensa e sola di Dio clemenza!) mi accettò per serva, anzi per figlia di grazia; né pur sostenne che io ti fossi discepola, ma comportò che io sotto il legno de la croce lavassi le mani del mio peccato ne la innocenzia del suo sangue,” Opere religiose ii, 243. “O monte chiaro sopra ogni alpe e sopra ogni altezza […]. Vivi ne la riverenza dei fedeli nei viventi secoli. Movansi le genti di ciascun clima in ogni lito e vengano a te con i doni del proprio core. Sia il pianto dei ricomperati da la pietà del figliuol mio la rugiada de le tue erbe. Lavino il sangue sparso in benefizio de l’universe creature le lagrime di tutti i popoli,” Opere religiose ii, 282.

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figure 14.13

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Workshop of Francesco Mezzarisa (after Francesco Salviati), Crucifixion with Mary Magdalene. London, British Museum

the most incriminating term of all, namely, justification (by faith and grace, by blood and cross). At the Roman and Parisian exhibitions twenty years ago on the “bella maniera,” one could also see a painted terracotta from the British Museum of the Crucifixion with Mary Magdalene in a wide landscape (figs. 14.13–14.14), from the Faenza workshop of Francesco Mezzarisa (c. 1545) and derived from a composition by Francesco Salviati.42 At the bottom right,

42

See the entry by Philippe Costamagna (no. 33, 141) in Catherine Monbeig Goguel (ed.),

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figure 14.14

Workshop of Francesco Mezzarisa (after Francesco Salviati), Crucifixion with Mary Magdalene, detail. London, British Museum

hanging through a hole of a lean dry trunk is a sign that reads: Justifichati sumus / per Christo / I. S. C. (the last letters could be deciphered in several ways, while the sentence before it is unequivocal.) In the catalog entry, the writing, while properly reported, is not commented upon; it even affirms that the object belongs to a production designed for “popular devotion,” which is loudly contradicted by the representation of Mary Magdalene as an example of justification for the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, a concept that belongs rather to an educated form of devotion, and was certainly non-conformist. Thus,

Francesco Salviati (1510–1563), o La bella maniera, exhib. cat. (Rome-Paris, 1998). The panel is in London, British Museum, Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities: I do not know if it is currently on display.

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one could imagine this panel being given to a well-educated woman from an important family.43 6. Once they had built a new prestigious site, the confreres of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco had wished to convert the old “scoletta”44 into a hospital to best carry out their institutional tasks, but they were met with stubborn denial from their distinguished neighbors at the convent of the Frari, who had kept privileges and prerogatives on preaching and benevolent assistance since the founding of the fraternity on their land. The well documented moments of maximum commitment to the project by the school leadership, accompanied by massive propaganda but always concluded by failed negotiations, corresponds to the abstract compensation obtained by the creation of a virtual hospital, i.e. a painting of a hospital, in the adjacent church dedicated to the Saint. This is what happens with San Rocco in the hospital (San Rocco nell’ospedale) painted by Jacopo Tintoretto, placed in the presbytery in 1549: an impressive sample of ailing bodies, wounds, bubos, bandages, poultices, and potions, allegorically enriched by the contrast of darkness and light, illness and healing, damnation and salvation, and ideologically complicated, as written sources attest, by the ambiguous relationship between hospital care and miraculous healing.45 In 1559, another propaganda painting for the hospital project arrived at the church of San Rocco. The difficult negotiations between the confreres and the friars on the subject of the hospital resumed.46 There is a portico with columns, spacious in width but limited in height, from which a well-built, older man is moving away. He carries a brightly-colored, silver-gray bed with blue stripes, and an elegant light blanket with a long fringe: the setting, the multitude of sick

43

44 45

46

Here it would be good to have a few images of Mary Magdalene with her hands lightly touching (though not soaking wet with) the blood of the cross. In order to limit my examples, I will mention only the altarpiece with Jacopo Bassano’s Crucifixion (1561–1563) at the Museo Civico di Treviso. For more on that work, see Luca Bortolotti, “La pittura religiosa di Jacopo dal Ponte e la Crocifissione di Treviso,” Venezia Cinquecento, 7 (1997): 39–77 (63– 65); as well as the small/medium picture for private devotion (Venice, Galleria Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro) carried out in 1580 by a very young Palma il Giovane, who was never before or after so radically influenced by Titian: Stefania Mason Rinaldi, Palma il Giovane. L’opera completa (Milan, 1984), 138 n. 518, 13 pl. ii. The previous location of the Scuola. Maria Elena Massimi, “Jacopo Tintoretto e i confratelli della Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Strategie culturali e committenza artistica,” Venezia Cinquecento, 5 (1995): 5–107 (46– 85). Massimi, “Jacopo Tintoretto e i confratelli,” 83–85.

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figure 14.15

Tintoretto, The Probatic Pool, detail. Venice, Church of San Rocco

people, and the unambiguous character of the old man walking away with his bed identify the scene as the miraculous healing of the paralytic at the Piscina probatica (The Probatic Pool) according to John 5:1–9 [Fig. 14.15]. Christ seems to have no limit. The paralytic is healed, so much so that he is portrayed as athletic, but no longer merits even a glance. Surrounded by a “court of miracles” made mainly of wounded women and exhausted old men, the great healer is engaged in a new gesture of a healing blessing, directed toward a young blond woman crouching at his feet. She is disheveled, scantily clad, and imploring. Other sick people wait their turn in the order in which they arrive: the closest and most attentive among them are a physically disabled man with his pallet and two young, feverish women, one of whom is standing and has a red area under her neck. Of course, the painting is missing both the pool and the water: they are missing however, only to the viewer who cannot imagine them, that is, to see through and with images; for the viewer who still searches for a transcription of the gospel instead of its interpretation.47 Apart from the “technical” difficulty of painting an acceptably accurate large pool in a painting, why should such a pool 47

The entire opening section of John’s gospel is marked by a metaphorical passage of water: John (who other) baptizes in water and with water; at the wedding at Cana, the purifying

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have to be represented at all costs? The pool where sheep destined for pagan and Jewish sacrifices are washed, where the healing guaranteed by the God of Abraham through the occasional magic of water is never realized? Christ heals the sick through the kept promise of grace to replace the ineffective promises of the law. I do not know if it was, later on, Jacopo Tintoretto’s own idea to depict a whole muddy tub where little swamp plants grow in the Probatic pool in the upper room of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco [Fig. 14.16]: a rather ugly painting (sometimes you just have to tell it like it is), where there is however nothing of Jacopo’s painting, but there is a bit of his son Domenico (I would say the figure of Christ’s clumsy gait and overly characterized face), and then there is a lot of modest assistance, spoiled and bungled, ancient and modern, from indecisive, incompetent, or perhaps incapable restoration attempts. As has been shown, the attempt, as courageous as it is naïve, to make a pool creates a haphazard or at least poorly arranged, unpleasant crowd of small and less small figures: sometimes with unintentional comic effect, as in the case of the young man lying with arms crossed on the diagonal of the side of the pool, or in the case of the healed paralytic, forced to bend in two to exit with his bundle downstage, without too much hassle. Christ turns, perhaps to argue about something with a middle-aged mother who holds a young daughter across her lap—in a kind of clumsy Pietà—and raises the hem of her garment to show a circular red patch on her thigh. Other disheveled and scantily-clad young women, together with some slightly older men, several of whose bodies are a shade of red, populate the entire area around the pool and the portico, unexpectedly divided into angular alcoves that one may expect to find in a brothel. The terrible painting, water of the Jewish water pots becomes the wine of Christian sacrifice; Christ explains to Nicodemus that he must be born again by water and the spirit; the Samaritan woman is exhorted to look for the living water of Christ that quenches thirst forever instead of the stagnant water of Jacob’s well; earlier, on the last day of the feast of Tabernacles, Christ again promises rivers of living water to the thirsty. Antonio Manno, Tintoretto. Sacre rappresentazioni nelle chiese di Venezia (Venice, 1994), entry 8.2, titles the scene Gesù guarisce molti ammalati (he warns that it is about “works known under the title of Cristo risana il paralitico or Probatica piscina”): in the absence of a pool or “something that allows one to suppose the presence of a pool (qualche cosa che ne lasci intuire la presenza”) and not content that the healed paralytic who leaves with his cot, maintains that “the painting nonetheless does not illustrate a specific miracle, but describes the thaumaturgy of Jesus on the lakeshore of Tiberias” (“il dipinto pertanto non illustra uno specifico miracolo, ma descrive l’attività taumaturgica di Gesù sulla sponda del lago di Tiberiade;” based on Matthew 15:29–31). It seems to me rather amusing that the scholar, although in one moment insisting that there should be a tub in order to see the pool, does not need even a drop of water to see a whole lake.

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figure 14.16

Tintoretto, The Probatic Pool, Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, sala superiore

which had to face the Baptism of Christ, required the awkward total representation of the pool to credibly support the opposing parallel with the large bend of the River Jordan, where the clear gospel waters ensure spiritual regeneration, as opposed to the material healing, illusorily promised by the murky waters of Jewish superstition.48 48

“If you are ill, paralyzed, or weak, do not go to the Probatic pool to be healed, but come to the gospel waters, that have the power to heal all kinds of conditions and illnesses […]. If you are dead and you wish to be resurrected, do not keep waiting for life from Elijah or Elisha, but come to the gospel fountain, in which you can drink Jesus Christ, who is

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Beyond the officially flagged spiritual concerns, the multitude of chronic and miserable sick people who are gathered around Christ on the banks of the pools represents humanity, materially unfortunate but recoverable with the hospital project, which was so insistently pursued. This interpretive key obviously points to the origins of fearful attitudes about sex promulgated here by the morbid presence of infected feminine bodies—not by plague, but of syphilis or other sexually transmitted diseases, as has been appropriately suggested49—in the two versions, Tintoretto’s and Pseudo-Tintoretto’s, of the Piscina probatica: the terror of contagion had to intersect in just the right way with the obsessive preoccupation of the mercantile class, the power brokers of the fraternity, around the integrity of the family and of patrimony. Thus the hyperbolic detail of the lamenting crowd will not be stifled by Aretino according to a moderated taxonomy: Some were disabled in their feet, others in their arms, others in all their limbs. Some looked like a lump, others seemed like a monster. This one was immobile, while that one trembled such that he cannot hold on to what he took. They all together made a sighing sound, like the one that plagues, famines, and wars would make if the misery of their calamities were mixed in with that of the followers of death. And all sorts of sicknesses were represented […] there were those suffering from gout, French

49

the resurrection, the life, and the salvation of all believers” (“Se sete infermi, paralitici e deboli, non andate più alla probatica Piscina per ottenere la sanità, ma venite all’acque Evangelice, che hanno virtù di sanare tutte le sorti e conditioni di infirmità […]. Se sete morti, e desiderate di essere resuscitati, non state già più ad aspettare la vita né da Helia né da Heliseo, ma venite all’Evangelico fonte, in cui si beve Gesù Cristo, che è la resurrettione, la vita e la salute di tutti i credenti),” Angelico Buonriccio, Le Pie et Christiane Parafrasi sopra l’Evangelio di San Matteo (Venice, Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari: 1569, but dedicated to Giulio della Rovere, cardinal of Urbino, on 13 September 1568), with the Le Pie et Christiane Parafrasi sopra l’Evangelio di San Giovanni, (Venice, Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari: 1568, with a dedication on 30 August to Carlo di Leonardo Pesaro). This at least is the disposition of the two comments in the example I consulted (Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, 1.D.120). The passage mentioned here is in “Proemio” (pages n.n.) in the opening of the Johannine volume; but see also the entirety of chapter 5 on the Probatic pool (71–85). On the commentary of Buonriccio, accompanied by a number of very interesting illustrations, see Giandomenico Romanelli, “Tintoretto a San Rocco: committenza, teologia, iconografia,” in Paola Rossi-Lionello Puppi (eds.), Jacopo Tintoretto nel quarto centenario della morte (Padua, 1996), 91–95. Antonio Manno, “La Sala superiore,” in Giandomenico Romanelli (ed.), Tintoretto. La Scuola Grande di San Rocco (Milano, 1994), 173 (obviously in relation to the telero mural painting in the school that I have referred to here as the work of Pseudo-Tintoretto).

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pox, stomach ailments, hot fevers, cold chills, punctures, wounds, and every other malady that nature bestows on us and that are caused by our bad deeds.50 It is also useful to provide a “popular” and hyperbolic equivalent, in images, of the “French pox”51 that shows up as red patches on the skin, mainly in the women, though also in some men, who line the edges of the pool in the painting:52 namely, the eloquent illustration of the frontispiece of the Lamento di quel tribulato di Strascino Campana Senese, sopra el male incognito (The Lament of Strascino Campana of Siena on an unknown illness, [Fig. 14.17]).53 Here the “blisters” of the then well-known, though poorly treated, illness, are thrown like a rain of little balls by a flying demon—with no regard for the painting of the Savior on the wall—on the protagonist in bed who is already covered with them and whose lament is represented on a scroll: “Hoi me le doglie” (O, how I am in pain). 7. Tintoretto’s work, as is well known, is especially characterized by exclusive rights to the business of the Scuole Grandi of Venice, that is, in the world of associations of middle-class citizens officially founded for religious devotion, assistance and mutual support, and more concretely, for the establishment and

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“Alcuno era impedito de i piedi, altri de le braccia, altri in tutti i membri. Alcuno pareva un groppo, alcuno sembrava un mostro. Questo era immobile, e quello tremando non poteva tenere cosa ch’egli prendesse. Tutti insieme facevano un suono dolente, come quello che farebbono le pesti, le carestie e le guerre, se la miseria de i loro accidenti si rimescolasse con quella de i seguaci de la morte. E di tutte le sorti de i mali […] erano ivi langori di podagre, doglie galliche, passioni di stomaco, febbri calde, paracismi freddi, punture, piaghe, e ogni altra maladizzione che ci dà la natura e che causano le pessime opere nostre,” Opere religiose i, 333. “Doglie galliche.” No water, even in the large organ paintings by Paolo Veronese for the church of San Sebastiano (1559–1560) which when the doors are opened, reveal an original version of the Piscina probatica: a wide space between the two opposing sides of the painted portico let the imaginative viewer picture a large, open air tub. There is not even a large crowd. Attention is focused on the healing of the paralytic, which is happening at that very moment: the man has not hoisted the cot onto his shoulder in order to leave, but will now do so, following the indication Christ gives in his explicit gesture. On the left in the foreground, one notices a seated woman’s naked shoulder disfigured by terrible swelling. Here I consulted the Venetian edition of Nicolò Zoppino and Vincentio, 1521 (Biblioteca Marciana, Misc. 2166/n. 5). This short work in octaves, composed in Rome several years before, went through several reprints, thanks to its curious argument and despite its mediocre versification. On Strascino (1478–1523) see Roberto Alonge, “Campani, Niccolò, detto lo Strascino,” in dbi, vol. 17 (Rome, 1974), 404–406.

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figure 14.17

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Lamento di quel tribulato di Strascino Campana Senese, sopra el male incognito (Venice, Niccolò Zoppino e Vincentio compagni: 1521), title page. Venice, Biblioteca Marciana Misc. 2166.5. Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Divieto di riproduzione.

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defense of their shared interests. In these contexts, the individual or mutual commitment of laity and religious, merchants, artisans, and state officials, of lawyers and scientists, reflects a culture attentive to established traditions which are however far from the imported rigors of ecclesiastical control. Such a commitment claims a religion that is immediately comprehensible and easily communicable, founded on a radical Christology, based on the Eucharistic promise and the sacrifice on the cross, and its “evangelical” terms of salvation and grace. Such a religion is however still a religion of slogans and propaganda, quick to emphasize the importance of foundation myths (bodies and relics, translations and protections, legends and miracles) to revive the debate on eternal struggle between the Jewish world and the Christian one, to support the need to reform ecclesiastical institutions and daily practices in response to the steady diffusion of thoughts and words of the Protestant Reformation. The demand for high sentimentality is the starting point for a style of painting that was suddenly full of “special effects,” used to utilize surprise and astonishment to minimize traces of restless disagreement that emerge between the cracks of the images, often framed according to new readings. The analysis of context and images shows with absolute clarity that Tintoretto and his readers—as well as every painter and reader of the second half of the sixteenth century—work on religious texts in the vernacular, consciously taking a position against the prohibitions on translation, interpretation, and diffusion of holy scripture beyond ecclesiastical control. Tintoretto reads and interprets, among other things, parts of the Bible in the vernacular (1532) and biblical commentary (1540–1547) by Antonio Brucioli.54 Since the great Florentine scholar

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La Biblia quale contiene i sacri libri del Vecchio Testamento, tradotti nuovamente da la hebraica verità in lingua toscana per Antonio Brucioli, coi divini libri del Nuovo Testamento […] tradotti di Greco in lingua Toscana pel medesimo […] (Venice, Lucantonio Giunta: 1532); Commento di Antonio Brucioli in tutti i sacrosanti libri del Vecchio e Nuovo Testamento, dalla Hebraica verità et fonte Greco per esso tradotti in lingua Toscana […], 7 vols. (Venice, Francesco e/o Alessandro Brucioli e fratelli: 1540–1547). The impassioned defense of vernacular translations of Scripture, already outlined in the dedication of the 1532 edition of the New Testament to King Francis i of France (from which I will cite this passage, worthy of a modern semiologist: “And what else are the tongue’s words but signs of the spirit’s concepts? And if the mind and the spirit is that which seeks God, shouldn’t the mind express itself and ennoble itself with the signs that are known to the spirit?” [“E poi, che altro sono le parole de le lingue che segni de’ concetti de l’animo? E se la mente e l’animo è quello che ricerca Iddio, non debbe quella con que’ segni esprimersi, e coi medesimi edificarsi che noti gli sono?”]), and expanded upon in the dedication to Renata [Renée] of France, duchess of Ferrara in the first volume (1542) of the Commento: “Some people might say that a woman or a shoemaker is not worthy to speak of holy writ, or understand it by reading it; when in fact it is better to understand it with simplicity of heart than in

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was a layman and a spiritual extremist (i.e. for the conformist, a “heretic”), the painter preferred to show the version (1538) of the Dominican, Santi Marmochino, also of Florence;55 he must have had his own copy of this version of the bible for home use, since he uses it and “physically” represents it in the Bamberg Assumption of the Virgin Mary.56 Actually Marmochino’s translation into the vernacular was far from neutral, since it was largely based on the Latin bible of Santi Pagnini, a radical inspired by Savonarola.57 Above all, Tintoretto reads and interprets certain parts of Pietro Aretino’s religious works, published and reprinted many times by Francesco Marcolini

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elevation of human knowledge […]. These detractors should consider who strove to grow a branch from the Lord’s vine. What audience did Christ have: was it not a mixed multitude, among whom were the blind, the lame, beggars, tax collectors, centurions, artisans of every kind, women and children? Oh Christ now mourned, who read out the scripture to anyone who wanted to hear it! And why can he not come to the pasture of scripture, under [the watch of] our great shepherd Christ Jesus: the merchant, the blacksmith, the peasant, the bricklayer, the fisherman, the tax collectors, and all types of men and women who were created worthy to hear the word of God out of the mouth of Christ?” (“Esclameranno forse alcuni essere cosa indegna che una donna o un calzolaio parli delle sacre lettere, e quelle intenda leggendo; quando è meglio intenderle in semplicità di cuore che in elevatione di scientia umana […]. Considerino pure questi detrattori di chi si sforza di crescere propagini nella vigna del Signore, quali auditori havesse esso Christo: oh non una mescolata moltitudine, e in questa ciechi, zoppi, mendici, publicani, centurioni, artefici di ogni sorte, donne e fanciulli? oh fia ora gravato Christo, che sia letta la scrittura da quegli da’ quali volse esso essere udito? E perché non potrà venire al pascolo della scrittura, sotto quel nostro gran pastore Christo Giesù, il mercatante, il fabro, il contadino, il muratore, il pescatore, i publicani, e tutte le conditioni degli huomini e delle donne che furno fatte degne di udire il verbo di Iddio dalla bocca di esso Christo?”). La Bibbia nuovamente tradotta dalla Hebraica verità in lingua thoscana per maestro Santi Marmochino Fiorentino dell’ordine de predicatori (Venice, eredi di Lucantonio Giunta: 1538). See the reputable studies by Erasmus Weddigen, “Zur Ikonographie der Bamberger ‘Assunta’ von Jacopo Tintoretto”, in Die Bamberger “Himmelfahrt Mariae” von Jacopo Tintoretto (Munich, 1988), 61–112; as well as “Memoria purificata: ein Nachleben im Widerspruch,” in Augusto Gentili-Philippe Morel-Claudia Cieri Via (eds.), Il ritratto e la memoria. Materiali 2, (Rome, 1993), 263–282 (with a summary in Italian, 283–284); and finally “Memoria occulta: ein Nachleben als Bekenntnis,” in Jacomo Tentor F.: Myzelien zur Tintoretto-Forschung (Munich, 2000): 197–216. Anna Morisi Guerra, “Di alcune edizioni veneziane della Bibbia nella prima metà del Cinquecento,” Clio, 21 (1985): 55–76; Andrea Del Col, “Appunti per una indagine sulle traduzioni in volgare della Bibbia nel Cinquecento italiano,” in Libri, idee e sentimenti religiosi nel Cinquecento italiano (Ferrara-Modena, 1987), 165–188; Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo. La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605) (Bologna, 1997), 33–34; Lisa Saracco, “Aspetti eterodossi della Bibbia nuovamente tradotta dalla hebraica verità in lingua thoscana di Santi Marmochino: risultati di una ricerca,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica, 2 (2003): 81–108.

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between 1534 and 1543, and finally edited by Aldo Manuzio’s sons in a twovolume edition (1551–1552)—especially at the beginning of his works at the Madonna dell’Orto, where their presence is quite substantial—before inevitably ending up on the updated and enlarged list of prohibited books in 1559.58 Jacopo, supported by Aretino since the famous letter on the Miracle of the Servant (Miracolo dello schiavo) from April 1548 that provoked the jealousy and ire of Titian,59 continued to read them with increasing attention for the rest of his life, and once Pietro died, despite every possible censure.60 In the world of Tintoretto scholarship, it is common to find some of Aretino’s descriptions, which are particularly long and effective; they are very detailed and picturesque, so to speak. The most popular instance is that of the great flood, easily comparable with the Final judgment (Giudizio universale) by Jacopo in the Madonna dell’Orto, where the final judgment of the condemned is manifested as a huge torrent, a flood of black waters accompanied by driving rain that inexorably drags down the helpless bodies and improvised rafts.61 But, just as the Judgment signals the end of time, similarly my time and space now come to an end, and it is the right time to abandon the exercise on descriptions—which could usefully be continued—to render a final homage to the writer and the painter. Between 1581 and 1584 Tintoretto covers the long walls of the ground floor room of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco with yet another series of large teleri paintings, this time dedicated to the life 58

59 60

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On the importance of Aretino’s religious works in Tintoretto’s paintings, which has been emphasized many times, but rarely supported by specific comparative analysis, see Romanelli, “Tintoretto a San Rocco,” 93. On the Index of Pope Paul iv, see Paul F. Grendler, L’Inquisizione romana e l’editoria a Venezia, 1540–1605 (Rome, 1983), 159–168. Lettere iv, 266. Another important textual source for Tintoretto (which was already mentioned in note 25 on the iconography of the Coronazione di spine or Crowning with Thorns by Titian) is the Libro del Monte Calvario by Antonio de Guevara (1480–1544), a Franciscan friar and later bishop, as well as an advisor, preacher, diplomat, and the official chronicler of Charles v. He was especially known as the author of one of the most famous tracts of institutio in the European Cinquecento, the enormous, often translated, and widely distributed Libro aureo dell’imperatore Marco Aurelio con l’orologio dei prìncipi (1529). Printed in Venice by Giolito for the first time in 1555 and published again several times afterward in an Italian version by Alfonso de Ulloa, the Monte Calvario is yet another reimagining of the passion of Christ, designed for preaching and meditation, that is notable among many similar works (including some by Aretino) for descriptive insistence, attention to imagery, rich textual references, and the fullness of its allegorical interpretation: its image of Calvary as the “spectacle of spectacles” (“spettacolo degli spettacoli”), La prima parte del Monte Calvario (Venice, Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari: 1570, 277–286) is conceptually and descriptively fundamental for Tintoretto’s gigantic Crocifissione (1565) in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Opere religiose i, 112–115.

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figure 14.18

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Tintoretto, Mary at the Jordan River meditating on the past, detail. Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, sala inferiore

of Mary and the infancy of Christ,62 without holding back from the spectator the metaphorical surprises of the Annunciazione (Annunciation) or the bloody atrocities of the Strage degli innocenti (Massacre of the Innocents).63 At the far end of the walls are two smaller teleri paintings facing one another, with a woman by herself in an aquatic and woody landscape between twilight and evening; they go unmentioned in the sources and now are generally interpreted according to a somewhat old tradition in which they are representations of Mary Magdalene and Mary the Egyptian, penitent hermits who have nothing to do with this context [Fig. 14.18–14.19]. In both paintings, it is the same 62

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For information on the reorganization at the time of the execution of the telero paintings on the ground floor: Valentina Sapienza, “Vecchi documenti, nuove letture. Ragionando sulla cronologia delle Storie di Maria di Jacopo Tintoretto nella Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” Venezia Cinquecento, 16 (2006): 171–194. The Annunciazione (Annunciation) keeps an unprecedented space—a third of the total area—for modest and unorganized carpentry: where the worker cannot actually be Joseph, usually portrayed as an old man, sometimes as simply mature, but never a very young man, as he is here. Compared to the announcement of the incarnation, the carpentry scene is not a contemporary, narratively complementary episode, but a successive episode, rhetorically proleptic and metaphorical: his protagonist is Christ the youth, busy

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figure 14.19

Tintoretto, Mary at the Jordan River meditating on the future, detail. Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, sala inferiore

woman—she sits in two adjoining spots on the same river, she wears the same clothes. In one case, she almost faces us and in the other, her shoulders are turned a bit, leaving us only with the “lost” profile; in one case she concentrates her gaze on the open book, and in the other, raises her gaze in reflection. It is a double image of Mary, not as an object, but as the subject of the salvation

preparing the cross for himself. That he is indeed preparing the cross for himself could be just a conjecture: however, one can see very well on the shelf right under the last angels, protruding against the sky shining above them, the loop of the cord that will serve, years later, to drag him up the mountain, and the spear that will cut open his ribs. Augusto Gentili, “Personaggi e metafore nell’Annunciazione di Jacopo Tintoretto per la Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” Venezia Cinquecento, 6 (1996): 235–242. The complicated and noisy Strage degli innocenti or Massacre of the Innocents (especially compared to the quiet and charming Fuga in Egitto or Flight into Egypt that comes before it on the wall) has never achieved much success among art historians. The work is painstakingly described by Aretino, with much detail on its imagery (Opere religiose i, 290–298), and would merit one of my comparative “exercises,” but that will have to wait for another occasion.

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story. She is no supporting character, but the protagonist of redemption, who holds a privileged point of view, which simultaneously allows her two equidistant and complementary paths: meditation on past events and their projection on future events. We could imagine as the backstory to this scene the long ending of the Vita di Maria Vergine, when the mother decides to retrace the important places in her son’s life, starting with the Jordan River: When she arrived at the blessed river, she recognized the shores, walked upon by the sacred feet of Jesus, and the various new kinds of flowers and plants that were painted and polished. She noticed that the angels had stripped the clothes from Christ, since the air above was still marked by stripes, which the angels’ wings had left as they turned in flight, imprinting the air with the splendors of the divine spirits. The birds on the branches of the nearby trees sung notes never heard before formed by their throats, and celebrated the glory of the place. […] O noble river, o adventurous river, o chosen river, may you be eternal in your course. May your banks be ever pristine, may your bottom be ever grassy, and may the sweetness of the water, of which you are full, surpass the sweetness of every kind of liquor. Milk and honey yield in your waters, just as other waters yield to milk and honey. And may your welcome and pleasant shores remain clad in perpetual green, forever adorned with lilies. May the shadow of the trees make an eternal spring […] May the warmth of the sun shining with its clear rays appear in the continuous dawn of all your days, most blessed Jordan, and may none of your nights be deprived of the pure white light of the moon, nor the golden lamp of the stars.64

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“Giunta al benedetto fiume, riconobbe le sponde premute da le piante sacre di Giesù a la novità diversa dei fiori e de l’erbe varie di che esse erano dipinte e smaltate. Ella si accorse che ivi gli angeli spogliorono la veste a Cristo, perché sopra di cotal parte l’aria si stava ancora isferzata da le strisce, che nei giri dei lor voli ci stamparono gli splendori dei divini spiriti. Gli uccelli, che suso i rami dei vicini alberi cantavano in note non più udite formate da le lor gole, davano anche indizio del chiaro sito. […] O fiume nobile, o fiume aventuroso, o fiume eletto, sia il tuo corso eterno! Siano le tue onde sempre limpide. Sia il tuo fondo sempre erboso e la dolcezza de l’acque de le quali sei pieno, vinca il soave d’ogni liquore. Il latte, il mele ceda a loro come le altre acque cedano al mele e al latte. […] E voi, rive grate e amene, restatevi amantate di perpetuo verde e di sempiterna pittura di gigli ornate. Faccinvi ombra gli alberi di eterna primavera […]. Le tempre del sole cinte dei suoi più lucidi raggi appaiano ne le continue aurore di tutti i giorni di te, beatissimo Giordano, né manchi a veruna tua notte il lume candido de la luna, né il lampo aureo de le stelle,” Opere religiose i, 246–247.

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And there may yet be something to discover in the revived and revisited memory of relations of confraternities, especially those engaged in publishing. It may lie in the work of the great French scholar Guillaume Postel and his messianic vision of the feminine, the two Marys mothers of the world.65 But such a call for more research is only for those who, in spite of many calls to give up, insist on continuing to read and to look. 65

Valentina Sapienza, “Miti, metafore e profezie. Le Storie di Maria di Jacopo Tintoretto nella sala terrena della Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” Venezia Cinquecento, xvii/33 (2007): 49– 139.

chapter 15

The Imitation of Pietro Aretino’s Vita di Maria Vergine and Umanità di Cristo in Italy after the Council of Trent Eleonora Carinci

1

Introduction

Although Aretino’s works were all listed in the Index librorum prohibitorum, they nevertheless circulated widely.1 They were even reprinted after the Council of Trent and in the seventeenth century, both in Italy and abroad.2 For instance, Aretino’s comedies Il Marescalco, Il Filosofo and Lo Ipocrito were republished in Vicenza under the name of Luigi Tansillo, and were entitled, respectively, Il Cavallerizzo (1601), Il Sofista (1610) and Il Finto (1610). Similarly, the tragedy Orazia reappeared, this time attributed to Giuliano Goselini and entitled L’amore della patria (Venice, Barezzo Barezzi: 1604); in fact, it was published by the same publisher who brought out Lucrezia Marinella’s Life of the Virgin in 1602, one of the works I shall discuss here. Aretino’s comedy La Talanta appeared under the name of Cesare Caporali and with the title La Ninetta (Venice, Gio. Battista Collosini: 1604); whilst Aretino’s Lettere and all of his religious works were reprinted several times between 1609 and 1644 by the Venetian publisher Marco Ginammi, under the pseudonym Partenio Etiro, an anagram of Pietro Aretino. Moreover, a few years earlier, a number of his works were reprinted abroad in Italian or in translation under his real name. In 1584 John Wolfe published Aretino’s Ragionamento and Dialogo and Quattro commedie.3 I Sette salmi della penitenza di David were translated into French 1 Most of Aretino’s works were in the index of 1557. In the indexes of 1559 and 1564 he was listed within the Class i, meaning that his complete works were forbidden. See Jesús Martinez De Bujanda (ed.), Index des livres interdits, Index de Rome 1557, 1559, 1564. Les premiers Index romains. l’ Index du Concile de Trente (Geneva, 1990), 115, 125, 198 and 647–649. 2 For a survey of seventeenth-century Italian editions of Aretino’s works, see Quinto Marini, “Pietro Aretino nel Seicento: una presenza inquietante,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 479–499. 3 Pietro Aretino, La prima [-seconda] parte dei Ragionamenti (Bengodi [i.e. London, John Wolfe]: 1584); Id., Quattro Commedie ([London, John Wolfe]: 1588); Id., La terza, e ultima parte de’ Ragionamenti ([London], Gio. Andrea del Melagrano [i.e. John Wolfe]: 1589).

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by François de Rosset in 1605, and into English by John Hawkins in 1635, as well as being printed in Italian in Lyon in 1648.4 Therefore, even if Aretino’s name was not to be mentioned—at least in Italy—his works still enjoyed a notable fortune. His religious works particularly appealed to the trend of the period, and even before Ginammi reprinted all of them in the seventeenth century, some of them—certainly the Vita di Maria Vergine and the Umanità di Cristo— were already in circulation, being read and used as models for other religious literature. Thanks to both their style and the wealth of details contained within them, Aretino’s religious works became an exceptional source of stories, images and tropes to be re-used (including in more conventional religious literature), despite the fact they were not always perfectly orthodox. This essay considers the ways in which the Vita di Maria Vergine and the Umanità di Cristo were used as sources by a number of Italian authors in the years immediately following the Council of Trent, with particular attention to their reception and use by women. Whilst these two texts are the most striking examples of this phenomenon, it is quite possible that Aretino’s other religious works, too, may have had some impact on post-Tridentine religious literature, although further research would be necessary to ascertain this.5 After the Council of Trent we can identify two phenomena, which can explain the reasons for the revival of Aretino’s religious works and their reception by a female audience. Firstly, the second half of the sixteenth century saw an incredibly wide diffusion of devotional literature. If, on the one hand, any interpretation or paraphrase of the Bible (or other texts addressing doctrinal questions) were considered suspicious and possibly heretical by the Catholic Church, because of potential heretical or pro-Reformation content,6 4 See Élise Boillet, “David, personnage et masque de l’ Arétin entre xvie et xviie siècle,” in Élise Boillet-Sonia Cavicchioli-Paul-Alexis Mellet (eds.), Les figures de David à la Renaissance (Geneva, 2015), 329–363; Bruna Conconi, “La circolazione dei testi aretiniani nella Francia del xvii secolo,” in Delphine Montaliu (ed.), Le livre italien hors d’Italie au xviie siècle (Toulouse, 2010), 177–195; Raymond B. Waddington, “Pietro Aretino, Religious Writer,” Renaissance Studies 20 (2006): 277–292 (279). 5 Commentaries on Seven Psalms, for instance, were very popular in the post-Tridentine period. See Laura Battiferra, I sette salmi penitentiali del santissimo profeta Davit (Florence, Heredi di Bernardo Giunti: 1564); Flaminio Nobili, I sette salmi penitentiali (Venice, Domenico Nicolini: 1583); Chiara Matraini, Considerazioni sopra i sette salmi penitenziali del gran re, e profeta Dauit (Lucca, Vincenzo Busdraghi: 1586). Although Aretino’s Sette Salmi circulated widely and appeared in several editions during the author’s lifetime and after his death, none of them imitated Aretino. 6 See Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo. La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605) (Bologna, 1997).

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on the other hand, devotional literary works (including sacred epics, hagiographies, religious poetry, meditations) were promoted and considered appropriate, especially for women. Certainly, they were judged preferable to secular literature such as chivalric romances, and the print industry adapted to this trend.7 In such a context, religious literature was not only a means to express or inspire devotion, piety or belief, but also provided a safe channel through which female authors could express their creativity and literary ambition. Secondly, although after Trent the social control over women’s morality and behaviour tended to become stricter, in this period we can observe an increase in the numbers of published works by Italian women. Increasingly, women were experimenting with different literary genres, in some cases showing an unexpected degree of boldness and a tendency towards innovation. As Virginia Cox has pointed out, this was largely due to the Counter Reformation, which enabled women to access the literary system by publishing “safe” devotional literature, not all of which was strictly religious in nature.8 The connection between these two aspects, together with the similarities with Aretino’s style and baroque aesthetics (which made him such an appealing source for early seventeenth-century authors) may help to explain the reasons behind the success of Aretino’s religious works in this period, and to interpret the relationship between readers, writers and Aretino’s religious literature. Between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the genre of the life of the Virgin became very popular. Not only did it stress the importance of the cult of the Virgin for the Catholic Church—a point of contention with the reformers, who denied her traditional role as mediatrix in the salvation of humanity—it also provided women with a model of chastity, humility, obedience and devotion. All the stories concerning the life of Mary came from the apocryphal tradition, through the Golden Legend, and, even if not completely canonical, were commonly accepted as part of the Christian tradition. Aretino wrote his work before the life of the Virgin had become a popular lit-

7 Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy. The Editor and the Vernacular Text 1470– 1600 (Cambridge, 1994), 140 and ff. 8 See Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy (Baltimore, MD, 2008), 131–165. For an overview and detailed discussion of female literary production during the Counter Reformation, see Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore, MD, 2011), 8. The only complete life of the Virgin published before Aretino was Cornazzano’s very successful Vita di nostra donna (1471), written in terzine.

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erary genre, as it would later on. Therefore, in the absence of other models of this kind, it is not so surprising that some post-Tridentine authors refer to his life of Mary. La Vita di Maria Vergine by Pietro Aretino was first published in 1539, and went through a number of subsequent editions before 1552, and again in the first half of the seventeenth century. Between 1534 and 1543, in the same years as he was writing his dialogues between prostitutes Aretino penned his sacred writings: paraphrases of sections of the Bible, and hagiographies, which, after a long period of critical neglect, have finally attracted the attention of critics in recent years.9 Like all of Aretino’s literary creations, these works were addressed to different dedicatees and prospective patrons and were undoubtedly also intended as literary works, written in a high rhetorical style that ensured their success. Aretino’s Vita di Maria Vergine narrates the life of Mary, from her conception to her assumption into Heaven, including detailed descriptions of events and episodes that were often the fruit of his imagination. The register he uses, typically Aretinian, is markedly different from earlier devotional books about the Virgin, since it features flamboyant rhetorical tropes, pathos and verbal redundancies.10 In a postfatory letter, “Al romano Monsignor Girolamo Verallo,” published together with the 1540 edition of the Vita di Maria, Aretino justified the use of ‘poetic fiction’ for writing about religious topics. He claimed that, when used to praise the Virgin, “poetic lies become Gospels” (“le menzogne poetiche diventano Evangeli”), thereby legitimating the use of a highly rhetorical style for religious prose, and perhaps encouraging others to write about the Virgin in a similar mode.11 Aretino presented Mary in accordance with tradition, with all her manifold virtues: his work portrays Mary as an exceptional woman, beautiful, humble, pious and educated, and her story is recounted in detail with an abundance

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On Aretino’s religious works, in addition to Marini’s and Boillet’s chapters in this volume, see Mario Scotti, “Gli scritti religiosi,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 121–142; Raymond B. Waddington, “Pietro Aretino, Religious Writer;” Élise Boillet, L’Aretin et la Bible (Geneva, 2007). Modern editions of Aretino’s religious works edited by P. Marini and É. Boillet are published in the Edizione Nazionale delle opere di Pietro Aretino (Rome: Salerno). For a detailed description of the work and its language and style see the “Introduction” in Opere religiose ii, 9–68 and Paolo Marini’s chapter in this volume. “Tutto il mio sforzo è suto in estollere le azioni, le bellezze e le virtù de la Vergine con ogni sorte di parole atte a ringrandire il religioso de le meditazioni mie. E non è dubbio che le menzogne poetiche diventano evangeli allora che, posto da parte il celebrar le chiome, gli occhi, la bocca e il viso di questa e di quella, si rivolgono a cantar di Colei che è rifugio de le speranze nostre. E beati gli inchiostri, beate le penne, beate le carte che si spendano, si affaticano e si spiegano nei pregi di Maria,” Opere religiose ii, 606.

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of minute details. Yet, despite her modesty and humility, Aretino’s Mary is not silent or passive and is not presented as an imitable model for ordinary women, as she would become later. She represents the tension between human and divine: as Paolo Marini has observed, Mary, like other figures of saints described by Aretino, is presented as a figure very close to the reader, on account of her humanity and pathos, but at the same time divine, very distant and unattainable.12 Aretino’s Mary cannot be considered an example of ‘proto-feminism’, but she still reflects an image of powerful womanhood on earth, a feature that would gradually disappear in subsequent Marian literature. In his Vita di Maria Vergine Aretino does not describe in detail the story of the life of Christ, his passion and resurrection, because he had already told these stories in the Passione and in the Umanità di Cristo. Hence, in the life of Mary, he mentions the most important episodes of the life of Christ through the eyes and memories of Mary herself, who, after the death and resurrection of her son, visits the places where Christ had praised, performed miracles and died. PostTridentine lives of the Virgin usually narrated the story chronologically from conception to assumption, including selected episodes of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ in which Mary was present and which Aretino described in detail in the Umanità. For this reason the authors of lives of the Virgin inspired by Aretino, also used his Umanità di Cristo as a source.

2

Bartolomeo Meduna

A first example of Aretino-inspired Marian text, published after the end of the Council of Trent, is Bartolomeo Meduna’s Vita della Gloriosa Vergine Maria Madre di Dio, Regina dei cieli, con l’humanità del Redentor del mondo Giesù Christo Nostro Signore, printed in Venice by Giolito in 1574.13 Born into a noble family from Motta di Livenza, near Treviso, Bartolomeo Meduna was a conventual Franciscan who lived in the second half of the sixteenth century. He is also the author of the dialogue Lo scolare (1588), inspired by Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano and providing advice on how to form the perfect scholar.14

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Paolo Marini, “Introduzione,” 61. Bartolomeo Meduna, Vita della Gloriosa Vergine Maria Madre di Dio, Regina dei cieli, con l’humanità del Redentor del mondo Giesù Christo Nostro Signore (Venice, Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari: 1574). For information on Meduna, see the entry by Franco Pignatti, “Meduna, Bartolomeo,” in dbi, vol. 73 (Rome, 2009), 191–193.

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In his Vita della Gloriosa Vergine, Meduna describes the life of the Virgin and the humanity of Christ in a synthetic, yet rhetorically ornate style.15 Not only does the title recall Aretino’s titles, but an analysis of the content demonstrates that Meduna had drawn significantly on Aretino’s works, both the Vita di Maria and the Umanità. Meduna’s work is in fact a kind of collage of entire passages of Aretino’s works. Meduna cut some episodes, especially those which were less appropriate, controversial or simply redundant, and summarised others in order to make the text lighter and easier to read. The result is something completely different from the original. It is a sort of censored, shortened and simplified version of Aretino’s work, which reflects the priorities of its time: a readable and ornate literary hagiography, which could serve as pleasant and edifying reading material for a female readership. It is therefore not surprising that Meduna’s Vita—like other contemporary lives of the Virgin Mary—was dedicated by the publisher Giovanni Giolito to a woman. The dedicatory letter presents the dedicatee, Eleonora d’Asburgo, Duchess of Mantua and Marchioness of Monferrato (1534–1594), as a perfect example of a Catholic woman, and therefore close to the Virgin Mary.16 The first book opens with the story of Mary’s parents and ends with the birth of Christ. It is a shortened version of the first book of Aretino’s Vita di Maria, with some adjustments and additions from other works. Several passages are cut, including Aretino’s detailed description of the conception and birth of Mary and Mary’s childhood (Opere religiose ii, 104–117). After describing the well-known encounter of Joachin and Anna which followed their separation, and the revelation of the coming birth of Mary, Meduna merely mentions that Mary was born; he does, however, also reports a list of Biblical women outdone by Mary, using the words that Aretino’s Christ pronounces at the beginning of Book iii of his Vita di Maria, when the resurrected Christ meets Mary (Opere

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The work is described by Pignatti as follows: “Il racconto procede senza implicazioni dottrinali, mirato al coinvolgimento emotivo del lettore, nello spirito della devozione mariana radicata nell’Ordine francescano. Lo stile retoricamente sostenuto conferma le qualità di buon prosatore del Meduna;” there is, however, no recognition of the actual source. See Pignatti, “Meduna,” 193. “I hope, or rather, I am absolutely sure, that you shall not find any fault with my gift, since one can see that Your Highness is directed and dedicated to Christian Religion, with all the strength of the spirit and the mind, in the way which can be requested of the true Goddess, whose virtuous life should serve as an example to all great ladies” (“Espero, anzi tengo sicurissimo, che non gli sarà punto discaro questo mio dono; poiché si vede con tutto l’animo, e con tutta la mente l’Altezza v. esser rivolta, & applicata alla Religione Christiana, di maniera, che ben si può dimandare alla vera Dea, dalla quale tutte le gran Signore dovrebbono pigliar esempio di ben vivere,” Meduna, Vita, fol. iiir).

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religiose ii, 236). This is followed straightforward by a list of Mary’s virtues, the same included in book i of Aretino’s Vita di Maria (Opere religiose ii, 117): In terms of level, grace and merit, she [Mary] surpassed Bathsheba, mother of Solomon […] and all those women who were, are and will be […]. Her sentences were so rational and wise that they seemed by a more mature person; her look was shy; her laughter modest; her silence wise, her words benevolent, her moving solemn and her arresting gracious.17 In this case Meduna put together passages from different sections of the model, but keeps echoing Aretino word by word with minimal variations. A few lines later, Meduna’s Mary is already three years old. Aretino’s long description of the dedication of three-year-old Mary to the Temple is summarised by Meduna in a single page. Instead, Meduna focuses on emphasizing Mary’s humility and modesty, also abbreviating the pathetic account of Mary’s parents’ suffering following their separation from their beloved daughter (Opere religiose ii, 117–124). Similarly, the report of Mary’s life at the temple is drastically abbreviated in Meduna’s version. The beginning of the account echoes Aretino, but Meduna then omits the story of the angel who appeared to Mary to feed her, and the episode in which Mary asks him to become a servant to the mother of the Messiah (Opere religiose ii, 131–132), also mentioned in the very successful Rosario della Vergine Maria by Alberto da Castello.18 However, Meduna draws on Alberto da Castello to depict Mary’s physical features, claiming that “the Virgin had fine and lovely features, she was well composed and proportioned. Three arms tall, she had skin the colour of grain, eyes between red and white, with black eyelashes, small nostrils, a long face, long hands and fingers.”19 In this instance he may have sought to avoid Aretino’s sensual and

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“Vinse di grado, di gratia e di merito Betsabee genetrice di Salomone […] con quante donne che furono, che sono e che saranno […] formava detti sì accorti e sì saggi, che parevano sentenze di persona di matura etade et il suo guardare era vergognoso, il suo rider modesto, il suo tacer savio, il suo parlar humile, il suo conversar benigno, il suo moversi grave et il suo arrestarsi gratioso,” Meduna, Vita, 10–11; cfr. Opere religiose ii, 237 and 117. This and the following translations are mine, except those from Lucrezia Marinella’s work. Alberto da Castello’s Rosario della Gloriosa Vergine Maria was first published in 1522 (Venice, Melchiorre Sessa and Pietro Ravani) and saw a large number of subsequent editions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Era la vergine di aspetto dritto, et amabile, di persona ben composta, e proportionata, alta tre braccia, haveva il color di formento, gl’occhi tra il bianco et il rosso, le ciglia negre, le narici picciole, il viso, le mani, e le dita lunghe,” Meduna, Vita, 14. Meduna’s description of Mary echoes that of Alberto da Castello, who in turn had referred to the description

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very peculiar description of Mary, perhaps too provocative for Meduna’s sensibility and sense of decorum.20 Moreover, Meduna specified that Mary ‘used neither to smooth nor polish herself, but was content with the appearance that the Creator of everything had given her; she did not love wordly pomp or vanities, wearing a simple and honest dress’. He implied that contemporary women ought to follow her decorous example, whilst simultaneously also rectifying Aretino’s sensual description of the Virgin.21 Then Meduna moves straight on to the episodes concerning Mary’s marriage. He continues to echo Aretino, using his same words, but reducing the number of details and eliminating scenes, such as the active participation of Mary’s parents during the wedding (he only mentions their presence) and Joachim’s encounter with Joseph and the conversation between them (Opere religiose ii, 148–158), sometimes emphasising aspects that contribute directly to the aim of his work. For instance, Mary shows embarrassment when the ministers tell her that she should get married. Whereas Aretino said that embarrassment is “a praised sentiment” (Opere religiose ii, p. 145), Meduna deems it a “most praiseworthy sentiment in the female sex” (“passione molto lodata nel sesso femminile”), thus demonstrating, once again, the aim of promoting Mary as model for pious women in the post-Tridentine period.22 In addition Meduna completely omits the long account of Mary’s parents’ death (Opere religiose ii, 160–162) with which Aretino concludes his Book i. The episode of Joachim and Anna’s death at the same time was probably the fruit of Aretino’s imagination, as it is not attested anywhere else before him.23

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by Epiphanius of Saramis’—see Alberto Da Castello, Rosario della Gloriosa Vergine Maria (Venice, Giovanni Varisco: 1566), 42. For a comparison between Aretino’s description of the Virgin and those of other authors who came after Aretino, see below and the table in appendix. “Non si lisciava, né si puliva, ma si contentava di quella faccia, che il creator del tutto data le haveva, non amava le pompe mondane, e le vanitadi, perciò si vestiva di uno habito schietto et honestissimo,” Meduna, Vita, 14. Meduna, Vita, 16. The Apocrypha do not contain any information about the circumstances of the death of Joachim and Anna. Traditionally, the major controversy regarding Mary’s parents, coming from the Apocrypha and transmitted through the Golden Legend, concerns whether or not Anna remarried after the death of Joachim. See Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea con le miniature dal codice Ambrosiano C240 inf, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, Italian transl. cohordinated by Francesco Stella (Florence, 2007), 1004–1006; the story of Anna’s subsequent marriages also became the subject of a book in the eighteenth century: GiovanGrisostomo Trombelli, Vita e culto de’ ss. Genitori di Maria Vergine Gioachino, ed Anna (Bologna, a S. Tommaso d’Aquino: 1768).

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However, Meduna mentions that both her parents died shortly after Mary’s wedding, suggesting familiarity with Aretino’s version of the story: After the celebration of the holy wedding, the Virgin Mary, accompanied by a number of maids, left to Nazareth with her husband Joseph, and with Joachim and Anne, who both died shortly after. She buried them honorably with funeral pomp.24 He also deletes all the scenes in Heaven, when God decides to send Gabriel to announce the birth of Mary (Opere religiose ii, 165–170); instead, he skips straight to the Annunciation, the visit to Elizabeth and the birth of Christ. He starts describing the massacre of the Innocents, in line with Aretino’s Vita di Maria, where the scene is just mentioned without many details (Opere religiose ii, 193), but then he adds details inspired by the long, bloody and horrific description of the massacre in the Umanità: The cruelest [men] were not moved, and the bowels of their hardened hearths did not tremble when they spread the most innocent blood with their cruel sword. One could see some of them, more beastly than human, cutting heads from the body, hands from the arms, feet from the legs; others removing small children from the breasts of the afflicted mothers, keeping their feet while crushing their heads against the walls. Quite a few threw the little ones down the stairs, off the windows and up in the air. One stripped this one, another sliced that one, and one in a way, one in another, they wounded, slipped, and killed that multitude of tender children.25

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“Celebrato lo sponsalitio santo, Maria vergine, accompagnata da più donzelle, se ne andò in Nazzarette con Giuseppe suo marito, e con Gioachino, et Anna che non molto tempo doppo morirono, onde essa con pompa funerale li fece honoratamente seppellire,” Meduna, Vita, 2. “Non si intenerivano i crudelissimi, né tremavano le viscere del cuor lor indurato nello sparger col ferro crudo il sangue innocentissimo, ma come fossero stati fiere e non uomini si vedevano alcuni di loro a spiccar dal busto le teste, dalle braccia le mani, e dalle gambe i piedi, altri a tuor per forza da i seni delle afflitte madri i piccoli bambini, che tuttavia lattavano, e pigliandoli per i piedi darli col capo ne’ muri. Non pochi gittavano i fanciulletti giù per le scale, ne mandavano dalle finestre e ne tiravano nell’aria, chi spolpava questo, chi sventrava quello, e chi ad un modo e chi all’altro feriva, fendeva e amazzava la gran moltitudine di teneri fanciulli,” Meduna, Vita, 41.

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In Book ii of Meduna’s work, the Umanità di Cristo gradually replaces Aretino’s Vita di Maria as the dominant source of inspiration. Meduna still refers to the Vita di Maria, but makes greater use of the Umanità to furnish the account with details about the life of Christ. He moves from one episode to another, cutting massively from the redundant and detailed model, but quotes verbatim entire passages from Aretino. In fact, he practically rewrites the Gospels using Aretino’s words. After the Resurrection of Christ, described in Book iii (following the model of the Umanità), Meduna returns to Aretino’s Vita di Maria, recounting Mary’s life up until her Assumption into Heaven, and continuing to imitate Aretino, as he had already done in the previous Books. To conclude this survey on Aretino’s presence in Meduna’s life of the Virgin, we can say that Meduna used Aretino’s voice, transforming it into something completely different. He aimed to propose an easy reading, with some literary ornamentation; a text which, following the trend of the period, could be addressed to a female audience and offer edifying reading for pious individuals. Meduna’s book is full of images, and it is perfectly in line with the idea of devotional literature propagandised by the Counter Reformation. However, the fact remains that it is based on the banned works of the notorious, so-called ‘Flagello dei Principi’ (‘Scourge of Princes’).

3

Maddalena Campiglia

In 1585, Maddalena Campiglia, a noblewoman from Vicenza, published her Discorso sopra l’Annonciatione della Beata Vergine Maria (Discourse on the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary).26 Maddalena Campiglia, born in 1553, had married Dioniso Colzè in 1576. After a few years, probably around 1580, she had decided to leave her husband, returning to her father’s home and living a secluded life, which, however, allowed her to establish many literary connections with contemporary authors.27 She was probably close to the order of the 26 27

Maddalena Campiglia, Discorso sopra l’Annonciatione della Beata Vergine, et la incarnatione del s. n. Giesu Christo (Vicenza, Perin libraro, & Giorgio Greco: 1585). On Campiglia’s life, see Bernardo Morsolin, Maddalena Campiglia poetessa vicentina del secolo xvi. Episodio biografico (Vicenza, 1882); Sebastiano Rumor, Per una poetessa del secolo xvi (Vicenza, 1897); Giovanni Mantese, “Per un profilo storico della poetessa vicentina Maddalena Campiglia: aggiunte e rettifiche,” Archivio Veneto, 81 (1967): 89–124. See also Giuseppe De Marco, Maddalena Campiglia. La figura e l’opera (Vicenza, 1988); Carlachiara Perrone, “La donna e la penna,” in ‘So che donna amo donna’. La Calisa di Maddalena Campiglia (Galatina, 1996), 27–67; Adriana Chemello, “«Donne a poetar esperte». La « rimatrice dimessa » Maddalena Campiglia,” Versants, 46 (2003): 65–101; Virginia Cox-

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dimesse—lay women living together who dedicated their chaste and austere life to charity and prayer—and her writing of the Discorso may well have been inspired by a desire to become one of them. All her other works, including the pastoral drama Flori (1588) and the eclogue Calisa (1589), were published after the breakdown of her marriage and were not devotional works. In her Discorso, Campiglia tells the story of the Annunciation and her meaning for Christianity, adding some meditations, inspired in part by books for the Rosary, and in part by Gabriel Fiamma’s sermons.28 According to the dedicatory letter, her work was intended as a “consolation for pious and spiritual people” (“consolazione per le persone devote, & spirituali”), as devotional literature and hagiographies were expected to be. However, the book also reflects Campiglia’s literary ambition, as well as her intention to promote a model of marriage in which women play a more active and powerful role. The text is relevant here because, in the section where Campiglia describes the life of Mary before the Annunciation, she used Aretino’s Vita di Maria as a model. A comparison between Campiglia’s Aretinian passages and Aretino’s original work shows that Campiglia often paraphrased Aretino, sometimes even using the same words. In general, she avoided using adjectives as names, which Aretino favoured; she also created dichotomies from single nouns in her source, or changed the order of ideas and sentences, but the content and in most cases the words are basically the same. Campiglia begins her narrative by mentioning the ‘Aretinian’ death of Mary’s parents.29 Like Meduna, she does not describe the circumstances around the last hours of Joachim and Anne’s lives, as Aretino did at some length, but instead starts her narrative when they had just died “on the same day” (“in un istesso giorno”).30 She focuses her attention on Mary’s feelings and her rela-

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Lisa Sampson, “Volume Editors’ Introduction” in Maddalena Campiglia, Flori, A Pastoral Drama. A Bilingual Edition, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Virginia Cox and Lisa Sampson, Translated by Virginia Cox (Chicago, IL; 2004), 1–35; Lori J. Ultsch, “Maddalena Campiglia, ‘Dimessa nel mondano cospetto?’: Secular Celibacy, Devotional Communities, and Social Identity in Early Modern Vicenza,”Forum Italicum, 39 (2005): 350–375, and “Epithalanium Interruptum: Maddalena Campiglia’s New Arcadia,” Modern Language Notes, 120 (2005): 70–92. On Campiglia’s sources for the Discorso, see Eleonora Carinci, “Lives of the Virgin Mary by Women Writers in Post-Tridentine Italy,” (Ph.D dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2009), 130–141. “Essendole di poco morto il Padre & la Madre in un istesso giorno, & letto quasi in un’hora, & ritornato a sé (inteso il caso degli Avi suoi) il marito Joseffo […] si stava tutta dogliosa,” Campiglia, Discorso, 2. Campiglia, Discorso, 2.

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tionship with Joseph, who in Campiglia’s work (in contrast to both traditional accounts and Aretino’s rendering) is a young and virgin man. Campiglia may have drawn her initial inspiration from Aretino, but she then developed the discourse with her own ideas on marriage, which she saw/envisaged as a kind of mutual and equal union, based on friendship and respect, as exemplified by Mary and Joseph. In the scene in Heaven, which follows the first narrative section of the Discorso, the correspondences between Campiglia’s and Aretino’s writings are almost word for word. In both Aretino’s and Campiglia’s works, Heaven is described as a classical council of the gods in which the angels, the blessed souls and God are attributed quite human characteristics. The heavenly scene in both texts depicts the reactions of some souls to the notion that humanity is going to be saved. Here, we find penitent Adam and Eve, who ask God’s forgiveness for original sin and are happy to learn of the imminent salvation of humanity.31 Both Aretino and Campiglia show the reaction of Satan to the happiness of the blessed souls. Here, Campiglia moves away from Aretino somewhat, replacing the image of Satan as a human tyrant with a more neutral reference to the animal world. Campiglia wrote: On the other side, when Satan heard from down the centre [of the Earth] that our salvation and his own ruin were close, almost presaging the brevity of time, he whistled and roared like a poisoned snake and a ferocious lion. He was full and filled with hanger and indignation for the fear to lose his rule on our souls, which had been given to him by our first parents because of their disobedience.32 While Aretino had written: Presaging the advent of the one who would have taken the power that he had exercised until then over human generations, Satan reacted with terrible moans and horrible sighs. Had someone seen him twisting so ferociously, and so ferociously fidgeting, he would have assimilated him to a

31 32

See Opere religiose ii, 166, and Campiglia, Discorso, 9–10. “Satanasso dall’altra parte, sentendo anch’egli fin giù nel centro hormai fatta vicina la salute nostra, & rovina sua, quasi presago della brevità del tempo, a guisa d’avvelenato Serpe, e fiero leone, fischiava, & ruggiva, ripieno & colmo di rabbia e di sdegno, per tema di perder l’imperio, che sopra l’anime nostre gli avevano dato i primi parenti con la disubidienza loro,” Campiglia, Discorso, 11.

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tyrant who had just heard that the weapons and the men of those from whom because of his cruelty the old freedom’s privileges had been stolen, were reaching him.33 In this context, at the beginning of Aretino’s Book ii, God looked at the Earth and decided that it was time to redeem humanity and to incarnate his son in Mary. Campiglia, once again, echoes Aretino, sometimes using the same words, sometimes paraphrasing or resorting to synonyms. Both Aretino and Campiglia report God’s words as he deliberates saving humanity from original sin, and, in this case, too, Campiglia copies Aretino almost to the letter.34 When God decided to redeem humanity and sent Gabriel to announce the good news to Mary, Campiglia, again, bases her account on Aretino.35 At this point, Campiglia argues that, if angels were able to feel envy, they would envy Gabriel for being chosen to inform Mary of her destiny as the mother of Christ; however, she takes care to say that this certainly did not happen, because everyone was very happy for Gabriel. This idea of the angels’ envy is taken directly from the beginning of the Umanità, where, when describing the same episode, Aretino had written that “If envy could arise amongst Angels, it would have arisen as soon as he [Gabriel] was assigned that big duty, because everyone would have loved to be the herald of such a message.”36 When considering the section of the Discorso taking place into Heaven, Maddalena Campiglia’s biographer Bernardo Morsolin stated that, “in addition to enjoying the Gospel stories, Campiglia sometimes lost herself in pieces of pure imagination, mainly inspired by pagan poets. For instance, the council of the blessed souls, described just before God’s decision to send Gabriel to Earth, undoubtely resembles Homer’s descriptions of the gods’ council.”37 Mor33

34 35 36

37

“Satan, presago de lo avenimento di Colui che doveva torgli la potestà che egli essercitò fino allora sopra le generazioni umane, ne faceva segno con gemiti terribili e con sospiri orrendi. Chi lo avesse veduto torcersi cosí fieramente e cosí fieramente smaniare, lo avrebbe simigliato a un tiranno che sente avvicinarse l’arme e gl’uomini di quegli ai quali la crudeltà sua ha rubbato i privilegi de l’antica libertade,” Opere religiose ii, 167. See Campiglia, Discorso, 11–12; Opere religiose ii, 168–169. See Campiglia, Discorso, 14–15; Opere religiose ii, 169. “Onde sì fra gli angeli potesse nascere invidia, ci saria nata tosto che egli ebbe la gran commessione, perché ogn’uno vorrebbe essere stato il messo di cotanta imbasciata,” Opere religiose i, 263. See Morsolin, Maddalena Campiglia, 20: “Talvolta [Campiglia] non si appaga della pura narrazione Evangelica, ma si abbandona a squarci di pura fantasia, ispirati più che ad altro a’ poeti pagani. Simile quasi in tutto a quelli di Omero, è, non v’ha dubio, il congresso de’ beati nel cielo prima che il padre eterno si determini a mandare in terra l’arcangelo Gabriele.”

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solin had obviously not drawn a connection between Campiglia and Aretino, and attributed to Campiglia “pieces of imagination” that in fact originated in Aretino’s Vita di Maria Vergine. However, Morsolin had certainly noticed quite an unusual use of rhetoric in Campiglia, which in fact derives from Aretino’s menzogne poetiche. Moreover, this humanized and almost pagan description of Heaven and its inhabitants sits quite oddly in the post-Tridentine period, when all combinations of sacred and profane images were frowned upon by the censors. Campiglia, unlike Meduna, was clearly not concerned by this. When describing the life of Mary before the Annunciation, Aretino spends several pages reporting a scene in which Mary, still living in the temple, learned from the Bible that a virgin would give birth to the Son of God, and asked an angel if she could become a servant of such a blessed woman. Whereas Meduna had omitted this scene, Campiglia refers to it with plenty of details. When the Angel replies to Mary that her destiny holds in store something greater than being a simple servant of such a lucky virgin, Aretino’s Mary asks: “Would the Superior Mercy allow me to clean her shoes or touch her clothes?,” while Campiglia’s Mary says: “Would my Master allow me to touch her clothes and speak to her?”38 In both accounts, Mary is so humble that she cannot conceive of the possibility of being the lucky virgin herself. Nevertheless, Campiglia adds the very meaningful wish on Mary’s part to talk to such a woman, engaging her in an intellectual exchange. On the theme of female community, Campiglia also gives a description of the small group of “donzelle” who left the temple at the same time as Mary to accompany her in her secular life, and she uses again Aretino as a source. In addition, in describing Mary’s physical features, Campiglia borrows Aretino’s words, when she writes that, but she does not emphasize the very sensual description of the dress of the Virgin given by Aretino, which probably appeared excessive to her.39 Campiglia’s language is less flamboyant than Aretino’s; when she rewrites a section of his work, she modifies the text, trying to make it different through paraphrases and other means, but the source is nonetheless evident. If, on the one hand, Campiglia selects passages from Aretino which help her to express her own ideas, on the other, she refers to details of Mary’s life that can only be found in Aretino, as if to stress the originality of her model. We do not know 38

39

“Vorrà forse la superna misericordia, che io le netti i calzari, o che le tocchi i vestimenti?,” Opere religiose ii, 132; “vorrà il mio signore ch’io le tocchi i vestimenti, & seco ragioni?,” Campiglia, Discorso, 31. See the table in the Appendix for a comparison of the ways in which Campiglia and other authors used Aretino’s physical description of the Virgin.

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how far contemporary readers were in fact able to recognize Aretino, but it is plausible that they did, considering that Aretino’s works, despite the censorships, were well known and that Aretino was generally appreciated in Baroque Italy. Certainly, the model ceased to be recognised later on, when Morsolin wrote about Campiglia. The judgement pronounced by Morsolin on the language of the Discorso is significant in this regard: The only value of Campiglia’s Discourse is a certain clarity of the text, which is, however, damaged by a certain lasciviousness of images, foreshadowing the Seicento, and by a verbose and contorted written style, which, with only a few exceptions, is a common defect of writers from that century.40 Campiglia’s “lasciviouness of images” and the “verbose and contorted written style,” both recognized as typical of the Baroque aesthetic, did in fact derive from Aretino. Nevertheless, although Campiglia borrowed from Aretino’s imagery and words to represent the Virgin, she did not choose to follow Aretino’s style systematically, as Lucrezia Marinella would do less than twenty years later.

4

Lucrezia Marinella

The Vita di Maria Vergine (1602) by the Venetian writer Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1647) is another, and probably the most meaningful example of female use of Aretino’s Life of Mary in Post-Tridentine period.41 Together with Moderata Fonte (Venice, 1555–1592), and later followed by Arcangela Tarabotti (Venice, 1604–1652), Marinella is famous for being one of the first women in Italy to make a contribution to the contemporary querelle des femmes. She wrote La Nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, a treatise in which she directly refutes the arguments formulated in Giuseppe Passi’s Dei donneschi difetti and discusses Aristotelian ideas about women, demonstrating their superiority over men.42 Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, Marinella 40

41

42

Morsolin, Maddalena Campiglia, 21: “Unico pregio del Discorso della Campiglia è una tal quale chiarezza di dettato, a cui non lascia peraltro di nuocere una certa lascivia d’immagini, che accenna al Seicento, e quel fare prolissamente contorto, che salve poche eccezioni, è vizio comune ai letterati del secolo.” Lucrezia Marinella, Vita di Maria Vergine Imperatrice dell’Universo. Descritta in Prosa, et in Ottava Rima (Venice, Barezo Barezi: 1602). The work was re-printed in 1604, then slightly enlarged in 1610, and with further additions in 1617. Lucrezia Marinella published the treatise Le nobiltà, et eccellenze delle donne: et i difetti, e

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also published several other works, experimenting with a number of different literary genres, such as the epic poem and the pastoral novel.43 She became the most prolific female writer of her time: besides the Vita di Maria Vergine, Marinella was also the author of six other religious works—mostly lives of saints—characterized by a high literary style, and published in several editions in the course of her lifetime.44 The choice of religious themes was characteristic of the period in which she wrote, and reflects the propagandizing aims of the Catholic Church at the time. It is interesting to note that Marinella developed the literary qualities of religious writing. As well as devotional content, she paid great attention to style and language, bringing remarkable erudition to her subject, and her writings lack the spirituality and mysticism present, for instance, in Campiglia’s work. Indeed, it is not coincidental that Marinella’s life of the Virgin is introduced by a disquisition on rhetoric and style. In his Vita di Pietro Aretino Giammaria Mazzuchelli wrote that: “Lucrezia Marinella imitated him [Aretino] when writing her Vita di Maria Vergine in prose; in her preface she claimed to refer to Apuleius as an authority on this manner of writing;”45 and later Giovanni Laini stated that “Aretino was present in every page.”46 The reference to Apuleius is found in Marinella’s preface to her Vita di Maria, the only instance in all her literary production in which the author defines her style. Here, she affirms that her work “reaches the peak of the height of eloquence” (“tiene il sommo dell’altezza dell’eloquenza”), contradicting the Aristotelian idea that the high literary style needed to represent

43

44

45

46

mancamenti de gli huomini (Venice, Gio Battista Ciotti: 1600), which was republished in an expanded version under the title La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne, co’diffetti, e mancamenti de gli huomini in 1601 by Ciotti and in 1621 by Gio Battista Combi. Giuseppe Passi I donneschi difetti (Milan, Pacifico Pontio: 1599). For instance, the epic poem L’Enrico, overo Bisantio acquistato, poema heroico (Venice, Ghirardo Imberti: 1635); the pastoral novel in prose and verse Arcadia Felice (Venice, Gio. Battista Ciotti: 1605); and the later treatise Essortationi alle donne et agli altri, se a loro saranno a grado (Venice, Francesco Valvasense: 1645). See Lucrezia Marinella, La Colomba sacra. Poema heroico (Venice, Gio. Battista Ciotti: 1595); Vita del serafico, et glorioso S. Francesco […]. Con un discorso del Riuolgimento amoroso, uerso la somma bellezza (Venice, Pietro Maria Bertano & fratelli: 1597, reprinted in 1606); Rime sacre (Venice, Collosini: 1603); De’ gesti heroici e della vita maravigliosa della serafica S. Caterina da Siena (Venice, Barezzo Barezzi: 1624); Le vittorie di Francesco il Serafico. Li passi gloriosi della diva Chiara (Padua, Giulio Crivellari: 1643); Holocausto d’amore della vergine Santa Giustina (Venice, Matteo Leni: 1648). “Lucrezia Marinella scrivendo in prosa la Vita di Maria Vergine lo imitò, e nella prefazione pretende di dar autorità a questa maniera di scrivere coll’esempio d’Apulejo,” Giammaria Mazzucchelli, La Vita di Pietro Aretino (Brescia, Pietro Pianta: 1741), 129. Giovanni Laini, Il vero Aretino. Saggio critico (Florence, 1955), 309.

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sublime subject matter was reserved for poetry alone. Marinella found support in authors such as Isocrates and Gorgias of Leontini, Plato, Marsilio Ficino, Apuleius and Boccaccio, who used “all those ornaments befitting poets, and in particular a wealth of epithets, hyperbole and descriptions” in their prose.47 Marinella says that Aristotle defines Gorgia’s style as “poetic elocution” (“elocutione poetica”), as he used in his prose “all those copious ornaments, all those magnificent and archaic words, that one normally finds in poetry.”48 Starting from the assumption that “great, magnificent and divine actions, which exceed human works, require a magniloquent and admirable language,” Marinella said that she chose “this poetic language” (“questo modo di parlar poetico”), which is suitable for the noble subject of her work: she is going to use “all the poetic ornaments when talking about most glorious actions and about people who exceed nobility itself.”49 Marinella concludes that this “style which encompasses all the ornamentation of eloquence” (“stile che tiene in sé tutto l’ornato dell’eloquenza”) will also be appreciated by the followers of Aristotle. In fact, she did not consider poetry to be better than prose tout court, but agreed with the idea that poetic elements determine a high style and are necessary to describe noble subjects. With these words Marinella seems to describe Aretino’s style, and her idea of parlar poetico is very similar to Aretino’s menzogne poetiche. I have demonstrated elsewhere that Marinella uses Aretino’s words and style on every page, rewriting his work, and producing something close to plagiarism.50 In some cases she modifies or omits passages, which might appear inappropriate to post-Tridentine sensibility. This is true, for example, of the episode of Mary’s conception, in which she seems to adapt Aretino’s words to post-Tridentine morality, although her style, images and language clearly derive from Aretino. Both Marinella and Aretino make plain that the conception of Mary took place without pleasure. Nevertheless Marinella merely alludes to the sexual act and to Aretino’s allusive description. She only writes that Mary’s conception had happened without “desire for pleasure” (“desiderio di piacere”) and

47 48 49

50

“Tutti quegli ornamenti che a’ Poeti si convengono, et in particolare dell’abondanza de gli Epiteti, delle Hiperbole, e delle descrittioni,” Marinella, Vita [1602], fol. a3v. “Tutti que’ copiosi ornamenti, e tutte quelle parole magnifiche, e peregrine, che si sogliono nella poesia adoperare”, Marinella, Vita [1602], fol. a3v. “Le attioni che hanno del grande, del magnifico, e del divino, e che trapassano le operationi humane, ricercano un modo di dire grande, & mirabile,” Marinella, Vita [1602], fol. a4r, and “Tutti gli ornamenti poetici, ragionando di attioni grandissime, e di persone che eccedono l’istessa nobiltà,” Marinella, Vita [1602], fol. a4v. For a more detailed analysis of Marinella’s use of Aretino, see Eleonora Carinci, “Una riscrittura di Pietro Aretino: La Vita di Maria Vergine di Lucrezia Marinella e le sue fonti,” The Italianist, 33.3 (2013): 361–389.

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“with all the innocence and purity of their souls and bodies” (“con tutta la candidezza, e con tutta la purità de’ lor animi, e de’ lor corpi”).51 While Aretino does give more physical details: he names a “pudic bed” (“letto pudico”) compared to an altar in a church; he mentions the “carnal desire” (“desiderio di carne”) and the “sensual pleasure” (“piacere di voluttà”) (Opere religiose ii, 104). Even if he mentions desire and pleasure to underlining their absence, Aretino produces a passage full of allusions and similitudes, attenuated by Marinella probably because unacceptable in Post-Tridentine period. Something similar happens when Marinella describes Mary’s physical features. Like Campiglia, she echoes Aretino’s words, which recall the traditional characteristics of Petrarchan idealized woman: And not only did she supersede the beauty of all human creatures, but even that of all the heavenly angels. Her hair, fine and wavy, as can be truly believed, was hidden beneath a delicate veil, and was spun of gold far brighter than the sun. The arches of her eyebrows, darting arrows of divine love into the breasts of angels, were blacker and more glistening than ebony. Her modest, gentle eyes spread rays of grace and salvation: her sweet glances prompted chaste desires and holy wishes in others’ breasts. The pink of roses and the white of lilies paled in comparison with her cheeks. Her lips could equal rubies had they been quarried in Heaven: even when polished, the highest grade of white ivory never reached the delicate glow of her limbs, supported by life’s breath, by the power of her senses and strength of mind. And in her every aspect was a touch of the ineffable, which, being ineffable, cannot be put into words. All that remains is wonder at the miracle, and the miracle of wonder. Her divine beauty was bestowed by nature and by Heaven, not simulated by art, and appeared adorned with all those delights that the heavenly treasure chests almost hoard in their breasts.52 However, instead of the allusive language used by Aretino to describe Mary’s clothes and what was visible of her body, Marinella simply states that the Virgin inspired “chaste desires and holy whishes” (“voglie caste e desideri santi”).

51

52

Lucrezia Marinella, Life of the Virgin Mary, in Vittoria Colonna-Chiara Matraini-Lucrezia Marinella, Who is Mary? Three Early Modern Women on the idea of the Virgin Mary, ed. and trans. Susan Haskins (Chicago, IL, 2009), 141; Marinella, Vita [1602], fol. 9r. Marinella, Life of the Virgin Mary, 152; Marinella, Vita [1602], fol. 16v. See the table in appendix for the original passage.

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Regarding Mary’s clothes, she only mentions the “whiteness and simplicity” of Mary’s “pure, plain, single robe.”53 In this way she alludes to Aretino’s view, without, however, his voyeuristic aptitude. She records the Aretinian allusion that Mary’s appearance can induce desire, but she does not add many details. In fact, Marinella only alludes to Aretino’s more explicit allusions. On some occasions, like Meduna and Campiglia, Marinella also refers to the Umanità, using passages in which the descriptions were more effective than in the Vita di Maria. An example of this is the depiction of the place where Jesus was born: whilst in Aretino’s Vita di Maria it is the traditional manger built in ancient ruins adapted by humans as a shed (Opere religiose ii, 186), in the Umanità it is a more artistically connotated and rhetorically ornate representation of ancient ruins, that the nature had surrounded with plants and thorns, typical of some contemporary paintings (Opere religiose i, 275). Marinella, in her Vita di Maria, refers to the Umanità when describing the nativity scene. She uses the same source to describe John the Baptist in the desert, and again when she recounts the last moments of Christ’s life and Mary’s reaction, which Aretino had described in a more detailed and emotionally charged way in the Umanità than in the Vita. Although her systematic re-elaboration and re-use of Aretino’s works may resemble Meduna’s approach, Marinella’s Vita is completely different from Meduna’s work. Whereas Meduna incorporated Aretino’s most canonical passages, to enrich the style of his work, Marinella uses massively Aretino’s material. Although sometimes she mitigates some Aretinian sentences and images, possibly because they looked too audacious for her time, she adapts them maintaining some of their original meaning. Marinella seems to challenge the model, trying to use his rhetorically ornate style autonomously, sometimes by inventing new images and metaphors. This finds a good illustration in her description of the massacre of the innocents. In Matthew’s Gospel (2. 16– 18), the scene is described in a few words, but the cruelty of the episode had inspired the imagination of many painters and its pathos was often represented in their works.54 Marinella’s description is definitely the result of the dissemination of this horrifying and grievous scene, but her style is, once again, similar to Aretino’s.

53 54

Marinella, Vita [1602], fol. 16 v. Examples of paintings of the Massacre of the Innocents include Giotto’s frescoes in the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua and Tintoretto’s painting in the Scuola grande di San Rocco in Venice. The episode was the subject of a poem by Giovan Battista Marino, La strage degli Innocenti (Venice, Giacomo Scaglia: 1633).

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In his life of the Virgin, Aretino merely states that one hundred and forty thousand children were killed, omitting any description of the massacre; by contrast, in the Umanità he goes into great detail (Opere religiose i, 291–297) and Marinella was certainly inspired by his narration. Marinella starts out along similar lines to Aretino (“Ecco […] il balenar dei ferri”), but then does diverge from it. She uses Aretino’s ornate style full of pathos and macabre details, again borrowing his aptitude for vivid painterly descriptions, giving, however, her personal interpretation of the episode and using her own repertoire of images: Behold (as many have written), the sound and flash of swords are now heard and seen by the earth’s sorrow; behold the shrieks are heard, which spread to Heaven the wretched anguish moving in the mothers’ breasts. […] Growing offspring were torn from arms, breasts, and laps with violent ferocity. Breasts, cradles, roads, houses, beds, and squares were seen full of blood, and limbs were cut away from the innocence of delicate bodies. Here a young girl, who saw her son torn from her arms, whom she loved more than her own life (like a gentle plant plucked from the earth in which it took on life and nourishment), taken by his feet, and the sword given to the tender neck, his head and remains thrown to the ground. Another woman saw her two little boys torn from her arms, and, with bestial evil, the heads of the poor brothers hit together so much that the one killed the other. […] But listen to something strange: while a beautiful little boy, similar in appearance to an angel, was gurgling, a child in his mother’s lap, and in whose breast moved simplicity and innocence, who received kisses from his mother and returned them, he received a sword blow in his stomach from one of the villains so that the milk that she had given him only a little time before leapt out of the child’s mouth into his mother’s.55 55

Marinella, Life of the Virgin Mary, 195: “Ecco già si sente, e si vede per l’infelicità della terra il suono, & il balenar de’ ferri: ecco si sentono le strida, che sparge al Cielo la miseria della pietà, che si muove nel seno delle madri. […] Già si vedevano i seni, le culle, le strade, le case, i letti, e le piazze piene di sangue, e di membra recise dall’innocenza de’ dilicati corpi: ecco una giovanetta, che si vede sterpare dalle braccia il figliuolo amato più che la propria vita, quasi pianta gentile svelta dal terreno, in cui prendeva vita e nutrimento e pigliarlo per li piedi e darli col ferro nel tenero del collo, e gettare la testa, & il rimanente a terra, Un’altra vede togliersi di braccio due figliuolini, e percotere tanto insieme i capi de’ duo miseri fratelli, che l’uno uccise l’altro, e l’altro l’uno. […] Ma udite cosa strana. Mentre un vago fanciullo simile nell’aspetto ad un Angelo stava nel grembo della madre pargoleggiando ne’ vezzi, che nel suo petto moveva la semplicità, & l’innocenza, e che riceveva da lei basci, i quali erano da lui a lei scambievolmente renduti, li fu dato da uno de’ scelerati col ferro ne lo stomacho, in modo che fece saltare da la bocca del fanciullo nella bocca della madre il latte, ch’ella poco innanzi dato gli avea,” Marinella, Vita [1602], fol. 44r–v.

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In the description of the massacre, Marinella seems to challenge the model. While Meduna had simply summarized and shortened Aretino’s long description, Marinella changes images and adds details creating something new, but as effective and pathetic as the model.

5

Orazio Guarguante

Aretino’s Vita di Maria influenced subsequent lives of the Virgin, and not only those written in prose. In 1586, the philosopher and physician Orazio Guarguante of Soncino (1554–1611) published a short poem in ottava rima on the physical and moral virtues of the Virgin, Eccellenze di Maria Vergine.56 Not surprisingly, the text once again addresses a woman, Caterina of Austria, Duchess of Savoy. It is offered to her as a gift on the occasion of the birth of her first son, and, as usual, the dedicatory letter evokes connections between the new mother and the Virgin Mary. However, in describing Mary’s physical features, Guarguante clearly draws on Aretino’s Vita di Maria, also alluding to the Aretinian sensual description of Mary’s clothes, that Campiglia and Marinella had omitted. Mary’s “soft, simple, thin robe” only allowed to see “the throat and the feet.” But Guarguante feels the need to mitigate Aretino’s gaze, by underlining that such kind of dress was “an ancient habit of honest women” (“Fu antica usanza de le donne oneste”). In this way he does address the reader on its decorum rather than on the desire the image might have inspired. If, on this occasion, Meduna had chosen to bypass Aretino, opting for a more canonical and decorous image of the Virgin, Guarguante and the other authors did indeed use Aretino, adapting his words to a Post-Tridentine context, but still maintaining most of Aretino’s imagery.57

56

57

Orazio Guarguante da Soncino, Eccellenze di Maria Vergine (Venice, Gioliti: 1586), reprinted in Venice in 1599 by Giacomo Vincenti. Guarguante’s poem is also mentioned by Moderata Fonte in her Merito delle donne. See the table in appendix for a comparison.

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Conclusion

In conclusion, it is clear that Aretino’s Vita di Maria Vergine and Umanità di Cristo were read and used as sources even after Trent, as Aretino’s style was in tune with baroque aesthetics, and represented a suitable source of images and rhetorical tropes for religious literature. Devotional works, very popular between the two centuries, were primarily underpinned by propagandistic intentions and were supposed to replace prophane readings. It is therefore likely that Aretino’s sacred writings were to some extent tolerated by the Church, even if they were formally in the index, at least until they were read as useful sources for making edifying literature more entertaining readings. Meduna broadly followed this trend. Although he made constant use of Aretino’s works, he normalised the model, using Aretino mainly to enrich his style. On the other hand, Aretino’s life of the Virgin offered women of the period, such as Campiglia and Marinella, the opportunity to express their literary ability within a safe devotional framework, proposing a model of Mary who was significantly more active than the one represented in other contemporary lives of the Virgin. Although they tried to make their works acceptable, they were certainly more audacious than Meduna in the way they used the model: they transformed it, yet maintained most of its peculiar characteristics. In addition, it is worth noting that, generally speaking, women’s works were taken less seriously by the censors than those of their male counterparts. It follows that, within certain limits, women may have had relative freedom to challenge Aretino without incurring the suspicion of censors—as, indeed, is suggested by the works of Campiglia and Marinella. Therefore, it is safe to say that far from being sent into oblivion by the Counter Reformation, Aretino’s religious writings enjoyed a new lease of life in the seventeenth century—a fact that has often been neglected by critics. Certainly, his ‘presence’ had a different impact compared to when the author was alive, and probably did not imply, at least consciously, any heterodox idea, but it still deserves critical attention in order to interpret the subsequent literary production and Aretino’s afterlife.

“le menzogne poetiche diventano evangeli”

7

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Appendix

Pietro Aretino, Vita di Maddalena Campiglia, Maria Vergine in Marini, Discorso, 1585 Opere religiose ii

Orazio Guarguante, Eccellenze di Maria Vergine, 1586

Lucrezia Marinella, Vita di Maria Vergine, 1602

Lo avorio candido e puro nel più eccellente grado non arrivò mai, con il terso per cui lampeggia la sua morbidezza, al delicato de le membra che le reggevano i fiati de la vita, le virtù dei sensi e i vigori degli spiriti, talché tutte insieme parevano una mistura di gigli lattei spruzzati nei rilievi de le congiunture di quella grana che dipigne le guancie de la più fresca e de la più splendida aurora. Iddio la creò tale perché, oltre a lo averci a seminare la Parola sua, ella facesse fede quaggiuso di quello che si puote lassuso. Ma per non essere mai suto compreso da l’arte non che da la natura corpo sí perfetto di forma, non ardisco di aguagliarlo a veruna figura di marmo né di carne. […] La Vergine si adobbava d’uno abito puro come la sua mente e candido come le sue opere: usciva dal delicato de la sua bianchezza più bello splendore che non esce de la tela d’ariento ferita dal sole. La zona che poco di sotto al sacro del petto fervido cingeva la veste lucida, la quale non consentiva

Come candide havea l’opre, e la mente, Tal candido havea, e puro il portamento, Splendea il fervido manto rilucente, Qual ferita da sol tela d’argento. La zona che di sotto al petto ardente Cingea la veste in bel componimento, Del Sciamito era stesso de la gonna, Onde parea celeste Dea, non Donna.

E non solamente vinceva il bello di tutte le creature humane, ma anchora di tutti gli Angeli superni: I suoi capelli, che sottilissimi, e crespi ascondevano la loro bellezza sotto il sottile di un velo, vincevano tanto il vivace dell’oro, quanto lo vince il Sole: gli archi delle ciglia saettanti ne’ petti de gli Angeli strali di divino amore avanzavano il negro, & il lucido, che si mira nell’Ebano: gli occhi modesti, e gratiosi diffondevano raggi di gratia, e di salute: il soave de’ suoi sguardi creava ne’ petti altrui voglie caste, e desiderii Santi: perdeva appo le sue guancie il vermiglio delle rose, & il candido de’ gigli: la sua bocca si poteva agguagliare a rubini, se nascessero nelle miniere celesti. L’avorio candido nel più eccellente grado, non giunse mai col terso, per cui lampeggia al delicato delle membra, che erano rette da i fiati della vita, dalle virtù de’ sensi, e da’ vigori degli spiriti: Et in ogni sua parte era quel non so che, che per non si potere dire rimane nespresso nello

Ma al lucido delle tue biondissime trecce perderebbe di splendore il più fin oro delle più vere, & più reali miniere, ne alcuna soavità averebbe il fino musco dell’arabia felice in paragone delle tue fragrantissime respirationi, & l’alabastro ruvido scorza di selvaggia quercia sarebbe, in rispetto alle divine tue membra. Questa donna divina non haveva di latte le sue carni, non di neve, & d’argento il viso, non d’ebano le ciglia, non di zaffiri gl’occhi, non di rose le guancie. I gigli lattei, al pari del bellissimo collo, & seno perderebbono di candore: L’orientali perle più preggiate, i fiammeggianti rubini con li bianchi suoi denti, & colorite labbra sono vil paragone, così leggiadro, & svelto era poi il restante di lei, che mente humana qui giù non potria giamai con l’altezza dell’intelletto giungere a immaginarne una minima parte (38).

Quell’habito Arabesco Magistrale, Quella morbida schietta sottil veste, Lampeggiava nel vago del mortale D’immortal raggio, di splendor Celeste: Scopriva sol la gola, e’l piè, che tale Fu antica usanza de le donne honeste: Ne la Divinità de la sembianza Facea solo a se stessa simiglianza. […] A le treccie non era l’oro uguale, Né l’ebano a le ciglia, né il Zaffiro A gli occhi, né a le guancie orientale Ostro, o a le labbia il bel rubin d’Epiro,

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(cont.) Pietro Aretino, Vita di Maddalena Campiglia, Maria Vergine in Marini, Discorso, 1585 Opere religiose ii

Orazio Guarguante, Eccellenze di Maria Vergine, 1586

Lucrezia Marinella, Vita di Maria Vergine, 1602

che se le vedesse se non il piede e la gola, era de lo sciamito de la istessa gonna, la cui sottile morbidezza, cedendo a le molestie del vento, iscopriva quella parte de le gambe, de le ginocchia e dei fianchi che ci improntava il suo respirare, onde poteva affermarsi dal sano de lo intero giudicio ella confarsi con la semplicità de la sembianza e con la facilità del portamento solamente a sé medesima e agli angeli. Le sue treccie non erano d’oro, né le sue ciglia d’ebano, né i suoi occhi di zafiro, né le sue guancie d’ostro, né le sue labbra di rubini, né i suoi denti di perle: ad altro bisogna simigliar ciò, perché in ogni cosa di lei si stava quel non so che il quale, per non si potere esprimere, si rimane nel tacito de la considerazione. (138– 139)

Cedean le perle a i denti, et immortale Raggio dal volto suo spuntava in giro Un non so che ogni parte havea d’honore Ch’inespresso riman, ne lo stupore (fol. B 1r– v).

stupore della maraviglia e nella maraviglia dello stupore. […] E ella non isplendeva fra quelle porpore, e fra quegli ori sotto le quali cose stanno gonfiate le tumide vanitadi delle donne, ma tra la purità e la schietezza del candor di una sola vesta, la quale era un decoro della pompa dello spirito, & i fregi belli che in lei si miravano si vedeano contesti di viltade inculta (fol. 16v).

part 6 Networks

∵

chapter 16

Aretino as a Writer of Letters Paul Larivaille

When the 400 crowns a year are given to me for my living expenses, I will spin tales of the fame of your King with my truth. I am a Captain too, and my militia does not steal its wages, does not cause mutinous revolt, nor surrender castles. On the contrary, with the troops of my inks, with truth painted onto my banners, I acquire more glory for the prince I serve than armed men can ever conquer territories. My pen pays honor and blame in cash. In a single morning, lacking other stories to occupy my pen, I divulge praise and rebuke not according to those I love and hate, but according to those who merit being loved and hated […].1 These few lines mark, at forty-five years of age, a culmination of Aretino’s career, the moment in which, in response to the French proposition of an annual stipend twice as much the one assigned him a year before by Charles v, “[…] when he wanted to promise to write about the Emperor, as of his Majesty (Francis i), according to merits and qualities of each of them, not forgetting the Truth.”2 Aretino defines himself as a captain of the pen and establishes the rules that from now on will govern relations not only with the two sovereigns, but with society as a whole. Both to complete and concretize this military metaphor, scholars often invoke a few other of Aretino’s earlier writings: on 22 June 1537, a note accompanying the first modest dispatch to Francesco Marcolini of “a few letters” to be printed “with diligence and on fine paper,” insistently proclaimed to be a totally disinterested gift, from an Aretino determined

1 “Quando i cccc scudi l’anno mi si consegnano al vivere, con la verità mia favellerò de la fama del Re vostro. Perché ancor io son Capitano, e la milizia mia non ruba le paghe, non amuttina le genti, né dà via le rocche. Anzi con le schiere de i suoi inchiostri, col vero dipinto ne le sue insegne, acquista più gloria al principe che ella serve, che gli uomini armati terre. Poi la mia penna paga altri d’onore e di biasimi in contanti. Io in una mattina senza altre istorie divulgo le lodi e i vituperi di coloro non ch’io adoro e odio, ma di quelli che meritano d’essere adorati e odiati […],” Lettere i, 216, 8 June 1537, to the “Great Master” of France, Anne de Montmorency. 2 “[…] Quando […] volesse promettere scrivere de l’Imperatore, come di sua Maestà [Francis i], secondo li meriti e qualità delli fatti de ciascuno, non perdonando alla Verità,”lsa i, 224, 216– 217, by Ieronimo Comitolo, 17 May 1534 (actually 1537, since the following letter is dated 1 June 1537).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_018

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to arrange “with God’s favor, that the courtesy of the Princes pays for the labors of the writer, and not the misery of the one who buys them.”3 And the day after, in the letter to the Milanese Paolo Pietrasanta, he confesses “to having recently acquired the knowledge of himself,” to having “refuted every past composition,” and affirms “beginning to master the craft of writing.”4 Although it is not possible to be certain of the sincerity, even if illusory, of a profession of disinterest, after the clamorous commercial success not only of the first two Marcolini editions of 1538 but of the other ten editions—pirated, for the most part—that followed in the meantime, this profession of disinterest was destined to disappear from the third Marcolini edition of 1542. And if one can be even less sure that his unconvincing repudiation of all his previous works and the enigmatic affirmation of his new beginning were not apt responses to valorize by contrast the “perfect wisdom”5 granted to the correspondent more than to a strict sense of truth, nothing seems opposed to dating the beginning of Il primo libro de le lettere di M. Pietro Aretino to the first week of June of 1537. Despite the fact that a letter from a Roman correspondent from November 1535 and various others to and from Aretino could attest to his intention to collect his own letters, it is unclear how he could have asked for his previous letters before 7 June 1536, the date of an important letter on the triumphal apparatus for Charles v’s visit to Florence. He sent this letter to Giorgio Vasari without keeping a copy for himself.6 The first reliable document is his letter from 20 June 1536 in which, Considering that the false modesty with which Aretino explains his carelessness masks a presumably nascent—or at least recent—regret for not

3 “Poche lettere […] con diligenza e in fogli gentili […] con il favor di Dio, che la cortesia de i Principi [gli] paghi le fatiche de lo scrivere, e non la miseria di chi le compra,” Lettere i, Appendix 1, 513 (The letter is only published in M1–M2, not in M3, the third edition called “seconda,” from 1542). On this point, see also Brian Richardson’s essay in this volume. 4 “[…] di aver da poco in qua la conoscenza di [sé] medesimo [e] rifiutata ogni composizione […] fatta per lo adietro […] cominci[are] a imparare e a scrivere,” Lettere i, 226, 23 June 1537. 5 “Sapienza perfetta.” 6 See Lettere i, 288–289, 23 September 1537, to M. Giorgio Pittore: “If it is possible, my boy, to find the letter in which I depicted the triumphs that were made for the Emperor, when his majesty came to Florence, send me a copy, because I wish to add it to the 200 or more that I intend to have printed. But there would be more than two thousand if I, who do not value them at all, would not have sent them to whom they went, without holding onto the originals” (“Se gli è possibile, figliuolo, di trovar la lettra, ne la quale vi replicai i trionfi che si fecero a l’Imperadore, quando la maestà sua venne a Fiorenza, mandatemene la copia; perché io averei caro di porla al numero di più di ducento ch’io ne faccio stampare. Ma sarieno più di due milla, se io che non le apprezzo punto, non l’avessi mandate a chi esse andarono, senza serbarmene gli originali”).

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having thought about “hold[ing] onto a copy,” it is legitimate to see this as the first reliable confession of Aretino’s desire to retrieve his letters: a confession, however, which does not yet permit the inference of any intention of publishing them, or at least of gathering them for a specific volume.7 The sudden awakening of international tensions provoked by the FrancoTurkish treaty in February 1536 could only contribute to the delay of the appearance of the first reliable traces of Aretino’s intention to publish the letters he was collecting. Armed conflict resumed between the Empire and France, now strengthened by the Ottoman fleet. Italy was destined to yet again become a theater of war operations, exposed to the plundering of Barbary pirates on the coasts, with Venice as outpost of the Italian peninsula and of the Christian world. Pietro Aretino was angry with the king of France who had neglected his advances for the previous three years, while the imperial party secretly courted him, in hopes of an open acceptance of their cause, and seeing his interests coincide with those not only of his adopted homeland, but—he thought— of all of Christendom, he had taken the opportunity to settle accounts with Francis i and to pull off an abrupt volte-face in favor of Charles v, whom he proclaimed to be the last bastion of the Christian faith against “Muhammad’s armies.”8 By year’s end, in the weeks in which Pietro was struggling to overcome the administrative delays that deferred the payment of the imperial stipend of 200 crowns on the revenues of the state of Milan attributed to him since mid7 “Considerando che la finta modestia con cui Aretino spiega la sua trascuraggine maschera presumibilmente un nascente—o perlomeno recente—rammarico di non aver pensato prima a «tenerne copia», sarà legittimo vedere la prima indubbia confessione di una volontà di ricuperare le sue lettere anteriori: una confessione, però, dalla quale niente autorizza a inferire già una qualche intenzione di pubblicarle, o perlomeno di raccoglierle in un volume specifico,” Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1997), 221. See Lettere i, 127–128, to Cavalier Malvezzi: “But who would believe that I would go begging for my things? My neglect comes from my never having judged that they merit any fame, since I wrote them casually as occasional letters. They are certainly worthy of little praise; if they have any merit at all, attribute it to the courtesy of others. And the fact that I am not at all proud of them is proven by my not holding onto a copy.” (“Ma chi crederà che io vada mendicando le cose mie? Così fatta trascuraggine deriva dal mio non aver mai giudicato che meritino fama veruna, perché io le ho scritte a caso e famigliarmente. E certo son degne di poca lode, e, se punto ne hanno, attribuiscasi a l’altrui cortesia. E ch’io non sia punto superbo per ciò, ne fa argomento il mio non tenerne copia alcuna”). 8 “Le armi machomettane,” Paul Larivaille, L’ Arétin entre Renaissance et Maniérisme (Lille, 1972), Appendix v, “Deux lettres de l’ Arétin au roi de France,” 759–792 and 1301–1321; the text of the first is collected in Lettere di, a, su Pietro Aretino nel fondo Bongi dell’Archivio di Stato di Lucca, ed. Paul Larivaille (Nanterre, 1989), ii, 4, 57–63; introduction and commentary rewritten in Italian, in Paul Larivaille, Varia aretiniana (1972–2004) (Manziana, 2005), 59–79.

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June,9 two letters were disseminated under his name in Milan: one against the emperor and the other against the condottiere Cesare Fregoso. Both letters were destined to bear decisive weight on his future.10 The two months that he sought to have his innocence recognized would have been insufficient for a proclamation to be made of his innocence, were he to find himself within reach of imperial thugs. By that point, he had determined once and for all never to lift his Venetian exile.11 After the disappointing outcome of a decade of loyalty to Francis i, the misfortune of the Milanese pamphlets ended up dissuading him from tying his fate to one or another of the two major European sovereigns, and a month later, in May, the lavish offers by the French, mentioned above, came to comfort him in the now immutable decision to align himself with the cleverly balanced politics of the Venetian republic, the only possible guarantee for his security and his pen’s independence. Presumably this is the state of mind in which Pietro had initially conceived the project to publish his collected letters, those of the first group given to Marcolini: “a momentous beginning, composed of letters to the most powerful persons of the time”12 followed by dozens more letters, nearly all thanking people for gifts he had received: “a homogenous section, nearly a first chapter” on gifts, designed to be emulated.13 However this introductory florilegium, obviously intended to attest to the respectability of 9

10 11

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Lettere i, 140–141, 4 December 1536, to Cardinal Caracciolo, governor of Milan, who announced to him the arrival of imperial “previlegio”; and 147–148, 7 January 1537, to the same person, to remind him that the imperial motu proprio “states from now on” (“da qui inanzi”) and not “from the moment of his arrival” (“da che si presenta”), and to ask for 100 crowns instead of 50 for the second “quartirone,” in order to reimburse ambassador Don Lope de Soria the 50 crowns from the first trimester (“quartirone”) he expected from Pietro. The second letter has been lost; the first is iii, 1 in Lettere di, a, su Pietro Aretino, ed. Larivaille, 107–115 (see 108–113 for the text). Lettere i, 183, 12 April 1537, to Cardinal Caracciolo: “How many downfalls can first impressions cause? And how many downfalls are caused by sickness in the heart of the one who is in a position to govern another? I would like to live out my days on free land, since here a single man does not have the power to condemn me according to the desires of a favorite of the Prince. An invidious man, a traitor, cannot touch a hair on my head, my life, or my honor.” (“Quanti ne fan precipitare le prime impressioni? E quanti l’infermità del senno di chi è posto a governar altri? Io per me vo’ fornire i miei giorni in terre libere, perché qui non è in potestà d’un solo condennarmi di quello che un favorito del Principe volesse che cosí fosse. Né pò torcermi un pelo de la vita, né de l’onore, questo invidioso, né quel traditore”). “Un’apertura grave composta di lettere ai personaggi sovrani del tempo,” Giuliano Innamorati, Pietro Aretino. Studi e note critiche (on the front cover: Tradizione e invenzione in Pietro Aretino) (Messina-Firenze, 1957), 238–240, passim. “Una sezione omogenea, quasi un primo capitolo.” 238–240, passim.

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an author who “confesses to having recently gained knowledge of himself,”14 could not long disguise the resolution already proclaimed in the letter to the connestabile Anne de Montmorency to assign himself the role of arbiter of reputations and to make his epistolary activity the basis for the material support of his existence.

1

The Invention of the Book of Letters

What the correspondence of June 1537 shows is that Pietro has realized that even greater than the proven power of his letters, is the possibility offered by the press to multiply the copies in circulation and feed them to a much broader audience than what had been achieved through hand-copied manuscripts […] While the wide reach of the printing press allowed him to take advantage of public opinion as a means to put pressure on princes and as a more effective way to increase his reputation as the Scourge of princes, also had the effect of forcing him to keep a vigilant eye on his own image.15 And it is with this in mind: this perpetual need to find and maintain a strategic balance between the means of pressuring his correspondents or their clients and the protection of a positive image of himself, as well as with the hard-to-measure complicity of Francesco Marcolini and with the similarly hard-to-measure help of certain “created” young men—beginning with the last to be recruited, the Beneventan Niccolò Franco16—that Pietro Aretino is about to inventa whole editorial typol-

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“Confessare di aver da poco in qua la conoscenza di sé medesimo.” 238–240, passim. “Quello di cui la corrispondenza del giugno 1537 attesta che Pietro ha preso coscienza, più che il da tempo sperimentato potere delle sue lettere, è la possibilità offerta dalla stampa di moltiplicarne gli esemplari in circolazione e darle in pasto a un pubblico infinitamente più vasto e numeroso di quello finora raggiunto per mezzo della sola copiatura manoscritta. […] Ma l’ampiezza e perennità della diffusione a stampa, nello stesso tempo che permettergli di usufruire dell’opinione come mezzo insieme di pressione sui principi e di una più efficace pubblicizzazione della sua reputazione di Flagello dei principi, non può non vincolarlo a un’accresciuta vigilanza della propria immagine,” Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 223. Arriving at Aretino’s home in the autumn of 1536, first as secretary, and later as compiler and quasi-curator of the first volume of Aretino’s letters; he was likely the mediator between Aretino and Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis; see Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice. Researches on Aretino and his Circle in Venice, 1527–1556 (Florence, 1985), esp. chapt. 6; the same Franco in November 1538 published a volume of

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ogy, even before the literary one [based on] a new editorial tradition: that of the book of letters, which for the entire century and beyond will assume a stable and constant shape, involving everyone from writers to editors, public persons and groups, etc.17 From his success in the triumphant publication of the Libro primo in 1538, followed in less than two years by at least six pirated editions and a second augmented edition of 25 other letters, until the third edition—called the second— of 1542 “with the addition of xxxxiiii letters addressed to him by the top minds of the world,”18 immediately followed by the publication of a second book, and then, in 1546, for the edition of the third book, Aretino remained “without rival, an absolute protagonist.”19 After this date gradually the situation changes, depending on the appearance of duplicates and events; but the decade of unprecedented years of the formula invented and refined by Aretino with the help of Marcolini signals a crucial moment, not only in the career of the Scourge of princes, but in the history of epistolography as well.20

17

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Pistole Vulgari concurrently, which was quickly marginalized by the success of Aretino’s volume. “Una tipologia tutta editoriale, prima ancora che letteraria [fondata su] una nuova tradizione editoriale: quella del libro di lettere, che per tutto il secolo e oltre assumerà proporzioni stabili e costanti, coinvolgendo tutti, scrittori e redattori, uomini pubblici e gruppi, ecc.,” Amedeo Quondam, “Aretino e il libro. Un repertorio per una bibliografia,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 197–230: 217. On this episode, see Innamorati, Tradizione e invenzione; Amedeo Quondam, “Nel giardino del Marcolini. Un editore veneziano tra Aretino e Doni,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 167 (1980): 75–116; Amedeo Quondam (ed.), Le «carte messaggiere». Retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare: per un indice dei libri di lettere del Cinquecento (Rome, 1981); Guido Baldassarri, “L’invenzione dell’epistolario,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 157–178; as well as the important introduction by Paolo Procaccioli (1997) to the first of six volumes of Aretino’s Lettere that he edited; and Fabio Massimo Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa. Strategie di autopromozione a Venezia nel Cinquecento (Rome, 2003). “Con giunta de lettere xxxxiiii scrittegli dai primi spiriti del mondo.” “Senza rivali, protagonista assoluto,” Amedeo Quondam, “Dal «formulario» al «formulario»: Cento anni di «libri di lettere»,” in Amedeo Quondam (ed.), «Le carte messaggiere»: Retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare: Per un indice dei libri di lettere del Cinquecento (Rome, 1981), 13–157: 39. On the “materiality” of the “editorial adventure” of the six volumes of Lettere, the production, the controls, and interventions of Aretino in the course of printing, and everything pertaining to bibliological aspects (concerning which I will limit myself to mentioning some observations and/or results useful to my argument), see the valuable textual notes by Paolo Procaccioli and Fabio Massimo Bertolo (in charge in each textual note, of the “study and description of the prints [points ia and ib]),” and assembled in the second part (“Schede”) Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa.

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As it is now for the Libro primo, given that the letters written between June and December 1537 represent nearly two-thirds of the total of those published—to the third, “To the King of France,” from 24 April 1525, to the last dated 31 December 1537—it is quite clear that the sumptuous folio of the editio princeps issued in January 1538 by Marcolini’s press cannot be considered a faithful reflection of Aretino’s life from 1525 to 1536, but only as the fruit of an evolution carried out in May or June of 1537: when, on the basis of some recovered texts, the idea of an edition conceived as a kind of public self-portrait appeared. This idea was aimed at illustrating and justifying his role as a paid arbiter of people’s reputations, which he claimed for himself on the note to Montmorency by declaring himself: “divus p. aretinus acerrimus virtutum ac vitiorum demonstrator” (the divine P. Aretino, keenest demonstrator of virtues and of vices).21 Despite so brazenly proclaiming his implacable impartiality, Aretino does not tarry long before revealing a certain ambivalence, evident from the threatening warning that immediately follows the last sentence cited above, in the epigraph: “So carry out the words that you have said in the presence of the many people scattered all over Italy. And I will be what necessity wants me to be.”22 And just three months later, another example will suffice to show that, despite the generally measured tone of his “new style,” Pietro does not forget about earlier excesses and knows how to remind recalcitrant correspondents of them: see the 18 September 1537 letter in which he adapts to the service of his adoptive homeland his own strategy of concealing his interests beneath the higher interests of Christendom, and where he does not hesitate to ascribe to the king of France some of the worst offenses he had already used for his own ends in two of his letters—now prudently excluded from the libro primo—the year before.23 Concerning this letter—apparently directly commissioned by the Venetian rulers, but more likely provoked by the persistent silence of Francis i four months after the first announcement of the miraculous French stipend—a single undated example survives from the earlier diffusion and prestigious reaction before the end of the king’s reign, which Aretino will glorify a dozen years later.24 21 22 23

24

Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa, 53, 63 (M1), 71 (M2). The inscription on the back of a table of letters added after the colophon in M1, appears on the title page of M2. “Per ciò mettete ad essecuzione le parole che avete detto a la presenza di molti, le quali sono sparse in ogni luogo d’Italia. E io sarò quel che il dovere vorrà ch’io sia.” Lettere i, 280–282, «Al Re Francesco i». See also note 6 above, and in particular the text of the first one in Lettere di, a, su Pietro Aretino, ii, 4, 57–63; and Larivaille, Aretino, 230–239, for an analysis of the relations between Aretino and Francis i from 1537 on. See Pietro Aretino, Lettere: Libro primo, ed. Francesco Erspamer (Milan-Parma, 1995), 407, fn.; and Lettere v, 267–270, October 1549, to Bernardo Tasso: “Viseo and Don Diego, great

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For now, his earliest answers to a pair of these reactions allow one to penetrate more deeply into his behavior: better illustrating the existence and functioning of one of the many networks of contacts that he had woven and maintained among important people much earlier, to think about preserving the text of his letters. In addition to the pompous note to the connestabile, there are more details on the role he assumed and that he intended to continue to assume. These details illustrate how cocky he can be in confronting a recalcitrant benefactor, even a king, yet he remains capable of slipping from a tone of calm moralizing to that of cynicism and insult. The 11 November letter to the duke of Atri, a key figure between the French connestabile and the other Italians in Aretino’s network, through whom the announcement of his stipend had come and who had not appreciated Aretino’s attacking Francis i once more, gradually transforms from an exhortation pro domo sua to a genuine self-attestation of benevolence and even of good faith. From the defense of the constant “modesty”25 with which the good Christian, “without the passion of partiality”26 with which his pen “does not touch upon the king in order to fight him, but to urge him on and to console him,”27 Aretino passes to the affirmation that he has a duty “to tell tales about the homeland,”28 that is, Venice, which he has “accepted as a citizen,”29 that all that he says and writes “is sincere and true.”30 Far from trying “to climb up in the ranks and profit financially by boasting about great figures,” he is “the person to pay off the debts of whatever rewards have been received by means of stable and praiseworthy gratitude!”31 Not until the conclusion of this self-panegyric does Aretino refer to punishing him for the harm his words caused while he believed he was “speak[ing]

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

in Rome, and still your servants, swear that England and Portugal three times used what I had written as an answer to France when the Turk took Corfu, and Contarino himself wrote to the legate in the name of the Pope, that what I sent in should be sent to the King instead of to an ambassador” (“Viseo e Don Diego, grandi in Roma, e vostri anco, giurano che Inghilterra e Portogallo tre volte nel proprio consiglio fecer replicarsi quella a Francia, alora ch’era il Turco a Corfù. E il Contarino medesimamente qui scrisse al Legato, in nome del Papa, che in cambio d’Imbasciadore al Re si mandasse”) trans. in Thomas Caldecot Chubb, The Letters of Pietro Aretino (Hamden, CT, 1967), 283 (translation slightly modified). “Modestia.” “Senza passion di parzialità.” “Non tocca il Re […] per pugnerlo, ma per ispronarlo a consolarci.” “Favellare in pro de la patria.” “Accettato per Cittadino.” “È sincero e verace.” “[…] Di trar gradi e danari per via di millantare i grandi,” “[…] ben persona da scontare i debiti de i premi ricevuti col mezzo della gratitudine stabile e laudabile.”

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well,”32 and renounces his option to “refresh the Great Master’s promise by other means.”33 Such a tactic makes one suspect that all that came before was not only Aretino offering an example of his new style to a well-connected intermediary at the French court, but was also intended as a polite invitation to move forward with the connestabile as an ally—a course of action which he could still reverse.34 Less than a month after this highly dignified response, he writes another response, probably to the Countess Argentina Rangona’s attempt to intercede, in which his exasperated tone reveals a cynicism more characteristic of his earlier works: Hear, my Lady, what I was able to say about your King, when his majesty would give me [financial support]. I have always said, and I say it again now, that I can remember princes’ honors, when their excellencies can [bring themselves to] remember my needs. Whoever neglects me, teaches me to neglect him; and whoever addresses me gives me material with which to address them. […] Who is that Captain so enamored of France, who wishes to serve it for our Lord (per dominum nostrum)? Give him what is given to you (dabitur vobis), says the pedant. I adored the French King, but I never had the money he so freely threw around—something that would have cooled even the furnaces of Murano. So, either your most excellent ladyship can make me give breath to the trumpets of virtue, or forgive me if I do not cry out his name at the top of my lungs.35 In short, apart from a more careful vocabulary and the importance now reserved for European politics, in which Italy would remain a nerve center for several decades still, Aretino’s strategy launched a few months earlier by the miraculous offer from France was little changed. And it would not change

32 33 34 35

“Dir bene.” “Rinfrescare con altra pratica la promessa del gran Maestro.” Lettere i, 320–321. “Eccovi, Signora, quello che seppi dire del Re vostro, mentre la maestà sua sapea donarmi. Io ho sempre detto, e di nuovo ridico, ch’io so ricordarmi de gli onori de i principi, quando le loro eccellenzie sanno ramentarsi de i miei bisogni. Chi tralascia me, insegna a me di tralasciar lui; e chi a me si rivolge, mi dà materia di rivolgermi a lui. […] Chi è quel Capitano sì affezionato a la Francia, che voglia servirle per dominum nostrum? Date a lo dabitur vobis, disse il pedante. Io adorava il Re Francesco, ma il non aver io mai argento da lo sbragiar de le sue liberalità, raffreddarìa le fornaci di Murano. Sì che V.S. Eccellentissima o mi faccia dare del fiato per le trombe de la vertù, o mi perdoni s’io non gli grido ad alta voce al nome,” Lettere i, 382–383, 5 December 1537.

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much, even in the months and years to come, oscillating depending on events such as a series of counsels and precepts worthy of Machiavelli (1 May 1538), followed a month later—when Francis i had reached the emperor and the pope in Nice—by a halting retreat from earlier audacities (4 June 1538), then, once the truce between Francis i and Charles v was established, by a dithyrambic panegyric of the two sovereigns (1 August 1538):36 dithyrambs about the King, perhaps before that time, given that many other letters would have been necessary for him as well as for his entourage, and at least three or four “embassies”37 in France, before the sums promised in Nice—no more than four hundred, but according to the letter from Pietro to Francis i on 7 October 1538, six hundred crowns—were delivered to Gianambrogio Eusebi, whom Aretino “created,”38 and who would quickly lose the money by gambling at the home of Cardinal Niccolò de’ Gaddi or Piero Strozzi, both exiles in France.39 While those with Charles v had been established over a period of a few months after the affair of the false Milanese letters and the problems regarding the interpretation of imperial “privilege”40 and the payment of the stipend, the relations between Pietro and Francis i, which were never quite smoothed out, offer an illustration of certain visible aspects of Aretino’s typical pattern of behavior. Aretino promised recriminations not only to the Italians introduced to the court of France: the duke of Atri, or Guido Rangoni and his wife, but also to ministers and auxiliaries with royal power: the connestabile, the ambassador to Venice, and Cardinal Jean de Lorraine, present in Nice in 1538. This expedient to hold back certain discourses with high placed correspondents, an expedient which he now deems prudent not to reveal to the king, far from being a strategic innovation in the second half of 1537, already flourished a decade before in the correspondence with Mantua published by Alessandro Luzio, where the epistolary surrounding of the marchese operated through notes sent to his ambassador to Venice or to other members of his entourage, as needed, to act or to report on his judgments, threats, or otherwise. And the series of letters, which are partially included in the first part of the Libro primo, would suffice to show that this was a very early example of the beginning of Aretino’s “new style.”41 36

37 38 39 40 41

Respectively: Lettere ii, 32–33; Lettere i, 440–441 (4 June 1538 in M2, dated earlier to 22 December 1537 in M3) and i, 456–457 (1 August 1538 in M2, dated before to 27 December 1537 in M3). “Ambasciate.” “Creato.” Lettere ii, 83, 85; on his relations with Francis i, see Larivaille, Aretino, vi 3, 230–239 passim. “Privilegio.” “Nuovo stile,” Lettere i, 65–68, 122–126, 4 June, to the imperials; and later: 120–124, 186–191, to Cosimo i de’ Medici and his collaborators.

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In the end, the ideological premises—the necessary remuneration of virtue understood less in a strictly moral sense, than as a merit, aptitude or ensemble of aptitudes or masteries42—were also practical, as they concerned his behavior. These premises were present in him before they were available for all to see in the book of letters. Now that it was “politically” safe, now that he had surmounted all the attendant risks, the idea came to him or to “one of his youths”43 that because of the growing success of the letters, they ought to be sent out by methods of diffusion adapted to the international dimensions of the hearing that the Venetian press had already given to his other works: a hearing that he immediately sought to increase, multiplying contacts with éminences grises as well as other figures of varying importance, and achieving in only a few months such publicity that one must seriously consider the evidence of the letter of 27 November 1537, while taking into account the vanity that surely also motivated it. In the letter, Aretino evokes the cosmopolitan crowd that daily frequents the palace where he lives: They all come to me: Turks, Jews, Indians, French, Germans, and Spaniards. Now think what our Italians are doing. I say nothing of the little people. It would be easier to take you from your devotion to the Emperor than to see me for a single moment without soldiers, students, friars and priests around. For it seems I have become the oracle of truth, to whom everyone comes to tell me how they have been wronged by this prince or that prelate. Hence I am the world’s secretary.44

42

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Arturo Graf, “Un processo a Pietro Aretino,” in Attraverso il Cinquecento (Turin, 1888), 87– 167: 142. Cfr. Pietro Aretino, Sei giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1969), 112; “nanna. The fancy took me to strum a lute, not for the pleasure of it but in order to make a show of enjoying the arts. The truth is that the accomplishments whores acquire are only snares to catch the fools,” Pietro Aretino, Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, preface by Alberto Moravia, introduction by Margaret F. Rosenthal (Toronto, 2005 [1971]), 119. “Nanna. Mi venne fantasia di trempellare il liuto, non perché ne avessi voglia, ma per parere di dilettarmi delle virtù: ed è certo che sono lacciuoli che si tendono agli sciocchi le virtù che imparano le puttane.” “Uno de i suoi giovani.” “A me vengon Turchi, Giudei, Indiani, Franciosi, Todeschi e Spagnuoli. Or pensate ciò che fanno i nostri Italiani. Del popol minuto non dico nulla, per ciò che è più facile di tor voi da la divozione Imperiale, che vedermi un attimo solo senza soldati, senza scolari, senza frati, e senza preti intorno. Per la qual cosa mi par esser diventato l’oracolo de la verità, da che ogniuno mi viene a contare il torto fattogli dal tal principe e dal cotal prelato. Onde io sono il secretario del mondo,” Lettere i, 355–357, to Francesco Alunno, 27 November 1537. The word “secretario” is to be interpreted etymologically as “depository of secrets.”

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This crowd, presumably somewhat exaggerated but not imaginary, was emblematic of the success that he anticipated two months before the release of the Libro primo, and attests mainly to the efforts he put forth and the scope which Aretino was aiming for: this is what Aretino expected from the publication of his letters. A retrospective look at the hundreds of letters dated between 22 June—the delivery date of the first parcel of letters to Marcolini— and 27 November 1537 should give some idea of that sense of anticipation. A quick examination shows that the first indication of a wish to speed up the extension of Aretino’s network of correspondents was that almost a third of the 222 recipients registered in the index of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pietro Aretino make their first appearance here (and in three quarters of the cases, their only appearance) in the hundred letters written mostly from what Innamorati calls “the recuperated section”45 and “the last phase of the book.”46 According to Innamorati, this more cheerful section began near the end of October, reaching its height with the letter to Domenico Bolani, owner of the palace on the Grand Canal where Pietro lived since 1529. This set of a hundred letters was destined to be the heart of the volume, with some compositions “among the most famous out of the entire set of letters.”47

2

In Search of Recognition and Acknowledgment of “Virtuous People”48

But I for my part have written what I have written for the sake of Virtue. Up to now Her glory had been hidden in a dark corner by the avarice of the great lords. Indeed, before I began to lash out and to paint these fellows in their true colors, men of virtue had to become beggars for the ordinary needs of life. If any one of them was able to stave off want and misery, he did so by becoming a buffoon and not because he was a man of talents. But my pen, armed with its terrors, was wrought in such a manner that these mighty folk, aware of its powers, were obliged to receive men of intellect with enforced courtesy even though they hated this worse than some deadly disease. The worthy, then, ought to hold me dear, for always and with my life’s blood, I have done battle for

45 46 47 48

“La sezione ricuperi,” Innamorati, Tradizione e invenzione, 237. “L’ultima fase del libro,” Innamorati, Tradizione e invenzione, 245. “Tra i più celebri di tutto l’epistolario,” Innamorati, Tradizione e invenzione, 243–247, passim. “Virtuosi.”

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their cause, and it is through my efforts alone that, in these days of ours, Virtue garbs herself in brocade, drinks from cups of gold, has necklaces and money, rides like a queen, is served like an Empress and revered like a goddess. He is a lewd blasphemer who does not say that I have restored her to her ancient place.49 In the letters concerned with politics Aretino shows that he now considered himself not only able to argue and judge, but also authorized to recommend to Charles v to give his daughter Margaret of Austria in marriage to Duke Cosimo i. She was widow to his assassinated predecessor, Alessandro de’ Medici.50 In addition, Aretino, aware what he could gain from his notoriety as Scourge of princes, and perhaps motivated by publicity that they would have been able to offer him in return, had not hesitated to give the rightful place to the artists and the intelligentsia among his correspondents. After having claimed to renounce all his earlier writings in June, the pride with which he listed the eight crowns that were due to him and which he pretended to refuse in December, revealed how much he wanted to be recognized.51 49

50 51

“Io ho scritto ciò che ho scritto per grado de la vertù, la cui gloria era occupata da le tenebre de l’avarizia de i Signori. E inanzi ch’io cominciassi a lacerargli il nome, i vertuosi mendicavano l’oneste commodità de la vita. E se alcuno pur si riparava da le molestie de la necessità, otteneva ciò come buffone, e non come persona di merito. Onde la mia penna, armata de i suoi terrori, ha fatto sì che essi riconoscendosi hanno raccolti i belli intelletti con isforzata cortesia, la quale odiano più che i disagi. Adunque i buoni debbono avermi caro, perché io con il sangue militai sempre per la vertù; e per me solo a i nostri tempi veste di broccato, bee ne le coppe d’oro, si orna di gemme, ha de le collane, de i danari, cavalca da Reina, è servita da Imperadrice, e riverita da Dea. È empio chi non dice ch’io l’ho riposta nel suo antico stato,”Lettere i, 173–175, 3 April 1537, to Giannantonio da Foligno, who has not been well identified; trans. in Caldecot Chubb, The Letters of Pietro Aretino, 52 (translation slightly modified). Lettere i, 237–239, 6 July 1537. Lettere i, 383–390, 6 December 1537, to Gianiacopo Lionardi, ambassador of the Duke of Urbino: “Questa di ruta ti si dona per gli acuti Dialoghi puttaneschi; questa d’ortica per i pungenti Sonetti preteschi; questa di mille colori per le piacevoli comedie; questa di spine per i Cristiani libri; questa di Cipresso per la mortalità data dai tuoi scritti a i nomi; questa di Oliva per la pace acquistata co i Principi; questa di Lauro per le stanze militanti e per le amorose; questa altra di Quercia si dedica a la bestialità di quel tuo animo c’ha debellata l’avarizia,” trans. in Caldecot Chubb, The Letters of Pietro Aretino, 116: “This one of goat’s rue is given to you for your dialogues about whores; this one of nettles for your sarcastic sonnets about the priests; this one of milfoil for your pleasant comedies, this one of cypress for the immortality which your writings have given famous men; this one of olive leaves for the peace you have made with princes; this one of laurel for your poems about warriors and for your love poems; this one of oak leaves in honor of your rage and fury which has conquered avarice.”

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With regard to the arts, Aretino had boasted a certain competency in painting since his sojourn in Rome, which he still claimed in a note from May 1537,52 as well as expertise accumulated over a decade of spending time with Titian, and in the field of sculpture and architecture from Jacopo Sansovino and Sebastiano Serlio. It seems that he was almost obsessed with the memory of gigantism of Michelangelo’s characters from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, to such an extent that he had not even waited until the second half of 1537 to declare to Bernardino Daniello, of Lucca, that in his treatise Della poetica he had found The very same conception [of art] that Michelangelo wanted to be acknowledged from his paintings in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. He, who knew the value of his style, in order to motivate the painters to reflect upon his masterly drawing skills that heaven and study gave him, deviating from conventions, made of larger than natural figures, so that the viewers’ eyes, as soon as they looked up to the paintings, would be lost in amazement, and, lost in such amazement, would wisely begin to absorb with their gazes his powerful efforts.53 It is no accident that in the first and most important of the “doctrinal” letters, he takes on the task of systematizing more than ten years of polemics against the pedants who disfigured Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s works. Aretino models his own language, devoid of ridiculous anachronisms, on Michelangelo for his formulation of the precepts imparted to his fellow writers: “What honor is there in using beatiful colors to depict trivial subjects without any sense of disegno? Their glory rests in the lines that Michelangelo expanded, who put in his considerable works both Art and Nature, such that no one can tell who is student and who is teacher.”54 And the concluding line of his long writing lesson that follows, even though the artist’s name does not reappear, leaves little doubt

52 53

54

Lettere i, 201–202. “Il proprio giudizio che Michelagnolo volse che si conoscesse ne le sue pitture di capella a Roma. Egli che sapeva il valor del suo stile, accioché i dipintori avesser meglio a considerare il profondo disegno che il cielo, e il suo studio, gli diede, uscendo de l’uso de gli altri fece le figure grandi oltra il naturale perché gli occhi nel subito alzarsi a quelle si confondessero ne la maraviglia, e confusi nel maravigliarsi di ciò, cominciassero sottilmente a ritrar col guardo la possanza de le sue fatiche,” Lettere i, 145–146, 22 December 1536, to Bernardino Daniello. “Che onor si fanno i colori vaghi che si consumano in dipingere frascariuole senza disegno? La lor gloria sta ne i tratti con che gli distende Michelagnolo, il quale ha messo in tanto travaglio la natura e l’arte, che non sanno se gli sono maestre o discepole.”

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about who he intended: “aim to be a sculptor of the senses, rather than a mere rubricator of words.”55 But the most important and ardent of Aretino’s initiatives regarding Michelangelo—and the first and most representative of his approach from this point onward, which would be applied to all kinds of correspondents—was indisputably the letter which included his knowledge of painting, his more recent experience with religious literature, and the additional prestige accorded to him by the stipends from Charles v and Francis i. In it, the “Divus Petrus Aretinus” took the risk of writing “to the divine Michelagnolo.”56 Aretino begins with a solemn elegy followed by a brief reminder of his reputation as an arbiter of reputations, and continues by audaciously adding a long, insistent description—punctuated by an anaphora of no less than a dozen instances of “I see”57—of his own vision of the Last Judgment, as a kind of program offered to the artist. For those familiar with Michelangelo’s legendary bad temper—and Aretino must have known about it—his reaction to such a bold proposition could only have been negative; but he knew that his author had not in any case presented himself as someone who “with the praise and infamy had dispatched most of the merits and faults of others.”58 The answer took a couple of months to arrive, and when it did, was polite and perfectly appropriate: To the Divine Aretino, Magnificent Master Pietro, my lord and brother, I felt both joy and sorrow upon receiving your letter; I very much rejoiced to hear from you, who are unique in the world for your virtue, and also I felt regret, since having completed a large part of the story, I could not replicate your vision, which is so constructed that if the day of judgment had come, and you had seen it personally, your words could not have been more appropriate.59

55

56 57 58 59

Lettere i, 229–232, 25 June 1537, to Niccolò Franco in M1; the second citation is from a letter to Ludovico Dolce (in M3, 1542): “Attendete a esser scultor di sensi, e non miniator di vocaboli.” “Al divino Michelagnolo.” “Io vedo.” “Con la lode e con l’infamia [aveva] spedito la maggior somma de i meriti e de i demeriti altrui.” “Al Divino Aretino. Magnifico M. Pietro mio Signore e fratello, io nel ricevere de la vostra lettera ho avuto allegrezza e dolore insieme; sommi molto rallegrato per venire da voi che sete unico di virtù al mondo, e anche mi sono assai doluto, però che avendo compito gran parte de l’istoria, non posso mettere in opra la vostra imaginazione, la quale è sì fatta che se il dì del giudicio fusse stato, e voi l’aveste veduto im presenzia, le parole vostre non lo figurarebbono meglio,” lsa i, 396, 369, 20 November 1537.

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At best, perhaps to mitigate the vexing effect of the inadmissibility of his proposal to his correspondent, Michelangelo urged him immediately afterward to write about him, adding without calculating the effect of his words: “If I have anything worthy, I offer it to you from the bottom of my heart;”60 an offer inevitably received as an invitation to go to the final steps of his now immutable strategy, except here he reverses the order of the request and the incitements to accede to it.61 As in the features of Propp’s scheme of the folktale, the steps of Aretino’s strategic scheme are not found in their entirety in any single episode.62 But the fact that the scheme is never realized in its totality does not affect either its potential to be fully realized or its relevance; and in Aretino’s usage, just as in fables, the absence of one or more constitutive elements of any particular sequence does not change the order of the other instances of the sequence. The exception to this here is in the second and third steps that could be inverted, as is precisely the case with Michelangelo, when Pietro feels it appropriate to flatter him with gifts and promises before making a request. In this instance, the steps follow a consistent, logical, and chronological order, with occasional repetitions or omissions in order to react to particular recipients or for freedom to maneuver. For instance, to react to Michelangelo’s rejection of Aretino’s vision of the Last Judgment, he waited carefully for the release of the Libro primo of his own Lettere, a couple of months after Michelangelo’s note, before defending himself for having presumptuously wanted to advise him on “the painting of the judgment,”63 thanking him for the “license”64 given him to write about

60 61

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“Se io ho cosa alcuna che vi sia a grado, ve la offerisco con tutto il cuore.” Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, vi 4, 240–242, the scheme that attempts to condense Aretino’s “diplomacy”: “1. adulation / 2. request / 3. incitements to accede to the request: a) exhibition—more or less insistent according to the correspondents’ condition, and eventually according to the quality and length of their relationship with Aretino—of the merits and successes of the latter, of their power, of the praises and gifts attributed to them; b) pledges and offers of service; c) important gifts, variable according to their addressee and the requested favor: – examples of advice or praise wisely administered; – artistic objects received by someone else, or commissioned to be done by a renowned artist, – personal works / 4. insistent solicitations: a) moral lessons, on generosity and on the evils of broken promises; b) pleading; c) sarcasm; d) demands (some of them perhaps wise ones, since Aretino could vent his anger publicly from time to time) / 5. attacks: a) insults; b) blackmail; / 6. (after the satisfaction of a request), dithyrambic thanks, accompanied if necessary by humble apologies for his insults.” See Vladimir J. Propp, Morfologia della fiaba, ed. Gian Luigi Bravo (Turin, 1966), 28, 114–115, 216. “Ne la pittura del giudizio.” “Licenzia.”

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him, and ceremoniously offering him “the volume in which, to be honored with the glory of his name, he counted on him many times,”65 he ended up making a pleading, and at the same time, confident request for a worthless memento: But does my devotion not deserve just a fragment of those cartoons that you, the prince of sculpture and painting, toss into the fire, so that it might bring me joy while I am alive, and that I might take with me to my grave when I die? I know that this proud request will not offend the excellent man I ask it from, and since he is of noble blood, he will not let his offer of himself or anything he has be proven to be a lie.66 Michelangelo not only did not report receiving the volume, but never again wrote a single line to Aretino. Michelangelo did not even react when Aretino, after many years of an exceptional patience for someone like him, and after many failures and persistently fruitless efforts, took the opportunity—as with the king of France—to pay off his debts with him; profiting from the imminent opening of the Council of Trent and from a simultaneous rising chorus of critics, he railed against the incongruity of the Last Judgment to mask his rancor at the artist’s intransigent silence under the guise of scandalized Christian indignation, threatening him at first with inveighing against him, and after five years finally divulging in the Libro quarto of his letters a version of his famous letter against the grand fresco of the Sistine Chapel, accurately purged of every appearance of wanting to come to terms with him.67 No traces have been found of any reaction by the artist, either to the first version of the letter sent to him with an insolent postscript that incited him to tear it up (“that even I have torn it to pieces, and you might decide that I am 65 66

67

“Il volume in cui, per onorar[si] con la gloria del [suo] nome, [si era] in molti propositi di lui valuto.” “Ma non debbe la divozion mia ritrarre dal principe de la scultura e de la pittura, un pezzo di quei cartoni che solete donare fino al fuoco, accioché io in vita me lo goda, e in morte lo porti con esso meco nel sepolcro? Io so che la soperbia di tal prego non disdegnarà la eccellenza de l’amico pregato, e perché è di gentil sangue, e per non far bugiarde l’offerte che di sé, e d’ogni sua cosa, m’ha fatte,”Lettere ii, 28–29, 20 January 1538, to the great Michelagnolo Buonaruoti; trans. in Caldecot Chubb, The Letters of Pietro Aretino, 133 (translation modified). A more detailed summary of the relations between Aretino and Michelangelo may be found in Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, vii, 295–305; see also Aretino e Michelangelo. Annessi e connessi per un ripensamento, in Larivaille, Varia aretiniana, 337–353. The text of the first version of the letter is in Johann Wilhelm Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli xiv, xv, xvi (Florence, 1840) vol. 2, 332–335; the second version is in Lettere iv, 130–131, to Alessandro Corvino, July 1547.

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such a person that even Kings and Emperors reply to my letters”),68 or to the second version addressed to the secretary of Cardinal Sforza, nephew to Pope Paul iii. He was practically the only one to resist the three “assaults”69— particularly the last push to the extreme limit of a threat of blackmail: 1.2.3. / 1.a.2.a.3.a / 1.b.2.b.3.b.4.5.—which Aretino conducted with an otherwise exceptional patience. Aretino was not used to enduring similar affronts without reacting. Thus, considering that half or so of Aretino’s published letters are partly or totally more or less explicitly reducible to one or more phases of the strategic sequence, the exceptional nature both of the relationship between the two protagonists and of their content and implications was that the two letters on the Last Judgment pose, more neatly perhaps than the insolent and otherwise intemperate language toward the sovereigns, a dual problem: of substance and of form. The problem of substance concerned the idea that the Pietro could be enabled to judge and give lessons even to the most powerful and illustrious; in other words, of the adequacy of a behavior, and of morals and morality— elements which have never been typical of him, nor afterward—through his claim to be a moral arbiter of the world. Additionally, there was the problem of form, and specifically the method that always earned him general reprobation: that of the recourse to blackmail.

3

Aretino and Morals70

The changes in status in the life of the Scourge of princes that took place between 1536 and 1538, and the evolutions of his relations with the world brought on by the creation of the book of letters do not seem to have significantly changed the understanding of human nature perceptible in his earlier works. If anything, with material comfort, a new notoriety, and the familiar style of many of his letters, he now allowed himself to reveal more of his personality and temperament than in the past. It is useless to insist on his famous belief that no one can resist the call of sex, as natural to man as the need to eat and drink, and that sexuality, as it

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“Che anch’io l’ho fatta in pezzi, e risolvetevi pur ch’io son tale che anco e’ Re e gli imperadori respondan a le mie lettere.” “Assalti.” Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, vi, 5, 247–256; and especially Larivaille, L’Arétin, viii (“L’Arétin moraliste”), 553–613, passim (Italian translation: Pietro Aretino tra Rinascimento e Manierismo [Rome, 1980], 331–370).

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was called, constituted one of the primary forces of the world, if not the foremost. The second motivator of human actions, as natural and primordial as love, is interest, whose legitimacy Pietro proclaimed boldly and insolently, to everyone—the naïve, the fearful, and the hypocritical—, who preached the virtue of disinterest. If for his part he declared to prefer poverty to lies and that he would never for any price renounce his habit of speaking his mind, he never stopped repeating that, like the legendary chameleon, he was not used to living on air alone, and that he knew “to remember the honors of princes, when their Excellencies can [bring themselves to remember his own] needs.”71 The postulate of the omnipotence of sex and of money did not imply, in itself, anything contemptible a priori. According to Aretino, the causes of corruption that he denounced were insatiable appetites, excessive love of riches and the relaxation of customs, exacerbated—as he had suggested in the second version of his Cortigiana—by the wars that had ravaged Italy and Europe for decades.72 And all whose privileged position made them models were guilty: sovereigns, gran maestri, men of the Church of every grade who, on account of their bad behavior and their contempt for elementary moral principles they were supposed to champion, nonetheless hastened to contain the process of society’s corruption. If from 1537 on he had started avoiding in his letters the truculent, cutting critique of the pasquinate and of the Pronostici, he did not miss—and had never missed—a chance to lash out at the vices of the incurably greedy princes, slaves of their riches and of their instincts. He likewise railed on the vices of dignitaries of the Roman court, a “hell”73 that was both model and caricature of all other courts;74 or the hypocrisy of certain preachers,75 of others “are similar to instruments that play with each other without ever hearing

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“Ricordar[si] degli onori de i principi, quando le loro Eccellenze sanno ramentarsi de i [suoi] bisogni.” Cortigiana 1534, ii, x, 5, p. 267, in Teatro i. “Inferno.” Lettere i, 393, 10 December 1537, to Marcantonio da Urbino: “[…] non veggo andar mai alcun de i miei amici a starsi a Roma, ch’io non pianga la lor disgrazia più che s’andassero a la sepultura, perché ne la fossa si sepelliscano i morti, e ne la corte i vivi. E quel dolore che averia sapendosi che un fratello fusse ne lo inferno, s’ha di coloro che vivono ne le crudeltà di così fatto abisso.” Lettere ii, 356, 25 March 1542: to a preacher who asked for a definition of charity: “dicovi che secondo Pasquino ella è una cappa fratesca; però ch’è l’ombra di cui la santimonia ricopre la moltitudine de i vili procreati da le ipocrite azzioni vostre,” trans. in Caldecot Chubb, The Letters of Pietro Aretino, 175: “I tell you that according to Pasquino, charity is a friar’s robe; because its holiness covers the multitude of evils created by your hypocritical actions” (translation slightly modified).

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themselves,”76 and especially of the “Chietini,” that is, the Teatini, who under Cardinal Carafa’s authority comprised the cutting edge of the nascent Counter Reformation: “rascals who would not rescue a thousand men with a glass of water, but who are revered, observed, and adored by most people.”77 According to Aretino himself, he apparently did not feel at all disqualified by certain vices that he rather violently scolded the Great Masters for, as if his own personal conduct, which could be reprehensible, was nothing but an example of human weakness. As if, for those who could not be reputed responsible of the moral order, Dante’s inferno did not begin before the walls of Dis: all that in him as in common mortals was the fruit of simple intemperance, was not subject to eternal torments. Lust and anger, for Pietro, were worthy of pardon.78 Aretino flaunted his own love for food in about ten episodes, since the Libro primo, offering a testimony to his leniency for the sin of gluttony. As for prodigality, far from being a sin, it was a cardinal virtue for Aretino. In his view, only greed remained worthy of condemnation, although he considered it excusable in most men because of the bad example set by those in the higher strata of society. It was not that he wished to free part of humanity from the rules of traditional morality, whose fundamentals he had never questioned. It was rather that, confident in his knowledge of human nature coming from his incessant observations both of himself and his era, he wanted to rethink the notion of culpability, variable according to the individual. Given that men are not equals before the moral law he claimed that there was a hierarchy of responsibilities according to the attitudes and positions of each person: in such a way that, to take an example from the first letter to the King of France in 1536, an action that is simply reprehensible in an ordinary individual could become ignominious in a Most Christian King.79 This contradiction between the sever-

76 77

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Lettere iv, 350, May 1548, to Captain Franciotto: “si confanno di simiglianza con gli stromenti, i quali suonano a gli altri senza mai udirsi da se stessi.” Lettere iii, 251–252, August 1545, to Cesano: “ribaldi che non soccorrerebbono mille uomini con un bicchiero d’acqua, [ma] sono riveriti, sono osservati, adorati dalla maggior caterva de le genti.” Lettere i, 335–336, 21 November 1537, to Girolamo Quirini: “è in arbitrio di pochi, anzi di niuno, il potersi difendere da gli assalti datici da la libidine e da l’ira. Onde è degno di perdono l’accidente de l’una e de l’altra passione.” (“It is in the power of few, almost none, to defend oneself from the assaults of sexual desire and of anger. Thus the occurrence of either of these two passions is worthy of pardon.”) Lettere di, a, su Pietro Aretino, ii 4, 57–63: “to do something unworthy of a king is more indecent for a king than for a private knight, just as it would be more shameful for Your Majesty, who is called Most Christian, than for another prince to join up with and call for

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ity Aretino doles out for some and the indulgence Aretino grants himself and to others stems from the fact that he replaced the traditional and peremptory distinction between good and evil with “actively-oriented” criteria which were at the same time more realistic and more nuanced, and which assigned greater responsibility to the Great Masters, society’s “manager class.” Such persons were, in Aretino’s view, responsible for behaving in an exemplary manner; they had to show that they held mastery over themselves, and that they were more rational than other people. The idea that moral responsibility is equal for all persons comes from Christian ethics, as does the idea that actual judicial punishments correspond with the social pyramid, as in Jean de la Fontaine’s fable The Animals Sick of the Plague. Aretino instead argued for an upside-down pyramid in which more extensive responsibility is assigned to those at the peak of the social hierarchy. Although Aretino’s argument may well have been more fabricated than truly felt, it is nonetheless evidence of a coherent reflection on human nature and the society of that era, and forms the indispensable basis of any attempt to understand the range and unity not only of the letters and the larger part of his works, but also of the very existence and actions of Aretino. Aretino’s morality could not but recall Machiavelli, given how often Aretino cited him, and the considerable weight Aretino accorded to the active virtù that was so dear to the author of The Prince.80 There is indeed a kind of morality of action, which is only concerned with acts that have a practical scope; it passes over in silence or, in certain cases, accords only indulgence or contempt for any qualità, in the etymological and Machiavellian sense of the word, which does not affect public life. This same morality is already evident in two letters on the suffering and death of his close friend Giovanni dalle Bande Nere in 1526, for which he was present. In the letters, Aretino shared Machiavelli’s view without knowing it;

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help from the enemies of Christ”. (“come fare una cosa indegna de Re è più disdicevole a un Re che un cavaglier privato, così a Vostra Maestà, che si chiama Christianissima, è più infamia che ad un altro prencipe il congiungersi e chiamare aiuto dalli nemici di Christo.”) The clearest reference both to the limits and to the field of application of his virtù is in a note from November 1545 to a relative of Duke Orazio Farnese, Lettere iii, 392, to Franchino: “I confess, since I am only a man and not a God, to still having some vices: but the virtù with which I scold princes about their vices is without blemish. I likewise praise the goodness of those who are good. My vices harm only myself; all of theirs are offensive to others. So, instead of reproaching me, they should refrain from doing so, and the world would be a much better place”. (“Confesso, per esser uno uomo e non un Dio, d’aver anch’io dei vizii; ma la virtù con la quale gli riprendo ne i principi, come anco laudo la bontà di chi è buono, è senza diffetto. Di poi i miei a me solo nuocono; e i loro qualunque si sia offendono. Sì che in cambio del ciò rimproverarmi, essi di ciò si astengano; e sarà il mondo assai più bello che non è brutto.”)

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Pietro admired the only man of the time still capable, if he had survived, of “turning Italy from a servant into a Queen.”81

4

Pickpocket of Princes and Virtuous Blackmailer?

Questions remain as to how Aretino’s constantly proclaimed and exalted virtuous actions could be reconciled with the inexhaustible greed, whose results he was not ashamed to boast about.82 Aretino’s greed and high resultant earnings, supported as they are by varying degrees of documentation but which are plausible on the whole, could not but earn him the nickname of Pickpocket of princes attributed to him in Terremoto del Doni fiorentino con la rovina di un gran colosso bestiale Antichristo della nostra età.83 81

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Lettere i, 54–59 (55), 10 December 1526, to Francesco degli Albizzi; and 5, 59–61, on the same date, to Maria de’ Medici. An analysis may be found in Larivaille, L’Arétin, iii, 1.3, 134–139 passim. For the judgment of Niccolò Machiavelli, see Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence, 1971), 1228–230, lett. 296, to Francesco Guicciardini, 15 March 1526: “I think everyone believes that among the Italians, there is no leader the soldiers would rather follow, nor whom the Spaniards fear more and respect more: everyone considers lord Giovanni to be bold and impetuous: a man of great ideas, who can make important decisions.” (“Ciascuno credo che creda che fra gli Italiani non ci sia capo, a chi li soldati vadino più volentieri dietro, né di chi gli Spagnuoli più dubitino, et stimino più: ciascuno tiene ancora il signor Giovanni audace, impetuoso, di gran concetti, pigliatore di gran partiti.”) Lettere i, 196, 16 May 1537, to Agostino Ricchi: “Against those who say that I have nothing, I spent ten thousand crowns from 1527 until today, not counting the gold and silk cloth, worn on my back and the backs of others. My pen and my paper have pulled that money from the very heart of greed itself.” (“Io a onta di coloro che dicano che ho niente, ho speso x millia scudi dal xxvii [1527] a questo giorno, senza i drappi d’oro e di seta consumati nel mio dosso e ne gli altrui. E una penna e un foglio gli ha tratti del core a l’avarizia.”). See also Lettere ii, 263–264, 6 July 1541, to Giuliano Salviati: “the foundation of my hopes is fixed in God and in Caesar. And thanks be for their majesties, adding a hundred crowns of stipend that the Marquis of Vasto gives me, and as many that the Prince of Salerno pays me, I have an income of six hundred, with a thousand more, that I earn for myself with a notebook and an ampule of ink.” (“I fondamenti de le mie speranze son posti in Dio e in Cesare. E grazia de le lor maestà, aggiungendoci cento scudi di pensione che mi dà il Marchese del Vasto, e altretanti che me ne paga il Principe di Salerno, ne ho sei cento di rendita, con mille appresso che me ne procaccio l’anno con un quaterno di fogli e con una ampolla d’inchiostro.”); Lettere iii, 112, January 1544, to doctor Macassola: “the more than 25,000 crowns that the alchemy of my pen has drawn from the guts of many princes since arriving here I have thrown away, without spending a penny of it.” (“i più di xxv mila scudi che l’archimia del mio calamo ha tratto de le viscere a molti principi da che qui sono, ho io tutti gettati, senza mai spenderne soldo.”) Anton Francesco Doni, Terremoto (Rome, Conomelo: 1556). For an estimate of his income,

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In reviewing Aretino’s letters and those of his correspondents, one is struck by seeing his earnings, mentioned or implied, openly associated with the way in which he squandered them. His boast of having spent 10,000 crowns since his arrival in Venice in 1527 was preceded by a sentence that would urge one to view the expenses he confessed right afterward as an unbroken succession of ten years of virtuous generosity: “But if the greatest wealth in the world is to give money to friends, who has more than I do, who have given everything away, as opposed to the Princes, greedy with their gold and generous only with glory?”84 He then suddenly declares that “most of the 25,000 crowns”85 which had been gleaned from princes until 1544 were “all thrown away, without spending a penny of it.”86 And in a letter from November 1545 to Niccolò Franco, Aretino, to humiliate to the very end the ex-disciple who had become one of his worst enemies, confronted with his own success, concluded that “beyond that”87 he spent quite a lot (“I threw away [my] money”),88 adding: “And what should make you hurt the most is that I always find a way to do this!”89 To say nothing of Aretino’s biographers, equally or less scandalized by the methods he adopted to collect such amazing amounts of money, than they were by the carefree way he offended ordinary morals by squandering as much as he earned. The six volumes of the collected letters of Aretino are sprinkled with allusions to accusations of wastefulness that many of his correspondents and even friends bring against him, transmit, or pretend to transmit.90

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see Scipione Ammirato, Opuscoli (Florence, Amadore Massi e Lorenzo Landi: 1637), vol. 2, 264–265: “He was sure of having, while he lived, and he lived for a long time, more than seventy thousand crowns on hand; but the ease with which he acquired that money was the same ease with which he threw it away, in other words, spent it.” (“Si tien per fermo esser capitati in man di questo huomo mentre egli visse, ché visse lungamente, più di settantamila scudi; ma con quella facilità che gli acquistava, con la medesima li gittava, per dir meglio che spendeva.”) “Ma se la maggior facultà che sia al mondo è il donare a gli amici, chi ha più avere di me, che gli ho donato ogni cosa per farmi contrario a i Principi, avari de l’oro e liberali de la gloria.” “I più di xxv mila scudi.” “Tutti gettati, senza mai spenderne soldo.” “Oltre di ciò.” “Getto via al solito.” Lettere iii, 351, “a Colui”: “E quel che più ti dee accorare, è che mi ritrovo il modo a far ciò più che prima.” In Larivaille, L’ Arétin, 1183, n. 93, a list of about ten of Aretino’s responses to the warnings about his wasteful spending, among them: Lettere iii, 212–213, May 1545, to an unidentified count; Lettere iii, 397, 1545, to Jacopo Sansovino: “I really thought it was a hoot that you said you wished I would get a steady income. You know that if my income were the pyra-

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To limit ourselves to a colorful illustration of the scant confidence Pietro’s money management inspired, when he announced to Cosimo i de’ Medici that his daughter Adria was to be married, de’ Medici responded at first only with a laconic promise to pay him the sum asked “for her dowry,”91 but on one condition: “three hundred crowns […] which we will give you every time we can verify that she has in fact been married, and that the money will only be delivered if this is the case.”92 Aretino hesitated for almost six months before sending a letter from the Duke of Urbino by way of attestation, together with a fierce defense of his “bontade” (goodness): You can see if I, nurse and host of any hungry person with no place to go, am any less [generous] than [the owners of] ten houses richer than mine. I cannot visit a church or walk down the street without hearing someone from the crowd call out to me, “May God grant you a long life,” “May Christ keep your health,” and similar words penetrating to the soul of anyone who divides the wealth he earns for the benefit of the needy.93 The Duke, unmoved, replied two months after that the payment of the dowry had only been delayed “so the money might go with effect where it was intended,”94 and proposed to deliver them to the “Consort”95 by a proxy rather

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mids of Egypt, I would make them wander away from me.” (“Io mi rido da senno quando mi augurate una entrata istabile, sapendo voi che se le piramidi di Egitto mi fusser di rendita, le farei come la mobiltà erranti;”) Lettere iii, 497, January 1546, to Danese Cattaneo: “my ears are battered with reproach of the intemperate spending of my household; its abundance of life feeds the people as well as art. Certainly it will never be the case that I donated to the masses this inn that was open 18 years. Such a thing taking place should be attributed to error than to the rule.” (“mi tempestate l’orecchie con la riprensione del disordinato spendere di casa mia; ne la cui abondanza del vivere si sfama il popolo e l’arte. Certo che mai non sarà vero ch’io serbi alle turbe quella osteria che gli è stata aperta xviii anni. Che ciò facendo, cotal fatto si attribuirebbe più tosto a falligione, che a regola.”) “Per la dote di essa.” lsa ii, 12, 20, 22 June 1548: “trecento scudi […] quali vi daremo ogni volta che saremo certi che l’abbiate maritata, e che abbino a servire solamente per tale effetto.” “Ella vede se a dieci case più ricche che la mia povera, cedo io ispedaliere e oste d’ogni senza ricetto affamato. Né per le chiese, né per le strade passo mai, né vado, che non oda gridare a le turbe: «Iddio vi dia vita lunga», «Cristo mantengavi sano», e simili parole penetranti a l’animo di coloro che ispartiscano le procacciate sustanzie con le necessità de l’altrui miseria,” Lettere v, 117–118, December 1548, to the Duke of Florence. “Perché i danari andassero con effetto, dove son dissegnati.” “Consorte.”

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than directly into Pietro’s hands, who, “by natural liberality (which is not a vice) might have converted them to another use!”96 And this time, Aretino was forced to consent.97 In short, the examples mentioned here are nothing but new variations or illustrations of the theme of the gift, already the dominant subject of a kind of “first chapter” of the Libro primo delle Lettere;98 with the difference that, early on, and then gradually more and more, the role of Aretino as a virtuous arbiter of reputations was specified and solidified. The gift had changed status, so to speak: no longer an homage or recognition of merits, it had become a kind of prebend, a payment payable by princes, Great Masters, or other wealthy people, for the benefit of a kind of charity work. Such gifts had been given a name that in Dante’s hell, and thereafter in Christian doctrine, sounded like a sin, but according to Pietro, had always referred to what he had always presented, whether sincerely or not, as his cardinal virtue: prodigality. Without compiling an exhaustive list of the many passages of the six volumes of the Lettere that mention prodigality and its near-synonym “liberality,”99 since such a list would go on forever, I will at least recall certain concrete and duly attested or attestable instances of this innate virtue of a man “born in a hospital with the spirit of a king.”100 First, an excerpt from a letter to the ambassador Don Lope de Soria from 1542, seeking his support for Aretino’s request for a doubling of his imperial stipend: For even if you gave me a thousand-fold what you did, it still would not meet my needs. For it so happens that everybody runs to me just as if I

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lsa ii, 13, 20–21, 10 February 1549: “per natural liberalità (che non è vizio) li averian possuti convertire in altro uso.” Lettere v, 152, March 1549 and 202, 158, in the same month. Innamorati, Tradizione e invenzione, 239–240, passim. “Liberalità.” “Nato in uno spedale con animo di re,” Lettere i, 147–148, 7 January 1537, to Cardinal Caracciolo: “need, where I will be held forever, my being born in a hospital with the spirit of a king” (“la necessità, dove mi terrà sempre il mio esser nato in uno spedale con animo di Re”) (in M1 e M2: “born a beggar with a royal spirit” [“nato mendico con animo reale”]). See also the capitolo “to the Duke of Florence” “Al duca di Fiorenza” (1540), in Poesie varie i, 141–147 (144, ll. 104–105): “and born to purge my sins / with the spirit of a king in a hospital” (“e nato per purgare i miei peccati / con animo di re nello spedale”); Lettere iii, 164–166, February 1545, to Clario: “my having been born in a hospital with a royal spirit” (“il mio esserci nato in lo spedale con reale animo”); and Lettere v, 364, [September 1554], to Baldovino del Monte: “such a minimal sum […] should continue to give lie to my saying that I was born with the spirit of a King but in a hospital” (“sì mecanica somma […] dava continue mentite al mio dire di esserci nato con l’animo di Re ne lo spedale.”).

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were the royal treasury. If a poor woman gives birth to a child, it is my house that pays the bills for her. If someone is clapped in prison, I have to provide him with everything. Soldiers whose equipment needs repair, holy pilgrims in dire need, and in fact every kind of vagabond knight errant comes begging to me. Nobody falls ill of any ailment that they do not send him to my apothecary for drugs or to my doctor to be cured of it. It was, indeed, not more than two months ago that a young fellow was wounded near my house. He had himself carried into one of my chambers. Hearing the uproar, I rushed to his side only to find that he was already half dead. “I am glad to play the host,” I roared, “but I wasn’t aware that I also run a hospital.” Is it any wonder, then, that I am always crying out: “I am dying of hunger!”101 A note from 1544 adds to the parade of the poor, the imprisoned, those in labor, and “other unfortunate people,”102 in cases already encountered among the throng of visitors mentioned in a letter in the Libro primo,103 and that, more than a charitable recourse, would make Aretino into a righter of wrongs: “friars accused as heretics, […] priests tormented by calumnies, […] badly treated servants, and those who live in the Stinche prison in Florence!”104 A morning escape to flee the crowd of visitors becomes another chance to provide aid to his neighbor: The lack of peace that this brings me is why, as soon as I have dined I flee to your house, or to the house of Messer Titian, or to relax for a morning, to the house of those poor nuns who for the charity of a few small coins— even those few that I always give them—lift up their hands to heaven. I do not fail to have them sew for me shirts, and sheets, and caps, and pillows, 101

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“Benché il mille volte tanto non sarebbe per cavarmi di stento, avenga che ognun corre a me non altrimenti che se io fusse l’erario del tesor reale. Se una poverina partorisce, la mia casa le fa le spese. Se uno vien posto in carcere, io gli ho da provedere il tutto. I soldati male in arnese, i peregrini afflitti, e ogni sorte di Cavalieri erranti, si riparano meco. Né si amala persona di disagio, che non mandi al mio spiziale per le medicine e per il mio medico che lo risani. E non è due mesi che essendo ferito un giovane poco lontan da me, si fece portare in una de le mie camere; onde io udendo il romore, e visto l’uomo mezzo morto, dissi: «Io sapevo ben d’essere oste, ma non ispedaliere». Sì che non vi maravigliate se io grido sempre che muoio di fame,” Lettere ii, 355–356, 20 March 1542; trans. in Caldecot Chubb, The Letters of Pietro Aretino, 174 (translation slightly modified). “Altra gente di sì fatta sorte.” Lettere i, 355–357, November 1537, to Francesco Alunno, cited above, n. 44 Lettere iii, 93, July 1544, to Captain Croce: “frati accusati per eretici, […] preti perversati da le calunnie, […] servitori mal trattati, e sin da chi si vive ne le Stinche di Fiorenza.”

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and handkerchiefs, and other trifles, which is how they earn their bread. And as I do this, I leave the cares of the council to anyone who wishes to have them.105 There are still, in the six volumes of the collected letters, some more precise accounts of Pietro’s charitable activity.106 A student from Padua states that, without knowing it, Aretino had welcomed him into his house during a long illness and had him treated by his doctor and his spiziale.107 In 1545, “the first day of Easter,”108 he was offered “a good number of animals, bleating and mooing,”109 which he hurried to distribute “to the poor who had gone hungry.”110 Shortly afterward, he came to the aid of a poor, sick “old friend,”111 and then in October of the same year, he helped a penitent brother “in need of everything.”112 In February 1549 he showed one of his visitors “twenty-two people with their babes at the breast, who had suddenly run to him to gnaw at the bones of [the earnings from] his ink”;113 and in April 1550, “18 children, boys and girls, without their mothers or nannies, enjoyed a meal in my house. Neither should it be believed that they did not leave without a few coins in their hands.”114 Meanwhile, between January 1549 and February 1550, he helped out the noble Antonio degli Albizzi,115 who was in dire straits, and had sent a little money to a “lady”116 who had fallen on hard times, while waiting for some

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106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

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“Per il fastidio ch’ormai ne sento, tosto che ho desinato me ne fuggo a casa vostra, o da M. Tiziano, o a spassarmi la mattina nelle celle d’alcune poverine che toccono il cielo col dito ne la limosina di quei parecchi soldi, o di quei pochi, che tuttavia porgo loro; non mancando di fargli cusire e camiscie, e lenzuola, e scuffie, e cussini, e fazzolletti, e simili bazzicature da guadagnargli il pane, lasciando in cotal mentre la cura del concilio a chi se la vuol pigliare,” Lettere iii, 114–115, agosto 1544, to Marcolini; trans. in Caldecot Chubb, The Letters of Pietro Aretino, 199. See Larivaille, L’ Arétin, 599–602 (references have been adapted to the Edizione nazionale volumes). Lettere ii, 374, 13 May 1542, to Anton de Roveste. “Il primo giorno di Pasqua.” “Buon numero di animali intronanti il luogo e di beli e di muggiti.” Lettere iii, 178, April 1545, to Ranieri dal Monte: “a i poveri che ne tenevano carestia.” Lettere iii, 207, May 1545, to Molino: “compare.” Lettere iii, 303–304, October 1545, to Marco Antonio Molino: “in necessità d’ogni cosa.” Lettere v, 146–147, to Luis D’Avila: “ventidue persone sin con i loro figlioletti alle poppe, concorsi d’improviso a mangiar l’ossa del [suo] inchiostro.” Lettere v, 355–356, to the chief magistrate of Riva: “diciotto tra bambini e bambine, senza le madri e le balie, [gli] mangiarono in casa godendo. Né si creda che se ne partisse alcuna senza qualche marcello in la mano.” Lettere v, 321–322. “Comare.”

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money owed to him which he told her he would not greedily keep from her.117 In December 1553 he apologized again for not sending more than a crown to a “Madonna” who had called upon his generosity, justifying this with the total of 310 crowns spent in less than two months on charitable works: a funeral he paid for just one day before. But as if that charity were not enough, here is one gondolier after another who must ask me to be his friend not only because of our mutual religion, but also to loosen my purse strings for him. As if that were not enough, here too it is almost Christmas, though I think I could get through the season alright, that is, if the bagpipers, beggars, my acquaintances, and even my household staff did not make me offer up my very flesh and bone as collateral to Jew[ish lenders].118 Finally, in a letter from February 1554, he asked Agostino Ricchi, his former disciple who became doctor to the pope, to fulfill a request from his old Jewish doctor, Maestro Elia, who said that he had participated “for 15 or 20 years”119 in charitable actions, benevolently caring not only for all the guests at the palazzo Bolani, but “any poor man or woman”120 indicated to him by Aretino.121

5

Morality as Double Entry Bookkeeping

Three of the Lettere written to Pietro Aretino, two from Antonfrancesco Doni (one of which was written in 1538, but presumably back dated) and one from Francesco Marcolini, bring together most of the apologetic materials mentioned above from among the six volumes of the collected letters, but they also added more to them. However, when it comes to “truthfulness”122 and “authen-

117 118

119 120 121 122

Lettere v, 231, September 1548. “Né bastando cotal limosina, a un barcaruolo dopo l’altro è bisognato ch’io sia compare, come di sacramento, di borsa. E perché nulla manchi, eccocimi vicino al Natale, cosa che ben ne vado se i pivi, le mendiche, le mie conoscenti, e la istessa brigata purtroppo in mia casa, non mi mandano in pegno in carne e in ossa a i Giudei,” Lettere vi, 295–296, to “Madonna etc.,” trans. in Caldecot Chubb, The Letters of Pietro Aretino, 315 (translation modified). “xv o xx anni.” “Qualunque misero o poverina.” Lettere vi, 322–323, to Ricchi. “Veridicità.”

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ticity,”123 the close relations between the two authors and Pietro have given some scholars pause.124 And no one can be sure how literally to interpret the writings of a vain and calculating man like Aretino; were that the countless gifts he bragged about always as natural and disinterested as he made them out to be? Were his charitable acts merely a disguise for an innate and irrepressible propensity for unbridled spending? Or in this case, did his behavior have more to do with his reckless spending habit, which was condemned by the Church, or with the Christian charity he so often invokes? But whether conscious or not, whatever his real motives were, and even if he was a prisoner of his own personality, he gave more by calculation than by a charitable calling. Prodigality constitutes the key to his ethic, and key—tout court—to his epistolary strategy. Aretino’s prodigality must be understood within the logic of a system that was constructed as his personal method of fighting against the empire of money and its consequences. His prodigality, whether sincere or not, was aimed at reducing the gap between rich and poor. It assumed a utopian function in the end: as an equalizer, he distributed riches that the princes and greedy Great Masters had accumulated to the detriment of both their subjects and of their moral principles. What part would the memory of the impoverished origins of the Scourge of princes and of his past struggles play in such a conception inspired by an egalitarianism which was at the very least naïve? And what of the calculated desire to disguise his innate propensity for wild spending behind the mask of acceptable principles? The answer lies shrouded in the past. But it remains true that he made prodigality his cardinal virtue, which probably in his eyes could, if not exactly justify, than at least cause history to forget his blackmail and other unscrupulous methods.125 And for his whole life, Aretino employed his prodigality to impose his own tribute not only on the rich and powerful, but also on the whole society of his time. 123 124 125

“Autenticità.” Luisa Mulas, “Le «Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino». Disegno e fini della raccolta,” Annali della Facoltà di Magistero dell’Università di Cagliari, n.s., 15/3, (1991–1992): 143–178 (157). To qualify Aretino’s embattled ethic, caught between opposite poles of blackmail and prodigality, it is tempting to draw inspiration from Procaccioli’s title, drawn from the lexicon of accounting: The Writer at the Abacus: The Double-entry Bookkeeping of Pietro Aretino (“Lo scrittore all’abaco. La partita doppia di Pietro Aretino,” in Paolo ProcaccioliAngelo Romano [eds.], Cinquecento capriccioso e irregolare. Eresie letterarie nell’Italia del classicismo [Manziana, 1999], 149–172). See Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (Turin, 1961–), Partita, n. 31: a. in partita doppia, “which takes its inspiration at that time from ethical norms opposed or discordant with them.” To borrow from Antonio Labriola’s example that seems apt for Aretino: morality employs double-entry bookkeeping.

chapter 17

Pietro Aretino and Publication Brian Richardson

In 1542, during the period when Aretino’s literary reputation had reached its height, he wrote in a letter to the Modenese captain Giovan Francesco Faloppia that, although he would never claim to be the greatest writer, “as for winning reputation, I would bow neither to those who wrote long ago nor to the writers of today.”1 Referring to the gifts that he had received from rulers, he claimed that all the world’s princes paid tribute to him, and that his fame had spread to England, Portugal, and Spain. Over the three decades that preceded this letter, Aretino had won his prestige not only through the verve and variety of his verse and prose, but also through his expert and trailblazing manipulation of the diffusion of his works. Aretino’s ambitions to profit from his writing, while advertising his talents as widely as possible to the reading public and to actual or potential patrons and benefactors, were especially well suited to the use of print publication, with its wide and rapid reach. One can get an initial idea of his success in this medium from Amedeo Quondam’s list of editions catalogued under the name of Aretino and produced between 1512 and 1557, the year after his death: there are no fewer than 151 of them, of which 44 were first editions (with a peak of six in 1538) and 107 were further printings (with a peak of 22 in 1539).2 We shall see also that, for his shorter writings, Aretino made more selective use of scribal publication, sometimes as the only form of diffusion of a work, even though this process meant that the attribution to himself as author might disappear or that the work itself might be lost. On occasion, too, he would recite his own verse. Aretino made his entry into the world of print early in his life, when he was not quite twenty years old but evidently already connected with the cultured society of the city where he was then living, Perugia. On 22 January 1512, a press in Venice produced the Opera nova del fecundissimo giovene Pietro Pic-

1 “Certo che circa le poesie cedo a ciascun che ora scrive, e che già scrisse; ma nel caso del farsi stimare, non darei la man ritta né a chi gìa scrisse, né a chi ora scrive,” Lettere ii, 368, 4 May 1542. 2 Amedeo Quondam, “Aretino e il libro: un repertorio, per una bibliografia,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 197–230 (221–230).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_019

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tore Arretino zoè strambotti sonetti capitoli epistole barzellete et una desperata, in octavo format, 24 leaves long. The adjective “fecundissimo” (“most abundant”), unlikely to be a misprint, may have been intended by Aretino as a variation on the more common “facundissimo” (“most eloquent”), which was closely associated with the poet-singer Serafino Aquilano. The colophon states that the edition was “Impresso in Venetia per Nicolò Zopino.”3 Zoppino, originally from Ferrara, was a street performer and a bookseller-publisher; the “per” of the colophon may in this case mean “for” rather than “by,” since it is thought that he did not become also a printer, in partnership with Vincenzo di Paolo, until a few years later.4 It seems very likely that the initiative for this edition was taken jointly by Zoppino and the author. Zoppino had published similar collections of courtly verse in Bologna and Venice, by poets such as Serafino Aquilano and Vincenzo Calmeta, as well as an Opera nova della vita et morte della diva et seraphica s. Catharina da Siena […] in rima. In strambotti: capituli: sonetti: epistole: et sextine, by Aretino’s former teacher in Arezzo, Giovanni Pollio Lappoli (1511).5 Aretino’s active involvement in the venture is revealed by the presence, on the verso of the title page, of a letter addressed by him to his readers, “L’auctore ali legenti.” This is a familiar genre of paratext, although it is the only such letter by Aretino, who later preferred to use his prefatory letters to address individuals. It begins with conventional modesty. These poems, he writes, are merely “some things we made almost in an instant” (“alquante cose da noi facte in uno quasi istante”); he had intended to hide them, not to expose them to critics. But Aretino then produces a bold and witty twist. He has nevertheless decided to publish the writings (“mandarle fore”); if the work itself gives no pleasure, at least its audacity will. “Read [the poems] at least,” he tells the reader, “and if you are irritated and do not want them to clutter up your house,

3 Lorenzo Baldacchini, Alle origini dell’editoria in volgare: Niccolò Zoppino da Ferrara a Venezia. Annali (1503–1544) (Manziana, 2011), 73–74, no. 18. On Zoppino, see also Neil Harris, “L’avventura editoriale dell’‘Orlando Innamorato’,” in I libri di “Orlando Innamorato” (Modena, 1987), 35–100 (88–94); Jeremy M. Potter, “Nicolò Zoppino and the Book-Trade Network of Perugia,” in Denis Reidy (ed.), The Italian Book, 1465–1800: Studies Presented to Dennis E. Rhodes on his 70th Birthday (London, 1993), 135–159; Massimo Rospocher, “‘In vituperium status Veneti’: The Case of Niccolò Zoppino,” The Italianist, 34 (2014): 349–361. On the Opera nova and its context, see Roberto Fedi, “ ‘Juvenilia’ aretiniani,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 87–119. In quoting from sixteenth-century sources, I have expanded “&” to “et,” adopted the modern distinction between u and v, modified punctuation, and added diacritic accents. 4 Baldacchini, Alle origini, 35; Harris, “L’avventura editoriale,” 88. 5 On the connections between Aretino and Lappoli, see Louise George Clubb and Robert Black, Romance and Aretine Humanism in Sienese Comedy: Pollastra’s “Parthenio” at the Studio di Siena (Florence, 1993), 23–26.

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sell them to booksellers to make bindings for other books or to grocers to wrap little seafish; this will not cost you too much and I would have no objection.”6 By 1517, Aretino had moved to Rome. Niccolò Martelli later recalled him using his skills as a performer of his own verse in the circle of Agostino Chigi at the age of 28, in other words around 1520: “If you have not entirely forgotten the time past when we were in Rome, during the papacy of Leo x, I as a young man, you barely 28, when you visited me in the splendid garden of Agostino Chigi and composed in undeserved praise of me the elegant capitolo beginning ‘Two living sapphires, or rather two shining suns,’ for which I am still indebted to you, and by reciting to me sometimes ‘The tyrant knows if Lucretia was fair’ and sometimes ‘Fair lady and flame of mine,’ you enraptured me so much with the sound of your excellent verses, by which all of Rome was still amazed, that I resolved to enter the pleasant field of fair Tuscan poetry.”7 Such love poems doubtless circulated beyond the garden of Chigi’s new Villa Farnesina, but in this period Aretino also acquired wider literary fame, indeed notoriety, in the city and beyond through satirical verse that was circulated, in the first instance, in manuscript. He and the older Roman poet Antonio Lelio were reputed, according to an anonymous poem, to have affixed some of their verses in public places: “they go by night around all the streets sticking up their poems, Pietro in the Borgo [near the Vatican], Antonio in Parione [between Piazza Navona and the Campo de’ Fiori].”8 Aretino, too, had a link with Pari6 “[L]ègeli al meno e, fastidito, si non vòle te innopicheno la casa, vendeli a li librari per far coverti de li altri o a li salsamentari per involuparci li pesciculi marini e né fia tuo troppo danno, e a me non seria tedioso,” Poesie varie i, 39. 7 “Se non è spenta in voi la memoria del tempo andato […] nel quale eravamo in Roma, sedendo Lione x, io giovanetto, et voi apena alli xxviii anni, che visitato da me nel superbo giardino del Magn. Agostin Ghigi, […] in mia lode componeste (benché indegnamente) il leggiadro capitolo che cominciava ‘Duoi zaphir vivi, anzi duoi sol fulgenti,’ del che anchora obligato vi sono, et recitandomi ora ‘Se Lucretia fu bella, il sa il Tiranno,’ et hora ‘Alma mia donna et fiamma,’ […] ne invaghiste tanto col suono delle vostre rime eccellenti, di cui anchora tutta Roma stupiva, che […] mi diedi a entrare nel dilettevole campo della vaga Poesia Toscana,” Niccolò Martelli, Il primo libro delle lettere (Florence, [Anton Francesco Doni] for the author: 1546), letter of 1 October 1540, fol. B2r. On the implications of this passage, see also Luca Degl’Innocenti, “The Singing Voice and the Printing Press: Itineraries of the Altissimo’s Performed Texts in Renaissance Italy,” The Italianist, 34 (2014): 318–335 (329–331). For an overview of the role of oral performance in Aretino’s career, see Paolo Procaccioli, “Reading Modern Authors: Aretino as Host and Speroni’s Dialogo dell’amore,” in Stefano Dall’Aglio-Brian RichardsonMassimo Rospocher (eds.), Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society (London, 2016), 170–182. 8 “[P]er ogni cammino / van di notte attaccando le canzone: / Pietro nel Borgo, Antonio im.Parione,” Valerio Marucci-Antonio Marzo-Angelo Romano (eds.), Pasquinate romane del Cinquecento, 2 vols. (Rome, 1983), vol. 1, 259, no. 268, lines 18–20.

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one, and specifically with the battered statue nicknamed Pasquino, which had been set up not far from Piazza Navona. Poems, which came to be known as pasquinades (“pasquinate”), were attached to it, especially on the feast of St Mark, 25 April, but also during conclaves for the election of popes. For instance, 51 poems written during the election of Adrian vi (between December 1521 and January 1522) were gathered together in a manuscript collection (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, ms. Magl. xxxvii 205). Such poems, ephemeral in nature, were published anonymously, and it has proved difficult to attribute specific sonnets to Aretino with certainty. However, throughout his life he associated himself closely with the satirical tone of pasquinades and with their semi-clandestine mode of publication.9 To the period of the election of Adrian vi belongs, in all probability, a longer poem (298 lines) that Aretino linked with the spirit of Pasquino but that he decided to publish in print: the Lamento de uno cortigiano già favorito in palazzo, et hora è in grandissima calamità: compositione de m. Pietro Aretino. One copy survives of a printed edition, in octavo format, with no indication of its date or printer. Whether or not this copy represents the first edition of the work, Aretino had arranged the publication of the poem in a formal manner, providing a letter of dedication to Paolo Valdambrini, a fellow-Aretine and a secretary of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (later Clement vii). He uses this letter to advertise his persona of a truth-telling critic of others, a “most just censor of everyone,” writing “with a free tongue with the permission of Master Pasquino.”10 9

10

On the origins of the pasquinades, see Angelo Romano, “La satira di Pasquino: formazione di un genere letterario,” in Chrysa Damianaki-Paolo Procaccioli-Angelo Romano (eds.), Ex marmore. Pasquini, pasquinisti, pasquinate nell’Europa moderna, Atti del Colloquio internazionale Lecce-Otranto 17–19 novembre 2005 (Manziana, 2006), 11–34. Studies on Aretino and Pasquino, during his Roman period and afterwards, include Alessandro Luzio, “Pietro Aretino e Pasquino,” Nuova antologia, 3rd ser., 28 (1890): 679–708; Valerio Marucci, “L’Aretino e Pasquino,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 67–86; Danilo Romei, “Aretino e Pasquino,” in Da Leone x a Clemente vii. Scrittori toscani nella Roma dei papati medicei (1513– 1534) (Manziana, 2007), 23–44; Paolo Procaccioli, “Tu es Pasquillus in aeterno: Aretino non romano e la maschera di Pasquino,” in Ex marmore, 67–96; and the chapter by Chiara Lastraioli in the present volume. Romei considers only five pasquinades to be attributable to Aretino with certainty: these are the tailed sonnets nos. xiii, xv, xvi, xxiii, and xxiv in Operette politiche e satiriche ii. However, Faini includes in this edition several other pasquinades derived from the Florentine manuscript mentioned above. “[G]iustissimo censore d’ognuno”; “con libera lingua […] con licenzia di maiestro Pasquino,” Opere politiche e satiriche ii, 51–60, 264–265, 291–292. Valdambrini is mentioned in Vasari’s life of Giovanni Antonio Lappoli: see Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 8 vols. (Florence, 1966–1987), Testo, v, 182.

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During Aretino’s second period in Rome, from November 1523 to October 1525, his verse continued to be linked consistently with specific occasions, and his means of publishing it were as diverse in nature as the poems themselves. Most of his occasional verse was diffused effectively in handwritten form: Ariosto, in Ferrara, knew it well enough to cite “Petro Aretino” as an example of a satirical poet in his Satira vi (line 96), written about 1524–1525. Aretino sent out formal Petrarchan poems in manuscript, sometimes within his personal letters, as he was to do throughout his life. In a letter of 26 May 1524, Vittoria Colonna wrote to Gian Matteo Giberti about some madrigals, one of them written in praise of her, by “our Pietro” (“il nostro messer Pietro”), most probably Aretino.11 Federico Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, thanked him on 27 August of the same year for the gift of a canzone written in imitation of Petrarch.12 In contrast, the initial circulation of his scandalous tailed sonnets describing sixteen positions of sexual intercourse, the Sonetti sopra i “xvi modi” (as Aquilecchia entitled them), was carried out surreptitiously, and it is now shrouded in uncertainty. The sonnets must have been read in manuscript in Rome when they were first composed, in 1524 or 1525, but soon afterwards they found their way into one or more clandestine printed editions, together with woodcuts based on engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi. A letter of 9 November 1527 with which Aretino sent to Cesare Fregoso “the book of the sonnets and the lustful figures” (“il libro de i sonetti e de le figure lussuriose”) seems to refer to a printed volume. But only one copy of a sixteenth-century edition survives, without indication of date or printer, and this was judged by Aquilecchia to come from a reprinting of some years later.13 While the Lamento de uno cortigiano belongs to the world of cheap print, at the opposite end of the spectrum lie the three very elegant editions of canzoni written by Aretino in support of the policies of Clement vii and Giberti, the pope’s datary: Laude di Clemente vii Max[imus] Opt[imus] P[ontifex], Esortatione de la pace tra l’Imperadore e il Re di Francia, and Canzone in laude del Datario. With characteristic lack of modesty, the author advertised himself on the title page of the Canzone as an “illustrious poet” (“preclaro poeta”), and on that of the Laude as even a “divino poeta,” a term that he was to repeat on several occasions throughout his career. Aretino’s self-descriptions seem hyper-

11 12

13

Vittoria Colonna, Carteggio, ed. Ermanno Ferrero-Giuseppe Müller, supplement by Domenico Tordi (Turin, 1892), letter xii, 15–16. Armand Baschet, “Documents inédits tirés des archives de Mantoue,” Archivio storico italiano, 3rd ser., 3, pt. 2 (1866): 105–130 (116). This may have been a manuscript copy of one of the three canzoni printed around the end of the year; on these, see below. Poesie varie i, 12–15, 103–114, 290–298 (292).

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bolic, but they were successful enough to lead Ludovico Ariosto to call him “il divin Pietro Aretino” in the Orlando furioso of 1532, as well as to give him another of the titles with which he advertised himself, “the scourge of princes” (xlvi, 14).14 These canzoni, which use almost identical rhyme schemes derived from Petrarch’s “Spirto gentil, che quelle membra reggi,” form a triptych, but they were printed between December 1524 and January 1525 as separate pamphlets, single quarto gatherings with italic types, at the press of Ludovico degli Arrighi, a highly distinguished calligrapher from Vicenza who had recently begun to operate also as a printer in Rome.15 Earlier in 1524, Arrighi had been commissioned to print works by leading members of Roman literary society, such as the Coryciana, a collection of Latin poems by humanists from the papal curia; the tragedy in vernacular blank verse, Sophonisba, by the aristocrat Gian Giorgio Trissino, a fellow-Vicentine; and Trissino’s own Canzone al santissimo Clemente settimo. Collaboration with Arrighi thus gave Aretino the opportunity to associate himself with the literary elite of Rome, as well as to win personal favor in the papal court. In the colophons of all three editions, the phrases “Con gratia et privilegio” or “Con privilegio et gratia” indicate that no one else had the right to print the poems, and the second and third editions specify protection against printing of this or any other work printed in Arrighi’s newly designed italic types (referred to as “questa littera” or “questa nuova Littera”) for a period of ten years.16 This suggests that it was Arrighi who requested the privileges. But it seems certain that he habitually worked on commission, and in this case Aretino appears to have received financial support from papal circles for the diffusion of works that had propaganda value. Maria Grazia Blasio notes that two payments were made to him by the Camera Apostolica in late 1524.17 When the canzoni were printed, Aretino sent copies to Federico Gonzaga, while taking the opportunity to suggest that he might be offered lavish gifts in return: to be precise, four pairs of shirts embroidered with gold and silk and two gold

14

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16

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“[I]l flagello de’ principi.” Aretino used this phrase in the first of his stanzas “In laude di Venetia,” which date from soon after his arrival in the city: Scritti di Pietro Aretino nel Codice Marciano It. xi 66 (= 6730), ed. Danilo Romei (Florence, 1987), 109. Poesie varie i, 11–12, 85–102, 288–290; Emanuele Casamassima, “Ancora su Ludovico degli Arrighi vicentino (notizie 1510–1527): risultati di una ‘recognitio’,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 40 (1965): 35–42. Maria Grazia Blasio, Cum gratia et privilegio: programmi editoriali e politica pontificia, Roma, 1487–1527 (Rome, 1988), 70–71, 97. On the system of literary book privileges that had become well established throughout Italy from the 1480s onwards, see Angela Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Leiden-Boston, 2013), 195–217. Blasio, Cum gratia et privilegio, 70, n. 164.

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bonnets. After a delay that angered Aretino, these items were made for him by nuns, and he was pleased to receive them in March 1525.18 Aretino left Rome in October 1525, after the attack on him carried out on behalf of Giberti. At the end of 1526, he was in Mantua, under the protection of Federico Gonzaga. From this period dates a prose prognostication for the year 1527, written in the name of Pasquino, of which the marquis received a manuscript copy; only the opening survives in a fragment.19 Aretino moved from Mantua to Venice in March 1527. For the time being, he continued to reach his readers chiefly through the handwritten word. In the Veneto, a number of writings in verse and prose, including five datable from late 1526 (the prognostication just mentioned) to July 1527, were copied out and gathered into a miscellany of texts.20 The Venetian aristocrat Marin Sanudo, an avid seeker of new works relating to current affairs, transcribed some sonnets by or about Aretino, including one dating from early 1526.21 Soon after the Sack of Rome on 6 May 1527, Aretino composed a frottola in the voice of Pasquino, beginning “Pax vobis, brigata,” and he sent a copy to Federico Gonzaga with a letter of 7 July 1527, together with a long canzone about the situation of the devastated city, “Deh, avess’io quella terribil tromba.” Berni responded to “Pax vobis, brigata” with his tailed sonnet “Tu ne dirai e farai tante e tante.”22 The frottola was also printed at the time, but the edition, of which no copy survives, had no indication of its provenance and may have been issued without Aretino’s involvement. In this form the poem circulated in Rome in late 1527 and was read by Pope Clement, as Girolamo Barbolani of Montacuto informed Aretino, with the suggestion that the poem was “printed, it is thought, in Siena.”23 Once Aretino was in Venice and no longer had to jostle for attention and favor on the fringes of courts, he could rethink and raise his literary ambitions in the context of the publishing opportunities that were offered to authors

18 19

20

21 22 23

Baschet, “Documents inédits,” 119–125. Alessandro Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni a Venezia e la corte dei Gonzaga (Turin, 1888), 8–9, 63–64; Scritti di Pietro Aretino, ed. Romei, 54–57; Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 90–91, 309. Scritti di Pietro Aretino, ed. Romei, 45–83. Romei suggests a possible link with the Cornaro family (17) and describes the neat, “humanistic,” handwriting of the manuscript’s principal scribe (18–21). Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 11. Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 16–18. “[S]tampato per quel che si pensa in Siena,” Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 14– 18, 64–71; Scritti di Pietro Aretino, ed. Romei, 58–83, 159–178; Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 117–148, 311–313; lsa i, 371–372, from Barbolani, 5 December 1527.

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by the resources of the city’s printing industry, unrivalled throughout Europe during his lifetime. From this pivotal stage of his career, Aretino began to compose more substantial prose and verse works, alongside shorter, occasional works, and to diffuse them forthwith through Venetian presses. But that was not enough to ensure his remarkable rise to fame: crucially, his more systematic and intensive use of printing houses went hand in hand with the protection of his editions through privileges, with the dedication of his works to men and women in positions of power, and with the ways in which he publicized these dedications. A possible early indication of the strong links that Aretino was forming with printers and publishers in Venice comes, surprisingly, from an edition of Dante’s Commedia whose colophon is dated 23 January 1529. It was printed by Iacopo Pocatela da Borgofranco for the very well-established publisher Luc’Antonio Giunta. The title page includes, on the left, woodcut profile portraits of five great classical Latin authors, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, and Terence. Facing them on the right are the three great Tuscan authors of the fourteenth century and two contemporary authors: in descending order, Dante, Petrarch, Pietro Aretino, Boccaccio, and Bernardo Accolti, known as “l’Unico Aretino.” Pietro Aretino may have been placed opposite Ovid on the strength of his success as an amatory poet. It seems likely that Aretino was responsible for the inclusion of himself and of a fellow-Aretine whom he much admired, with the support of Luc’Antonio Giunta’s son Tommaso, with whom Aretino was acquainted by early 1529.24 In the late 1520s, Aretino set about writing his first substantial poem, the chivalric romance Marfisa. Some stanzas were sent in manuscript to Federico Gonzaga between 1527 and 1529, as letters from the marquis to Aretino reveal.25 This involved having a fair copy made by a scribe in Venice or Mantua, and Gonzaga refers to this process: “And if you do not have someone there to transcribe, do not stop sending me some [stanzas], and I shall certainly have them copied here by that servant of [Benedetto] Agnello, who I know writes well”; “I am reading your stanzas with the greatest pleasure, and I shall have them copied by that servant of Agostino Gonzaga. Once he has copied them, I shall send you back the originals as you instruct.”26 This was intended to be a private process,

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Brian Richardson, “A Series of Woodcut Borders in Early Sixteenth-Century Venetian Title Pages, and the Career of Pietro Aretino,” La Bibliofilìa, 103 (2001): 137–164. On the use of author portraits of Aretino, see Raymond Waddington’s chapter in this volume. Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 20, 72–74, 75–76, 83. See also Poemi cavallereschi, 9–32, 315–389. “Et si non havereti lì chi transcriva non restate però di mandarmene, et io ben le farò copi-

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not a form of scribal publication. By the end of 1529, Aretino was able to make plans to have the Marfisa printed and to earn money from its sales and not only from the gifts of rulers. On 3 December he wrote to ask the marquis to request on his behalf “a brief [i.e. a formal letter] from the pope [Clement vii], and from the emperor [Charles v] a privilege, to prohibit [unauthorized] printing of the aforesaid book in their jurisdiction for a period of ten years. […] And because I hope the printing, and not princes, will reward me, I beg you not to deprive me of this benefit.” If the two rulers were to refuse, Aretino threatened to write twenty stanzas about them “in the manner of Pasquino” (“pasquillamente”).27 They did in fact refuse, not only on account of Aretino’s past actions but also because he had allegedly just written a “will” (“testamento”) that insulted them both.28 Aretino protested his innocence to the marquis but, significantly, he put a brave face on this setback because he did not depend solely on income from sales: “Not being able to obtain the brief may cost me the profit of some scudi, but my glory does not depend on its power and I can do very well without it.”29 In August 1530, in preparation for printing, rather than for scribal publication, Aretino unsuccessfully begged Gonzaga to send a scribe, a certain Attilio, to Venice in order to make a fair copy of the 3500 stanzas that he had completed.30 Nevertheless, manuscript transmission to an individual, with the possibility of further oral diffusion, was still an option through which Aretino could win favor, and on 24 October 1530 Girolamo Bencucci wrote to him that Alessandro de’ Medici “would be glad to see something from the work, and you can have

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are qua a quel servitore di m. Agnello quale so che scrive bene.” “Con grand[issi]ma delettatione lego le stanze vostre, quale vedarò di far copiare a quel servitore di m. Augustino Gonzaga, […] et copiate che le habbi ve remanderò li originali secondo mi scriveti,” Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 73, 78. On Agnello, see David S. Chambers, “Benedetto Agnello, Mantuan Ambassador in Venice, 1530–56,” in David S. Chambers-Cecil H. CloughMichael E. Mallett (eds.), War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice: Essays in Honour of John Hale (London, 1993), 129–145. “[D]al Papa un breve, et dallo Imperatore un privilegio che per x anni proibiscano in la giuriditione loro lo stampare il prefato libro. […] Et perché io ho speranza che la stampa mi premierà, et non i principi, vi suplico che non mi vogliate torre tanto bene,” Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 85; see also Angela Nuovo-Christian Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa nell’Italia del xvi secolo (Geneva, 2005), 194–195. A privilege from the pope was normally expressed in the form of a brief, and it was valid not only in the Papal States but in all the states of Christendom: see Nuovo, The Book Trade, 246. Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 86, n. 1. “A me po’ torre l’utile di qualche scudo il non poter ottenere il breve, ma la gloria mia non è in potestà de tal breve, et senza si po’ far benissimo,” Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 86. Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 97 and 100, n. 1.

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any canto of it that you wish transcribed and send it through our young man; it would be learned by heart, not just read.”31 Aretino finally obtained his papal brief to protect the printing of the Marfisa in September 1530.32 However, it was not until 7 March 1532 that a licence (licenza) was requested in order to permit its printing in Venice. (This measure had been necessary, in principle, since 29 January 1527, when the Council of Ten decreed that no new works could be printed without a licence issued on its behalf, in order to prevent the publication of “works that are dishonorable and of a bad nature.”)33 Probably in the same year 1532, and probably at the press of Bernardino Vitali, the first two cantos of the poem were printed. The title page gives prominence to the patron to whom the poem was now addressed, the imperial captain Alfonso d’Avalos (the “reale Alfonso” of canto i, 6): Al gran marchese del Vasto dui primi canti di Marphisa del divino Pietro Aretino. The title page also advertised, grandiosely but somewhat vaguely, that the cantos were protected by more than one privilege: “Let no one dare to print them, or sell them once printed, under the penalties set out in the concessions granted by all the Princes of Italy.”34 On the verso was a letter addressed to Aretino by Lorenzo Venier, which laments the harm done to the text “by the printings of Ancona” (“per le stampe d’Ancona”) and claims that Venier is publishing it “not without your indignation” (“non senza vostro sdegno”).35 The style of this letter suggests that its true author was Aretino, who had described Venier in 1530 as “my protégé” (“mio creato”).36 The claim that publication was taking place against Aretino’s will was certainly a fiction, but the allegation about an earlier pirate edition may have had a basis in truth, even though no copy of it is known to survive. As we have seen, parts of the Marfisa had been transmitted in manuscript, and they had doubtless been recited by the author and others: the letter in Venier’s name says that “I have mentally snatched [the cantos] away from you while you have sometimes made Venice and all Italy hear

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“Il Signor Duca [Alessandro was Duke of Penne] vederia volentieri qualche cosa de l’opera, e potrete far transcrivere un canto di quella che vi paresse, e mandarlo per via del nostro Giovene, qual se impareria a mente, non che se leggesse solamente,” lsa i, 82–83. Aretino thanks Pope Clement in Lettere i, 75–76, 20 September 1530. “[O]pere dishoneste, et de mala natura.” The decree is published in Horatio F. Brown, The Venetian Printing Press 1469–1800 (London, 1891), 208, and in Tiziana Plebani, Venezia 1469: la legge e la stampa (Venice, 2004), 40–41. See below, n. 87, on Aretino’s requests for this and other licences. “Nessuno gli ardisca imprimere, né impressi vendere, sotto le pene contenute ne le gratie concedute da tutti i Principi d’Italia.” Poemi cavallereschi, 319. Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 46.

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them.”37 An unauthorized edition based on the first canto and part of the second, still addressed to Federico Gonzaga, with the title Opera nova del superbo Rodamonte re di Sarza che dapoi la morte sua volse signorizare l’inferno: cosa bellissima novamente stampata, was printed, together with three other poems, by Guglielmo da Fontaneto in Venice in 1532, commissioned by the performing poet and part-time publisher Ippolito Ferrarese. It has been suggested that this edition was based on an earlier one, now lost, and “the printings of Ancona” could refer to such an edition.38 In 1535, Aretino’s first publisher, Niccolò Zoppino, printed Tre primi canti di Marfisa del divino Pietro Aretino, nuovamente stampati, et historiati (i.e. “illustrated”), adding canto iii to the two published earlier.39 The edition opened with a letter ostensibly addressed by the Roman poet and playwright Giuseppe Santafiore “to readers of vernacular works” (“Iosef Santa Fior’ a i lettori delle vulgari opere”). Perhaps it was indeed contributed by Santafiore; it lacks the vivacity normally associated with Aretino’s writing. The letter does, however, refer in an Aretinian way to performance as well as to silent reading: “[the] vernacular and Tuscan language […] is in no small way welcome and useful to nourish the ears and mind at the same time with new and varied works, both for listeners and for readers.”40 This is an appropriate reference in the context of the edition, since Zoppino’s performances as a street singer made a deep impression on Aretino, who recalled them in his later works.41 Aretino may have continued his collaboration with Zoppino in other editions of this period: it has been observed that some unsigned editions of works by Aretino from the 1530s are printed with the distinctive italic types used by Zoppino as printer.42

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39 40

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“[D]etti canti […] vi ho con la mente involati, mentre a Vinegia e a tutta Italia […] gli avete talor fatti udire.” See also Luca Degl’Innocenti, “Paladini e canterini: appunti sull’oralità nella tradizione cavalleresca italiana del Quattro e Cinquecento,” in Johannes BartuschatFranca Strologo (eds.), Carlo Magno in Italia e la fortuna dei libri di cavalleria (Ravenna, 2016), 301–323 (318–320). Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 20–22; Poemi cavallereschi, 29–30, 317–318; Giancarlo Petrella, “ ‘Ad instantia d’Hippolito Ferrarese’: un cantimbanco editore nell’Italia del Cinquecento,” Paratesto, 8 (2011): 23–80 (30–35). Petrella notes that Ippolito had had a book printed in Pesaro, not far from Ancona, in 1531 (34). Baldacchini, Alle origini, 277, no. 337. “[La] vulgare e tosca lingua […] è di non picciola gratitudine e utilità per pascier in un tempo gli orecchi e la mente di nuove e varie cose, tanto de gli ascoltanti quanto de i lettori,” Poemi cavallereschi, 47. Aretino, Lo Ipocrito (iv, 11), in Teatro ii, 246; Pietro Aretino, Sei giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1969), 161. Neil Harris, review of Baldacchini, Alle origini, The Library, 7th ser., 14 (2013): 213–217 (217).

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In about 1535, Vitali printed D’Angelica di m. Pietro Aretino due primi canti. The title page noted that the edition was protected by a ten-year privilege granted by the Venetian Senate. A preliminary letter is addressed by Aretino to Maria d’Aragona, but its adulation extends to the person to whom he had addressed this poem and (as we have seen) the Marfisa in two cantos, her “superhuman consort” (“sopraumano consorte”) Alfonso d’Avalos.43 In contrast, Aretino’s two other incomplete romances were published without a clear indication of the printer’s name and without a date: Li dui primi canti di Orlandino del divino messer Pietro Aretino, with no dedication and a teasingly cryptic colophon,44 and the Astolfeida del divino Pietro Aretino: opera delettevole da leggere, che contiene la vita e fatti de tutti li paladini di Francia. The latter edition is preceded by a colorful letter addressed by the author “To Pasquino and Marforio [another ‘talking statue’], ancient Romans and lovers of the truth” (“A Pasquino e Marforio antichi romani e amatori del vero”), in praise of their endurance and their devotion to revealing virtues and vices in a world without paladins, and by a tailed sonnet headed “Pasquino a li lettori,” in admiration of Aretino’s own love of revealing the truth.45 The edition concludes with an announcement that “The rest will soon be published” (“Presto sarà fuore il resto”), but no more followed. In 1533, Vitali had printed Aretino’s comedy Il Marescalco (“The Stablemaster”). For this edition Aretino devised another dedicatory letter that went against expectations. It was addressed to Argentina Pallavicino Rangone, daughter of Federico Pallavicino of Zibello and wife of the soldier Guido Rangone. A noblewoman would have been an unusual choice for a comedy of any kind, because of their often indecorous subject matter, and the choice was especially striking in the case of this play. It turns on a trick played on the stablemaster: although he is homosexual, he is told that he is being given a bride, and in due course “she” turns out to be a page boy in disguise. Aretino argues in his letter that someone of good reputation, such as his dedicatee, was needed in order to absolve his work from blame. Describing the play as a daughter of his, he expresses fear that her good reputation is at risk, since she seems to know everyone: “I see her honor and mine in danger; thus, since I cannot persuade her to become a nun, and seeing the religious spirit in which you bring up the most noble ladies placed in your service, I give her to you. I hope to hear about her some of those qualities that the world hears about you, who have 43 44 45

Poemi cavallereschi, 159–160. “Stampato ne la stampa, pel mastro de la stampa, dentro da la città, in casa e non di fuoro, nel mille vallo cercha;” perhaps printed by Agostino Bindoni, not before 1540. Poemi cavallereschi, 239–242.

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made your house the temple of modesty. Since she is somewhat daring, teach her, you who are the paragon of noble behavior, not to go beyond the bounds of honor in making a comedy of the story of the stablemaster.”46 In this period, Aretino began the most fruitful of his collaborations with the world of commercial publication, in which an outsider like himself, Francesco Marcolini of Forlì, acted first as his publisher and then as his printer.47 Marcolini had arrived in Venice around the same time as Aretino and had begun to work there as a bookseller. He must have attracted Aretino’s friendship as a member of the book-trade who had unusually wide cultural interests and skills, including drawing and architecture, which are reflected in his own writings and in Aretino’s correspondence with him. Marcolini, for his part, must have seen in Aretino’s writings an attractive opportunity to invest in publication, not just in bookselling. In 1534 and 1535 Marcolini published or printed solely works by Aretino; he then used this experience as a springboard from which he broadened his publishing activities to include other authors. In 1534, he commissioned Giovanni Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio, who had been printing in Venice since 1526, to print three prose works by Aretino: in June, a free account of La passione di Giesù con due canzoni, una alla Vergine, et l’altra al Christianissimo (the King of France); in August, a revised and more formally correct version of the comedy La Cortigiana;48 and in November, a paraphrase

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“[O]nde io, che veggio in pericolo lo onor suo e il mio, poiché non posso metterle in core di farsi monica, vedendo la religione in cui allevate le nobilissime donzelle poste a i servigi vostri, ve la dono, sperando udire di lei qualcuna di quelle qualità che il mondo ode di voi, che avete fatto de la casa vostra il tempio di pudicizia; e perché ella è alquanto baldanzosetta, insegnatele voi, che sete lo essempio dei gentili costumi, a non passare i termini di onestà nel far comedia de la istoria del marescalco.” Aretino, Il Marescalco, in Teatro ii, 9–152 (25). On Argentina Rangone, see Katherine A. McIver, Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580: Negotiating Power (Farnham, 2006), 21, 143. On Marcolini’s printing and on his collaboration with Aretino, see especially Gli annali della tipografia veneziana di Francesco Marcolini compilati da Scipione Casali, ed. Alfredo Gerace, 2 vols. (Bologna, 1953–1958); Amedeo Quondam, “Nel giardino del Marcolini: un editore veneziano tra Aretino e Doni,” Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 157 (1980), 75–116; Paolo Temeroli, “Astuzie del paratesto e gioco delle parti tra autore e editore nelle stampe di Francesco Marcolini,” in Marco Santoro-Maria Gioia Tavoni (eds.), I dintorni del testo: approcci alle periferie del libro, 2 vols. (Rome, 2005), vol. 2, 493–504; Paolo Veneziani, “Marcolini, Francesco,” in dbi, vol. 69 (Rome, 2007), 773–776; Paolo Procaccioli-Paolo Temeroli-Vanni Tesei (eds.), Un giardino per le arti: “Francesco Marcolino da Forlì.” La vita, l’opera, il catalogo, Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Forlì, 11–13 ottobre 2007 (Bologna, 2009); Francesco Marcolini, Scritti: lettere, dediche, avvisi ai lettori, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana, 2013). The first version of this play, dating from 1525, has survived in a single manuscript copy (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, ms. Magl. vii 84), and Aretino seems to have

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of I sette Salmi della penitentia di David. In 1535, Nicolini printed at Marcolini’s instance a third religious work of Aretino’s, I tre libri de la humanità di Christo, and an edition of Il Marescalco. Marcolini also set up his own press, probably by 1534. He is most likely to have been responsible for the first edition of the Ragionamento de la Nanna, et de la Antonia, fatto in Roma sotto una ficaia, composto dal divino Aretino per suo capricio, a corretione de i tre stati delle donne. However, because of its risqué content, a fictitious attribution was prudently given in the colophon: “Ne la inclita città di Parigi: Ubertinus Mazzola art. et medicine doctor, questo mese di aprile 1534.”49 Marcolini printed second editions of La Cortigiana and La passione di Giesù in November and December 1535 respectively. Aretino enhanced the prestige of the editions of his religious works by dedicating them to highly prominent members of society. La passione di Giesù was addressed to the French king, François i; the Sette Salmi to Antonio de Leyva, general of the army of Charles v; and La humanità di Christo in three books to the Milanese statesman Massimiano Stampa.50 Unusually, La passione had a dedication expressed in the form of an ex-voto inscribed in capital letters on the verso of the title page, rather than in the customary letter. The Sette Salmi included a letter from the author and doctor Agostino Ricchi to Gian Pietro Carafa, bishop of Chieti, that acclaims the recently elected Pope Paul iii (Alessandro Farnese), to whom Aretino asked Ricchi to send a copy of the work.51 The case of La Cortigiana is more complex. Five of the surviving six copies of the first edition have a letter of dedication addressed to Cardinal Bernardo Cles, “gran cardinale di Trento,” that includes praise for Charles v and his younger brother Ferdinand i, of whom Cles was chancellor. But the other copy has a dedication to another cardinal, Jean de Lorraine, in which the proimperial passage is replaced by another that eulogizes François i.52 As well as helping to raise the profile of an edition, such dedications could be rewarded by,

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taken no steps to encourage its circulation. See Paolo Trovato’s “Nota al testo” in Teatro i, 155–176. Aretino, Sei giornate, 370. Opere religiose i, 515, 598–600, 602–606; Élise Boillet, L’Arétin et la Bible (Geneva, 2007), 32–34. Lettere i, 97–98, to Giovanni Guidiccioni, 15 January 1535; Opere religiose i, 601; Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1997), 211–212, 339. See Della Corte’s “Nota al testo” in Teatro i, 339–380. For contemporary instances of special copies with an alternative or additional dedication, see Trattati sull’ortografia del volgare 1524–1526, ed. Brian Richardson (Exeter, 1984), 154–158, and James P. Carley, “Henry viii’s Library and Humanist Donors: Gian Matteo Giberti as a Case Study,” in Jonathan Woolfson (ed.), Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke, 2002), 99–128 (101–102).

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or could give thanks for, tangible benefits to the author: for example, Aretino wrote to thank Antonio de Leyva for a golden cup in June 1534, and to thank Bernardo Cles in November of the same year for one hundred ongari (ducats) and two medals.53 However, Aretino’s letter of dedication of the Ragionamento began by subverting expectations about how authors presented their works to readers. It was offered to his monkey (“Pietro Aretino al suo monicchio”), whom he regarded as “a great master” (“un gran maestro”), a phrase that Aretino often used with reference to those in power. In the first part of the letter, monkeys are compared with humans and the dedicatee is told to “take my pages and tear them up” (“piglia le mie carte, e squarciale”). Towards the end of the letter, though, Aretino returns to a more conventional mode, albeit within this unconventional context, by including praise of persons to whose patronage he aspired: the King of France, Antonio de Leyva, the Duke of Florence (Alessandro de’ Medici), the marchese del Vasto (Alfonso d’Avalos), the Prince of Salerno (Ferrante Sanseverino), and Massimiano Stampa. A passage that commended François i in the first edition was replaced before long by another in support of Charles v, following a change of political allegiance on Aretino’s part.54 The second part of the Sei giornate was printed in 1536, with the title Dialogo, nel quale la Nanna il primo giorno insegna a la Pippa sua figliuola a esser puttana, probably by Marcolini but under another false attribution: “Impressa in Turino. P. M. L.”55 The letter of dedication was this time addressed to a real person. He was not an aristocrat, of course, given the nature of the work, but someone who could nevertheless be of practical assistance to the author: Bernardo Valdaura, who must have been in the service of Pedro de Toledo, the viceroy of Naples.56 Another letter from Aretino to Valdaura, dated 26 August 1537, reveals that Valdaura made a substantial contribution towards the costs of printing this edition, and received a number of copies that he could then sell or perhaps use as gifts. Aretino wrote: “You must believe that I dedicated the edition to you not for the forty scudi that you provided for me, but because of your generous worth and the zealousness of your love of virtue. Nor would I have delayed returning them to you if Marcolini’s books, whose value is much higher, had not been left in your hands.”57 53 54 55 56 57

Lettere i, 94–95, to Leyva, 6 June 1534; 95–96, to Cles, 15 November 1534. Aretino, Sei giornate, 3–5, 373–378. Aretino, Sei giornate, 410–411. Aretino, Sei giornate, 145–147. “Credetelo pure che vi intitolai il dialogo non per i quaranta scudi, de i quali m’accomodaste, ma per cagione del vostro generoso valore, e per il zelo de l’amore che portate a la vertù. Né averei indugiato a rendervigli, se i libri del Marcolini, che montano molto più, non vi fussero rimasi in mano,” Lettere i, 257.

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The editions of Aretino and Marcolini benefited from the two men’s connections with the world of art and architecture. The German printmaker Johann Britt probably designed italic types for Marcolini.58 The title page of the 1537 edition of Aretino’s Stanze in praise of Angela Serena is dominated by a fine woodcut attributed to Britt, and derived from a design by Titian that depicts Aretino in the guise of a shepherd who is gazing at a winged siren in the heavens. This was the second of the great artist’s two designs intended for books, after the portrait of Ariosto included in the Orlando furioso of 1532.59 This edition is dedicated by the author to the Empress Isabella of Portugal, wife of Charles v.60 In September 1537 Marcolini brought out an edition of Sebastiano Serlio’s Regole generali di architetura sopra le cinque maniere degli edifici, in folio format with italic types. In January of the following year this provided a material model for the printing of the first book of Aretino’s Lettere, an imposing volume even though it is printed on somewhat smaller sheets of paper and with a smaller type-page than the Serlio edition. The two books are also linked through their use of the same architectural frame on their title pages, and through their inclusion of a letter from Aretino to Marcolini of 10 September 1537 that endorses the value of Serlio’s treatise. Aretino’s collection was his most enterprising publishing venture to date and, as the foundational work in the genre of letters in the vernacular, it proved to be one of his most influential.61 His personality as the most trenchant critic of his age was asserted more boldly than before. A woodcut portrait of the author, wearing a gold chain given to him by François i in 1533, is included on the title page and again on the last leaf, where it is preceded by the words “Divus P. Aretinus acerrimus virtutum et vitiorum demonstrator” (“the divine Aretino, sharpest commentator on virtues and vices”) and followed by the motto “Veritas odium parit” (“Truth begets hatred”). Aretino’s dedicatory letter is addressed to Francesco Maria Della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Aretino was assisted in the preparation of the work by Niccolò Franco, but the two men

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59 60 61

See Fabia Borroni, “Britto, Giovanni,” in dbi, vol. 14 (Rome, 1972), 351–352. On Marcolini’s italic types, see Luigi Balsamo-Alberto Tinto, Origini del corsivo nella tipografia italiana del Cinquecento (Milan, 1967), 150, 155, and fig. 63. David Rosand-Michelangelo Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut (Washington, D.C., 1976), 193–195, cat. nos. 41 and 42. Poesie varie i, 311–314. The letter, here dated 15 January 1537, is included with variants in Lettere i, 423–424, with the date 18 December 1537. On the printing of Aretino’s letters, see Fabio Massimo Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa: strategie di autopromozione a Venezia nel Cinquecento (Rome, 2003), and the chapter by Paul Larivaille in the present volume.

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became bitter enemies when Franco had the temerity to bring out his own rival collection of Pistole vulgari (Venice, [Antonio Gardane]: November 1538).62 Printing of Aretino’s first book of letters must have been carried out in some haste, and the edition includes a long list of errata. In September 1538, Marcolini published a new issue of the edition, substituting the original sheet that contained the first and fourth leaves and adding twenty-five letters. The title page has a different but similar portrait, and the description of Aretino as an unmasker of virtues and vices now appears above it. This issue was brought out in competition with unauthorized editions that had appeared since January.63 The success of the first issue is recorded in one of the letters added to the second, in which Aretino responds to Bernardino Teodoli’s description of customers jostling to get their hands on copies in a bookshop.64 A letter to François i was also printed individually, as part of Aretino’s efforts to encourage Christians to fight against the Turks, with the title Copia de una letera, al Christianissimo Re di Franza, ne la quale essorta sua Maestà a entrare in Legha con tutti gli altri Signori et Prencipi Christiani, a destruttione et ruina de l’immanissimo Turcho, nimico de la S[anta] Fede di Christo.65 In August 1542, Marcolini published a second edition in which the novelty was a number of letters addressed to Aretino: Del primo libro de le lettere di M. Pietro Aretino: editione seconda con giunta de lettere xxxxiiii scrittegli da i primi spirti del mondo. Marcolini continued to set the text in italic types, but he now used the unostentatious octavo format, and the title page showed his printer’s device (which, appropriately, represented Truth) rather than a portrait of the author. This combination of types and format was used henceforth for all Aretino’s editions of his letters. The second book, published by Marcolini in the same month, was dedicated “to the most holy King of England” (“al sacratissimo re d’Inghilterra),” Henry viii, using Pietro Vanni of Lucca as an intermediary.66 From this book onwards, the name of the dedicatee was to appear on the title page; indeed, it was placed as the first item except in the case of book iv. Book ii was updated in a second issue that included three additional letters and several

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Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice: Researches on Aretino and his Circle in Venice, 1527–1556 (Florence, 1985), 128–129. Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa, 30, 56–58. Lettere i, 523–524, 8 August 1538. Teodoli’s letter, written from Forlì, is in lsa i, 164–165, 3 May 1538. Cf. Lettere i, 280–282, 18 September 1537. Lettere ii, 430–431, to Vanni, 14 August 1542. On the dedication and the events that arose from it, see Juan Carlos D’Amico, “Aretino tra Inghilterra e Impero: una dedica costata cara e una lettera non pubblicata,” Filologia e critica, 30 (2005): 72–94.

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revisions; among these was the omission of some lines in the dedicatory letter that praised Henry for liberating the English from the tyranny of the papacy. In spite of the dedication, Aretino did not receive a stipend from the king until 1547.67 Aretino’s continued collaboration with Marcolini between 1538 and 1544 was remarkably successful for the author. His printed output was at its most prolific in this period; thereafter, it declined quite steeply. In close combination with a calculated use of paratextual letters, his works took him to the height of his influence and saw him, for instance, ride on the right-hand side of the Emperor Charles v at Peschiera, on Lake Garda, in 1543, enjoying a private conversation on political matters.68 As well as producing further editions of works by Aretino that had already appeared, Marcolini printed several new religious works, a dialogue, some verse, and two comedies, almost always using the octavo format. La humanità di Christo, redistributed into four books, was printed in 1538 with a prefatory letter addressed to Isabella of Portugal. This was not a letter of dedication, however, since the empress was used as an intermediary between the author and the true dedicatee, Charles himself, so that he would accept the gift more warmly: “Not out of desire for fame, not for an outward show of virtue, not in hope of reward, but by divine inspiration, by a fated agreement, and because I must do it, I dedicate the four books of the humanity of Christ to your Christian, all-powerful consort. I offer it to you who are worthy, to you who are just, to you who are pious, so that his most worthy, just, and pious majesty may receive more fervently the devout pages that I devoutly present to you.”69 One issue of the edition of Il Genesi, con la visione di Noè, from the same year, had a dedication to the emperor’s brother Ferdinand in the form of an ex-voto, as in La passione di Giesù of 1534: “That natural talent, such as it may be, that God’s generosity has granted to Pietro Aretino, with the support of imperial courtesy, hangs this small votive offering at the honoured feet of the

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Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa, 84–90. On Aretino and Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s principal secretary, see Angelo Romano, Periegesi aretiniane: testi, schede e note biografiche intorno a Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1991), 50–55. Lettere iii, 68–72, to Giovanni Rossi, October 1543. “[I]o non per cupidità di fama, non per pompa di virtù, non per isperanza di premio, ma per ispiratione divina, per consenso fatale, e perché debbo farlo, intitolo i quatto libri de l’humanità di Christo a la christianità del vostro omnipotente consorte, e la porgo a voi che sète degna, a voi che sète giusta, a voi che sète pia, acciò la sua maestà dignissima, giustissima, e piatosissima riceva con più fervore le carte divote che divotamente vi appresento” (fol. A3v). See Élise Boillet, “L’Arétin et l’ actualité des années 1538–1539: les attentes du ‘Fléau des princes’,” in Danielle Boillet-Corinne Lucas (eds.), L’Actualité et sa mise en écriture dans l’ Italie des xve–xviie siècles (Paris, 2005), 103–117 (109–110).

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sacred image of the glorious Ferdinand, true redeemer of virtues.”70 An alternative dedication to François i, printed in a similar form, is found in another issue.71 The principal dedication of La vita di Maria Vergine (1539) was made to Maria d’Aragona, and it compared her, in her role as wife of the governor of Milan, Alfonso d’Avalos, with the Blessed Virgin.72 In some copies, however, this dedication is replaced by one to John Zápolya, King of Hungary, or another to Marguerite d’Angoulême, Queen of Navarre. Aretino took the opportunity to add, at the end of this volume, a letter to the bishop Girolamo Verallo, in which he airs his grievance about his lack of recognition on the part of the Church, in spite of his having written “many books in honor of God.”73 This pairing of a mark of Aretino’s relationship with a ruler with another that relates to his personal network of acquaintances is also found in La vita di Catherina Vergine (1540). Here a paratextual letter of formal dedication to Alfonso d’Avalos, which includes a lament for the recently deceased Francesco Gonzaga, is followed by another letter to the Florentine scholar Francesco Priscianese, on the subject of his group of friends in Rome, a city that Aretino condemns as no longer the seat of Christ.74 Avalos was also chosen as the dedicatee of La vita di S. Tommaso signor d’Aquino (1543).75 Both these lives were commissioned by Avalos in an agreement apparently formalized by “a public contract” (“un contratto publico”). Aretino sent his patron a copy of the printed life of St Catherine, but payment of his fee was withheld in 1542 because he was taking too long to complete the life of St Thomas.76 A number of other works by Aretino issued by Marcolini’s press in these years had a wide range of secular themes that contrasted with his religious output. The Ragionamento de le corti, or more fully the Ragionamento nel quale messer Pietro Aretino figura quattro suoi amici, che favellano de le corti del mondo, et di quella del cielo, appeared in 1538. This dialogue is set in the gar-

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“Quel naturale ingegno quale egli si sia, che la bontà di Dio ha concesso a Pietro Aretino, sostenuto da la cesarea cortesia, appende questo picol voto a gli onorati piedi de la sacra imagine del glorioso Ferdinando, vero de le virtuti redentore,” Opere religiose i, 606. Opere religiose i, 606; Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 330–331; Boillet, “L’Arétin et l’actualité des années 1538–1539,” 115. Boillet, “L’ Arétin et l’ actualité des années 1538–1539,” 110–111. “[M]olti libri […] in onore di Dio,” Opere religiose ii, 21–24, 603–606, 615–621. Opere religiose ii, 29–31, 606–610, 635–637. Opere religiose ii, 612, 654–656. Lettere ii, 178, to Federico Gonzaga, 16 February 1540, and letters to Alfonso d’Avalos, ibid.: 226–227, 25 October 1540; 237–238, 26 November 1540; 345, 2 March 1542; 351, 15 March 1542, with the reference to a contract. Alfonso had a claim to be related to St Thomas. On the genesis and composition of the work, see Opere religiose ii, 31–45.

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den of Marcolini, but the printer is absent and his return is announced only at the very end, with a knock on the door. The edition appeared in at least three issues. The first, dated 1538, was dedicated to François i. In order to balance this pro-French gesture, two others were dedicated to Luis de Ávila, one of Charles v’s diplomats and military commanders, who is described somewhat ambiguously as a shining example of the courtly profession that Aretino is criticizing. Another issue is undated, while the third was dated 1539 so that it could be offered on the market as a fresher product. A calligraphic manuscript, now in Los Angeles, seems to be derived from yet another Marcolini edition (or issue), dedicated to an unnamed “Cardinale di Trento,” who might be Bernardo Cles or Cristoforo Madruzzo.77 Marcolini’s press was almost certainly responsible for the pamphlet in quarto format that contained the capitolo on the death of Francesco Maria Della Rovere (on 20 October 1538), A lo Imperadore ne la morte del Duca d’Urbino, which has a brief letter of dedication, dated 15 January 1539, to the imperial ambassador in Venice, Lope de Soria.78 In March 1542, two new comedies appeared, La Talanta and Lo Hipocrito, and here again the editions contain pairs of letters to a public figure and a personal acquaintance. La Talanta was dedicated to Cosimo i de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, with affectionate words in memory of Cosimo’s father and Aretino’s former patron, Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, and a second letter at the end of the volume was addressed to Alessandro Piccolomini. In the case of Lo Hipocrito, the dedicatee is Guidobaldo ii Della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, while the concluding letter is addressed to the Venetian patrician Daniele Barbaro. The final edition of this phase of collaboration with Marcolini paired a work printed previously with a new one: Gli strambotti a la villanesca freneticati da la quartana, con le stanze de la Serena appresso, in comparatione de gli stili (1544). The Strambotti, written in a rustic style, opened with a facetious letter of dedication from Aretino to a certain “Trippa,” described as a groom in the court of the Duke of Urbino. The original dedicatee of the Stanze, Isabella of Portugal, had died in 1539, and now the poem was introduced by a letter of dedication from Marcolini, addressed to the Paduan man of letters Sperone Speroni, which provided a retrospective survey of the strange variety of subject matter (“stranezze di materie”) found in Aretino’s by now substantial catalogue of works.79 In 1545, however, Marcolini called a temporary halt to his publishing activities when he moved to Cyprus. His friendship with Aretino apparently cooled, and on his return to Venice he

77 78 79

Operette politiche e satiriche i, 353–390. Poesie varie i, 123–131, 302–304. Poesie varie i, 173–247, 308–317.

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published for him only the Lettere scritte al Signor Pietro Aretino da molti signori, comunità, donne di valore, poeti, et altri eccellentissimi spiriti, in two books, in 1551 and again in 1552. In a letter to Marcolini dated 22 June 1537, included in both issues of the first book of Lettere in 1538 but not in the 1542 edition, Aretino makes a gift of his correspondence to the printer, just as he gave him his other works. He claims to disdain profits that are made in a mercantile manner from selling one’s own books, and points instead to the main source from which he planned to receive tangible benefits: “With God’s help, I want the courtesy of princes to pay for the labors of my writing, and not the poverty of those who buy them.” His future writings will likewise belong to the printer.80 In the same year, Aretino writes that it is specifically the terror created by his pen that drives princes to reward him and other writers, and tells a French soldier that his inks form troops that win more glory for princes than armed men win lands.81 The printing of his Lettere played an important role in putting extra pressure on his dedicatees, since Aretino could place his private interactions with them in the public domain, providing appropriate comments on their generosity or otherwise. Thus, for instance, Aretino thanked Ferdinand warmly for a gift of 200 gold ducats following the dedication of Il Genesi, mentioned above; on the other hand, François i was rebuked because he had not provided a promised gift of 600 scudi, even though Aretino had sent him two works recently dedicated to him, Il Genesi and the Ragionamento de le corti.82 Nevertheless, in 1541, while Aretino boasts that he derives an income of 600 scudi from pensions awarded by princes, he insists that his writing might still remain a source of direct income, “with a further 1000 that I earn annually with a gathering of sheets and a bottle of ink.”83 Marcolini requested a number of privileges in the Venetian state to protect his printing of works by Aretino in 1534 and 1541– 1542.84 Yet Aretino showed that he, too, was concerned with the business aspect

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“Io voglio, con il favor di Dio, che la cortesia de i Principi mi paghi le fatiche de lo scrivere, e non la miseria di chi le compra,” Lettere i, 513. Lettere i, 173–175, to Giannantonio da Foligno, 3 April 1537; 215–216, to Anne de Montmorency, 8 June 1537. Lettere ii, 132–133, to Ferdinand, 13 July 1539; 85, to François i, 7 October 1538. On the tale of the king’s gift, see Boillet, “L’Arétin et l’ actualité des années 1538–1539,” 106–109; see also Boillet, L’ Arétin et la Bible, 33, n. 67. “[C]on mille appresso che me ne procaccio l’anno con un quaterno di fogli e con una ampolla d’inchiostro,” Lettere ii, 295, to Giuliano Salviati, 6 July 1541. For La Cortigiana, the Sette Salmi, and La passione di Giesù in 1534 (Venice, Archivio di Stato (asv), Senato Terra (st), reg. 28, fols. 78r, 101r); for La vita di Catherina Vergine, the second book of letters, La Talanta, Lo Ipocrito, and the second edition of the first book

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of publication by requesting several Venetian privileges in his own name.85 At the end of the letter that describes his Dream of Parnassus, he argues that he prefers to poetic crowns “a privilege through which I can sell or pawn the virtue that the heavens have scattered upon me.”86 He also requested a number of licences to publish between 1532 and 1543 from the heads of the Council of Ten.87 Although Aretino’s professional relationship with Marcolini was very close, it was not exclusive. In 1543, Biagio Spina, an artisan working in Venice, known also as Biagio Perugino, Paternostraio (rosary maker), or Muschiaro (perfumer), requested privileges for two works by Aretino, the Dialogo nel quale si parla del giuoco con moralità piacevole and the life of Thomas Aquinas, both of which were printed for him by Giovanni Farri and brothers.88 In the dedicatory letter of the Dialogo, Aretino rebukes Ferrante Sanseverino because he has ceased to receive his annual payment from him. Titian, the author writes, agrees that this neglect is unworthy of a magnanimous man. He compares himself with a gambler who remains patient in spite of his losses; hence the dedication to the prince of this work on card games. Soon after Aretino’s meeting with Charles v in July 1543, Farri printed at Spina’s request two editions of a capitolo and a sonnet by Aretino, with a dedicatory letter from the author to Guidobaldo Della Rovere that recalled the encounter at Peschiera, and with a title that claimed

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of letters in 1541–1542 (reg. 31, fol. 144r; reg. 32, fols. 40v, 90r). The privilege request for La Cortigiana is published in Teatro i, 354. I am very grateful to Mario Infelise for providing information on requests for privileges and licences. The records in the asv, st for Marcolini editions up to 1545 concern the Stanze on Serena, 1536 (reg. 29, fol. 109r) and La vita di Maria Vergine, 1539 (reg. 30, fol. 130r). Aretino made further requests before 1550 for another book of letters, 1545 (reg. 34, fol. 120v), L’Orazia, 1546 (reg. 34, fol. 186v), and a “new” book of letters, 1549 (reg. 36, fol. 139v). “[U]n previlegio, per vigore del quale io possa vendere o impegnare la vertù che m’hanno squinternata adosso i cieli,” Lettere i, 389, 6 December 1537. For the Marfisa, 1532 (asv, Capi del Consiglio dei Dieci, Notatorio (ccxn), reg. 9, fol. 93r); the Sette Salmi, 1534 (Capi del Consiglio dei Dieci, Lettere, reg. 34, fol. 402r); La passione and La Cortigiana, both 1534 (ccxn, reg. 10, fols. 121r and 125v; for the latter, see Teatro i, 354); La humanità di Christo, 1535 (ccxn, reg. 11, fol. 15r); the Stanze and two canzoni, 1537 (ccxn, reg. 11, fol. 161r); La vita di Catherina Vergine, 1541 (ccxn, reg. 12, fol. 95r); the second book of letters, La Talanta, Lo Hipocrito, and La vita di S. Tommaso, all 1542 (ccxn, reg. 12, fol. 160r); the second edition of the first book of letters, 1542 (ccxn, reg. 12, fol. 186v); the Dialogo del giuoco, 1543 (ccxn, reg. 13, fol. 81r); and La vita di S. Tommaso again in 1543 (ccxn, reg. 13, fol. 138v). asv, st, reg. 32, fol. 185r, and reg. 33, fol. 46r. See Operette politiche e satiriche i, 36–39 (on Spina), 390–419 (on the text of the Dialogo); Opere religiose ii, 654–656, 669–671 (on the life of St Thomas).

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that Aretino had spoken both texts to the emperor: Il capitolo et il sonetto di m. Pietro Aretino in laude de lo Imperatore et a sua maestà da lui proprio recitati.89 Between late 1545 and early 1546, after Marcolini’s departure to Cyprus, Aretino had his third book of Lettere printed by the man who was fast becoming the most powerful printer-publisher in Venice, Gabriele Giolito. According to Niccolò Franco, already by 1539 Aretino felt that he had enough influence over Giolito to prevent him printing anything hostile to Franco.90 Aretino expressed his admiration of Giolito in a famous letter of 1 June 1542 in which he thanked him for the gift of a copy of his recently printed edition of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, noting that the printer-publisher was intent on earning honor rather than profit.91 This book of Lettere included a missive to Marcolini in which Aretino justified his change of publisher as enforced by his need to publish the third volume in order to feed himself, while also expressing regret that Marcolini had not been able (or seen fit) to bid him farewell before leaving Venice.92 This edition, too, was revised during printing for political reasons: at least four formes were composed afresh because Aretino wished to remove criticism of the Farnese family.93 The dedicatory letter, addressed to Duke Cosimo i, declared frankly the power of dedicating “to great masters” (the phrase he used in the dedication of the Ragionamento of 1534 to his monkey). Behind the scene of publication, Aretino wrote on 7 April 1546 to Gianfrancesco Dini, a secretary of Cosimo’s, in order to ask the duke to remunerate him for the dedication, proposing an annual pension of 100 scudi but claiming that he would be content with any sum in order to silence his rivals’ tongues. The duke had in fact already sent him 100 scudi on 2 December 1545, but on 30 April 1546 he pre-

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See Poesie varie i, 23–24, 159–172, 307–308. Franco wrote to Francesco Alunno in June 1541 that Aretino “placed informants in Giolito’s house, during the printing of my Dialogi [the Dialogi piacevoli of 1539], for fear that it would mention him” (“pose li spioni appresso il Giolito, a tempo che si stampavano i miei Dialogi, per la tema non di lui vi si fusse scritto”). Niccolò Franco, Epistolario (1540–1548): Ms Vat. Lat. 5642, ed. Domenica Falardo (Stony Brook, NY, 2007), 68. “Onde si può dire che fate mercanzia più d’onore, che d’utile,” Lettere ii, 381. On Giolito, see especially Salvatore Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato stampatore in Venezia, 2 vols. (Rome, 1890–1897); Amedeo Quondam, “‘Mercanzia d’onore’, ‘mercanzia d’utile’: produzione libraria e lavoro intellettuale a Venezia nel Cinquecento,” in Armando Petrucci (ed.), Libri, editori e pubblico nell’Europa moderna. Guida storica e critica (Bari, 1977), 51–104; Nuovo-Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa. Lettere iii, 285, September 1545. On Marcolini’s stay in Cyprus, see Paolo Procaccioli, “ ‘Cipri non vi dee torre de la mente questa città’: quesiti e ipotesi sugli anni ciprioti di Francesco Marcolini,” in Benjamin Arbel-Evelien Chayes-Harald Hendrix (eds.), Cyprus and the Renaissance (1450–1650) (Turnhout, 2012), 97–124. Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito, vol. 1, 109–111; Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa, 35–36, 95–100.

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sented another gift of money through the Florentine ambassador, Pierfilippo Pandolfini, in recognition of the trouble that Aretino had taken.94 Aretino complained about the inaccuracy of this edition in a letter of July 1546 to Niccolò Martelli, blaming above all the scribe who had prepared the copy text, even though this man had been paid twenty ducats for his work. He agreed with Martelli that it was better to give works for printing “to the barbarians, to the careful, correct, and diligent Northern Europeans” (“ai barbari, ai tramontani accurati, corretti et diligenti”), not “to swinish Italian labourers” (“ai taliani meccanici porci”).95 Aretino nevertheless made use of Giolito’s press for two further editions of new plays in 1546. His fifth and final comedy, Il Filosofo, was printed with a brief dedicatory letter to Guidobaldo Della Rovere, at whose instance Aretino said he had written the play. The background to the publication of Aretino’s only tragedy, L’Orazia, reflects the most devious of Aretino’s dealings with patrons. He offered to dedicate the play to Pier Luigi Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza, in return for a promised gift of 150 scudi; but once the sum had been received, he chose another dedicatee, the duke’s father, Pope Paul iii.96 A remarkable feat of organization led to the appearance of both the fourth and the fifth volumes of the Lettere in 1550, at an interval of some nine months. For these editions, Aretino turned to Andrea Arrivabene, another very experienced publisher working in Venice. Arrivabene had each edition printed by a different workshop, that of Bartolomeo Cesano for book iv and that of Comin da Trino for book v. As with the previous volumes of his letters, Aretino involved himself closely with the publication process, and many corrections were introduced during the production of both books.97 He wrote of the haste of production in a letter to Giorgio Vasari dated September 1549, and Aretino’s “hands-on” approach led to some disagreements with Arrivabene.98 As dedicatees, Aretino chose two contrasting figures: for book iv, Giovan Carlo Affaitati, a wealthy merchant and patron who resided near Brussels; for book v, Baldovino Del Monte, brother of Pope Julius iii, the newly elected successor of Paul iii. The latter choice was dictated by Aretino’s hopes of becoming a cardinal, as were

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Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito, vol. 1, 110–111; Florence, Archivio di Stato (asf), Mediceo del Principato (MdP), vols. 6, fol. 382r, and 7, fol. 87r. Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito, vol. 2, 5–7. Lettere iv, 81, to Pier Luigi Farnese, July 1546; 90, to Farnese, 12 October 1546; 108–109, to Durante Duranti, January 1547; 109–110, to Paul iii, January 1547; Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito, vol. 1, 123–125, 131–134; Teatro iii, 167–173. On both editions, see Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa, 36–38, 102–108, 110–114. Lettere v, 243, to Vasari, September 1549, and 275–276, to Arrivabene, October 1549.

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the dedications, signed by Marcolini, of the two volumes of Lettere scritte al Signor Pietro Aretino mentioned above, printed by Marcolini in 1551 and in 1552. The first book was dedicated to Innocenzo Del Monte, Baldovino’s adoptive son, and the second to Baldovino’s son Giambattista.99 As part of the same campaign, Aretino had new editions of his religious works printed by the heirs of Aldus Manutius (“in casa de’ figliuoli d’Aldo”), in quarto format and in roman types (thus more formal in their presentation than octavo editions would have been), with dedications to the pope himself. The elaborately worded title pages gave information on the dedicatee, the author, and the latter’s declared devotion to the former: Al beatissimo Giulio Terzo, papa com’il ii ammirando, il Genesi, l’Humanità di Christo, et i Salmi: opere di m. Pietro Aretino del sacrosanto Monte humil germe, et per divina gratia huomo libero (1551) and A la somma bontà di Giulio iii pontefice al par del ii invittis[simo], La vita di Maria Vergine, di Caterina santa, et di Tomaso Aquinate, beato: composition di m. Pietro Aretino del Monte eccelso divoto, et per divina gratia huomo libero (1552).100 The sixth and final volume of Aretino’s letters was announced in a letter to Guidobaldo Della Rovere of January 1554, but it was printed only in 1557, the year after the author’s death, by Giolito, who had made the request for a privilege on 4 March 1555.101 Aretino must have been responsible for the flourish of words on the title page, which suggests that this link with the everlasting fame of the dedicatee, Ercole ii d’Este, will ensure that the author, too, is remembered: “Behold how Pietro Aretino, by God’s grace a free man, has dedicated the sixth book of his letters to Ercole d’Este, as magnanimous as he is great, so that the immortal memory of the perpetual reputation of the great duke may save from oblivion the hoped-for memory of his [reputation].”102 Some of Aretino’s minor verse works appeared during his lifetime in editions with which he probably had no personal connection. A collection of Capi-

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After the death of Giambattista in April 1552, Ludovico Beccadelli became the dedicatee of a second issue of book ii: see lsa ii, 389, 393–395. On Aretino’s efforts to be nominated cardinal, see Paolo Procaccioli, “Un cappello per il divino: note sul miraggio cardinalesco di Pietro Aretino,” in Angelo Romano-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Studi sul Rinascimento italiano—Italian Renaissance Studies: In memoria di Giovanni Aquilecchia (Manziana, 2005), 189–226. On the 1552 edition, see Opere religiose ii, 45–55, 662–666. Lettere vi, 311–312, January 1554; Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito, vol. 2, 5–14; Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa, 38–39, 116–118; Nuovo-Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa, 414–416. The privilege request is found in asv, st, reg. 40, fol. 144v, and transcribed in Lettere vi, 434. Ecco che al come magno, magnanimo Hercole Estense, ha dedicato Pietro Aretino per divina gratia huomo libero il sesto delle scritte lettere volume; acciò che la immortale memoria del perpetuo nome dell’ottimo duca privi dell’oblivione la bramata ricordanza del suo.

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toli printed by Curzio Navò and brothers in 1540 included four poems by him alongside those of Ludovico Dolce, Francesco Sansovino, and others. The wording of Navò’s letter of dedication, addressed to Francesco Zorzi, suggests that manuscript copies of the poems came into his hands through Dolce, who must have put the edition together.103 Sonnets by Aretino appeared in anthologies of lyric verse published between 1542 and 1550, sometimes in versions that differ from those found within his letters.104 In conjunction with Aretino’s grand public gestures of dedication to the great and the good, he made well-calibrated, and potentially well-rewarded, use of the presentation of gift copies of his printed works to dedicatees and other powerful figures. Some of his gift-giving was then documented for all to read about in his printed Lettere. An example of such an offering is the copy of the issue of Il Genesi (1538) dedicated to François i, which survives in its original binding, stamped with the fleur-de-lys.105 Often Aretino would ask someone to present the book on his behalf. For instance, he had a copy of the Stanze in praise of Serena (1537) decorated by the miniaturist Iacopo del Giallo for presentation to the Empress Isabella by Lope de Soria. In return, she sent him a gold chain worth 300 scudi.106 A further copy went to another Spanish diplomat, Gonzalo Pérez.107 Copies of the life of St Catherine were sent to Soria and to the Duchess of Mantua, Margherita Paleologo, on 10 December 1540, to Giuliano Salviati on 6 July 1541, and to Girolamo Rovero, together with other books, on 1 May 1542.108 One of the men of letters who worked as an editor for Giolito, Ludovico Domenichi, supervised printing of Lettere, book iii, and was then asked to present a copy to the Duke of Florence.109 A copy of Lettere, book v went to the dedicatee, Baldovino Del Monte, whom the author thanked a couple of months later for a gift of 100 scudi.110 Aretino presented copies of his religious works printed in 1551 and 1552 to Cosimo de’ Medici, suggesting that the duke should send him as much money each year as Aretino gave to

103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110

Poesie varie i, 133–157, 304–307. Marco Faini, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle Rime di Aretino: le antologie a stampa (e una rara miscellanea di strambotti),” in Dentro il Cinquecento: per Danilo Romei (Manziana, 2016), 97–142 (100–105, 108–113, 116–117). Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, shelfmark Réserve A-6708. Opere religiose i, 677–679. Lettere i, 201–202, to Giallo, 23 May 1537; 254–255, to Isabella, 20 August 1537; lsa i, 375, from Luis de Ávila, 18 March 1538. Lettere i, 151–152, to Soria, 23 January 1537; 178–179, to Pérez, 8 April 1537. Lettere ii, respectively 251, 252–253, 294–295, 367–368. Lettere iv, 67, to Cosimo’s secretary Gian Francesco Lottini, April 1546. Lettere vi, 53, to Monte, November 1550; 64, to Monte, January 1551.

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the poor in six months.111 When Bona Sforza, Queen of Poland, sent him a gold cup to thank him for a book of his (probably Il Marescalco) in 1533, she was unsure if the gift had come from him or the protégé of his, a gondoliere called Polo, who had presented it to her; her gift would have been more generous, she wrote, if she had received a covering letter from him.112 Aretino may have left its source ambiguous in order to benefit the intermediary as well as himself. On another occasion, he told Valdaura that he planned in due course to give a copy of his first book of letters to a relative of his whom he wanted to assist, “and he will present them to the viceroy [of Naples, Pedro de Toledo] through your intercession.”113 Aretino signed for Agostino Ricchi a copy of a letter printed separately, addressed to the government of Venice (“A i Signori Veneziani”) and dated 7 June 1538.114 A more personal gift was a copy of a non-religious work, perhaps the Tre primi canti di Marfisa, for which Vittoria Colonna thanks the author in a letter sent from Ferrara on 6 November 1537, with a mention of some personal favor that he has asked of her. Aretino’s letter of reply defends his choice of a secular topic and contrasts his success in obtaining the reward of a gold chain from François i with the silence encountered by Antonio Brucioli when he dedicated his Bible translation to the “most Christian” king. However, Aretino’s next gift to Colonna, a work that she described as “so beautiful and dear” (“sì bella e cara opera”), was perhaps his life of the Virgin Mary.115 According to an admiring letter of Francesco Coccio, Aretino wrote at least twice as fast as printers could print.116 In the dedicatory letter to Valdaura of the Dialogo of Nanna and Pippa, he compared his printed works to an artist’s sketches, and claimed that “I let my works be printed just as they are, nor do I bother at all to embellish words. […] And everything is a joke, except working

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Lettere vi, 104–105, March 1552. lsa i, 219, 1 September 1533. Another gift to the queen, of “devout pages” (“carte divote”), is mentioned in Lettere i, 181–182, 9 April 1537. On the relationship between Aretino and the ill-fated queen, see Giorgio Petrocchi, “Bona Sforza, regina di Polonia, e Pietro Aretino,” in Vittore Branca-Sante Graciotti (eds.), Italia Venezia e Polonia tra Medio Evo e età moderna (Florence, 1980), 325–331. “[E]t egli le presenterà al vece Re per vostra intercessione,” Lettere i, 257–258, 26 August 1537. Cf. Lettere i, 441–443, 22 December 1537; Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni, 6– 7; Paolo Marini, “Pietro Aretino (Arezzo 1492-Venezia 1556),” in Matteo Motolese-Paolo Procaccioli-Emilio Russo (eds.), Autografi dei letterati italiani, vol. 1: Il Cinquecento (Rome, 2009), 13–36 (22, no. 84). lsa ii, 24, 6 November 1537; Lettere ii, 27–28, 9 January 1538; lsa ii, 24–25, 25 September 1539. Aretino, Sei giornate, 353.

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quickly and doing your own thing.”117 As an anti-pedant and anti-conformist, he liked to portray himself as someone who left the minutiae of linguistic correctness, spelling, and punctuation marks to the editors employed by printers. However, from around 1534 he realized that these matters had to be taken seriously if he was to be taken seriously as a writer. One of the figures to whom he turned for help was Ludovico Dolce, who in 1533 and 1535 had dedicated to Aretino editions of comedies by Ariosto. It has been suggested that Dolce may have edited the Ragionamento for Aretino in 1534.118 In a letter of 1 September 1541, Aretino claimed that he was giving Dolce full permission to intervene in the text of his letters in preparing them for printing in 1542, with an eye to enhancing their appeal to potential purchasers. He wrote: “Truly a work that is well written and well punctuated is like a well-adorned and elegant bride. When those who have to print it see it in this form, they therefore feel the same pleasure as when they see the elegance and adornment of such a lady. And so it is no wonder if I long for my work to appear just as your practiced diligence will make it appear. […] Now, since my love for such labors makes me consider the benefit of profit rather than the duty of what is honorable, I send you the book, giving you discretion to make both additions and cuts exactly as your lofty and faithful judgment sees fit to cut and add.”119 Among the other men of letters used by Aretino were Franco and Domenichi (as was mentioned apropos of Lettere, i and iii respectively), Coccio, and Anton Francesco Doni (for the Lettere scritte al Signor Pietro Aretino).120 Ricchi may have been responsible for the numerous stop-press corrections introduced during the printing of

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“[L]ascio stampare le mie cose così fatte, né mi curo punto di miniar parole: […] e tutto è ciancia, eccetto il far presto e del suo,” Aretino, Sei giornate, 146. See Aquilecchia in Aretino, Sei giornate, 427. “Veramente una opra bene scritta e ben puntata è simile a una sposa bene adorna e ben polita. Onde coloro che la debbono imprimere, nel vederla sì fatta, ne hanno quel piacere che si prova mentre si vagheggia il polito e lo adorno de la donna predetta. E però non è maraviglia s’io bramo che la mia appaia tale quale la saputa vostra diligenzia è per farla apparire. […] Or perché l’amore ch’io porto a cotali fatiche mi sforzono a riguardare più tosto al profitto de l’utile, che al dovere de l’onesto, vi mando il libro, con arbitrio però che ci potiate e aggiugnere e scemare né più né meno che a l’altezza del vostro fedel giudizio parrà e di scemarci e di aggiugnerci,” Lettere ii, 318–319; Ludovico Dolce, Lettere, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana, 2015), 207. On the revisions made by Franco and Dolce to punctuation, spelling, and accentuation, see Paolo Procaccioli, “Così lavoravano per Aretino: Franco, Dolce e la correzione di Lettere, i,” Filologia e critica, 21 (1996): 264–280. Giovanni Aquilecchia, “Pietro Aretino e altri poligrafi a Venezia,” in Nuove schede di italianistica (Rome, 1994), 77–138 (114–117), and, for Franco and Doni, Paolo Procaccioli’s chapter in this volume.

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La Cortigiana in 1534.121 A writer who arrived in Venice in 1549, Girolamo Ruscelli of Viterbo, may have seen the fourth and fifth books of Lettere through the press.122 For all Aretino’s close involvement with print culture before and during his years in Venice, he continued to appreciate the values of scribal publication and to make use of the options that it offered for the diffusion of shorter works. It was natural for him to issue occasional sonnets in manuscript, so that they would be read when they were at their most relevant. Paolo Marini’s study of Aretino’s autograph manuscripts lists twelve letters that contain between one and three sonnets, datable from 1523 until the author’s last years. Two of these sonnets are pasquinades. Two others were sent in the form of a missive to Ludovico Beccadelli, but without a covering letter.123 Since the recipient could make a copy, or allow others to make one, this kind of transmission constituted a “weak” form of publication, in the terminology of Harold Love.124 Aretino could then reinforce this means of publication by including versions of these missives in his printed Lettere. For example, an autograph letter to Cosimo de’ Medici with a sonnet on the death of the duke’s father-in-law, Pedro de Toledo, was written on 14 March 1553, and then a much shorter version, still with the sonnet, was included in Lettere, vi, no. 250.125 Aretino might send a handwritten copy of a work to a favored patron ahead of its printing. The Stanze in praise of Serena that went to Alfonso d’Avalos with a letter dated 18 December 1536 may have been manuscript, since printing of the edition was not completed until 22 or 23 January 1537.126 Two plays were sent to key patrons in rough copies. A summary, dated 23 February 1542, of a letter received by Cosimo i records that Aretino sent the duke a comedy, very probably La Talanta, in a manuscript that he described apologetically as a poorly written draft: “Pietro Aretino, in letters of the ninth of last month, says that he is sending your excellency through ser Vecchia [Benedetto Alessi] a comedy without its prologue, and that he has sent it to you badly written and uncorrected because there are not many days to go until Carnival. He asks you to return his favor, because his heart never sinned against your excellency.” The 121 122 123 124 125 126

Federico Della Corte, “L’Aretino in tipografia: preliminari all’edizione della Cortigiana a stampa,” Filologia italiana, 2 (2005): 161–197 (183–184). Bertolo, Aretino e la stampa, 38, 102, 110. Marini, “Pietro Aretino,” 16–24, nos. 1, 10, 17, 18, 34, 49, 53, 65 (pasquinade), 68 (pasquinade), 80, 88, 100, and 109 to Beccadelli. Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in SeventeenthCentury England, foreword by David D. Hall (Amherst, MA, 1998), 36. Marini, “Pietro Aretino,” 20, no. 49, and fig. 4. Lettere i, 141–142, 18 December 1536.

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play was evidently sent in haste, with a view to a possible performance.127 The copy of Il Filosofo that went to Guidobaldo Della Rovere in December 1544 was, according to the author, “badly copied” (“mal copiata”) by a scribe.128 In these two cases, the value of Aretino’s gift consisted in his giving privileged access to the text in advance of the general reading public. Aretino employed scribes to make fair copies of his letters for printing and to make calligraphic copies of short writings that were to be sent to persons of high status.129 His comments on their work reflect his appreciation of the value they added. The characters of Giulio Berneri are compared with rows of pearls, “so that at least that [composition] that is going to the King of Portugal will bring with it praise or reward.” Giulio’s brother Antonio was working on the decoration of this manuscript.130 In 1553, Aretino asked Antonio Anselmi, who had previously worked as a scribe for Pietro Bembo, to copy one of his sonnets for presentation in his “pearl-like script.”131 However, Aretino was very conscious of the prestige value of an autograph manuscript, and he had a sufficiently neat hand to undertake the transcription of a text for presentation, even to figures of the stature of Charles v and Cosimo i. He wrote out and signed a copy of the Esortatione de la pace, using a single sheet of paper that was folded in two in order to create a bifolium, then folded in three vertically and once horizontally, as was commonly done with letters.132 This copy must thus have

127

128 129

130 131 132

For Aretino’s original letter, see Marini, “Pietro Aretino,” 17, no. 15, and Carmine Boccia in Teatro ii, 156. The report is in asf, MdP, 617, fol. 266: “Pietro Aretino con sue de’ viiii del passato dice mandare a V. Ex.a una commedia per ser Vecchia, alla quale mancha il prologo, et haverglela mandata mal scritta et incorretta per la brevità de’ giorni che sono di qui a Carnovale, supplicando li renda la gratia sua, perché il suo core non peccò mai contro a V. Ex.a.” An added instruction reads: “Thank him and say we did not put on the play because of lack of time, and that he will never lose the duke’s favor unless he wishes to do so” (“Ringratiarlo et dirgli non s’è provata per haver hauto poco tempo et che la gratia di S. Ex.a non la perderà mai, se non quando lui vorrà”). Lettere iii, 131, to Guidobaldo Della Rovere. See Paolo Procaccioli, “Le carte prima del libro: di Pietro Aretino cultore di scrittura epistolare,” in Guido Baldassarri et alii (eds.), “Di mano propria”: gli autografi dei letterati italiani. Atti del Convegno internazionale di Forlì, 24–27 novembre 2008 (Rome, 2010), 319–377 (336–339, 372–373, 377). “Tal che almeno quella [composizione], che al Re va di Portogallo, portarà seco laude o premio,” Lettere v, 31, June 1548. “[N]el di voi carattero di perle,” Lettere vi, 232, March 1553. Livorno, Biblioteca Labronica, Autografoteca Bastogi, P90, inserto 1221. See Paolo Marini, “Un autografo dell’Esortatione de la pace tra l’Imperadore e il Re di Francia di Pietro Aretino,”Filologia e critica, 31 (2006): 88–105. On this “tuck and fold” method of folding letters, see Peter Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology 1450–2000 (Oxford, 2008), s.v. “letter.”

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been originally enclosed with a letter, as a unique gift. To judge from Aretino’s surviving manuscript letters, he would sometimes add only the salutation or the signature to the main text, but he took the trouble to write most of his correspondence entirely in his own hand.133 In the medium of manuscript, compared with that of print, there was a much greater danger that works might be lost, but Aretino did not always take steps to ensure their survival. Little evidence remains, for instance, of the prose prognostications that he circulated scribally.134 In November 1545 he turned to Vincenzo Rosso in an effort to retrieve and preserve a large number of sonnets of which he had kept no copy but that Rosso had apparently committed to memory: “since your memory is so deep, I am sure that you still remember those writings of mine that you have learned by heart, and therefore I ask you to make me a copy of them. […] And I wish to God that so many others that are circulating here and there were deposited in the treasury of your mind; it would set my very confused spirit to rest about at least four hundred satirical sonnets of which I have no copy. Because if I had them, since they are as they are known to be, they would be kept for ever.”135 The problem was exacerbated by the tendency of those who possessed a work of his in manuscript to keep it for themselves, according to a letter from Giambattista della Stufa: “I wanted to collect your writings and send them to you, so that you could do what you preferred with them. I find my expectation has been completely disappointed, since your writings are collected carefully by persons of a kind that does not even want to let others see them.”136 Alongside his ceaseless use of the written word, Aretino retained throughout his life the personal links with oral performance and performers that he had already demonstrated through his connections with Zoppino and through his own use of recitation, mentioned above. As late as 1545, a letter of his to the 133 134

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Marini, “Pietro Aretino,” 13–14. For the year 1527, see above, n. 19; for 1529, see Franca Ageno, “Un pronostico dell’Aretino in un manoscritto Hoepli,”Lettere italiane, 13 (1961): 449–451; for 1534, see Operette politiche e satiriche ii, 172–198, 327–328. “[S]e bene la di voi memoria è sì profonda, son certo che le cose che già di mio si recò a mente, se le ricordano ancora; imperò la prego a farmene copia. […] E Dio volesse che le altre tali e tante, che vanno disperse, fossero riposte ne lo erario del vostro ingegno; che mi riposarei l’animo molto confuso di almeno quattrocento sonetti satirici, de i quali non ho copia veruna. Che s’io l’avessi, per essere eglino come si sa, si serberebbono per sempre,” Lettere iii, 423. “[V]olevo mettere insieme li scritti vostri e mandarveli, acciò che voi ne potesti fare quello che più a grado vi fussi stato. Dalla quale credenza io mi trovo forte ingannato; conciosia che le cose vostre sono con gran diligenzia raccolte da una sorte di uomini, e quali non che altro non le vogliono lasciare vedere,” lsa i, 257, 20 November 1535.

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renowned doctor, publisher, and street singer (or “charlatan”) Iacopo Coppa reveals his pleasure at the news that Coppa was both performing and selling Aretino’s works in the piazza in Ferrara: “I not only tolerate, but wholeheartedly rejoice in being in the mouth of charlatans.”137 The means through which Aretino circulated his works to the public were not new in themselves. However, his innovative use of the resources that were available to authors within the culture of print enabled him, especially in the last two decades of his life, to draw greater direct personal benefit from publication, and to obtain far more publicity for his writings and for the authorial persona that lay behind them, than previous authors had either wished to do or been able to do. One of his most powerful tools was his manipulation of the traditional process of dedication. He selected dedicatees who were politically and socially well positioned—rulers and other figures from the imperial court, France, Tuscany, and elsewhere in Europe—and many of them rewarded him with gifts and subventions. He used his volumes of collected letters to underpin his use of dedications by including in them some dedicatory letters (as Erasmus had done) and some correspondence that made visible to other readers the social infrastructure of the process, on the one hand by mentioning his own presentation of gift copies and, on the other, by providing a running commentary on the largesse or perceived miserliness of his dedicatees. Four times in the period 1534–1539 he took the risk of providing alternative dedications for printed editions. But he also parodied the practice of dedication by addressing editions to a monkey or a groom. Aretino showed well-judged flexibility in his provision of information on the circumstances of publication, according to the nature of the work: most often, information on printing was declared clearly and openly, but it could be camouflaged, as in the cases of the two parts of the Sei giornate in 1534 and 1536. He was bold in his use of woodcut portraits of himself by Titian, placed prominently on title pages from 1533; in contrast, Ariosto had included Titian’s profile portrait of himself only on the penultimate leaf of the Orlando furioso of 1532. Aretino cultivated close relationships with certain printer-publishers, notably Francesco Marcolini and Gabriele Giolito. His public praise for them, as printers of works in the vernacular, recalled humanists’ declarations of admiration for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of Greek and Latin. Aretino’s partnership with Marcolini, protected systematically by privileges awarded by the Venetian state, helped to demonstrate the 137

“[N]on pur sopporto, ma in tutto mi rallegro d’essere in bocca de i ceretani,”Lettere iii, 326, October 1545. On Coppa as a performer, see most recently Eugenio Refini, “Reappraising the Charlatan in Early Modern Italy: The Case of Iacopo Coppa,” Italian Studies, 71 (2016): 197–211.

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mutual benefits that authors and printers could derive from a program of collaboration. Such an overall strategy of publication was unprecedented, and it was to remain unique; but younger writers, such as Dolce and Ruscelli, could take advantage of aspects of the example that Aretino had set. From 1557 onwards, the Church of Rome attempted to suppress the publication of Aretino’s works by placing at first some of his writings, then all of them, on Indexes of Prohibited Books.138 It is ironic that, in spite of the profusion of editions printed during his lifetime, copies of them are now relatively rare, and some editions survive in a single copy or have been lost entirely. Yet the setback proved temporary. Editions of his works gradually began to appear again, first from the press of John Wolfe in Elizabethan London, then in the seventeenth century in Paris, in Venice (under the anagrammatic name of Partenio Etiro), and in the Netherlands. Aretino’s European renown, firmly established with the support of his adventurous use of publication, ensured that, in the long term, the printing of his works would resist repression. 138

See Jésus M. de Bujanda, Index de Rome: 1557, 1559, 1564. Les premiers index romains et l’ index du Concile de Trente (Sherbrooke, 1990), 647–649, 743, 779, 864, and the chapters by Eleonora Carinci and Paolo Procaccioli in this volume.

chapter 18

Aretino as a Target for Criticism, and His Enemies from Berni to Muzio Paolo Procaccioli

Over the years, two myths became associated with Aretino: first a positive myth1 and then a negative one, which condemned him to a fate of death, but also of resurrection. All this was however already completely prefigured during his lifetime both in excessive praise and equally in insults. These rising choruses of cheers and jeers were not so much a reflection of Quintilian laude ac vituperatione as they were due to the preposterous choices of his antagonistic personal style. In fact, Aretino’s identification with Pasquino extended well beyond the years of the Roman period, and obliged the poet to embrace positions in the harsh terms of polemic and mockery. It should therefore come as no surprise that precisely because of this identification, Aretino was made the target of similarly fierce attacks in all the circles in which he lived. So far, these episodes have been studied individually, in order to focus on the origins of each of them and to determine the specific merit of those claims. However, I believe that if one considers these individual episodes and their sequence, that is, if the accusations are considered in light of the social and political contexts in which they emerged, this could help to understand better the meaning and import of Aretino’s public persona. It is to this end that I propose a review of the most notable attacks against him, from those by Berni and Franco to those of Albicante, and from Périon to Doni and Muzio. Thus this article proposes such a review in order to unearth the reasons which each time sparked and fueled the controversies and to account for their repercussions, but also to verify if and to what degree, as they built on one another, they conditioned the developments 1 The launch of the negative myth will be the subject of these pages; on the positive myth, see in particular the essays by Raymond Waddington and Harald Hendrix in this volume. Raymond Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art, (Toronto, 2004), retrieves and systematically investigates the political and artistic promotional strategy with which Aretino tried to defend imago sui reflected in objects, first portrait medals and then regular portraits. Harald Hendrix, “La funzione della morte leggendaria nella mitografia di Pietro Aretino,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 453–469, places Aretino’s legacy in historical context, following its evolution over the centuries in various social contexts and in the history of ideas.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_020

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of Aretino’s public reputation during his life, and if and to what extent they contributed to determine whether or not he would be remembered in literary history after his death. The intention of course is neither to set up a “black book,” nor on the contrary is it to rush to his defense. Rather the goal is to try to balance the “cons” with the auto-apologetic perspective of the writer’s own words, the words of a devotee, and those of the epistolographer, as well as with the all-out “pros,” namely of his friends and allies: from the benevolent and even encomiastic view of Ariosto to the all-forgiving and complicit view of the first of those allies, Francesco Marcolini. The same happens with images and medal portraits, where the celebratory ones created by Sebastiano del Piombo, Marcantonio Raimondi, Titian, and Leone Leoni, are contrasted by just as much mocking critique. The sequence of attacks considered here can be divided into two phases: the first spans from the 1520s to the 1540s, and the second falls in the 1550s. The first phase, arising from local politics (Berni, Albicante) and from personal rivalry (Franco) resulted in attacks that uncovered ghastly truths in order to bring to light the unfair advantages that the writer enjoyed. The second phase of attacks (that of Périon, Doni, and Muzio) had a different, more ambitious goal. Without giving up the pursuit of a specific goal, this phase of attacks aimed at the moral de-legitimization of Aretino and at identifying him with the Antichrist. The next step would be the pronouncement of the Index.

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Berni

Thus, the series of attacks can be classified according to place and period. The first began in Rome and derives from the dramatic end of the “seven traitorous years” that Pietro spent in the service of Medici popes.2 For my purposes, this period is especially marked by the verses of Francesco Berni. They were the expression of a hostility determined by the “rotten, putrefying, bland tongue” (“lingua fracida, marcia, senza sale”) of Aretino, which in various passages of the frottola Pax vobis had touched negatively on Berni’s patron, Giovan Matteo Giberti, already a pontifical datary, and a friend, Giovan Battista Sanga. The attack therefore does not follow any particular difficulty in the relation2 I allude here to the attack against him on 28 July 1525 and his flight from Rome the following October. Aretino defines the Medici period in the incipit to his sonnet, “Sett’anni traditor ho via gettati,” in Scritti di Pietro Aretino nel codice Marciano It. xi 66 (= 6730), ed. Danilo Romei (Florence, 1987) 117.

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ship between the two poets, who during the Roman years did not seem to have had any reason for direct conflict. On the contrary, it is an answer that is, in a certain sense, pro forma; he is induced to speak out in his role as secretary, and thus as custodian of the public image of a patron with whom Aretino is on a collision course.3 This late and non-Roman attack was the occasion for a caudate sonnet of fifty verses, that proposed the annulment of the adversary both as a person and as a political interlocutor.4 The sonnet dates back to Aretino’s months spent in Mantua, when he was a guest of Marquis Federico Gonzaga from October 1525 until March 1527. Preceding the poem was also the physical attack against Aretino on 28 July 1525 in Rome, which was then discovered to be the work of Achille della Volta but which Aretino, and many others with him, thought was commissioned by the Datary. Berni did not take a position on the matter, but in his verses he focused on the stabbing and its consequences (“maiming”. “storpiataccio,” l. 8) and used it as proof of the degraded nature of the antagonist: “look at your sycophant manners / and if you insist on prattling on, talk about yourself: / look at your chest, your head, and your hands” (“scorgi i costumi tuoi ruffiani / e se pur vòi cianciar, di’ di te stesso: / guàrdati il petto, la testa e le mani,” ll. 12–14). Implicit but not less evident are the connection with the courtly context, and the political reading of the affair: on the one side are Rome, the pope, the datary, “and the others in his circle” (“e gli altri che gli ha appresso,” l. 9), all having escaped the Sack of Rome in 1527; on the other side is Mantua, with the Marquis, Aretino, and “his scroungers, / buggerers, tavern pages” (“quei suoi leccapiatti / bardassonacci, paggi da taverna,” ll. 45–46). In the background are the actions of Pietro’s sisters in the brothels of Arezzo (ll. 22–32). The ending lived up to such rancor: “Now live and rule yourself / although a dagger, a toilet, or even a knot / will make you quiet in every way” (“Or vivi e ti governa / ben che un pugnale, un cesso, o ver un nodo / ti faranno star queto in ogni modo,” ll. 48–50). These final words could assume a different, terrible tone, if what has been theorized were true,5 that in Rome in these same months, the pope was plotting so that in Mantua Marquis Federico completed what della Volta had tried without success: that is, to eliminate Aretino.

3 The fundamental terms of the story, though not their interpretation, remain those laid out by Antonio Virgili in his impassioned monograph on Berni: Francesco Berni. Con documenti inediti (Florence, 1881). 4 “Tu ne dirai e farai tante e tante;” number xxxii, in Francesco Berni, Rime, ed. Danilo Romei (Milan, 1985). 5 On this question, see Paul Larivaille, Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1997), 128–129.

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A disturbing and disquieting story, important for the characters involved and the methods alluded to, and hoped for (“a dagger, a toilet, or even a knot”), and in which, beyond the historical details, it is interesting to note the emphasis on the peculiarity of Aretino’s action, which is not that of a writer but a courtier and a man of action. It is no accident that both his tongue and his behavior are condemned: “you will say and do this” (“tu ne dirai e farai,” l. 1). For everybody, in fact, that was the Aretino of the 1520s.6 His unscrupulous use of words had built himself not only a role but could have also accrued a semblance of power if he had been able to divide the Medici party in the curia and oblige the pope to choose between himself and the Datary. This would still be his chosen style in the first years of his stay in Venice, dominated by his role as Pasquino until the transformation and the rejection of “every composition […] made before” that had sanctioned the birth a new writer.7 Precisely for its political nature, the story was not destined to end with the episode of the attack but to survive in time, fueling other positions both taken by Aretino (see the sonnet “Fa noto et manifesto” and the invective in the form of a letter to Giberti) and by other members of Giberti’s circle:8 in Giovanni Mauro, in particular, and very likely in Berni’s Rifacimento of Boiardo’s Inamoramento de Orlando.9 But it was Giovanni Alberto Albicante who would take the precedent to a most insistent and violent conclusion in Milan in 1538.

6 For Coppetta, for example, who opens one of his sonnets with a quatrain in which the reference to Aretino was taken as antonomasia: “Explain that in these pages and in others / are the defects of others and the poison of Aretino / which touches the tongue and does not pull back on the reins / nor on the state, nor on the degree of his evil and cruel wishes” (“Spieghi pur altri in queste carte e ’n quelle / gli altrui difetti e d’aretin veleno / tinga la lingua e non ritenga il freno / stato né grado a le voglie empie e felle”), Rime d’amore, xxxii, ll. 1–4, in Giovanni Guidiccioni-Francesco Coppetta Beccuti, Rime, ed. Ezio Chiòrboli (Bari, 1912), 121. 7 “Ogni composizione […] fatta per lo adietro,” Letter to Paolo Pietrasanta, 23 June 1537 (in Lettere i, 153). 8 The sonnet is in Scritti di Pietro Aretino, 138–139; the invective is in Paolo Procaccioli, “Il fiele dopo il miele (e il pugnale). Aretino contra Giberti,” in Giuseppe Crimi-Cristiano Spila (eds.), Le scritture dell’ira. Voci e modi dell’invettiva nella letteratura italiana (Rome, 2016), 51–66: 62– 66. 9 In Giovanni Mauro’s Capitolo delle bugie, he returned to the reason for the wounding, read in light of excesses of the tongue: “This happened to him for having spoken / of matters which should be kept quiet / / In order to avoid angering the people. // He was wrong, and not those who were owed it, / Since he should know, that with great lords, / Without saying anything else, it is enough to drop a hint. // Others, who have fallen into such errors, / Have ended their days over three planks of wood, / And fed the ravens and hawks,” (“Questo gli advenne per esser dicente / Di quelle cose, che tacer si denno, / Per non far gire in collora la gente. // Egli hebbe il torto, e non quei che gli denno, / Perché dovea saper, che a’ gran signori, / Senza dir altro, basta fare un cenno. // Altri, che sono incorsi in tali errori, / Han finito i lor dì sovra

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Albicante

It was in fact the Milanese poet who between the end of the 1530s and the first years of the 1540s embraced Berni’s testimony with greater determination. Moreover, Albicante was also the only opponent who induced Aretino to cross swords with him, but also to come to terms afterward. For this reason, this story is important to other episodes as well and deserves to be rehearsed, albeit briefly, both to examine the positions he and Aretino took in their writings against each other and the implications of their arguments. The facts, all dating from 1539, include first the exchange of capitoli and letters, then a printed copy of the Abbattimento poetico which gathered them together to validate their truce and the end of their hostilities. A late recurrence (the Nuova contentione of 1543) followed, in which the Milanese poet threatened to launch a new attack if Aretino did not return to milder language in their debates.10 And in fact he did tone down his language, as the documents from the following years demonstrate. The official reasons for the clash were Aretino’s critiques of the Guerra di Piamonte, the short poem with which Albicante had celebrated the endeavors of Alfonso d’Avalos, and which earned him the laurel. These reasons were not however enough to justify such violence, neither the involvement of the emperor, whose image, in the Abbattimento, sealed the end of the conflict. Before delving into the details of the controversy, it is worthwhile to linger over its context and chronology. The story takes place in a setting that until 1536 had remained if not exactly irrelevant, then certainly marginal in the deployment of Aretino’s diplomatic and courtly actions: Milan, where his affairs were limited to his contacts with Count Massimiano Stampa and De Leyva. Things changed in 1536 with the imperial stipend that weighed heavily on the city’s finances. It turned Spanish Milan into a nerve center, which through the effective and regular payment of the stipend was called on to concretize the emperor’s word and with it, public recognition of the role of the beneficiary. Things would probably have not ended traumatically if the city’s finances had been healthier and if Aretino had not been aligned with the French cause until that point. It seems to me that only if things are put in these terms can one understand the reasons for the beginning of a series of attacks targeting him.

10

i tre legni, / Et pasciuto gli corvi, et gli avoltori,”) Giovanni Mauro d’Arcano, Terze rime, ed. Francesca Jossa (Manziana, 2016), 311 (ll. 76–84). The texts are published in Giovanni Alberto Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane (Vita di Pietro Aretino del Berna, Abbattimento, Nuova contentione), ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana, 1999).

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Clearly, it was all about placing him in the worst possible light in the eyes of the city administrators, the Spanish diplomats, and the emperor himself. It began with attributing the anti-Spanish letters to Aretino, which earned him the distrust of the governor, cardinal Marino Caracciolo, as well as that of Don Lope de Soria, once the imperial ambassador in Venice where he had been among Aretino’s great supporters, and who had been invited to Milan “with the precise mandate of reorganizing financial administration.”11 This distrust was not easy for the writer to dispel, especially in Soria. At this point, Albicante enters the picture. He is close to Count Stampa, another of Aretino’s protectors. Taking the octaves of the Guerra as a pretext, Aretino attacks him with a capitolo dated 4 February; it was precisely this author who had been indicated as the writer of the fake letters. The operation is delicate and the title itself (Invettiva del divino Aretino contra l’Albicante, sopra ‘La guerra del Piemonte’) is careful to narrow the criticism and single out his target from everything else. In fact, the ridicule is present only in the octaves and their author (who will remember later how, in those tercets: “mocking, mocking, you told me so much bullshit”, “burlando burlando mi dite mille coglionerie”), while the protectors—who are the same protectors of both contenders—are themselves protected from any reference.12 The answer came immediately: the Apologia del Bestiale Albicante contra il Divino Aretino was a less cheerful capitolo but by no means less efficacious. Its tercets not only rebutted him point by point, but especially showed how the author was able to hold his ground against such an opponent. The verses’ bitterness was followed by yet more bitterness, this time in epistolary prose. Aretino began with a letter from 28 April in which he accused the recipient of composing the defamatory letters and criticized Count Stampa for non-payment. Albicante followed suit immediately on 20 May, with a no less venomous letter accusing Aretino of sodomy and reminding him that the year before he was banned from Venice “as a blasphemer and arsepounder” (“per bestemiatore, et rompitore di tondi.”)13 Since the danger level had risen and the polemics had gotten out of hand, signals of reconciliation were sent from Venice. On 20 September, Aretino wrote to Albicante, whom he now called “brother,” and attributed their debate to the “furor of the Poets” (“fratello,” “furor de i Poeti.”)14 On 22 October, the Milanese poet followed with his response to Aretino, his “arch-brother” (“arcifratello”) in which he reiterated 11 12 13 14

“Con il preciso incarico di riordinare l’amministrazione finanziaria,” Federico Chabod, Storia di Milano nell’epoca di Carlo v (Turin, 1971), 285. Albicante, Occasioni, 123. Albicante, Occasioni, 125. Albicante, Occasioni, 127.

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his good will and availability.15 Of particular interest, in their exchange, is the statement: “Please, let’s continue to write one another, because the patrician people, I do not say the plebs, take pleasure in it in excelsis” (“di gratia continuiamo al scriversi, perché la gente Patricia, non dico plebea, se ne gode in excelsis.”)16 This claim confirms that the ongoing dialogue was anything but a private matter. It was of course not in Milan and Venice, but probably also not in Spain and in the imperial court, and after the publication of the pamphlet, it was certainly not in the rest of Italy. Despite high hopes, the controversy was not completely resolved. Another episode took place at the beginning of 1543. Albicante, under the pretext of a letter included in the second book (Lettere ii, 168, 1 March 1540) that he found “very offensive to me” (“in me molto biasimevole,”) responded to Aretino with a Nuova contentione, an epistolary pamphlet dated 25 January.17 It is a small summa of anti-Aretino sentiment of the most recent period, with explicit mention of Franco and his Rime, and with a review of powerful people who had made the mistake of being generous with the writer. But still in 1543, as already in 1539, what is suspicious is the timing of the attacks, which coincide conveniently with the renewed conflict between Aretino and the Milanese administration. The long delay in the payment of the stipend prompted Aretino to appeal directly to the court, and in particular to Granvelle, a powerful minister notoriously opposed to Avalos, something that would have irritated the governor in Milan quite a bit. The governor still owed Aretino some crowns that were promised for the dedication of the hagiographies. No wonder Albicante felt obliged to do his part by reopening hostilities.

3

Pseudo Berni (Albicante, As Well?)

In 1538, while in Milan the story of the false letters aroused the controversy mentioned above, in Perugia, Francesco Berni submitted a Vita di Pietro Aretino to Bianchin del Leone’s presses for publication. The title page and colophon of the short text claim that it was a biography of Aretino. The text is written in the form of a dialogue between Berni himself and Giovanni Mauro. But this story was not very believable: Berni and Mauro were dead, Berni in 1535 and Mauro the year after, while in 1538 Bianchino, the printer, was either already

15 16 17

Albicante, Occasioni, 128. Albicante, Occasioni, 128. Albicante, Occasioni, 133.

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dead or retired. Although in theory nothing contradicts that it may have consisted of preexistent materials in manuscript that were later transferred to print, such a possibility is only hypothetical since the text presupposes the publication of the first book of Lettere, which, as it is well known, happened in January 1538. It is therefore inevitable to ask who is writing under Berni’s name and why he chose such a nom de plume. Various theories have been advanced, more or less likely and more or less compatible with the chronology and the topic of the controversy. The names involved run from Niccolò Franco to Fortunio Spira, Ortensio Lando, and Anton Francesco Doni. It seems logical to me to consider the short work as belonging to the defamatory campaign that Count Massimo Stampa and Avalos had vowed to wage against him in Milan, or that it was yet again Albicante. The specific reasons for this attribution are illustrated elsewhere18 and it is not necessary to go over the details again here. Suffice it to say that a) in Milan, printer Francesco Calvo was about to publish Berni’s Rifacimento of Boiardo’s poem (Inamoramento de Orlando) that, according to certain rumors, would contain attacks against Pietro; b) Albicante was centrally involved, perhaps as an editor, in the printing of the Rifacimento; c) in February 1540 Aretino thanked Calvo (Lettere ii, 156) for having purged the text “of all slander” (“da ogni maladicenzia.”) Thus it does not seem likely that right at the peak of the intensity of the clash, and at Aretino’s most difficult moment, during the months of his flight from Venice, that Albicante would have chosen to use the gossip scattered across the poem’s excursus or in some of the beginnings of its cantos, organize it into a biography in the form of a dialogue, and then attribute it (in essence, giving credit for it back) to the same Berni from which the material mainly derived. The problem of attribution is not only about authorship, but also about determining who exactly the book was composed for, and therefore also about interpretation. Of course, voices opposed to the author were loud in more than one Italian piazza, but until that point they had only managed to orchestrate episodic and unrelated initiatives, for example, in pasquinate from Rome, as well as those by Gobbo di Rialto in Venice, or in the sonnets produced over the course of the Bembo-Brocardo controversy. It was in Milan, because of the stipend and the difficulties he had trying to get paid, that resentment against him ran stronger,19 and thus it was from there that an attack such as the one 18 19

See the introduction and commentary in Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane. It is sufficient to point to the evidence in this passage from his letter to Avalos in July 1538: “I swear to Christ that I will not open my mouth about the stipend, and thus I will flee both your indignation and the bites of Sauli, who asked how exactly I am serving the emperor, that I might have what he wants me to have” (“Sto per far voto a Cristo di non aprire più bocca di pensione, e così fuggirò la indegnazione vostra e i morsi del Sauli, il

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in the Vita would make the most sense, that is, it would adequately explain the attack’s origins and goals. Moreover, given that the stipend had arrived not in payment for service rendered, but as a consequence of the imperial recognition of the writer’s moral superiority, particularly for his capacity for discerning good from evil, now the questioning of the benefice could not simply be structured as a denunciation of individual actions or words, but required the complete delegitimization of the person, that is, of his “life.” Therefore it mattered little if the facts mentioned were false or unlikely, or the arguments adopted were weak and debatable, or obviously serving as mere pretexts.20 Quite in line with what is required in every classic biography or hagiography, what was needed was an endless accumulation of details that replicated and amplified the main idea.21 In this case, the assumption was not the celebration of greatness or sanctity, but the proclamation of the person’s negative qualities. It was necessary to create an anti-hero, and a tale in which the details were as degrading as possible, such that, as in every defamatory campaign, the subject’s name was associated with terrible things, and was dragged down as low as possible. And to give everything the appearance of verisimilitude, the two interlocutors, heedless of obvious anachronism, engage in a dialogue that features, as reliable witnesses, people who either live in the same house as Aretino, or are frequent visitors there, or are close to the writer in various ways. It does not matter that such people could be no more than mere names, what matters is that, through such figures, the biographer can justify, at least superficially, each part of his attack.22

20

21

22

quale dimanda in che cosa io serva lo Imperadore, onde io abbia avere ciò che egli vole ch’io abbia,”) Lettere ii, 59; Domenico Sauli, of Genoa, was then president of the Magistrate of the ordinary revenues of Milan. See Walter Cupperi, Pietro Aretino e la pensione cesarea nelle Lettere, nei documenti e nell’ecfrasi sul ritratto tizianesco di Isabella d’Aviz, in Anna Bisceglia-Matteo Ceriana-Paolo Procaccioli, «Inchiostro per colore». Arte e artisti in Pietro Aretino, foreword by Enrico Malato-Eike D. Schmidt (Rome, 2019), 219–233. With great clarity just a few years before, Erasmus introduced his biography of St. Jerome, writing that “people are surprisingly credulous, or to put it better, there is an “I don’t know” that is profoundly connatural with the human mind, which makes it more willing to listen to made-up stories than to facts that actually happened, and which makes it more pleasurable to believe in imaginary, unbelievable fables that in real things,” citation from Anna Morisi’s Italian translation in Erasmus of Rotterdam, Vita di San Girolamo, ed. Anna Morisi Guerra (L’Aquila-Rome, 1988), 93–94. This is the focus of the indispensable study by Ernst Kris-Otto Kurz, La leggenda dell’artista: Un saggio storico, presentazione di Enrico Castelnuovo, prefazione di Ernst H. Gombrich (Turin, 1980 [1st ed. Vienna 1934]). In particular, this concerns Niccolò Franco, Francesco Marcolini, Fortunio Spira, Leonardo Parpaglioni, Polo Bartolini, all noted to the reader in the first book of Lettere.

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But more than the words of these witnesses, whether they were responsible or simply conspiring with the author, the Vita uses two works by Aretino to give depth to the dialogue, acting as real hypotexts: the Cortigiana (“his life is easily understood in that Comedy”) and the first book of letters,23 which are his most biographical and militant works. It is not by chance that the “dream of Parnassus,” one of the more well-known pages from his Lettere,24 begins and ends the Vita as a narrative frame, which at the end reveals no more or less than a continued gloss on the book of letters. Naturally, the Vita itself becomes the occasion for a counterargument that, following the customary schema of every biography (the sequence of birth, formation, and deeds), intends to unveil the true and not very laudable “virtues of Poet Aretino,” as promised in the dedication.25 Fate naturally has been marked right away, characterized only by negative signs. The family is not saved either (Pietro is born “of a villainous father, a whore-ish and Slavic mother,” the father was a “cobbler,”) nor is his education, which derives all from popular literature.26 Neither are his associations and collaborations spared from the author’s disdain. Customs are degraded, appetites are perverse, aspirations ignoble and the same goes for his actions, naturally destined for the fishmongers’ stalls. All this is said clearly and directly, to inform the readers and dissuade Aretino’s protectors: “the lords who give him money should be hanged.”27 In line with such a view the stages that mark the cursus honorum of Aretino, from his school years to his time in the service of Agostino Chigi and of a cardinal of St John, from an imaginary stay in Vicenza as a charlatan to an equally elusive experience at a monastery in Ravenna, from his return to Rome under Pope Leo as a buffoon and a pimp, to a role as manservant of Giovanni de’ Medici. Then, after the captain dies, he serves again as a pimp under Pope Clement until a misadventure suffered at the hands of the Spaniards during the Sack of Rome (chronology is clearly not the biographer’s strong suit), followed by his time in

23 24

25 26 27

“La sua vita si comprende facilmente in quella Comedia,” this quotation and those that follow refer to Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane (here 75). The letter to Gianiacopo Leonardi referred to this as the “dream of Parnassus” (Lettere i, 280, 6 December 1537) is in effect one of the most important pages in the entire book of letters, and functions as a depository of the political and cultural program of Aretino when he is in Venice. “Virtù del Poeta Aretino,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 55. “Di padre villano, di madre Schiavona et putana,” “ciavattaro,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 60 and 67. “Bisognerebbe impiccar i signori, che gli mandon danari,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 60.

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Venice. The following decade, beginning with the improvident gift of a hundred crowns obtained of course by the liberality of King Francis and not by Pietro’s virtue, is marked by depravity (“Pietro screwed everybody”) and by an unmerited fame achieved through his publications.28 Of course the titles “divine” and “scourge of princes” are removed, and the author denounces the practice of multiple dedications as scandalous.29 Next comes a reference to the stipend that he had “from the state of Milan on behalf of the emperor to immortalize him.”30 But, the biography mentions right afterward, how would it be possible for Aretino to immortalize others if his own works did not last, with the exception of the sacred writings, which would last only “because they bear the name of Jesus”?31 And yet, “maybe some idiot […] paid him money in this hope (i.e., of becoming immortal).”32 At this point in the narration, after the biography claims to have “demonstrated” the unworthiness of Aretino’s character, the stipend was revealed as completely indefensible, and so were all the protections that rest on the first and most important one: the protection of emperor. The conclusion shows that the lords were in fact accomplices, who “delight in seeing vices prosper, and virtue starve.”33 The last attack deals with themes taken from the most recent publications, the Ragionamento della Nanna e della Pippa and the Lettere. It consists of a sexualized interpretation of his works, which extends Aretino’s degradation to all of his associates: Francesco Marcolini and his wife Isabella, Sebastiano Serlio and his wife Francesca, Polo Bartolini and Perina Riccia, Angela and Giovan Antonio Serena, Caterina Sandella, Gianambrogio degli Eusebi and his wife. The conclusion is inevitable: “by God, a brothel is more honest,” and at the time between May and July of 1538, it seemed to be confirmed by the facts.34 Aretino fled to Gambarare after being denounced for blasphemy and sodomy, and 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

“Pietro tutti chiavava,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 84. The practice of multiple dedications would not have been very common but which was far from unknown, despite the fact that Tasso declared it to be a “new doctrine” a few months after Aretino’s death. On 16 November 1594, Tasso in fact confessed to Antonio Costantini of having “learned a new doctrine; that it is possible to make several gifts out of a single book, or multiple dedications in various cities,” (“imparato una nuova dottrina; che d’un medesimo libro si posson far diversi doni, o diverse dedicazioni in varie città”) letter 1514 in Torquato Tasso, Lettere, ed. Cesare Guasti, vol. 5 (Florence, 1855), 191. “Dallo stato di Milano per conto dell’Imperadore per immortalarlo,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 86. “Per esservi suso il nome di Giesù,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 86. “Forsi qualche coglione […] con questa speranza trasse i danari,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 86. “Si pascon di nutricarsi i vitii, et veder morir la vertù,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 88. “Per Dio che il bordello è più honesto,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 92.

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returned only thanks to the intervention of Gianiacopo Leonardi (the recipient of the “dream of Parnassus”). With the poet’s fate apparently sealed, there was no better occasion for such an attack and for cutting the “divine” Aretino down in his own terms: “poor ass,” “rascal,” “charlatan,” “pandering buggerer,” “crazy person,” and “fool.”

4

Niccolò Franco

Near the end, the pseudo-Berni Vita recorded the first outbreak of another clash, this time breaking out in Venice in Pietro’s very house: “I heard some say that Nicolò Franco wrote certain letters competing with those of Aretino, more beautiful, and a thousand times more learned as well.”35 It was not slander. In November 1538, printer Antonio Gardane published Franco’s Le pistole vulgari. Until that point, Franco had been a protégé of Aretino, who hosted him at Palazzo Bolani and celebrated him in his first book of Lettere (a work for which Franco had given his assistance). The particularity of the subject—a book of letters in the vernacular in print, a genre for which Pietro considered himself the inventor—and its timing—the preparation of the Pistole dates back to the critical months of Aretino’s denouncement for blasphemy and sodomy and his flight from Venice—must have nourished a growing conviction in Aretino that he had been betrayed. This betrayal was that much more serious since it happened when he was in most need of solidarity, beginning with that of his “familiari.” The clash that followed was unexpectedly violent, and would have affected for a long time Franco’s life thereafter, but also would have left a mark on Aretino’s own soul, a scar no less visible than those that marked his body. And this would have persuaded the writer to take a “vow that forbade him from having students.”36 The antagonistic aim of the Pistole was moreover evident, even for a reader less sensitive than Aretino was in the autumn of 1538. This antagonism was already clear in the title, which polemically featured a classicist dimension that was absent from the Lettere. It was evident also in the decision to entrust the printing to a direct competitor of Marcolini, namely, Antonio Gardane, who, having arrived in Venice from France, had expelled Marcolini from the music publishing business for good.37 35 36 37

“Ho inteso dire, che Nicolò Franco fa certe lettere a concorrenza di quelle dell’Aretino, più belle, e più dotte assai, mille volte,” Albicante, Occasioni aretiniane, 90. “Sacramento che gli vietava il far de gli allievi,”Lettere iii, 159, to Clario, February 1545, with explicit reference to Franco. It does not turn out the Pistole is the only non-musical title that appears in the French

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The story is complicated and many of its passages remain obscure. First because such passages rely on records that are indirect or, when explicit, as in the case of Franco’s Rime, are marked by a tone of resentment and by the desire for revenge. Secondly, the obscurity is due to the lack of a reliable critical edition and of a systematic scholarly interpretation of the Rime.38 Of course it is not necessary here to go over the details of the subsequent developments of the controversy; it is enough to describe the beginnings to better understand the nature and extent of the arguments on each side as they developed. Both sides made use of violent rhetoric: Aretino simulated it in his detached tone that he saw as proof of his superiority.39 Franco on the other hand openly displayed his violent rhetoric and intended it to feed the desire for a direct clash that turned into an editorial initiative, the Rime, which for nearly a decade—from the edition of 1541 to those of 1546 and 1548—would have kept the fire burning, unquenchable as the hatred that nurtured it. The same author was aware of it, who in 1548 addressed printer Grineo, recalling the image of a burning boiler, “which, having boiled a little while before, with every bit of fire given to it, comes back to a boil.”40 The Rime are an extended collection (298 sonnets in the third edition) which takes Aretino as its almost exclusive theme, just as its only tone is virulence, its only sentiment rancor, its only end the elimination of the enemy and his world and his part in it. The sonnets, indifferent to any artistic pretense, follow without any gradation, variation, schema, or subtlety in the allusions, as if every blow had to be a lethal one, with an explicit vocabulary, even in its continual recourse to obscenities. Counter to what was seen in the Vita, in these verses there is no preoccupation with finding evidence: the poet can present himself as the most trustworthy of witnesses exactly because of his extended

38

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printer’s catalogue. Marcolini’s reactions to the episode are discussed in Mario Armellini, “Francesco Marcolini stampatore di musica,” in Paolo Procaccioli-Paolo Temeroli-Vanni Tesei (eds.), Un giardino per le arti: “Francesco Marcolino da Forlì.” La vita, l’opera, il catalogo (Bologna, 2009), 183–224. On the work and on the editorial history see Roberto L. Bruni, “Le tre edizioni cinquecentesche delle Rime contro l’Aretino e la Priapea di Nicolò Franco,” in Libri tipografi biblioteche. Ricerche storiche dedicate a Luigi Balsamo (Florence, 1997), vol. 1, 123–143. Aretino’s response made waves on its own merits and because it made his falling out with Franco official by substituting Ludovico Dolce for Franco as editor of the first book of Lettere, as well as with the subsequent elimination of the elogio (Lettere i, appendix 3) and the substitution of Dolce as the recipient of letter 155, one of the main texts of Aretino’s poetic output. “La quale havendo bollito poco tempo inanzi, con ogni poco di fuoco che vi si dia, torna tutta via a bollire,” Delle rime di m. Nicolo Franco contro Pietro Aretino, et de la Priapea del medesimo (Basilea, Grineo: 1548), fol. A1v.

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proximity to Aretino in living and working together with his recent patron. His account shows no hesitation: he does not leave out anything that could be used to trace the negative portrait with which he proposes to topple the monument erected by the Lettere. This account is complete and valuable and appears to be an accurate confirmation—though wholly negative—of the existence of Aretino’s system. This system, whose celebration, initiated in 1538 with the first book of letters, would remain the goal of the following five. Similar considerations should be made later on in relation to the anti-Aretino writings of Doni, another of the former friends whose love turned to hate. He made this hatred his reason for living. The sonnets in the Rime are arranged in short sequences; it is unclear whether this arrangement happened at the time of their composition, or if it came about as they were edited for publication. The arrangement of the poems, whenever it took place, appears to have been designed to incite hatred of Aretino progressively, by association of names and contexts. At the opening, we find a number of poems written to various friends by way of excuse, “A diversi amici in iscusa sua,” (sonnets 1–16: Sigismondo Fanzino, Captain Lionardo Arrivabene, Matteo Crivelli, Bottazzo, Giovanni Cantelmo, count of Popoli),41 concluded by a cautious re-wording of the lasciva pagina from Martial: “And if Aretino’s writing makes me dirty and a scoundrel in speech, fine; at least Aretino does not make me, nor did he ever make me, vicious and ignorant in deeds.” (10, ll. 12–14).42 The “Prima parte” follows, with the premise at the outset that the series of rhymes is just a response: Should it look too generous an interest That the Bad Beneventan, gives a hundred loaves in return for a schiacciata (flatbread) This fact should not seem strange to you; Since you never fucked once Without being fucked a thousand times in return.43 17, ll. 9–14

41 42 43

The text and numbering of the sonnets comes from Niccolò Franco, Rime contro Pietro Aretino, ed. E[nrico] S[icardi] (Lanciano, 1916). “Et se nel dir mi fa sporco, e furfante, / Non mi fa l’Aretin, né mai m’ha fatto / Ne l’opre vitiosissimo, e ignorante.” “Se ti paresse usura troppo grata, / che il Mal Beneventano, a centinaia / renda pagnotte per una schiacciata, / questa faccenda strana non ti paia; / perché tu mai non desti una cazzata / che non ne ricevessi le migliaia.”

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The expedient, as we will see, will return in Doni’s Teremoto where one finds a hundred letters against one of Aretino’s. In both cases it is an intense fury, legitimated by the proverb tradition, as well as by what at the time was considered “the” rage par excellence, the one unleashed in Orlando by the sight of the names of Angelica and Medoro bound together: “As many letters as there are, there are just as many nails / with which Love wounds and hurts the heart.” (Orlando Furioso, xxiii 103 3–4). The attack includes reprimands (“you know that I helped you write, / having seen you maimed, / and what is worse, foolish and ignorant,” 19, ll. 6–8),44 pointed reiterations of controversial points first brought up by Berni (“whoever wishes to write about Nanne / should not have sisters who, for two danari / would be whores,” 24, ll. 9–11),45 the upending of Aretino’s well-known postulates (“Aretino, all your admirable works / say at the beginning, as is known, / that you bite vice and show the truth; / but by God, the one and the other offend the truth,” 26, ll. 1–4),46 and denouncements of ignorance (“Aretino, do you know what Franco says? / That having the Psalms translated into the vernacular for you / and, flowering them forth, as it were, from your hands. / So that you wear the sword of a learned man at your side, // reveals precisely how deficient you are / of what you claim to possess; you just follow / those who think they are writing in Tuscan /, just because they say ‘guari’ and ‘unquanco’,” 35, ll. 1– 8).47 So far we are within a narrow horizon, that of personal and professional polemic; things change when we move from references to family, typography, and poetry to the public and political stage. This evolution happens because of the involvement of high-society figures of early sixteenth century Europe, starting with the Emperor himself: Let Caesar praise, and hold good The little books you, Aretino, make That in truth you merited it

44 45 46

47

“Sai che t’ho ne lo scrivere aiutato, / avendoti veduto stroppiato, / e quel che è peggio, goffo e ignorantone.” “Chi le Nanne vuol mettere in sermone, / sorelle aver non dee, che, a duo danari, / sieno fine puttane al paragone.” “Aretin, tutte l’Opere [in the printed version: Opre] tue stupende / portano in fronte, come conosciute, / che mordi il vizio e mostri la vertute; / ma per Dio, l’uno e l’altro il vero offende.” “Aretin, sai che cosa dice il Franco? / che il tuo farti tradurre nel vulgare / i Salmi, e di tua man poi fioreggiare, / per portar di dotto uom la spada al fianco, // glie a punto un palesar come sei manco / di quel che sei, ed è proprio un andare / dietro a color che di toscaneggiare / si credon, sol con guari e con unquanco.”

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If you proclaimed his fame with so many words. Let him send you, I say, privileges and gifts, If you go on writing his chronicles. He would certainly gain honor from this If you talk about him with a cock in the mouth. But by God, can it be so, that, if he has tasted The bad soups of your writings, He hasn’t already vomited them up? Nor that that idiot as dumb as an ox realizes that To whomever will taste them in the future, His victories will taste like cock.48 son. 42

This was the same Charles v whose support led to Aretino’s prestige at the time. This connection led almost naturally to Franco’s crossing over to the other side: “Franco goes to France, to vomit / that which in Italy is perhaps forbidden to him.” (66, ll. 1–2; the ending declares his faith in Francis i, who has become “his” king: “very well guarded / I will be in the shadow of my noble Sire”, ll. 13–14).49 But he does this without losing clarity: Franco knows well that Aretino is not a man for single allegiances and shows himself to be “half Spaniard and half Frenchified” (47, l. 8).50 Along with the princes, their gifts are likewise object of scorn: “Do not brag Aretino and be satisfied / that a Prince gave you a gown, / and another gave you a chape, and another, a necklace […]” (50, ll. 1–3), and “Now you bragged, Aretino, in your Annals / even about the caps, and the handkerchiefs / and the marzipans and sweets and confetti […]” (51, ll. 1–3).51 Here he upends the meanings of those gifts and reduces the book of letters to mere “Annals” in which he registers the fruits of this very particular sort of begging,

48

49 50 51

“Tenga Cesare or su, tenga per buoni, / Aretino, i libretti che tu fai, / che da dovero meritato l’hai, / se hai posto la sua fama in tanti suoni. / Manditi dico i privilegi e’ i duoni, / se le croniche sue scrivendo vai, / che certo gliene segue onor assai, / se co ’l caragio in bocca ne ragioni. / Ma può far Dio, che s’egli have assaggiate / le ministracce [sic] de le carte tue, / non l’abbi infin ad hora vomitate? / Né pur s’aveggia il bufalazzo e il bue, / ch’a chi le gusterà, ne l’altra etate / sapran di cazzo le vittorie sue?” “Vassene il franco in Francia, a vomitare / quel che in Italia forse gli è disdetto;” “assai ben guardato / sarò ne l’ombra del mio nobil Sire.” “Mezzo Spagnuolo e mezzo infranciosato;” the Italian ‘infranciosato’ is a pun on ‘becoming a Frenchman’ and ‘being affected by the French disease.’ “Non ti vanti Aretino e tienti buono, / che un Prencipe ti diè la palandrana, / l’uno i pontali e l’altro la collana;” “Or hai posto, Aretino, ne gli Annali / fino a le cuffie, fino a fazzoletti / e marzapani e zuccheri e confetti.”

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despite the fact that it was well known that Franco’s hand was involved in the compilation and editing of the book of letters. The series of sonnets against princes and their “giving tribute to debauchery” (54, l. 5) becomes progressively apocalyptic, and culminates in the invocation, “At long last, Jesus, grant me revenge against the unworthy band of the infamous Princes” (65, ll. 1–2).52 Keeping in mind that Aretino “never responds to those who can really bark” (70, l. 8), Franco continues with a section about figures who, unlike those that came before, were able to hold their ground against the poet.53 Their names are Sadoleto and Giberti, Cardinals Gonzaga and Accolti,54 Carafa, and Aleandro. Similarly, he defended Beaziano, Ottavio Pantagato, the bookseller Troiano di Navò, Achille Bocchi, Giovanni Agnese, and Giovan Pollastra, all publicly attacked by Aretino. But it is not only about evoking friends and enemies; the Rime also unearth the secret weaknesses and strategies of their adversary, beginning with Aretino’s plans to become a prelate: “The popes are nonetheless popes and great masters, / you always were just a stubborn fool and you always will be, / in the same way, you will never wear a cardinal’s hat or cap / neither red, nor roan, nor even blue” (80, ll. 5–8).55 Even if the allusions in the letters were not sufficient, these expectations find an important and early confirmation precisely in the words of an enemy (for that argument, see sonnet 119). There is similar evidence regarding the value to be assigned to portraits, a theme to which 13 sonnets are dedicated, 11 of which are explicitly addressed to Titian (sonn. 100–110). Just after this, and I do not believe it is by chance, given the strategic nature of this section, is the denunciation of the emperor, who uses Aretino as his “trumpet,” and a defense of the French king, Francis, who despite everything cannot resist his charm: King Francis, I do not know what you are lacking, That you look so saddened by the fact That Aretino never tires of Spinning lies for the emperor. 52 53 54

55

“Dar tributo a la ribalderia;” “Deh, manda omai, giesù, sopra l’indegno / stuol de gli infami Prencipi vendetta.” “A chi ben sa baiar, mai non risponde.” The fact that the sonnets on the subject of the cardinals of Mantova and Ravenna came one after the other could be an expression of the well known political proximity that has been rediscovered and problematized by Elena Bonora, Aspettando l’imperatore. Principi italiani tra il papa e Carlo v (Turin, 2014). “I Papi son pur Papi e gran maestri, / tu pur furfante sei, fusti e sarai, / né per ciò scuffie, né cappelli avrai, / né rossi, né rovani, né cilestri.”

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Would you like perhaps for him to sing on the streets56 About your deeds? If this is true, it is a mistake, And I would ache with all my heart If you were to grow a white beard because of all this. If you long for his salty rhymes, Watch out because, if fate declares it, He could yet use that barbed tongue to sing about the French. Since the Spaniards, as Pasquino says (for being called ‘cut cocks’)57 are not well-liked by Aretino.58 son. 16

Beyond the polemical intentions, these verses are a valuable document as proof of the weight accorded to Aretino’s word in the contemporary political arena, naturally in his case, which was not directly about diplomacy, but more in the realm of propaganda and apologetics. Then followed a long series of sonnets, some pro (those dedicated to “allies” or friends: Giberti, della Volta, Pantagato, Troiano, Gardane, etc.), and others contra (Iacopo and Francesco Sansovino, Giovanni Giustiniani, Fortunio Spira, Giovanni Strazzone, etc.), culminating in four sonnets against Venice (184– 187) and in the very harsh one, against Speroni the tragedian (189), proof of the friendship between Speroni and Aretino. After a short military interlude dedicated to the “Testamento del Delicato” (190–191), the author returns to the subject of Venice, this time with the ambiguous tone, something between celebratory and condemnatory, of the seven sonnets “In morte del Bembo” (193– 199) with which the “Prima parte” ends in 1548.

56 57 58

In the printed edition, correctly, as banca rather than banco. The incision is a play on the equivalence between spagnoli = marrani, and therefore “circumcised.” “re francesco, io non so quel che vi manca, / che mostrate d’aver tanto dolore, / se l’Aretino per l’Imperadore / di spendere bugie mai non si stanca. / Vorreste forse ch’ei cantasse in banco / del fatto vostro? Oh s’egli è ver, gli è errore, / e ben me ne dorrei con tutto il core, / se poneste per ciò la barba bianca. / Se vi fan gola i detti suoi salati, / guardiate che i Francesi, per distino, / ponno da lui anch’essere cantati. / Perchè e Spagnuoli, a detto di Pasquino, / (per esser cazzi mozzi nominati) / non troppo van per man a l’Aretino.” Later, in the interrogation of 16 April 1569, concerning the Rime Franco said that the king of France “never really had a good laugh except when he was reading this work,” Angelo Mercati, I costituti di Niccolò Franco (1568–1570) dinanzi l’Inquisizione di Roma, esistenti nell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano (Città del Vaticano, 1955), 117.

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The second follows a more conventional structure. The argument is the same, but Franco develops it in a more academic fashion; he stages the debates in the countryside and on the ocean, with disputes between the shepherds Cinisco (or Alcippo) and the Caprar (Goat herder) (or Pescator / Fisherman) of Arezzo. The poem proceeds through iterations of various expedients. These iterations frequently occurred in the 16 sonnets dedicated to animals (Aretino the ram, roe deer, goose, wild boar, owl, sheep, etc), and in the 17 other sonnets dedicated to the gods. The effect is the same as if one sat down to read the Officina Textoris, an encyclopedic collection of classical citations, cover to cover. Things otherwise did not change with the 198 poems (still here mainly sonnets) in the short work associated with the Rime, the Priapea, in which however the author gleefully prioritizes the priapic material, such that the reference to Aretino is no longer the same obsession that it was in the first part. It is interesting that the sonnets seem to experiment for the first time with associating obscene material with Aretino’s name, a practice that would become commonplace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here Franco employs Aretino’s own techniques, such as those in the Modi: “Fucking from behind, it seems to me / to be one of the main positions: / you see, that all the animals / do not know how to do it in any other way,” (173, ll. 1–4).59 Franco seems to anticipate what would become a cliché theme in the Dubbi: “I have decided to remove from the minds / a doubt that makes many doubt, / the thing cannot be done / as one says, making three people happy.”60 The series ends with a call “To the infamous princes of our infamous age.” It amounts to a kind of general proclamation (“Aretino’s abuses will never be read, without yours being read as well”) with the only exception of Giberti, who “tried to eradicate the shame among men,” and of Alfonso d’Avalos, who donates to everyone and to whom Franco will dedicate the ten books of the Volgare historia.61 The fact however that no replies are given to such appeals, neither the one addressed to the king nor the one addressed to the marchese, shows that Franco’s word, though it could wound and scar, was far from lethal. If the purpose of the work was to let fly some of his rancor, the accumulation of names and metaphors was certainly useful, but it seems obvious to me that such repet-

59 60 61

“Il far a potta in dietro, al mio parere / è una de le foggie principali: / vedesi ciò, che tutti gli animali / ad altra strada non si san tenere.” “Son risoluto torre da le menti / un dubbio, che fa molti dubitare, / che quella cosa non si possa fare, / sì come dir si suole, a i tre contenti.” “I suoi vituperi mai non si leggeranno, che non vi si leggano i vostri ancora;” “cercò sradicare la vergogna di mezzo a gli uomini.”

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itive insistence robbed the work of its efficacy. In the end, one is left with the impression that the Rime served less as proof of Aretino’s depravity than as documentation of his enemy’s obsession.

5

Sorbona loquitur: Joachim Périon

Only three years passed since, with the third edition of the Rime, Michele Grineo had updated and strengthened Niccolò Franco’s voice in Basel, when Joachim Périon raised his own voice in Paris.62 It was developed from a similar point of view, and yet represented a giant improvement in the quality of critique, which would remain unique in the history of Aretino’s fortune. It was not like the voices of Berni or Albicante, who ran around with Pietro in the courtly scene, nor like the voice of Franco, competing with Aretino in the typographic market, but instead was the mannered and rather pompous voice of a Parisian magister. A Benedictine scholar educated in Greek and Latin, Périon, who either at the Sorbonne, where he was teaching, or in his native Cormery, had put aside Aristotelian translations, the controversies with Nicolas de Grouchy and Petrus Ramus, and the disputes about language, the things for which he would be remembered, in order to deal with Pietro. The result was no less than an oration, articulated in the perfect Ciceronian style for which he was famous, in which Périon warned Henry ii about the dangers that the word of this most pernicious author represented for the entire respublica christianorum. The intent is stated explicitly in the title: Ad Henricum Galliæ regem clarissimum ac potentissimum, cæterosque christianæ religionis principes in Petrum Aretinum oratio (Oration against Pietro Aretino to Henry, most famous and most powerful King of France and to all other Christian princes).63 The work proposes to bring the accused before the king to be judged: “in iudicium vestrum adduco.”64 It is not a fictitious juridical actio in the style of Boccalini, with Apollo called upon to pronounce on the charges of literary lèse majesté, but a real and proper trial, carried out in perfect oratorical style, founded on two precise charges: an infamous lifestyle and an equally obscene work, the “Capricium.”65

62 63 64 65

See the introduction by Joaquim Périon, Dialogues. De l’origine du français et de sa parenté avec le grec, ed. Geneviève Demerson-Alberte Jacquetin (Paris, 2003), 1–60. Printed in Paris in 1551 by two presses, that of Charles Perier and that of Nicolas de Guingant. Ad Henricum Galliæ regem, fol. A4r. “Capriccio” recalled in both its title and subtitle to the second and third days of the Ragion-

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It is only natural to inquire into the motivation for Périon’s efforts. It is first perhaps interesting to wonder if the initiative represented an outburst of a reader disgusted by the words of Nanna and Antonia, or if rather inside Henry’s (and Catherine de’ Medici’s!) court someone was interested in stirring up controversy by subjecting such a case to the learned prior. However, he had never hidden his inclination for polemical writing, even if before and after the incident he limited himself to controversies concerning theological and linguistic material. In any case, one cannot fail to notice that the date of the speech is significant. 1551 is the year in which Aretino is engaged with the final phase of his campaign to be named a cardinal, with initiatives in Italy (particularly in Rome, with the dedications of religious and secular works to the pope and his relatives), in the imperial court (the attempted involvement of the emperor himself is evidenced by a passage from a letter of Nicolas de Granvelle to Leone Leoni),66 and in France. Here in particular Aretino was concerned with a campaign of self-promotion aimed at the queen, through the Ternali in gloria di Giulio terzo pontifice cristianamente magnanimo, et della maestà de la Reina Cristianissima.67 His activism did not go unnoticed. Although it was directed

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amento della Nanna e della Antonia fatto in Roma sotto una ficaia composto dal divino Aretino per suo capriccio a correzione dei tre stati delle donne, in 1534 (“La seconda giornata del capriccio Aretino nella quale la Nanna narra alla Antonia la vita delle maritate;” “La ultima giornata del capriccio Aretino nella quale la Nanna narra alla Antonia la vita delle puttane”). “I wrote to Aretino, and I am sending you those letters. Titian was able to convince me to do this, since according to His Majesty, Aretino is obsessed with becoming a Cardinal by all accounts. And for this he sought the favor of His Majesty who sent him a scoffing reply that since many say that his majesty still aspires to the Pontificate, that he wishes to make a pact with Aretino, who, if he were Cardinal, would cast his vote for His Majesty to be Pope. In turn, His Majesty, who Aretino promised would be pope, would make him Cardinal. Here is the big secret, which is still contained in my letters which could be sent to you,” (“Al Aretino scrivo et a voi mando le lettere, et poteva levarmi di questo travaglio Tiziano, poi che di bocca di S. M.tà haverà intesa la resposta che è sopra uno humore che si è attacato al Capo l’Aretino di voler esser Cardinale in tutti i conti. Et per questo ricercava il favore di S. M.tà la quale metendolo a burla rispose che perché molti dicono che essa lei anchor aspira al Pontificato che vol far un patto con l’Aretino, che se sarà egli Cardinale dia il suo voto a S. M.tà per esser Papa et all’incontro S. M.tà li prometterà di esser papa lei crearlo lui Cardinale. Eccovi qui il gran secreto, il che si contiene anchora nele mie lettere le quale potrete mandar a posta vostra”); the text is in Giulia Grata, Des lettres pour gouverner. Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle et l’Italie de Charles-Quint dans les Manuscrits Trumbull de Besançon (Besançon, 2014), 192, lett. lxxxviii, 26 November 1551. A double reply may be found in a letter from Titian to Aretino (lsa ii, 154, 11 November, 1550) and in Doni’s Vita: Anton Francesco Doni, Contra Aretinum (Teremoto, Vita, Oratione funerale. Con un’appendice di lettere), ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana, 1998), 66–67. This work has been published by Jean de Tournes.

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toward becoming a cardinal, his activism was also of interest to those who followed the developments from a political or religious perspective. As often happens when Aretino is concerned—beginning with his own word, and the special status accorded to it—the various plans intertwine and it can be difficult to isolate the meanings and purposes of the different positions he takes. In any case in Paris in 1551, things must have reached a breaking point; it was enough for a person like Périon, whether of his own accord or at others’ behest, who felt it necessary to speak out against an eventuality he perceived as threatening. Of course, throughout this period one cannot speak about Aretino in France without evoking the name of another prior, Jean de Vauzelles, the prior of Montrottier, who had been Aretino’s translator and who was his admirer, enthusiastic to the point of fanaticism. He was not just any reader, if for no other reason than the fact that the prior was almoner to the queen of Navarre. It was precisely Vauzelles who had prompted the printing of the Ternali in Lyon, that he prefaced with a letter to Aretino himself. The facts, in short, reveal a parallel and almost simultaneous contest between two editorial initiatives, which were antithetical in both their sources and their goals. Vauzelles and Périon were likewise antithetical in their relationships to Aretino’s word. What for Vauzelles had become if not exactly a reason for living, then certainly the moment of greatest commitment in his literary activity,68 was for Périon on the contrary destined to remain entirely episodic.69 It is impossible to avoid thinking of a confrontation along political lines, because while one writer used the Oratio to address the king and advocated for the protection of the nation and of all of Christendom, the other presented the Ternali in honor of the queen—an Italian queen, at that—and took up the cause of an Italian writer believed to be able to glorify the queen herself as well as the kingdom. Considering the situation in these terms, it is easy to understand how Périon’s positions to ward off looming danger had to be radical, either with an eye to the Roman scene and to fight Aretino’s attempt at becoming cardinal, or limited to the possibility of success at a local court. It was not about advancing specific objections based on merit or of discussing this or that detail; on

68

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On this argument see Pietro Aretino, Trois livres de l’ humanité de Jésus-Christ, Extrait de la traduction de Jean de Vauzelles (1539), ed. Elsa Kammerer, intr. Marie-Madeleine Fontaine (Paris, 2004), and the contributions by Bruna Conconi, Élise Boillet in Philiep BossierHarald Hendrix-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Dynamic Translations in the European Renaissance (Manziana, 2011), 101–167, 169–206, 223–248. The relevant bibliography never seems to register this evidence (neither the Oratio nor the reference to Aretino in the reference mentioned above, at note 62).

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the contrary, since “non unum omnino scelus in isto; sed omnia maleficia et flagitia” (“in this one there is not just one evil, but all shames and all mischiefs”) he needed to propose the total annulment of a person presented as an enemy to all of Christianity.70 A vile man, who in his word and in his life embodied the subversion of morality, who was a champion of bestiality,71 a sodomite, a corrupter of women and young men, and who threatened the institution of the family that is the foundation of every state. The conclusion is almost de rigueur, and destined to a lasting success both in the present (as seen already in Doni) and in the future: Aretino is the Antichrist. In the face of such danger, the king’s first task had to be to protect the moral integrity of the kingdom. This is why, according to Périon, the king should be compelled to act as an example for the other lords. Naturally therefore in the words of the learned orator, there was no room for anecdotal vignettes, or for rumors or inventions that Pseudo-Berni had employed: the question was not one of establishing a biography, but of engaging in an indictment. Like a father of the Church confronting the heresy of the day, what is useful to Périon is to constantly reference scriptures that exemplify and condemn the sinful behaviors of which Aretino’s works were a concrete manifestation. And thus, he confronts even the title— the “capricium”—with short but exhaustive moral treatises, replete with references to authorities. And this is all made even more resonant and dramatic by Ciceronian vocabulary and syntax.

6

“Il Doni dell’Aretino”

The 1550s began with the greatest expectations for Aretino. The election of Julius iii heralded a glorious reentry into Rome for Aretino; the cardinal hat now seemed to be a sure thing, and not only from Aretino’s point of view. But in France, as we have just seen, his name was a reason for division and to support it or to contest it, one had to call upon the king or queen; in Spain things were more nuanced,72 but, even so, the emperor had not hesitated to distance himself and his previous statements and had dismissed as a joke that which only a short time before had seemed to be a serious commitment. In Italy the

70 71

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Ad Henricum Galliæ regem, fol. A8r. “Petrus Aretinus, aut Arietinus potius” (Ad Henricum Galliæ regem, fol. B4v); otherwise, and not by chance, his capriccio “a caprorum lascivia et libidine inscripsit” (Ad Henricum Galliæ regem, fol. C6r). See above, note 66.

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situation must have remained largely safe until 1553, when in late spring of that year the writer welcomed the invitation from Duke Guidubaldo della Rovere to join him in Urbino to meet with his following from Rome, where he was going to receive the military baton and be made a general. For the writer however the assessment of those years was disappointing: no appointment and only a knighthood of St Peter, which amounts to little more than a big ceremonial hug and kiss. What followed was a situation that seemed to be a stalemate, but in fact was a progressive disenchantment. Things changed completely in 1554, when Julius iii died in March, and after the brief term of Marcellus ii, Pope Paul iv was elected, Gian Pietro Carafa, an intransigent hardliner in religious matters, anti-Spanish in his politics, and always hostile to Aretino, who in turn had repeatedly ridiculed him. The support of the imperial network was also diminishing: Charles v’s increasing disinterest was accompanied by the misfortunes of powerful protectors such as the Duke of Alba in court, and Ferrante Gonzaga in Milan. It is in this scene of evident political weakness that the attacks of the final stage take place. The hardest, for its violence that followed an abrupt volt-face, was that of Anton Francesco Doni, but the most serious in its effects was that of Girolamo Muzio, who (at least according to his own testimony) set in motion the mechanism that ended with Aretino’s name added to the Index. For more than a decade, Doni had been among the most enthusiastic admirers of Aretino, to the point of signing his name as “il Doni dell’Aretino”; he had come across Aretino in his work (probably he had been the one to edit the two books of Lettere scritte al Signor Pietro Aretino, a decisive work in the overall strategy enacted in the years 1550–1551); he had, like Aretino, been a friend of Francesco Marcolini and in fact had taken over from Aretino as author of reference in that very particular catalogue; he had celebrated Aretino’s word and example in his works, until his full elogio in the Libraria. Such proximity was destined to be radically and irreparably compromised by Aretino’s lack of support for a request for employment that Doni had made to the Duke of Urbino. All-out war broke out from the situation, which would last for years. This behavior should come as no surprise from the man who accompanied his own portrait with the couplet: “Whosoever offends the other, writes on sand, / And whosoever is offended is sculpted in marble.”73 Neither man wrote about the exact terms of the episode at the root of their mutual hatred, but there is a clue in a letter that the Florentine agent in Venice, Giovanni de’ Rossi, wrote to Ludovico Domenichi on 4 Decem-

73

“Chi altri offende su la rena scrive, / Et chi offeso vien scolpisce in marmi” Anton Francesco Doni, La terza parte de’ marmi (Venice, Marcolini: 1552), 8.

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ber 1555.74 Implicated in the play of denunciations and counter-denunciations that Doni himself had begun, which ended in the condemnation of a Florentine former priest who was also a Venetian, Doni was forced to flee to Urbino, and under the circumstances, he had asked Pietro to help him in seeking the Duke’s support. Aretino’s rejection triggered an unstoppable ire, which would be translated into a series of writings, which Doni, who “always believed in having to get results by resorting to quantity,”75 penned with the intention of annihilating his former friend. It is unknown whether all seven of the pamphlets he threatened to write (Il terremoto, La rovina, Il baleno, Il tuono, La saetta, La vita et la morte, Le essequie et la sepoltura)76 were actually produced. Two of them have survived in print (the first and last, recognizable in the Oratione funerale) and a third in manuscript (La vita).77 Excellent recent studies support the idea that the culmination of the series of pamphlets was a handful of sonnets that take up the same themes.78 The first pamphlet, Terremoto, is woven together from 29 letters, most of them sent to Aretino, and five to his protectors and financial supporters. The letters to Aretino contained lists of fierce accusations against him, while the letters to his supporters (the pope, the emperor, the dukes of Urbino and Florence, the doge of Venice) invited them to put an end once and for all to their gifts that lent legitimacy to a monster of wickedness and corruption. In the series there was also a letter from Doni, and two letters to Doni: one from Aretino and the other from the Duke of Urbino. Despite its title, the Vita is an indictment. Doni singles out his presumption of the title “divino” and other titles; these titles which, he specifies, “are bad for a simple man, for a half-devil, they are worse, and for a pure demon, they are the worst,” and which are rewarded appropriately by “many scourges” that beat

74 75

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77 78

A letter from 4 December 1555 edited in Salvatore Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato stampatore in Venezia, vol. 2 (Rome, 1895), 40–41. “Credeva sempre di dover far effetto colla quantità.” This view is shared by Adolfo Gaspary, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 2: La letteratura italiana del Rinascimento. Parte seconda (Turin, 1912), 125. The series was not new; even in Aretino’s circle, Franco had already anticipated the sequence “vita”—“saette”—“esequie” in a letter to the printer of the Priapea, and the rest Aretino had evoked in his dispute with Bernardo Tasso on epistolary writing: “the kind of clouds that after and lightning, let loose the bolt that sent Antonio Broccardo underground,” (Lettere v, 345). The sections of that program that are known at this time are edited in Doni, Contra Aretinum (see the references within the edition). Giuseppe Crimi, “Otto sonetti contro Pietro Aretino: ipotesi per la paternità,” L’Ellisse, 10/1 (2015): 113–130.

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him.79 But Doni also accuses Aretino of theft: “one of the most foolish mistakes that you make in your stupidity is when you steal a passage from this book and put it into your stories, and a different passage from another good author;”80 to the continued and excessive requests and the wastefulness that they fed; and above all to Aretino’s supreme illusion, that of becoming cardinal. All this was “proven” by a plethora of references—albeit mainly specious ones—to the Lettere. The Oratione funerale is held by a hypothetical Father Simone, “a lector in the humanities from Novale,” according to the rituals of the Accademia dei Pellegrini. It repeats the previous allegations, this time as an oration, with an emphasis on religious material, culminating in an accusation of being a “Lutheran heretic.”81 Needless to say that, as it happened for Franco, for Doni the break with Aretino also meant a break with Marcolini and with his other allies, for example with Ruscelli, who not by chance under the circumstances took it upon himself to write a biography.82

7

Towards the Index: Muzio

The voices just recalled above are the more sonorous among those raised against Pietro Aretino over the years. If in the 1520s, sexual and linguistic excesses were especially condemned—his own sexuality, and particularly the supposed sexuality of his sisters—, in the 1530s, this was accompanied by a complete de-legitimization through a thoroughly negative biography. The strategy in the 1540s is different, when Niccolò Franco goes point by point through Aretino’s letters to deny not the facts, but their interpretation. After all, there are relatively few cases in which the Rime add new elements or reference facts beyond the books of letters or to other works by Aretino. This shows that the sonnets were especially interested in reexamining Aretino’s myth. For this reason, they reconsidered the common understanding of Aretino and proposed 79 80

81 82

“Come semplice huomo vi stanno male, come misto diavolo, peggio, et pessimamente come puro demonio;” “molti flagelli,” Doni, Contra Aretinum, 59. “Una delle più sciocche smemoraggini che habbia la vostra stoltitia è quando rubate di sopra questo libro un passo et l’incrociate su le vostre leggende, e da quell’altro autor buono un altro,” Doni, Contra Aretinum, 61. “Lettore in humanità di Novale;” “Luterano heretico,” Doni, Contra Aretinum, 74. Other important details are referenced in Giorgio Masi, “Scabrose filature. Il Capitolo del fuso fra Ruscelli e Doni,” in Paolo Marini-Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Girolamo Ruscelli. Dall’Accademia alla corte alla tipografia (Manziana, 2012), vol. 2, 401–453 (425 and n. 67).

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a critical reading to those readers who had been true guardians of the name and reputation of Aretino. Both Franco and then Doni fashioned themselves as interpreters committed to revealing the ultimate meaning of the irrefutable and notorious facts. This rendered them in turn, although unaware of their own role, guardians of Aretino’s doxa (as much anti- as they had been philo-) and despite their intentions, the most reliable witnesses for us. Things change radically when a Sorbonne-trained theologian enters the fray. This demonstrates that the period of gossip and verbal violence is now past and Aretino is being fought on moral and orthodox grounds. The categories at play, which have become discriminating in the meantime, are those of piety and impiety. Doni was following along these lines, whether independently from Périon or not I could not say. Doni seems to be the leader of the whole chain of previous antiAretinian sentiment, and he passes the baton—in the form of an introductory note to a copy of the Humanity of Christ—to Girolamo Muzio, who will in turn forward the critique of Aretino’s work to Roman inquisitors. And Aretino? He responded once and for all in February 1540, when, chanting the eternal “so many enemies, so much honor,” had written to Francesco Calvo that “those who became my enemies are just a bunch of guys who testify to me of the greatness of the virtue that provokes them to insult me; thus I am indebted to them as to true benefactors.”83 But it was a bluff, merely a rhetorical response. In fact he always tried to argue (or more often to cause to argue) the accusations point by point.84 Against Berni’s words, for example, both the true Berni and pseudo-Berni of 1538, he defended the honor of his sisters, recalling the public homage made in Arezzo by Duke Alessandro to one of them.85 He also defended the good name of the mother, commissioning Vasari to make a copy of the old city fresco that depicted her as the Madonna.86 He had asked Doni in 1550 to intervene against Franco (“it is certain that I do not care about what he says about me. But it would definitely make me grieve inwardly that one of your equals would be silent about it”)87 according to the pattern that,

83

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85 86 87

“Il numero di coloro che mi si fan nimici è uno stuolo di brigate che mi testificano la grandezza de la virtù che gli provoca a perversarmi; onde gliene son tenuto come a veri benefattori,” Lettere ii, 156. In addition, in March 1537 he wrote Giambattista Castaldo that “when it concerns my reputation, I do not suffer it; since whoever lets honor be taken away, lets his life be taken as well,” Lettere i, 106. Lettere iii, 20. Lettere v, 125. “Egli è certo, che io non mi curo del ciò che parla di me. Ma ben m’increscerebbe, che un vostro pari, ne tacesse,” Lettere v, 253.

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once Doni was out of the picture, was perhaps at the basis of Vita aretiniana (Life of Aretino) by Ruscelli (1556), presumably a response to the editorial program of the Terremoto, now lost. Still, despite their seriousness, in the end the writer’s charges do not seem to have made much difference to his readers and lords, at least not at the time. They clearly made a mark, but to a lesser degree than expected, if despite the clamor of “revelations” of the various writers (Berni, Franco, and Doni), the readers’ favor did not wane and the emperor and many other princes and lords continued to favor the “divine” Aretino. Things were destined to change only after his death. It was Girolamo Muzio, however, who took anti-Aretino sentiment to its most extreme conclusions. He too was something of a convert to the antiAretino cause, with the difference that while Franco’s and Doni’s about-faces with regard to Aretino came about when he was still alive, that of Muzio is not noted before October of 1556. It is true that there is no trace of his earlier position in favor of Aretino, but his sending him a “Discorso sopra il concilio”88 will suffice in lieu of more direct evidence. Aretino however must have not considered him an adversary; among the letters included in the fourth book were two addressed to him and in the Ternali in gloria de la Reina di Francia (from 1551 and reedited in Lettere vi, published posthumously in 1557 but prepared by the author), Pietro named him in the ranks of poets invited to sing the praises of Catherine de’ Medici. They also must not have been seen as enemies in the eyes of the Duke of Urbino, since Guidubaldo in August 1547 sent Muzio himself to Piacenza to plead the cause of Aretino before the Farnese89 and since even in May–June of 1553, he wanted them both in his retinue when he went to Rome to receive the general’s baton. Despite these precedents, and perhaps because of them, Muzio, in his growing role as a public figure involved in religious disputes in the course of the 1550s, followed his denunciations of the danger of notorious reformers’ works by denouncing even more famous literati. Initially this concerned Machiavelli, then Aretino too. Was it merely by chance that these were the only Italian literati who were included in the Index of 1559 among the authors of the first class, that is, those whose opera omnia were forbidden? There are two letters that document Muzio’s campaign against Aretino. One was edited by Muzio himself in 1570 in the Lettere catholiche,90 and the other

88 89 90

In reply to Lettere iv, 36, April 1546. lsa ii, 191 and 192. Girolamo Muzio, Lettere catholiche (Venice, Valvassori: 1571), 230–232, dated “Di Pesaro, a iii. di Maggio, Del lviii.”

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remained unpublished, though the author had intended to publish it.91 One can deduce from the first letter that Doni had been the first to light the fuse. Once Aretino had died, Doni submitted the Umanità di Cristo to Muzio, asking his opinion on matters of orthodoxy. The answer was a denunciation that Muzio submitted to the cardinal of Trani, of the college of the Inquisition, and who according to Muzio himself would have been behind the officially sanctioned condemnation of 1559: “I have already borne witness to [Aretino’s] divinity; I sent his Umanità di Cristo to Rome, and showed his heresies (as also appear in my letter to the most religious Cardinal of Trani in the third book of the Catholiche). All his writings were damned by the Holy Inquisition.”92 But this did not erase the memory of his previously positive attitude toward Aretino. The attack was accompanied by a defense. In the second letter concerning Aretino, written by Pesaro to Antonio Cheluzzi on an unspecified date (assuming the letter was actually delivered, and was not simply composed ad hoc in the early 1570s in light of the final publication of the book of letters), but which must have been created after Aretino’s death, Muzio was careful to cut off all the threads that tied him to Aretino, both those connected to the period in Venice and Urbino as well as those that Aretino had given to the press. Whether or not what Muzio said is true with regard to the role he played, it is clear that the Index should be regarded as the pinnacle of a series of initiatives aimed at denouncing the presumed deviations of the writer in matters of religion. Without this pronouncement, which legitimated all that was written against Aretino in the preceding decades and set itself as true and proper keystone of the new building, many works accumulated throughout the years would remain unrelated, anchored on one or another of occasional polemics. After “Petri Aretini opera omnia,” every article of accusation was not only destined to have its every hypothesis confirmed, but, having acquired the status of 91

92

The letter is in the ms. Riccardiano 2115 (621–622) with the argument “Muzio responds with this letter to a friend who had written to him that Pietro Aretino had spoken ill of him, and shows that he esteemed neither his praises, nor his condemnations,” (“Risponde il Muzio con questa lettera all’amico che gli aveva scritto che Pietro Aretino avea detto mal di lui, e mostra che non faceva stima né di sue lodi, né di sui biasimi”) and is now published in a modern edition: Lettere di, a, su Pietro Aretino nel Fondo Bongi dell’Archivio di Stato di Lucca, ed. Paul Larivaille (Paris-Nanterre, 1980), 125–126, and by Luciana Borsetto, “Lettere inedite di Girolamo Muzio tratte dal codice Riccardiano 2115,” Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 94/1–2 (1990): 99–178. “Alla sua divinità rendei io già testimonianza; che avendo mandata la sua Umanità di Cristo a Roma, e mostrate delle sue eresie (come apparisce in una lettera mia nel terzo delle Catoliche già al religiosissimo Cardinal di Trani), dalla Santa Inquisizione dannate furono tutte le sue scritture,” Girolamo Muzio, Battaglie per difesa dell’italica lingua, ed. Rossana Sodano (Turin, 1994), 97.

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proof, became legible (had to be read!) as a prefiguration of the final verdict, with all that this involved in terms of reliability of testimony, “objectivity” and certainty of the judgment. It likewise produced the decisive side effect of discouraging direct confrontation with Aretino’s writings, which had long been burdened with the prejudice that Aretino was a malicious blackmailer and a pornographer; this prejudice was further nourished by the writings examined here. No doubt that without this crescendo of critique, the negative myth of Aretino would have had trouble eliminating completely the positive one and surviving as the dominant memory of Aretino past the limits of his era. Without this crescendo, neither the seventeenth century nor even the eighteenth century would have seen in this once “Divino” the towering symbol of evil that until relatively recent times the writer would continue to be, not only for Catholic Europe, but for Europe in general.

part 7 Afterlife

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chapter 19

Aretino’s Troubled Afterlife Harald Hendrix

Aretino’s death in 1556 coincided with a major shift in artistic, ethical and political attitudes governing early modern Italian culture. The experimental and highly creative drive based on the fundamental claim to freedom—in the arts like in religion and politics—that had inspired his generation came to a sudden end, replaced by a culture in which order, control and obedience were of paramount importance. While this shift had been in the offing for some time, from the mid-1540s onwards, it was able to impose itself only at the end of the next decade, but with great force and long-lasting effects. In this violent clash of cultures Pietro Aretino became a key figure of undisputed symbolic importance, recognised by partisans of both sides for whom he was a villain or a hero.1 For many he represented even a combination of evil and excellence, as his legacy was seen with both disgust and admiration. Yet, its impact is undisputed, since both detractors and admirers were well aware of the far-reaching implications of his example, rejecting it, contemplating it with curiosity, or using it as inspiration for their own projects. Only when, in the mid nineteenth century, scholarly historiography on early modern Italy developed, Aretino’s highly controversial and contested reputation changed. Starting from Burckhardt’s still somewhat ambiguous celebration of him as one of the finest specimens of a ‘Renaissance man’ wholly dedicated to developing his individuality and enjoying life,2 Aretino slowly became recognised for what he is: a profoundly innovative and courageous spirit who both as an artist and as a public intellectual imposed himself in a still predominantly closed context, providing fundamentally new ideas and examples to his generation and far beyond. Modern scholarship on Aretino has been developing this assessment into what now is a rich field of research recognised as central to Renaissance Studies, since it dwells on fundamental issues of innovation and resistance. Yet this dynamic not only characterize Aretino’s work itself, but also its reception in the three centuries between his death in 1556 and 1 Cfr. Edward Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 2 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860], transl. S.G.C. Middlemore [1878] (Kitchener, 2001), 130–134.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004465190_021

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his modern re-appreciation. Thus, the goal of this closing chapter is to illustrate the dynamics of Aretino’s troubled afterlife, discussing it as an emblematic element in the advent of modernity. In the changing climate of the 1550s, Aretino’s last years witnessed ambiguous reactions to his bold performance as a successful literary innovator and a widely appreciated self-made public intellectual. Still a universally recognised authority, his failure to follow Pietro Bembo’s career track by obtaining a cardinalate was as big a setback as the escalating conflicts with some of his pupils, particularly Anton Francesco Doni. While this resistance from two quite opposite sides signals that Aretino’s project had reached its limits and indeed had generated its own enemies—in the world of power as well as in the arts—, it also opened up a new and long season where appreciation and detraction coexisted, sometimes coinciding and even generating one another. This is what the situation in the late sixteenth century suggests, when considered not only from an Italian but from an international perspective. The starting point here is what seems an almost concerted policy of ‘damnatio memoriae’ engendered and systematically applied by these two opposite stakeholders, perhaps ‘bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble’. While the ecclesiastical authorities used the newly developed tool of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum not only to condemn Aretino’s works but to make sure all extant copies were destroyed,3 some of his former pupils and other aspiring authors eager to make a swift career like Aretino’s initiated a slander campaign, starting with a funerary allocution full of violent defamation rhetoric and inventing a rich series of highly critical mock epitaphs.4 While these combined efforts resulted in strong public condemnation of a figure that only a few years before had enjoyed wide recognition and appreciation, they equally engendered curiosity for what they unintentionally turned into a counter-figure, particularly on the part of those interested in critical approaches to authorities—ecclesiastical and political—and to artistic conventions.

3 On the immediate and long-lasting effect of this prohibition, see Amedeo Quondam, “Aretino e il libro. Un repertorio, per una bibliografia,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 197–230, part. 202– 203. 4 Anton Francesco Doni, Contra Aretinum (Terremoto, Vita, Oratione funerale), ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana, 1998). On the epitaphs, cfr. also Harald Hendrix, “La funzione della morte leggendaria nella mitografia di Pietro Aretino,” in Cinquecentenario, vol. 1, 453–469. Other attacks on Aretino are illustrated in Giuseppe Crimi, “Otto sonetti contro Pietro Aretino: ipotesi per la paternità,” L’Ellisse. Studi storici di letteratura italiana, 10/1 (2015): 113–130.

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This is the Aretino interpreted as the quintessential critical author that we find as a more or less fictional protagonist in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century debates concerned with intellectual freedom, “one of the wittiest knaves that God ever made” as Thomas Nashe has it in his The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), having advocated in his Pierce Penniless (1592): “We want an Aretine here among us, that might strip these golden asses out of their gray trappings, and after he had ridden them to death with railing, leane them on the dunghill for carion.”5 Even in Italy, the ‘damnatio memoriae’ policy of Aretino’s opponents was not completely successful, since also in Italian texts from these decades we find him celebrated for his unyielding stance, like in Francesco Prati’s Avvisi di Parnaso (1619) where Aretino is equated to that other quintessential critical thinker, Niccolò Machiavelli.6 For his detractors, Aretino’s sharp tongue went far beyond what was acceptable, since it challenged all conventions and hierarchies, particularly in the domains of politics and religion.7 This made it easy to convert reservations towards his irreverent handling of princes and other people of authority into something even much larger, the accusation of atheism, grounded in one of the most wicked and therefore popular apocryphal mock epitaphs produced in the wake of his death, which reads: “Here lies Aretino, a Tuscan poet, who spoke ill of everyone but Christ, apologizing by saying: I don’t know him.”8 These accusations of atheism, while not in any way grounded in evidence, seriously undermined Aretino’s reputation, even becoming an embarrassment to subsequent generations, as is illustrated in the curious episode of his townsmen from Arezzo soliciting in 1581 a false document attesting to the fact that on his deathbed Aretino acknowledged God and received a Christian blessing before dying.9 Yet the accusation was there to stay, until today, and caused a long sequence of scholars, from Mersenne to Voetius and others, to discuss

5 On the early English reactions to Aretino, see Harald Hendrix, “The Construction of an Author: Pietro Aretino and the Elizabethans,” in Henk Dragstra-Sheila Ottway-Helen Wilcox (eds.), Betraying Our Selves. Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts (London, 2000), 31–44. 6 For Prati’s use of Aretino, cfr. Harald Hendrix, Traiano Boccalini fra erudizione e critica. Studi sulla fortuna (Florence, 1995), 249–250. On the equation Aretino-Machiavelli in England, cfr. Mario Praz, “Machiavelli e gli inglesi dell’epoca elisabettana,” in Machiavelli in Inghilterra (Florence, 1962), 97–152. 7 As such an ambiguous and controversial figure, Aretino is included among the protagonists in Gabriel Gilbert’s Le Courtisan parfait (Grenoble, Iean Nicolas: 1688). 8 For a discussion of a slightly different version of this epitaph, see the Introduction to this volume. 9 Hendrix, “La funzione della morte leggendaria,” 462–465.

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Aretino as the stereotypical atheist attributing to him even the authorship of the most scandalous manifesto of atheism, the anonymous pamphlet De Tribus Impostoribus.10 The particular mix of evidence-based criticism and wild speculations on his alleged atheism is clearly one of the side effects produced by the ‘damnatio memoriae’ policy of Aretino’s opponents, since it entailed the destruction of the extant work and the prohibition of new editions. In a situation where it is difficult or impossible to assess an author’s production, legends may arise, and particularly black legends like the one of Aretino being the quintessential atheist. Such effects were reinforced by the editorial response to prohibition, consisting of anonymous editions, the use of pseudonyms like the acronym Partenio Etiro, publication outside of the Index’s reach—in the original version or in translation—or in severely altered versions that no longer revealed Aretino’s authorship. As a consequence, all kinds of texts considered to be unorthodox could easily become associated with Aretino, whose name thus developed into a general marker of alternative and disputed culture. Thus, a considerable number of texts published from the sixteenth until the eighteenth century under his name, particularly outside of Italy, have no other association with the author than his reputation as a controversial thinker.11 However, Aretino’s legacy was not exclusively based on a highly contested reputation grounded in polemics. Particularly in the first century after his death, some of his works escaped coerced oblivion and became on the contrary popular and in some instances even highly influential models, without suffering from an association with the black legend of the alleged atheist. Perhaps paradoxically this was the case with his religious production, which had already gained acclaim abroad from the very moment it had appeared in the late 1530s, being almost instantly translated into French and English, by Jean de Vauzelles [Fig. 19.1] and Thomas Wyatt respectively.12 This early and favourable recep-

10

11

12

Marin Mersenne, Questiones celeberrimae in Genesim (Paris, sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy: 1623), 1830; Gisbert Voetius, “De atheismo pars quarta (1639),” in Selectarum disputationum theologicarum (Utrecht, apud Joannem à Waesberge: 1648), vol. 1, 205–206. Cfr. Wolfgang Gericke, Das Buch ‘De Tribus Impostoribus’ (Berlin, 1982). See for example, Strange & true Newes from Jack-a-Newberries Six Windmills: or the Crafty, impudent, Common-Whore (turnd Bawd) Anatomised […] by Peter Aretine cardinall of Rome (Venus [= London], Rodericus e Castro: 1660); La Bibliotheque d’Aretin contenant les pièces marquées à la table suivante (Cologne [= Low Countries], Pierre Marteau: [ca. 1680]); [Henri-Joseph Dulaurens], L’ Arretin moderne (Rome [= Amsterdam], aux dépens de la Congrégation de l’ Index: 1763). On the French translations of Aretino’s religious work, cfr. Pietro Aretino, Trois livres de l’ humanité de Jésus-Christ, Extrait de la traduction de Jean de Vauzelles (1539), ed. Elsa Kam-

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figure 19.1 Pierre Aretin, Trois livres de l’humanité de Iesu Christ, [transl. Jean de Vauzelles] ([Lyon], 1539)

tion facilitated a second wave of interest, now limited to France, in the early 1600s, and thus in a period of severe ‘damnatio memoriae’, when two of these religious works were reprinted in a total of three French editions. In these very years a remarkable interest in Aretino’s theatre also developed, following an English edition of his four comedies (in Italian) produced by John Wolfe in 1588

merer, intr. Marie-Madeleine Fontaine (Paris, 2004), and Pietro Aretino, Les trois livres de l’ humanité de Jésus-Christ traduits par Pierre de Larivey, ed. Bruna Conconi (Paris, 2009). On the French translations in general: Bruna Conconi, “1539–1618: tempi, luoghi, protagonisti della traduzione di Pietro Aretino in Francia”, in Philiep Bossier-Harald HendrixPaolo Procaccioli (eds.), Dynamic Translations in the European Renaissance (Manziana, 2011), 101–167. On early modern translations of Aretino’s work in general, see Paolo Procaccioli, “Aretino e la traduzione del moderno,” in Bossier-Hendrix-Procaccioli (eds.), Dynamic Translations, 223–248.

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figure 19.2

Quattro comedie del divino Pietro Aretino (London, 1588)

[Fig. 19.2],13 and contributing first to the emancipation of theatre in Holland, where in 1618 two versions in Dutch of his Ipocrito were produced by leading 13

On John Wolfe’s activities as an editor and printer of Italian texts, cfr. Kate De Rycker, “The Italian Job: John Wolfe, Giacomo Castelvetro and Printing Pietro Aretino,” in Richard Kirwan-Sophie Mullins (eds.), Specialist Markets in the Early Modern World (LeidenBoston, 2015), 241–257.

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litterati Bredero and Hooft,14 as well as to French theatre where somewhat later Corneille and Molière proved interested in Aretino’s Orazia and Ipocrito while conceiving their Horace (1639) and Tartuffe (1664).15 Even more far-reaching was the impact of Aretino’s literary production on the development of a stylistic and rhetorical sensibility that was to grow into what later generations would denote as Baroque. Thomas Wyatt’s interest in Aretino’s religious works16 is an early signal of a more comprehensive phenomenon that was to find its most poignant expression in the rewriting by Giambattista Marino in his immensely popular poem on the Strage degli Innocenti (ante 1625) of a notorious passage in Aretino’s Umanità di Christo (1535), a new version that in the rest of the seventeenth century proved crucial for the pictorial rendering of this scene by dozens of leading painters, including Poussin (1629) [Fig. 19.3] and Rubens (1638).17 And while the epithet ‘divine’, once coined by Ariosto to praise Aretino’s unrivalled linguistic creativity, was by most considered to be inappropriate for an author Montaigne valued as mediocre,18 his works remained part of the canon of exemplary vernacular authors, even when they were no longer available, as their inclusion in a work like Montemerlo’s Thesoro delle phrasi toscane (1566) exemplifies.19 Yet this part of Aretino’s creative legacy, unacknowledged as it remained until not very long ago, had difficulty competing with that other side dominated by the author’s association with irreverence and atheism, celebrated by some—like Marino who highlighted it favourably in the poem he dedicated

14 15

16 17 18

19

Cfr. Eddy Grootes, “Aretino’s L’Ipocrito translated and adapted to the Dutch stage by Hooft and Bredero (1618),” in Bossier-Hendrix-Procaccioli (eds.), Dynamic Translations, 207–222. Francesca Bonanni, “L’Orazia dell’Aretino e l’Horace di Corneille,” Studi romani, 30/2 (1982): 187–195; Kelver H. Hartley, “Pietro Aretino and Molière,” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 20 (1963): 309–317. See Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting (Oxford, 2012), part. 65–96. Elisabeth Cropper, “Marino’s Strage degli Innocenti, Poussin, Rubens, and Guido Reni,” Studi secenteschi, 23 (1992): 137–166. “[…] Les Italiens, qui se vantent, et avecques raison, d’avoir comunément l’esprit plus esveillé et le discours plus sain que les autres nations de leur temps, en viennent d’estrener l’ Aretin, auquel, sauf une façon de parler bouffie et bouillonnée de pointes, ingénieuses à la vérité, mais recherchées de loing et fantasques, et outre l’eloquence en fin, telle qu’elle puisse estre, je ne voy pas qu’ il y ait rien au dessus des communs autheurs de son siecle; tant s’ en faut qu’ il approche de cette divinité ancienne. Et le surnom de grand, nous lattachons à des Princes qui n’ont rien au dessus de la grandeur populaire,” Michel de Montaigne, Essais, i, 51 (Paris, 1950), 345. Giovanni Stefano Montemerlo, Delle phrasi toscane lib. xii (Venice, appresso Camillo e Francesco Franceschini: 1566).

536

figure 19.3

hendrix

Nicolas Poussin, Massacre of the Innocents, oil on canvas, 146×171cm, ca. 1626, Musée Condé, Chantilly

to Aretino—20 but seen in an overtly judgemental manner by most others. This uneven balance between admiration and condemnation was further complicated by an element that would govern most part of Aretino’s afterlife in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: his association with pornography. Based only on a small part of his work, his Dialogues and the sonnets written to accompany the notorious series of images on intercourse postures produced around 1525 by Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi,21 Aretino’s reputation as a pornographer turned out to be not only strong and enduring, but also 20 21

Giambattista Marino, “Pietro Aretino,” in La Galleria distinta in due parti (Milan, Gio. Battista Bidelli: 1620), 227. On the complex origins and afterlife of these sonnets, see Danilo Romei’s reconstruction in Pietro Aretino, Sonetti lussuriosi, ed. Danilo Romei (s.l. [Raleigh], 2013), 3–23.

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profoundly ambiguous. While during the author’s lifetime the Dialogues did not yet have a controversial flavour, as their early and unproblematic translation in Spanish (1547 and 1548) suggests,22 in the late sixteenth century they became a much sought after yet clandestine text, as may be gathered from their steady publication history in most European languages, including besides English and French also Latin, Dutch and German versions or adaptations, in a period of some eighty years, from 1580 till 1660.23 From references connected to these texts we may conclude that by the end of the sixteenth century they were not anymore read as amusing narratives, as had been the case in mid-Cinquecento Italy (as Bandello recorded),24 but consumed as what later generations would call pornography, notoriously exposed by Ben Jonson in his Volpone (1606): “[…] some young French-man, or hot Tuscane bloud, / That had read Aretine, conn’d all his printes, / Knew every quirke within lusts laborinth, / And were profest critique, in lechery.”25 Aretino’s very name was quickly turned into a brand, associating the author with the notorious postures illustrated by Raimondi which, though the originals were almost immediately and completely destroyed, enjoyed a clandestine yet massive popularity through several remakes produced to satisfy the curiosity of a large and clearly eager audience.26 And Aretyne a book of bawdery writ With many pictures which belonged to it Where many several wayes he teacheth howe One may performe that acte, with shame enough

22 23 24

25

26

Cfr. Pietro Aretino, Coloquio de las damas / Dialogo, transl. Fernán Xuárez, ed. Donatella Gagliardi (Rome, 2011), part. xi–xlvi. For a short overview, see Procaccioli, “Aretino e la traduzione del moderno,” 231–232. “Zanina che era scaltrita e più maliziosa d’una volpe, per meglio confettar il marito che era un augellaccio e nuovo squasimodeo, e talora se un’oncia di male sentiva, fingeva averne più di cento libre, e se ne stava tutto ’l dì in camera con il Petrarca, le Centonovelle o il Furioso, che di nuovo era uscito fuori, ne le mani, o leggeva la Nanna o sia Raffaella de l’Aretino, di maniera che bene spesso ser Gandino, a ciò che la moglie troppo leggendo non s’affaticasse, faceva egli il lettore, e con quella sua goffa pronunzia bergamasca le leggeva tutto ciò che ella comandava,” Matteo Bandello, La prima [-terza] parte de le novelle (Lucca, per il Busdrago: 1554), i, 34. More in Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography. Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), part. Part 2, “The Aretine and the Italianate,” 111–221. Cfr. also Saad El-Gabalawy, “Aretino’s Pornography and Renaissance Satire,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 30/2 (1976): 87–99. Cfr. I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures: An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance, edited, translated from the Italian and with a commentary by Lynne Lawner (Evanston, IL, 1989).

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That it is true the stationers can tell I’ve seene the pictures publiquely to sell.27 The identification of Aretino with this highly controversial genre of pornography once again caused his name to be used as marker for all kinds of publications in this field imitating his model, like in La bibliotheque d’Aretin (1680) containing an anthology of such texts, or much later, the notoriously pornographic L’Aretin françois (1782) containing on its opening page a provocatively explicit image of a vulva surrounded by ten ejaculating erect penises [Fig. 19.4].28 Yet it also reinforced his reputation as an unorthodox and critical spirit dedicated to challenging conventions and promoting intellectual and artistic freedom. As such, at the end of the seventeenth century Aretino comes to represent two sides of the newly developing phenomenon of the ‘libertine’. On the one hand, a man who provocatively challenges conventional morality openly celebrating an unrestrained sexuality lived and enjoyed without compunction, and on the other a free spirit cherished and loathed as a profoundly critical public intellectual who does not respect authority, doubting even the most fundamental values in politics and religion. In this guise of what might be defined a proto-libertine, Aretino figures as protagonist in one of Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683) where he teaches the first Roman emperor Augustus to distrust praise and appreciate instead criticism.29 And as such he also figures in what was to become one of the founding texts of eighteenth-century Enlightenment culture, Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), that dedicates an elaborate discussion to his work and legacy.30 Though following on some earlier yet less influential biographers,31 Bayle is the first to offer a balanced and well-informed profile of 27 28

29 30 31

J[ohn] M[arston], A Study of the Newe Metamorphosis (Gent, 1600), ed. John Henry Hobart Lyon (New York, 1919), 211. La bibliotheque d’Aretin, contenant les pièces marquées à la table suivante (Cologne [= Holland], Pierre Marteau: [ca. 1680]); [François-Felix Nogaret], L’Aretin françois, par un membre de l’ Académie des dames (Larnaka [= Bruxelles?], [1792]). On this particular side of Aretino’s reception in France, see Carolin Fischer, Education érotique. Pietro Aretinos ‘Ragionamenti’ im libertinen Roman Frankreichs (Stuttgart, 1994). [Bernard de Fontenelle], Nouveaux dialogues des morts (Paris, Chez C. Blageart-G. Quinet: 1683), 75–93: “Dialogue i [de morts anciens avec des modernes]. Auguste. Pierre Aretin.” Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, Reinier Leers: 1697), i, 342–346. A first biographical profile of Aretino’s was included in Girolamo Ghilini, Teatro d’huomini letterati (Venice, Guerigli: 1647), i, 191–192. Other such profiles in, for example, Lorenzo Crasso, Elogii d’huomini letterati (Venice, Combi & La Noù: 1666), i, 35–40, and Louis Moreri, Le grand dictionnaire historique (Lyon, Iean Girin, & Barthelemy Riviere: 1683 [first edition 1673]), i, 613.

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figure 19.4 [Francois-Felix Nogaret], L’Aretin françois, par un membre de l’Académie des dames, Larnaka [= Bruxelles?], [1792], title page, with the accompanying lines: “A tous les vits le con donne des loix, / Des voluptés c’est la source féconde. / Vits, couronnez le con, ce roi des rois, / Et que le foutre à chaque instant l’inonde.” courtesy of bibliothèque nationale paris

Aretino, an author appreciated precisely because of his claim to freedom, in the arts as well as in society. Bayle’s authoritative assessment would prove to be essential in redefining Aretino’s reputation in eighteenth-century Europe, balancing the controversial and often opposite judgments of his erotic production and slander with an appreciation of the innovative and liberating force of his disrespect of conventions and authorities. This is the Aretino we find in the first elaborate and well-researched scholarly biography published by Gianmaria Mazzuchelli in 1741,32 as well as in the profiles provided by many others following his lead. 32

Giammaria Mazzuchelli, La vita di Pietro Aretino (Padua, Comino: 1741); a reduced version of the text in French was published a few years later in the Netherlands: M. De Boispreaux, La vie de Pierre Aretin (La Haye, Jean Neaulme: 1750).

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In the multi-faceted understanding of Aretino’s legacy promoted by erudite scholars like Bayle and Mazzuchelli his claim to freedom became the crucial element, satisfying both a constant and ever-growing interest in a libertarian moralism as well as a more politically inspired desire for intellectual and artistic independence. While this always slightly ambiguous reaction to his person and work inspired a slowly but constantly augmenting presence in the historiographical literature produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,33 it also inspired playwrights, novelists and painters to adopt Aretino as protagonist of some of their works. As we may gather from the 1838 ‘drame en trois actes’ Pierre d’Arezzo produced for the Parisian ‘Théâtre de l’ AmbiguComique’ by Philippe Dumanoir and Adolphe Dennery [Fig. 19.5],34 it was precisely his controversial reputation and unconventional biography that made Aretino into what romantic culture would consider to be a picturesque figure.35 Yet paramount in this curiosity was admiration for Aretino’s autonomy, as the choice of biographical scenes illustrated by some of the leading painters in the historicist school of ‘peinture troubadour’, from Ingres to Feuerbach, elucidates.36 Foregrounding the author’s proudly manifested independence vis-àvis those in power, as in Ingres’s L’Arétin et l’envoyé de Charles Quint (1815/1848) [Fig. 19.6], or his all-pervasive laughter, as in Feuerbach’s monumental Der Tod des Pietro Aretino (1854) [Fig. 19.7], these artists bear testimony to what Aretino had become to the nineteenth-century historicist culture that would culminate in Burckhardt’s 1860 magisterial portrait: a thoroughly provocative intellectual and artist dedicated to irrespectively challenging conventions in all domains, from religion to politics and aesthetics. Truly a man in whom the innovative and experimental drive of Renaissance culture found one of its most poignant and thus fundamentally unsettling expressions.

33

34 35

36

Some examples: Apostolo Zeno / Giusto Fontanini, Biblioteca dell’eloquenza italiana (Venice, Pasquali: 1753), i, 195–219; Carl Friedrich Flögel, Geschichte der komischen Literatur (Liegniz-Leipzig, Siegert: 1785), ii, 144–145; Pierre-Louis Ginguené, Histoire littéraire d’ Italie (Paris, 1813), vi, 241–273; Giambattista Corniani, I secoli della letteratura italiana (Turin, 1854 [first edition 1813]), ii, 301–306; Philarète Chasles, “L’Arétin, sa vie et ses œuvres”, Revue des deux mondes, 4 (1834): 187–228, 292–312, 751–768. Philippe Dumanoir [= Pinel], Adolphe Dennery [= Philippe], Pierre d’Arezzo (Arétin), drame en trois actes ([Paris], 1838). Such ‘picturesque’ interest in Aretino may be gathered from the frequent references included in Valéry [Antoine-Claude Pasquin], Voyages historiques et littéraires en Italie pendant les années 1826, 1827, 1828; ou L’ indicateur italien (Paris, 1831–1835). See Harald Hendrix, “Aneddoti veri e/o verosimili nella pittura storicizzante del primo Ottocento: Aretino fra Tiziano, Tintoretto e Tasso,” Fontes. Rivista di filologia iconografia e storia della critica d'arte, ns 1 (2020): 87–113.

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figure 19.5 The actor Léon Lemadre as Pietro Aretino in the play Pierre d’Arezzo by Dumanoir and Dennery (Paris, 1838) courtesy of bibliothèque nationale paris

542

figure 19.6

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Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, L’ Arétin et l’envoyé de Charles Quint, oil on canvas, 41,5 × 32,5 cm, 1848, Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon, inv. 2013.1.1

aretino’s troubled afterlife

figure 19.7

Anselm Feuerbach, Der Tod des Pietro Aretino, oil on canvas, 267.5 × 176.5 cm, signed and dated 1854, Kunstmuseum Basel, deposit of the Gottfried Keller Foundation 1895, inv. 209

543

Bibliography 1

Primary Works by Pietro Aretino

In this section are listed only the editions of Aretino’s works other than those appeared in the ‘Edizione Nazionale’; for those editions, please refer to the List of Abbreviations. Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia, fatto in Roma sotto una ficaia, composto del divino Aretino per suo capricio a correttione de i tre stati delle donne (Paris?, 1534). Dialogo di M. Pietro Aretino, nel quale la Nanna il primo giorno insegna a la Pippa sua figliola a esser puttana, nel secondo gli conta i tradimenti che fanno gli huomini a le meschine che gli credano, nel terzo et ultimo la Nanna et la Pippa sedendo nel orto ascoltano la comare et la balia che ragionano de la ruffiania (Turin?, 1536). Stanze in lode di madonna Angela Sirena (Venice, Marcolini: 1537) La prima [-seconda] parte dei Ragionamenti (Bengodi [i.e. London], John Wolfe: 1584). “Dialoghi doi di Ginevra e Rosana, comp. da Messer Pietro Aretino detto il Divino. Stamp. in Bengodi, l’anno 1584. in-8°,” probably a lost edition mentioned in Guillaume François Debure, Bibliographie instructive ou Traité de la connoissance des livres rares et singuliers, 7 vols. (Paris, chez De Bure: 1763–1768), vol. 2, 216 (n. 3960). Quattro Commedie ([London, John Wolfe]: 1588). La terza, e ultima parte de’ Ragionamenti ([London], Gio. Andrea del Melagrano [i.e. John Wolfe]: 1589). Lettere di M. Pietro Aretino, 6 vols. (Paris, Matteo il Maestro: 1608–1609). Pasquinate di Pietro Aretino ed anonime per il conclave di Adriano vi, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Palermo, 1891). Dichtungen und Gespräche des Göttlichen Aretino (s.l., 1904). L’oeuvre du divin Arétin. Les Ragionamenti. La vie des nonnes, la vie des femmes mariees, la vie des courtisanes; Sonnets luxurieux, ed. Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris, 1909). Poesie, ed. Gaetano Sborselli, 2 vols. (Lanciano, 1930–1934). Lettere sull’arte, with a commentary by Fidenzio Pertile-Carlo Cordié, ed. Ettore Camesasca, 4 vols. (Milan, 1957–1960). The Letters of Pietro Aretino, trans. Thomas Caldecot Chubb (Hamden, CT, 1967). Tutte le commedie, ed. Giovanni Battista De Sanctis (Milan, 1968). Liebenszweifel andere Liebeszweifel und lustvolle Sonette (Hamburg, 1968). Sei giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1969). La Cortigiana, ed. Giuliano Innamorati (Turin, 1970). Aretino’s Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Toronto, 1971) [reprinted as: Pietro Aretino, Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, preface by Alberto Moravia, introduction by Margaret F. Rosenthal, Toronto, 2005.] See also the edition: Aretino’s

546

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Dialogues, preface and trans. By Raymond Rosenthal, epilogue by Margaret F. Rosenthal (New York, 1995). Tutto il teatro, a cura di Antonio Pinchera, con una nota di Nicola Ciarletta (Rome, 1974). Selected Letters [of ] Aretino, ed. George Bull (Harmondsworth UK, 1976). Opere di Pietro Aretino e di Anton Francesco Doni, ed. Carlo Cordié (Milan-Naples, 1976). Le vite dei santi: Santa Caterina vergine, San Tommaso d’Aquino, 1540–1543, ed. Flavia Santin (Rome, 1978). Scritti di Pietro Aretino nel Codice Marciano It. xi 66 (= 6730), ed. Danilo Romei (Florence, 1988). Der Zoppino (München, 1988). Cortigiana • Opera nova • Pronostico • Il Testamento dell’Elefante • Farza, ed. Angelo Romano, intr. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Milan, 1989). Lettere di, a, su Pietro Aretino nel Fondo Bongi dell’Archivio di Stato di Lucca, ed. Paul Larivaille (Paris-Nanterre, 19892). I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures: An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance, edited, translated from the Italian and with a commentary by Lynne Lawner (Evanston, IL, 1989). Sonetos lujuriosos & pasquines del Aretino. Seguidos de otros sonetos lujuriosos, dudas amorosas y otras dudas amorosas de autores anónimos de tradición aretinesca y de un soneto de Giorgio Baffo (Montevideo, 1991). L’Orazia, edizione critica a cura di Michael Lettieri, con un saggio sulla storia della critica e una nota bibliografica di Rocco Mario Morano (Rovito, 1991). Talanta, in Three Renaissance Comedies, trans. by Christopher Cairns (Lewiston, NY, 1991), 218–350. Lettere: Libro primo, ed. Francesco Erspamer (Milan-Parma, 1995). Cortigiana, trans. by J. Douglas Campbell and Leonard S. Sbrocchi (Ottawa, 2003). Il marescalco (The Master of the Horse), in Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance, ed. and trans. by Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore, MD-London, 2003), 117–204. Trois livres de l’humanité de Jésus-Christ. Extrait de la traduction de Jean de Vauzelles (1539), ed. Elsa Kammerer, intr. Marie-Madeleine Fontaine (Paris, 2004). Les trois livres de l’humanité de Jésus-Christ traduits par Pierre de Larivey, ed. Bruna Conconi (Paris, 2009). Casos de amor, ilustraciones de Perico Pastor, traducción de José Antonio Bravo, prefacios de José Antonio Bravo y Mirko Visentin (Salamanca, 2010). Suárez, Fernando-Pietro Aretino, Coloquio de las damas / Dialogo, ed. Donatella Gagliardi (Rome, 2011). Sonetti lussuriosi, ed. Danilo Romei (s.l. [Raleigh], 2013). Teatro comico. Cortigiana (1525 e 1534). Il marescalco, ed. Luca d’Onghia, intr. Maria Cristina Cabani (Milan-Parma, 2014).

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2

Primary Works by Other Authors

Alberto da Castello, Rosario della Gloriosa Vergine Maria (Venice, Melchiorre Sessa e Pietro Ravani: 1522). Alberto da Castello, Rosario della Gloriosa Vergine Maria (Venice, Giovanni Varisco: 1566). Albicante, Giovanni Alberto, Occasioni aretiniane (Vita di Pietro Aretino del Berna, Abbattimento, Nuova contentione), ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana, 1999). Alfabeto amoroso con alcune partenze, capitoli, villanelle et canzoni amorose […] (Verona, B. Merlo: 1630). Alighieri, Dante, Comedia di Danthe Aligheri (Venice, Luc’Antonio Giunti: 1529). Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, vol. 1: Inferno (Princeton, 1970). Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York, 1995). Ammirato, Scipione, Opuscoli (Florence, Amadore Massi e Lorenzo Landi: 1637). Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd and revised edition (New York, 1947–1948). Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando furioso, ed. Emilio Bigi (Milan, 1982). Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando furioso, trans. and ed. Barbara Reynolds (London and New York, 1977). Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei (Venice, Boneto Locatelli for Ottaviano Scoto: 1489). Augustine of Hippo, Opera omnia, vol. 5/1 (Paris, 1865 = Jean-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologia latina, vol. 38). Augustine of Hippo, “David and Goliath and Contempt of the World,” in Sermons, vol. 2: On the Old Testament, Sermon 32, trans. Edmund Hill, o.p. (Hyde Park-New York, 2009). Baffo, Giorgio, Raccolta universale delle opere, ed. Elio Bartolini (Milan, 1971). Bandarini, Marco, Stanze del Poeta in lode delle più famose cortegiane di Venegia (no typographical notes, known copy: London, British Library, Shelfmark C.62.a.12). There is also a nineteenth-century edition (Venice, 1835). Bandello, Matteo, La prima [-terza] parte de le novelle (Lucca, per il Busdrago: 1554). Barth, Kaspar von, Pornodidascalus, seu colloquium muliebre (Frankfurt, Wechel: 1623). Battiferra, Laura, I sette salmi penitentiali del santissimo profeta Davit (Florence, Heredi di Bernardo Giunti: 1564). Bayle, Pierre, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, Reinier Leers: 1697).

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Index of Names Accolti, Benedetto 358, 513 Accolti, Bernardo (Unico Aretino) 77, 196, 471 Acquaviva, Giovanni Antonio (duke of Atri) 442, 444 Adria, daughter of Pietro Aretino 25, 56, 458 Adrian vi (Adrian Florenszoon) 28, 78–81, 98, 194, 240, 271, 467 Affaitati, Giovan Carlo 487 Agnello, Benedetto 471 Agnello, Giovanni 106–107 Agnese, Giovanni 513 Alberto da Castello 415 Albicante, Giovanni Alberto 196, 272, 497– 498, 500–504, 516 Albizi, Francesco degli 226 Albizzi, Antonio degli 461 Albumasar 84 Aleandro, Girolamo 513 Alessi, Benedetto (ser Vecchia) 492 Alexander the Great 137, 144, 159 Alexandre de Villadieu 191 Alighieri, Dante 30, 199, 218, 308, 312, 347, 454, 459, 471 Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando (duke of Alba) 520 Amalteo, Giovanni Battista 171 Ambrose, saint 353 Ameria (Amelia), Jacopo di Nino d’ 80 Andrea, Alessandro d’ 31 Andrea da Barberino 230 Andrea Veneziano (Maestro Andrea / Mastro Andrea) 78, 96, 102, 241–242, 272, 282 Andrews, Richard 240 Angoulême, Marguerite de (queen of Navarre) 313, 351, 482, 518 Anselmi, Antonio 493 Apelles 137, 141–142, 159 Apollinaire, Guillaume 271, 277, 283, 288 Apuleius 424–425 Aquilano, Serafino 193, 198, 465 Aquilecchia, Giovanni 199, 304, 307, 468 Aragona, Maria d’ 8, 341, 350–351, 356, 360, 475, 482 Arelio, Bernardino 279

Ariani, Marco 266 Ariosto, Ludovico 3, 5, 10, 12, 26, 28, 30, 35, 38, 101, 197, 209–210, 213, 215, 222, 225– 226, 231, 236, 239, 244, 285, 468–469, 479, 486, 491, 495, 498 Aristotle 173, 237, 264, 425 Armellini, Francesco 81 Arrighi, Ludovico degli 469 Arrivabene, Andrea 487 Arrivabene, Leonardo 510 Augustine, saint 325, 353, 376 Austria, daughter of Pietro Aretino 56 Avalos, family 344, 352, 361 Avalos, Alfonso d’ (marquis of Vasto) 8, 84, 111, 208, 211, 280, 316, 331–332, 341, 350– 351, 353, 355–365, 381, 472–473, 475, 478, 482, 492, 501, 503–504, 515 Ávila, Luis de 483 Badoer, Federico 171 Baffo, Giorgio 292, 298 Bainbridge, Christopher 74 Ballarina, Elena 275 Bandarini, Marco 283 Bandello, Matteo 537 Baratto, Mario 257 Barbaro, Daniele 356, 483 Barbaro, Ermolao 3 Barbarossa (Khayr ad-Din, admiral of the Ottoman Empire) 36 Barbolani, Girolamo 470 Bargonio, Giovanni 186 Barth, Kaspar von 298 Bartolini, Polo 507 Bassano, Jacopo (Jacopo da Ponte) 379–380 Bauldeweyn, John 180 Bayle, Pierre 538–540 Beaziano (Bevazzano), Agostino 513 Beccadelli, Ludovico 492 Belcari, Feo 312 Bellini, Gentile 149, 151 Bellini Giovanni 139, 149, 151 Beltrami, Girolamo 80 Beltramo see Beltrami, Girolamo Bembo, Bernardo 3 Bembo, Carlo 200

index of names Bembo, Giovan Matteo 6 Bembo, Pietro 1, 3, 6–7, 20–22, 66–68, 193, 197, 200, 239, 354, 493, 504, 514, 530 Bencucci, Girolamo 279, 472 Benivieni, Girolamo 310–311 Berchem, Jacquet 181 Bernard, saint 353 Berneri, Antonio 493 Berneri, Giulio 493 Berni, Francesco 14, 200–211, 235, 273, 278, 470, 497–501, 504–504, 511, 516, 523– 524 Besomi, Ottavio 290 Bianchino del Leone see Cosimo Bernardo Bianco, Simone 4 Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi da 239, 247 Biffis, Mattia 146 Blosio, Maria Grazia 469 Boccaccio, Giovanni 242, 258–260, 262– 263, 283–284, 425, 448, 471 Boccalini, Traiano 516 Bocchi, Achille 513 Boiardo, Matteo Maria 197, 211–213, 215, 222, 231, 504 Boillet, Élise 8, 13 Bolani family (palace) 53, 57–58, 66–68, 111, 152, 168, 508 Bolani, Domenico 35, 53–54, 446 Bolani, Giacomo 53 Bonaventure, saint 20 Bonci, Fabiano 189–190 Bonci, Margherita (Tita) 189 Bonci, Niccolò 189–190 Bonneau, Alcide 271, 288 Bontempi, Francesco 192 Bordon (Bordone), Paris 148–149, 166–168 Borromeo, Carlo 324 Bottazzo, Giovan Iacopo 510 Brandino, Domenico 80 Braschi, family 73 Bredero, Gerbrand Adriaenszoon 535 Britt, Johann see Britto, Giovanni Britto, Giovanni (Johann Britt) 156, 479 Brocardo, Antonio 6, 504 Brolio, Ventura 297 Brucioli, Antonio 307, 321, 323, 327, 330, 401, 490 Bruno, Giordano 239 Bruscagli, Riccardo 226

587 Buonarroti, Michelangelo 3, 148, 170, 252, 325, 349, 357, 448–451 Buranello, Robert 286 Burckhardt, Jacob 9, 22, 68, 529, 540 Byron, George G. 21–22 Cabani, Maria Cristina 12 Caccia, Alessandro del 225 Cairns, Christopher 8, 238, 255, 304, 315– 316 Calabresi, Bianca 240 Calmeta, Vincenzo 465 Calvo, Francesco 504, 523 Campani, Niccolò (Strascino da Siena) 78, 400 Campiglia, Maddalena 14, 418–424, 426– 427, 429–432 Canisio, Egidio 78 Cantelmo, Giovanni 510 Caporali, Cesare 409 Caporali, Giovan Battista 192 Capponi, Alessandro Gregorio 296 Caracciolo, Marino 502 Carafa, Gian Pietro see Paul iv Carafa, Oliviero 73, 74 Caraglio, Giovanni Jacopo 24, 25 Cardinal of Trani see Scotti, Gianbernardino Cardinal of Trent see Cles, Bernardo Carinci, Eleonora 13 Cariteo (Gareth), Benedetto 193 Carpaccio, Vittore 151 Castiglione, Baldassarre 8, 10, 91, 96, 104– 105, 120, 124, 141, 172, 241, 297, 413 Catarino see Politi, Ambrogio Caterino Caterina of Austria 429 Cato 222 Cavallino, Antonio 285 Cesano, Bartolomeo 487 Charles iii the Good (duke of Savoy) 84 Charles v (emperor) 5, 41–42, 48, 50, 83, 111, 125, 137, 140, 142–143, 159, 164, 167– 169, 196, 206, 266–267, 285, 332, 353, 358, 365, 381, 435–437, 444–445, 447, 449, 452, 468, 472, 477–479, 481, 483, 485–486, 493, 502, 507, 511–513, 517, 519–520, 527 Charles viii (king of France) 2 Cheluzzi, Antonio 525

588 Cherchi, Paolo 296 Chigi, Agostino 34, 46, 77, 93, 170, 358, 466, 506 Chorier, Nicolas 298 Chrysostom John, saint 353 Chubb, Thomas Caldecot 9 Cino da Pistoia 199 Ciocchi Del Monte, Antonio Maria 74 Clement vii (Giulio de’ Medici) 5, 6, 28, 30, 46, 48, 77, 81–83, 85, 87, 93, 98, 101, 107, 194–196, 199, 206, 240, 248, 285, 354, 467–468, 470, 472, 499–500, 506 Cles (Clesio), Bernardo 86, 268, 350, 477– 478, 483 Cleugh, James 9 Coccio, Francesco 106, 108, 109, 111, 490–491 Colonna, Francesco 24 Colonna, Vittoria 280, 313, 350–351, 360, 468, 490 Colzè, Dioniso 418 Comin, family 155 Comin da Trino 487 Coppa, Jacopo 23, 495 Cordiale see Brandino, Domenico Cordié, Carlo 289 Cornaro, Marco 78 Cornazzano, Antonio 353 Corneille 535 Corso, Rinaldo 171 Cosimo Bernardo (Bianchino del Leone) 503 Cottrell, Philip 12 Cox, Virginia 411 Crimi, Giuseppe 9, 13, 105 Crivelli, Mattio 510 Croce, Benedetto 332 Dandolo family 67, 111 Daniello, Bernardino 448 Datary see Giberti, Giovanni Matteo De Gaulle, Charles 132 Del Giallo, Iacopo 489 Delicado, Francisco 288 Della Rovere, Francesco Maria i (duke of Urbino) 196, 200, 479, 483 Della Rovere, Guidubaldo ii (duke of Urbino) 42–43, 84, 197–198, 258, 267–268, 458, 483, 485, 487–488, 493, 520–521, 524 Della Stufa, Giambattista 494

index of names Delminio, Giulio Camillo 35–36, 39–40, 51, 53, 57 Del Monte, Baldovino 368, 487, 489 Del Monte, Giambattista 488 Del Monte, Innocenzo 488 Del Rio, Baldassarre 80 Dennery, Adolphe 540 De Sanctis, Francesco 303, 332 Dini, Gianfrancesco 486 Dionigi, Bartolomeo 314 Dolce, Lodovico 30, 65, 108, 164, 169, 356, 489, 491, 496 Domenichi, Ludovico 489, 491, 520 Donatus 191 Doni, Anton Francesco 7, 21, 25, 60, 62, 64, 171, 186, 274, 299, 456, 462, 491, 497– 498, 504, 510–511, 519–525, 530 Dragoncino, Giovanbattista (Dragoncino da Fano) 212, 284–285 Duke of Alba see Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando Duke of Atri see Acquaviva, Giovanni Antonio Duke of Ferrara see Este, Alfonso i d’; Este, Ercole ii d’ Duke of Firenze see Medici, Alessandro de’; Medici, Cosimo de’ Duke of Mantua see Gonzaga Federico ii Duke of Milan see Sforza, Francesco ii Duke of Savoy see Charles iii the Good Duke of Urbino see Della Rovere Francesco Maria i; Della Rovere Guidubaldo ii Dumanoir, Philippe 540 Dunstable, John 180 Dürer, Albrecht 23 Eco, Umberto 21 Egidio, frate see Canisio, Egidio Eisenstein, Elizabeth 40 Elias, Cathy A. 12 Eleonora of Habsburg 414 Erasmus of Rotterdam 40, 171, 173, 307, 311, 320, 327–328, 343, 495 Erizzo, Battista 380 Este, family 101, 205, 212 Este, Alfonso i d’ (duke of Ferrara) 84–85 Este, Ercole ii d’ (duke of Ferrara) 266, 488 Este, Ippolito d’ 209

index of names Eufusia, Lindsay 369 Eusebi, Gianambrogio degli 444, 507 Faini, Marco 195, 272, 274 Falaschi, Giovanni 296 Faloppia, Giovan Francesco 324, 464 Fanzino, Sigismondo 510 Farnese family 137, 140, 267, 486, 524 Farnese, Alessandro (cardinal) 87, 146, 388 Farnese Alessandro see Paul iii Farnese, Pier Luigi 267, 487 Farri, brothers 363 Farri, Giovanni 485 Fasoli, Paolo 337 Fedi, Roberto 192 Ferdinand i of Habsburg 477, 481, 484 Ferroni, Giulio 97, 102, 238, 244, 249, 259– 260, 315, 322 Feuerbach, Anselm 68, 540 Fiamma, Gabriele 419 Ficino, Marsilio 425 Filomarino, Lelio 280 Flora, Francesco 304 Florio, John 240 Folengo, Teofilo 230–231, 307–308 Fonte, Moderata 423 Fontenelle, Bernard de 538 Foucault, Michel 127 Franciotti, Nicolò 324 Francis (François) i (king of France) 5, 14, 26, 38, 41–42, 83–85, 102–104, 125, 143– 144, 147, 248, 323, 351, 435, 437–438, 441–444, 449, 452, 454, 468, 476–480, 482–484, 489–490, 507, 512–513 Francis, saint 207 Franco, Niccolò 7, 21, 57, 88, 293, 296, 439, 457, 479–480, 486, 491, 497–498, 503–504, 508–509, 511–513, 515–516, 522–524 Franco, Veronica 173 Fra Serafino 141 Freedman, Luba 145 Fregoso, Cesare 438, 468 Fugger, family 168 Fugger, Christopher 167–168 Fusco, Domenico 271 Gaddi, Nicolò de 444 Galderisi, Claudio 289–290

589 Galilei, Galileo 172 Gambarino, Vincenzo 232 Gardane, Antonio 508, 514 Gareffi, Andrea 304 Gauthiez, Pierre 304 Gentili, Augusto 13, 166 Gherardi, Luca di Domenico 189 Gherardo, Quinto 273 Ghetti, Andrea 323–324 Ghilini, Girolamo 1, 2 Ghinucci, Pietro 89 Giberti, Giovanni Matteo 5, 29–30, 82, 170, 212, 240, 468, 470, 498–500, 513– 515 Ginammi, Marco 314, 332, 409–410 Giolito, Gabriele 486–489, 495 Giolito, Giovanni 414 Giovanni da Fano 375 Giovanni dalle Bande Nere / of the Black Bands see Medici, Giovanni de’ Giovio, Paolo 2, 144, 319, 355, 365 Giraldi Cinzio, Giovan Battista 237, 264 Giulio Romano (Giulio Pippi) 3, 5, 148, 161, 170, 196, 245, 536 Giunta, Luc’Antonio 471 Giunta, Tommaso 471 Giusti, Vincenzo 297 Giustiniano (Giustiniani), Giovanni 109– 111, 514 Gnoli, Domenico 79, 195 Godard, Jean-Luc 12, 128–129, 131–132 Gonzaga, family 5, 101, 197, 205–209, 212, 236, 247 Gonzaga, Agostino 471 Gonzaga, Ercole 513 Gonzaga, Federico ii (marquis, later duke, of Mantua) 25, 28–29, 45–46, 51, 82–83, 99–101, 140, 205–208, 212, 230, 236, 245–246, 248–250, 279, 355, 384, 444, 468–472, 474, 482, 499 Gonzaga, Ferrante 266, 520 Gorgia of Leontini 425 Goritz, Hans (Giovanni Coricio / Johannes Coritius) 74, 77 Goselini, Giuliano 409 Gottschall, Rudolf von 68 Graf, Arturo 303 Granvelle, Nicolas de 517 Grappa 287

590 Gregory, saint 353 Grendler, Paul 20 Grimani, Domenico 375 Grimani, Marino 375 Grineo, Michele 509, 516 Gritti, Alvise 41 Gritti, Andrea 5, 41, 106–107, 110, 140, 375 Gritti, Francesco 355 Grouchy, Nicolas de 516 Guarguante, Orazio 429, 431–432 Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico 1–2 Guglielmo da Fontaneto 474 Guglielmo da Tocco 361 Guicciardini, Francesco 2, 225 Guinizzelli, Guido 199 Gutenberg, Johannes 23 Habsburg, family 150 Hairston, Julia L. 299 Harvel, Edmund (English ambassador in Venice) 90 Hawkins, John 410 Hendrix, Harald 11, 14, 338 Henry ii (king of France) 516–517, 519 Henry viii (king of England) 84, 480 Herrick, Marvin T. 266 Homer 276 Hooft, Pieter Corneliszoon 535 Horace 471 Humfrey, Peter 145, 166, 169 Hutton, Edward 9 Iacopo da Varazze 368 Ibrahim (Ibrāhi’m) Pasha 41 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 68 Innamorati, Giuliano 190, 446 Ippolito Ferrarese 474 Isabella of Portugal (empress) 38, 479, 481, 483, 489 Isocrates 425 Jerome, saint 353 John, saint 349 John iii (king of Portugal) 493 Jonson, Ben 268, 537 Julius ii (Giuliano Della Rovere) 144 Julius iii (Giovanni Maria Ciocchi Del Monte) 6, 67, 189, 197–198, 201, 303, 366, 368, 462, 487–488, 517, 519

index of names King of England see Henry viii King of France see Francis i; Henry ii King of Hungary see Zápolya, John King of Portugal see John iii La Fontaine, Jean de 435 Laini, Giovanni 424 Lamberti, Marco 295 Lambertino, Alessandro 171 Lando, Ortensio 504 Lanfranchi, Gino 288 Lappoli, Giovanni Pollio (Pollastra) 465, 513 Larivaille, Paul 10, 14, 79, 112, 246, 266–267, 277, 285, 304, 315–316 Lastraioli, Chiara 11–12 Latomo see Latomus, Jacobus Latomus, Jacobus 86 Legge (Lezze), Giovanni da 161 Lelio, Anton 76–79, 81–82, 194, 466 Leo x (Giovanni de’ Medici) 5, 28, 46, 77– 78, 93, 95, 98–99, 170, 194, 240, 285, 308, 358, 466, 506 Leonardi, Giovan Giacomo (Gian Iacopo) 304, 508 Leoni, Leone 26, 33, 498, 517 Leti, Gregorio 275–275, 291–292, 295 Leyva, Antonio de 478, 501 Libri, Guglielmo 281 Lilti, Antoine 21, 25 Livy 197, 238, 264 Lomazzo, Giovan Paolo 293 Lorena see Lorraine, Jean de Lorraine, Jean de 85, 444, 477 Lotto, Lorenzo 65, 138, 148, 160, 163–166, 169 Love, Harald 492 Luciani, Cristiano 297 Lucretius 471 Luke, saint 349 Luther, Martin 86–87, 276, 311, 376 Luzio, Alessandro 9, 79, 205, 208, 279, 285, 444 Machiavelli, Niccolò 3, 142, 239, 247, 444, 455, 524, 531 Madame Duchess see Renée of France (duchess of Ferrara) Madruzzo, Cristoforo 485 Maestro Andrea / Mastro Andrea see Andrea Veneziano

591

index of names Maestro Elia 462 Magistris, Giovanni Lazzaro de (Serapica) 95, 272 Malipiero, Gian Francesco 186 Mancinelli, Antonio 191 Manente, Giovanni (Gian) 98, 285 Manuzio, Aldo 404, 488, 495 Manuzio, Paolo 303, 366 Marcellus ii (Marcello Cervini) 520 Marchioness of Pescara see Colonna, Vittoria Marcolini, Francesco 5, 26, 30, 32, 36, 38– 39, 42, 149, 198, 286, 304–305, 319, 323, 329, 351, 353, 356, 362–363, 366, 382, 403, 435–436, 438–441, 446, 462, 476– 484, 486, 488, 495, 498, 507–508, 520, 522 Marcolini, Isabella 507 Margaret of Austria 447 Marinella, Lucrezia 14, 409, 423–432 Marini, Paolo 316–317, 412, 492 Marino, Giovan Battista 221–223, 298, 314, 535 Mark, saint 74, 349 Marmochino, Santi 403 Marquis of Vasto see Avalos, Alfonso d’ Martelli, Niccolò 314, 352, 466, 487 Martelli, Ugolino 350 Martial 510 Matthew, saint 349, 427 Mauro d’Arcano, Giovanni 89, 273, 500, 503 Mazzolini da Prierio, Silvestro 86 Mazzuchelli, Giammaria 9, 190, 271, 289, 299, 424, 539–540 Medici, family 3, 79, 194, 208, 254, 498, 500 Medici, Alessandro de’ (duke of Florence) 32, 48, 208, 447, 472, 478, 523 Medici, Caterina de’ (Catherine) 198, 201, 248, 517, 524 Medici, Cosimo i de’ (duke of Florence) 68, 84, 143–144, 146, 196, 225, 267, 447, 458, 483, 486, 489, 492–493 Medici, Giovanni de’ see Leo x Medici, Giovanni de’ (Giovanni dalle bande Nere / of the Black Bands) 28, 29, 35, 40, 99, 146–147, 160, 205, 224–226, 455, 483 Medici, Giulio de’ see Clement vii Medici, Ippolito de’ 48

Medici, Lorenzo de’ (il Magnifico / the Magnificent) 2, 197, 200 Meduna, Bartolomeo 14, 413–419, 422, 427, 429–430 Melchiori, Angiolina 257 Mersenne, Marin 531 Merula, Giorgio 3 Mezzabarba, Antonio 192 Mezzarisa, Francesco 393 Micheli, Parrasio 149, 164 Michiel, Pietro 66 Milani, Marisa 282 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della 3, 308 Molière 269, 535 Molino, Girolamo 171 Mongatti, Alessandro 258 Montaigne, Michel de 40, 535 Montemerlo, Giovanni Stefano 535 Montmorency, Anne de 439, 441 Morsolin, Bernardo 421–423 Moulton, Ian Frederick 12 Museo, Agostino 375–376 Musso, Cornelio 324–325, 327, 328 Muzio, Girolamo 14, 319, 322, 497–498, 520, 522–525 Nanino, Giovanni Maria 183 Nardi, Jacopo 57 Nashe, Thomas 531 Nausea, Friedrich 86 Navò, Curzio 489 Nero (emperor) 384, 386 Nichols, Tom 169 Nicolini da Sabbio, Giovanni Antonio Nobili, Flaminio 313 Nucci, Medoro 280 Nyman, Michael 186

476

Ochino, Bernardino 323, 328, 363 Odoni, Andrea 64–65, 67 Oradini, Giulio 192 Origen 353 Orlando di Lasso (Roland de Lassus) 180 Orsini, family 73 Ovid 471 Pace, Gian Paolo 146–147, 160, 168 Pagnini, Santi 403 Paleologo, Margherita 489

592 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 180 Palladino, Lora Anne 30 Pallavicino, Federico 475 Pallavicino, Ferrante 314 Palma il Vecchio, Jacopo 149 Palonio, Marcello 74 Pandolfini, Ferdinando 80 Pandolfini, Pierfilippo 487 Panigarola, Francesco 313 Pantagato, Ottaviano 513–514 Paolo Antonio (friar) 324 Passi, Giuseppe 423 Parabosco, Girolamo 171 Parmigianino (Francesco Mazzola) 47–48 Patrizi, Giorgio 243 Paul iii (Alessandro Farnese) 9, 101, 137, 197, 266–268, 319, 324, 354, 365–366, 444, 452, 477, 481 Paul iv (Gian Pietro Carafa) 310, 354, 365, 454, 477, 513, 520 Paul, saint 353, 376 Pazzi, Alessandro 264 Pérez, Gonzalo 489 Périon, Joachim 497–498, 516–519 Perrenot de Granvelle, Antoine 503 Peruzzi, Baldassarre 160 Petrarca, Francesco 6–7, 49–50, 181, 183, 193, 199, 228, 230, 241, 286, 448, 468–469, 471 Petrocchi, Giorgio 307, 316, 332 Philip ii (emperor) 137, 167–169 Piccardo, Pietro 108, 109, 110 Piccolomini, Alessandro 251, 483 Pietrasanta, Paolo 436 Pietro da Lucca 309 Pietro da Modena 85 Pino, Paolo 162 Pisanello (Antonio Pisano) 23 Pitati, Bonifacio de’ 148, 154, 160–163, 166– 168 Plato 172, 325, 425 Plautus 238, 258 Pocatela, Iacopo 471 Podiani, Alberto 192 Podiani, Mario 192 Poggio, Giovan Francesco 80 Poli, Donato 74 Polidoro da Caravaggio 160 Politi, Ambrogio Caterino 86

index of names Poliziano, Angelo 3, 193 Pollastra, Giovanni see Lappoli Giovanni Polo (gondolier) 490 Ponzetta, Fernando 81 Porta Salviati, Giuseppe 148, 159, 169 Portia, Lucrezia (Matrema-non-vuole) 296 Postel, Guillaume 408 Potenza see Ameria (Amelia), Jacopo di Nino d’ Poussin, Nicolas 535 Povoledo, Elena 254 Prati, Francesco 531 Prince of Salerno see Sanseverino, Ferrante Priscianese, Francesco 357–358, 482 Procaccioli, Paolo 10, 14, 195, 304, 315 Propp, Vladimir J. 450 Protogones 141 Pseudo-Berni 519, 523 Pseudo-Bonaventure 330 Pseudo-Tintoretto 399 Ptolemy 84 Pucci, Lorenzo 80 Pulci, Luigi 218, 231, 236 Queen of Navarre see Angoulême, Marguerite de Quintilian 497 Quondam, Amedeo 106, 111, 464 Rabelais, François 116 Raffaello (Raffaello Sanzio, Raphael) 3, 148, 157, 170, 252, 280, 297 Raimondi, Marcantonio 23, 28, 32, 34, 82, 170, 196, 199, 468, 498, 536–537 Ramazzani, Tito 192 Ramus, Petrus 516 Rangone (Rangona) Pallavicini, Argentina 267, 443, 475 Rangone (Rangoni), Guido 111, 444, 475 Renée of France (duchess of Ferrara) 87 Renier, Rodolfo 9 Ricasoli, Corinna 169 Ricchi, Agostino 310, 320–321, 462, 477, 490–491 Ricci, Giuliano de 289–290 Riccia, Perina 507 Richardson, Brian 14 Ridolfi, Carlo 149, 154 Ridolfi, Niccolò 358

index of names Robusti, Battista 155 Rocco, Antonio 298 Romano, Angelo 12, 274, 290 Romei, Danilo 77, 80, 82, 274, 286, 289 Rosenthal, Margaret 125 Rosset, François de 410 Rossi, Giovanni de’ 520 Rossi, Vittorio 9, 79, 271 Rosso, Vincenzo 198, 203, 494 Rovero, Girolamo 489 Rubens, Pieter Paul 535 Rufi, Enrico 289–290 Ruscelli, Girolamo 40, 492, 495, 522, 524 Sadoleto, Jacopo 513 Salviati, Francesco 26, 36, 38–39, 159, 351, 393 Salviati, Giuliano 489 Salviati, Maria 225 Salza, Abdelkader 9 Sandella, Caterina 56, 507 Sanga, Giovan Battista 498 Sannazaro, Jacopo 66–67, 140, 152, 155, 157, 163, 308, 312, 318, 353, 448 Sanseverino, Ferrante (prince of Salerno) 196, 478, 485 Sansovino, Jacopo (Jacopo Tatti) 3–4, 57, 170–171, 348, 356, 514 Sansovino, Francesco 489, 514 Santa Fiora see Sforza, Guido Ascanio Santafiore, Giuseppe 474 Santin, Flavia 332 Sanudo, Marin 470 Sarra, Girolamo 56 Sarracino, Giovan Francesco del 359 Savonarola, Girolamo 309–311, 403 Scala see Del Rio, Baldassarre Schiavone, Andrea 148, 152, 154, 158–163, 166, 169 Scotti, Gianbernardino 525 Scotti, Mario 316 Sebastiano del Piombo (Sebastiano Luciani) 25, 29–30, 47, 170, 498 Segre, Cesare 239 Serena, Angela 7, 26, 196, 200, 479, 492, 507 Serena, Giovan Antonio 507 Serlio, Francesca 507 Serlio, Sebastiano 38, 266, 448, 479, 507 Ser Vecchia see Alessi, Benedetto

593 Sforza, family 255 Sforza, Bona 490 Sforza, Francesco ii (duke of Milan) 84 Sforza, Guido Ascanio 87, 452 Shagin, Alex 43 Shakespeare, William 258, 268 Shemek, Deanna 12, 100 Sicardi, Enrico 272 Sillano da Spoleto, Decio 74 Silvestro see Mazzolini da Prierio, Silvestro Soderini, Francesco 78, 81 Sorella, Antonio 297 Soria, Lope de 459, 483, 489, 502 Speroni, Sperone 171, 483, 514 Spina, Biagio (Biagio Perugino, Paternostraio, Biagio Muschiaro) 485 Spira, Fortunio 272, 504, 514 Stampa, Massimiano 477–478, 501–502, 504 Stewart, Pamela D. 244 Strascino da Siena see Campani, Niccolò Strazzone, Giovanni 514 Strozzi, Piero 444 Suleiman (sultan) 252 Talvacchia, Bette 10 Tansillo, Luigi 409 Tarabotti, Arcangela 423 Tasso, Torquato 218 Tassoni, Alessandro 232 Teodoli, Bernardino 480 Terence 238, 253, 258, 471 Tiberius (emperor) 386 Tintoretto (Domenico Robusti) 59–60, 62, 66, 138, 148–163, 377, 395, 397, 399–401, 403–404 Tintoretto, Domenico 397 Tiziano (Tiziano Vecellio, Titian) 3–5, 24– 26, 33, 38–41, 56–57, 137–161, 164–169, 348–349, 373, 376, 381, 384–388, 404, 448, 460, 479, 485, 495, 498, 513 Toffanin, Giuseppe 304 Toledo, Pedro de 490, 492 Tomitano, Bernardino 325 Trajan (emperor) 252 Traiano di Navò 513–514 Tribolo (Niccolò Pericoli) 66 Trippa 483 Trissino, Gian Giorgio 196, 469

594 Trivulzio, Agostino 77 Troia see Pandolfini, Ferdinando Trovato, Paolo 296 Tylus, Jane 12 Ugolini, Paola 12, 282 Valdambrini, Paolo 467 Valdaura, Bernardo 217, 329, 348, 478, 490 Valdés, Juan de 315, 328 Van Heemskerk, Maarten 255 Vanni, Pietro 480 Varallo, Girolamo 329, 353, 357–358 Vasari, Giorgio 23, 30, 48, 66, 148, 152, 254– 255, 349, 356, 436, 487, 523 Vauzelles Jean de 62–64, 313, 518, 532 Venier, Domenico 171, 203, 219, 232 Venier, Lorenzo 275–277, 279–280, 285, 288, 473 Verallo, Girolamo 412, 482 Verdelot, Philippe 180–181 Vergerio, Pier Paolo 86 Verità, Girolamo 279–280 Veronese, Paolo 169, 376 Vico, Enea 60 Vida, Marco Girolamo 308, 312, 318 Vigilio, Francesco 206

index of names Vincenzo di Paolo 465 Virgil 226, 242, 276, 308, 347, 471 Vitali, Bernardino 473, 475 Vlady, Marina 128, 129 Voet, Gijsbert 531 Voetius, Gisbertus see Voet, Gijsbert Volta, Achille della 83, 195, 499, 514 Voltaire 292 Von Hadeln, Detlev 149 Waddington, Raymond B. 8, 11, 124, 165–166, 171, 304, 315 Wilde, Oscar 21–22 Willaert, Adrian 32, 171 Wolfe, John 268, 288, 409, 496, 533 Wyatt, Thomas 532, 535 Xuárez, Fernán 298 Zaffetta, Angela 277–282 Zanchi, Giovanni Alessandro 279 Zápolya, John (János / Jan, king of Hungary) 351, 482 Zoppino, Niccolò (Nicolò d’Aristotele de’ Rossi) 192, 281, 286, 465, 474, 494 Zorzi, Francesco 489