Aretino

Pietro Aretino (, ; 19 or 20 April 1492 – 21 October 1556) was an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer, who wielded influence on contemporary art and politics. He was one of the most influential writers of his time and an outspoken critic of the powerful. Owing to his communications and sympathies with religious reformers, he is considered to have been a Nicodemite Protestant.

Life

His father was Luca Del Tura, a shoemaker from Arezzo in Tuscany, Italy, who abandoned his family to join the militia. The father later returned to Arezzo, finally dying in poverty at the age of 85, unforgiven by his son, who never acknowledged the paternal name, taking ''Aretino'' (meaning 'Arretine, from Arezzo') as a surname.

His mother was Margherita, known as Tita, Bonci. Either before or after the abandonment (it is not known which), she entered into a lasting relationship with a local noble, Luigi Bacci, who supported Tita, Pietro and his two sisters and brought up Pietro as part of his own family.

Aretino spent a formative decade in Perugia, before being sent, highly recommended, to Rome. There Agostino Chigi, the rich banker and patron of Raphael, took him under his wing.

When Hanno the elephant, pet of Pope Leo X, died in 1516, Aretino penned a satirical pamphlet entitled "The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno". The fictitious will cleverly mocked the leading political and religious figures of Rome at the time, including Pope Leo X himself. The pamphlet was such a success that it started Aretino's career and established him as a famous satirist, ultimately known as "the Scourge of Princes".

Aretino prospered, living from hand to mouth as a hanger-on in the literate circle of his patron, sharpening his satirical talents on the gossip of politics and the Papal Curia, and turning the coarse Roman pasquinade into a rapier weapon of satire, until his sixteen ribald (Lust Sonnets) written to accompany Giulio Romano's exquisitely beautiful but utterly pornographic series of drawings engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi under the title finally caused such outrage that he had to temporarily flee Rome.

After Leo's death in 1521, his patron was Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, whose competitors for the papal throne felt the sting of Aretino's scurrilous lash. The installation of the Dutch pope Adrian VI ( in Pietro's words) instead encouraged Aretino to seek new patrons away from Rome, mainly with Federico II Gonzaga in Mantua, and with the condottiero Giovanni de' Medici ("Giovanni delle Bande Nere"). The election of his old Medici patron as Pope Clement VII sent him briefly back to Rome, but death threats and an attempted assassination from one of the victims of his pen, Bishop Giovanni Giberti, in July 1525, set him wandering through northern Italy in the service of various noblemen, distinguished by his wit, audacity and brilliant and facile talents, until he settled permanently in 1527, in Venice, anti-Papal city of Italy, "seat of all vices", Aretino noted with gusto.

He was a lover of men, having declared himself "a sodomite" since birth. In a letter to Giovanni de' Medici written in 1524 Aretino enclosed a satirical poem saying that due to a sudden aberration he had "fallen in love with a female cook and temporarily switched from boys to girls..." (''My Dear Boy''). In his comedy , the lead man is overjoyed to discover that the woman he has been forced to marry is really a page boy in disguise. While at court in Mantua he developed a crush on a young man called Bianchino, and annoyed Duke Federico with a request to plead with the boy on the writer's behalf.

Safe in Venice, Aretino became a blackmailer, extorting money from men who had sought his guidance in vice. He "kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege", in Jakob Burckhardt's estimation. Francis I of France and Charles V pensioned him at the same time, each hoping for some damage to the reputation of the other. "The rest of his relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar extortion", according to Burckhardt. Addison states that "he laid half Europe under contribution".

Aretino is said to have died of suffocation from " laughing too much". The more mundane truth may be that he died from a stroke or heart attack.

Writings

Apart from both sacred and profane texts – a satire of high-flown Renaissance Neoplatonic dialogues is set in a brothel – and comedies such as and , Aretino is remembered above all for his letters, full of literary flattery that could turn to blackmail. They circulated widely in manuscript and he collected them and published them at intervals winning as many enemies as it did fame, and earned him the dangerous nickname Ariosto gave him: ("scourge of princes"). In 1559, three years after Aretino's death, his entire oeuvre was listed in the papal Index of Prohibited Books. The first English translations of some of Aretino's racier material have been coming onto the market recently.

is a brilliant parody of Castiglione's , and features the adventures of a Sienese gentleman, Messer Maco, who travels to Rome to become a cardinal. He would also like to win himself a mistress, but when he falls in love with a girl he sees in a window, he realizes that only as a courtier would he be able to win her. In mockery of Castiglione's advice on how to become the perfect courtier, a charlatan proceeds to teach Messer Maco how to behave as a courtier: he must learn how to deceive and flatter, and sit hours in front of the mirror.

Portrayals by artists

Aretino was a close friend of Titian's, who painted his portrait three times: a 1527 portrait in the Kunstmuseum Basel, a 1537 portrait in the Frick Collection, and a 1545 portrait in the Pitti Palace. Luba Freedman cites a fourth portrait, from "not later than 1535," but Xavier F. Salomon, chief curator at the Frick Collection, writes that "there is no evidence that it ever existed." Titian also portrayed Aretino as Pontius Pilate in his painting "Ecce Homo," in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, "as a nameless soldier in the crowd" in " Alfonso d'Avalos Addressing his Troops," in the Prado, Madrid, and next to a self-portrait in " La Gloria," also in the Prado. Clement VII made Aretino a Knight of Rhodes, and Julius III named him a Knight of St. Peter, but the chain he wears for his 1545 portrait may have merely been jewelry. In his strictly-for-publication letters to patrons Aretino would often add a verbal portrait to Titian's painted one.

Titian was far from the only artist who portrayed Aretino. "Probably no other celebrity of the cinquecento had his image reproduced so often and in so many media: paintings, frescoes, sculptures, prints, medals ..At various stages of his life Aretino was also portrayed by Sebastiano del Piombo, Alessandro Moretto, Francesco Salviati, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Giorgio Vasari">Jacopo Tintoretto">726,_Pisan

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