Pietro Aretino

Poet, born in Arezzo, NC Italy. In Rome (1517–27) he distinguished himself by his wit, impudence, and talents, and secured the favour of Pope Leo X, which he subsequently lost by writing his 16 salacious Sonetti lussuriosi (1524, Lewd Sonnets). A few years later he settled in Venice, there also acquiring powerful friends. His poetical works include five witty comedies and a tragedy.

Pietro Aretino (1492 - 1556) was an Italian author, playwright, poet and satirist who wielded immense influence on contemporary art and politics.

Born out of wedlock in Arezzo (Aretino, "from Arezzo"), very casually educated then banished from his native city, Aretino spent a formative decade in Perugia, before being sent, highly recommended, to Rome. 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 Sonetti Lussuriosi written to accompany Giulio Romano's exquisitely beautiful but utterly pornographic series drawings engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi under the title I Modi finally lost him the public patronage of Pope Leo X.

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 prudish Fleming Adrian VI ("la tedesca tigna" in Pietro's words) instead encouraged Aretino to seek new patrons away from Rome, mainly with Federico II Gonzaga in Mantua, and with the condottiere 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, the anti-Papal city of Italy, "seat of all vices" Aretino noted with gusto.

"In a letter to Giovanni de Medici written in 1524 Aretino encloses a satirical poem saying the due to a sudden aberration he has falled in love with a female cook and temporarily switched from boys to girls..." (My Dear Boy)

From the security of Venice Aretino "kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege," in Jakob Burckhardt's estimation.

Apart from both sacred and profane texts— a satire of high-flown Renaissance neo-Platonic dialogues is set in a brothel— and comedies such as La cortigiana and La talenta, Aretino is remembered above all for his letters, full of literary flattery that could turn to blackmail.

La cortigiana is a brilliant parody of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, and features the adventures of a Sienese gentleman, Messer Maco, who travels to Rome to become a cardinal. 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.