by Sheila Hale
Sebastiano Luciani, Titian’s old friend and fellow student from the days in Giovanni Bellini’s studio, survived the Sack of Rome by taking refuge with the pope’s entourage in Castel Sant’Angelo and fled to Venice by October, but only for a short stay. Although he visited Venice again the following summer, he decided to remain in Rome, where he could count on the patronage of the pope when he returned from exile, on the friendship of Michelangelo and on the absence of Titian. Pordenone, so called after his hometown in the Friuli, settled in Venice for a few years in 1529 and became, for a short while, the only painter to present a serious challenge to Titian. But while Titian remained the supreme Venetian painter, the presence of three architects, all refugees from the Sack, began to drag a Venice that had clung to its traditional preference for Gothic buildings into the classical High Renaissance. It was to Venice that the Bolognese architect Sebastiano Serlio fled and there that in 1537 and 1540 he published two of his vastly influential Seven Books on Architecture, which diffused the Italian Renaissance language of the classical orders throughout Europe. The Veronese architect and military engineer Michele Sanmicheli, who had been employed in fortifying the Papal States, was appointed protomagister of the Venetian water board, with responsibility for defence. He built new bastions for Verona, and later that city’s magnificent crisply classical gates, as well as palaces there and in Venice.
The refugee who would make the most significant impact on the urban development of Gritti’s New Rome, however, was the Florentine sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino, who arrived in August after the Sack and soon became one of Titian’s closest friends. Jacopo Sansovino was forty-one when he fled to the Most Serene City. Although he had not completed many buildings in Florence or Rome,8 he had immersed himself in the study of Rome’s classical buildings and knew at first hand the buildings of Michelangelo and Bramante. His reputation, more as a sculptor than as an architect, preceded him – soon after his arrival Lorenzo Lotto described him as ‘second only to Michelangelo’. A bachelor and inveterate womanizer, he brought with him to Venice a six-year-old son, Francesco. Although he sometimes said he couldn’t be absolutely sure that Francesco was his son, he saw to it that the boy received the first-class education that equipped him later in life to become a prominent literary figure in Venice and the author of, among other works, the first guidebooks to the city.
According to Vasari, who left us with a vivid description of the appearance, character and habits of his friend and fellow Tuscan, Sansovino was of ordinary height, lean with an erect posture, a red beard, pale skin and a redhead’s tendency to outbursts of temper that soon passed; ‘and very often with a few humble words you could make the tears come to his eyes’. He was handsome, graceful, well dressed and adored by women, including some of high status. As for his qualities of mind, he was prudent, farsighted, always ready to learn from experience and to put his considerable financial acumen to the service of his employers. Although given to excessive habits in his youth, when he was often ill, he was never less than zealous, tireless and absolutely reliable in his work. (Vasari was not the only contemporary who mentioned Sansovino’s prudence and circumspection.) In his old age he enjoyed excellent health and perfect eyesight, thanks to restricting his diet in summer to fruits: Vasari claimed that he had seen him eat as many as three cucumbers at a time with half a lemon. He treated people from all walks of life with equal consideration – a rare quality in a period characterized by rigid social distinctions, one that must have helped him get on with the foremen and workers on his building sites, and ‘which made him very dear both to the great and to the small, and to his friends’. His death, which came in 1570 when he had reached the great age of eighty-four, ‘was a grief to all Venice’.
But Benvenuto Cellini, after dining with Sansovino in Venice many years after his arrival there, recorded a rather different impression of his personality: ‘He never stopped chattering about his great achievements, abusing Michelangelo and the rest of his fellow sculptors, while he bragged and vaunted himself to the skies.’
By that time Sansovino had become a leading member of the Venetian artistic establishment and was on his way to realizing Andrea Gritti’s ambition to follow the example of the Roman emperor Augustus who had proclaimed at the end of his reign that he had found a Rome of brick and left it a city of marble. In 1527, however, there were not enough gold ducats in the treasury to pay for ambitious new architectural projects, let alone to feed and house the poor or restore the neglected old building stock of the city. Sansovino planned to return to Rome as soon as it settled down and consider his career options, which included an invitation from Francis I to the French court and the offer of a commission from Henry VIII of England. But, as his son would write many years later, having intended to stay for two weeks, he stayed in Venice for the next forty-seven years. Cardinal Grimani alerted the doge to Sansovino’s presence, and Gritti did what he could to make him welcome, giving him the job of restoring the domes of the basilica, which were in danger of collapse.
One of the many friends Sansovino made in Venice was the Flemish composer Adrian Willaert. In December 1527 Andrea Gritti, despite some opposition from the procurators, succeeded in appointing Willaert choirmaster of the basilica, where the available musical talent had been enriched by refugees who had formerly sung in the Sistine Chapel choir. Willaert was the inventor of what we call stereophonic music. His dramatic arrangements of sung masses performed by split choirs became fashionable entertainments for the nobility, and gave entrepreneurs – always plentiful in Venice – the idea of staging sung music in commercial venues as well as churches. Willaert, who stayed in Venice until his death in 1562, made his adopted city the Italian centre of avant-garde composition. He trained generations of musicians to play and sing in ways that laid the foundations for the operas composed in the next century by Monteverdi, Cavalli and the other baroque Venetian composers.
It was probably the Tuscan writer Pietro Aretino, also a newcomer, although an altogether less reputable one, who played the larger part in persuading Sansovino to remain in the lagoon city and wait for better times. Ten years later when with the return of prosperity Sansovino had founded a High Renaissance school of Venetian sculpture and initiated the most radical rebuilding programme ever seen in a Renaissance city, Aretino was able to describe his friend as Rome’s greatest gift to Venice, the supreme example of the good that had sprung out of the evil of the destruction of Rome.
Aretino arrived in Venice six weeks before the Sack. Although he did not witness the event, he had predicted it in writing and later set one of his books, the pornographic Ragionamenti (Conversations), in those dark days. He had met Titian in Mantua, and almost immediately after his arrival formed a bond with him and with Sansovino that would last until he died, of laughter so they said, three decades later. He became the closest companion of Titian’s life, his most sensitive critic, as well as his adviser, agent, publicist, debt collector, scribe and hanger-on. He broadcast Titian’s talent to the world in his plays, sonnets and more than 225 published letters, while using his friend’s growing international reputation to gain entrée and gather information for his journalism. When he came to publish a collection of letters written to him by the great and famous men and women of the world he included only two of what must have been hundreds from Titian,9 presumably because they were of no literary merit and he considered that his pen could do better for a friend whose syntax was as plain and clumsy as his brushes were capable of capturing the very essence of nature. They were useful to one another, but there is no mistaking the real warmth of their relationship, or the pleasure they took in one another’s company. It is thanks to Aretino’s tireless pen that we know as much as we do about the silent artist whose painting and personality he understood better than any other writer of their day, and perhaps since.
The monumental figure of Pietro Aretino – journalist cum press baron, master of aphorism and hyperbole; pornographer, flatterer and blackmailer; play
wright, satirist, versifier, bisexual libertine, connoisseur of art; self-styled political seer, ‘fifth evangelist’, ‘censor of the world’, as well as its ‘secretary’ (meaning depository of its secrets); ‘one whose letters are answered even by emperors and kings’ – stands out even in a period characterized by extraordinary men. He rejoiced in Ariosto’s sobriquet, ‘Scourge of princes, the divine Aretino’, which he earned by writing and circulating editorials in the form of pronostici – the satirical and sometimes libellous mock-prophecies that he issued annually as parodies of the forecasts issued by astrologers – and unsolicited letters to and about every person of consequence, including the Most Christian King of France, the Habsburg emperor Charles V, the Medici pope Clement VII, the Turkish sultan and the King of Algiers. An avaricious, unscrupulous and highly sexed powerbroker, he recognized his own vices in the Great and Good of the Renaissance world, and used them to manipulate and prise from them rewards and gifts, distributing praise or slander in proportion to the generosity of his victims. Although, like most journalists, he sometimes posed as a defender and Oracle of Truth, he took more pride in his skills as a flatterer and blackmailer: ‘If the three Magi had lived in my time they would have had to pay tribute to me.’10 He described his pen as ‘plague-ridden’, his ink as ‘poisonous’, his paper as ‘the grave’,11 and wrote that he enjoyed besmirching that paper as others took pleasure in defacing the white walls of hostelries. Nearly half of his letters are about money – one of the many interests he shared with Titian. He claimed that in the years between his arrival in Venice and the mid-1530s he had extracted 10,000 scudi from princes, but at another time he also claimed that he had spent the same amount on helping the poor. Titian called him a brigand chief of letters. ‘I am in truth a terrible man,’ Aretino once confessed to his publisher, ‘since kings and emperors pay me out of fear.’12 The truth was that he was clever enough to know that flattery is usually a more successful tactic than threats, and took care to praise friends and patrons of all ranks in his letters and plays.
Sanudo deplored his habit of speaking ‘ill of nobles and others’. In the nineteenth century he was reinvented, rather like Machiavelli, as a dangerous monster, and all the more fascinating for that. Burckhardt,13 who called him ‘the greatest railer of modern times … not burdened with principles, neither with liberalism nor philanthropy nor any other virtue’, nevertheless admitted to ‘His literary talent, his clear and sparkling style, his varied observation of men and things … the coarsest as well as the most refined malice’ and ‘a grotesque wit so brilliant that in some cases it does not fall short of that of Rabelais’. Crowe and Cavalcaselle14 failed to understand how an artist as great as Titian ‘came to be connected with such a man, and how, knowing him intimately, he kept up relations with … a parasite of the most dangerous kind … Like a fungus on a dunghill he took advantage of a general corruption to live and to fatten, and he was not the less like a prosperous fungus because he happened to be poisonous.’ From our more liberal perspective, however, he seems not such a terrible man after all. He was steadfastly loyal to his friends, even when they let him down: ‘I keep friends as misers hoard their treasures.’ He was also capable of magnanimity (usually, it must be said, calculated) to his enemies, and was rarely vindictive. In the 1550s his publisher Francesco Marcolini advertised Aretino’s books with a letter, supposedly written by him to the author, praising the unstinting help he gave to the poor:
You pay travelling expenses for traders, come to the assistance of unmarried mothers who have been deserted … clothe the destitute beggars who come to you, taking the hose off your legs, the shirt off your back and your very doublet … You aid even the poor gondoliers. It is a fact that I know fifty to whose children you have stood as godfather, giving each of them a handful not of coppers but of silver scudi …15
Aretino, who doubtless dictated this puff, sometimes used his generous treatment of the poor and sick as justification for his endless requests for money from the rich and powerful. In a letter to a former imperial ambassador in Venice16 who had sent him 500 scudi he proclaimed that needy people of all ranks looked to him for help as though he were the heir to a king’s treasury: poor women in childbirth, prisoners in need of bail, soldiers, pilgrims, knights errant. When a man wounded in the street near his house was carried into his apartments he told the assembled crowds: ‘I’m well aware that I’m a good host, but I never knew before that I ran a hospital.’ But, full of himself as he certainly was, generosity to the poor is a characteristic that runs through the story of his life: six years before his death Titian wrote him a letter saying that he had been telling a mutual friend that Aretino gave everything to the poor, down to the clothes on his back.17
This complex character was a phenomenon that could only have existed in Italy, which was well ahead of the rest of Europe in the use of a literary vernacular (Aretino’s native Tuscan) that could be used to treat any subject and which was the lingua franca of all cultivated Europeans. One of the first European writers to live entirely by his pen,18 and the first to exploit the printing press to strut his opinions and influence the course of events, he issued his editorials as pamphlets or as flyers distributed along city streets and country lanes; and by the time the first volume of his collected letters was published in 1538, he was so popular that it went through ten editions, and was followed by five more (the second dedicated to Henry VIII of England). As a thinker he was not in the same league as Bembo, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini or Castiglione, but his more spontaneous pen had a greater influence on the political and social behaviour of the civilized world of his own day. The literate public from Amsterdam to Hungary, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Persia couldn’t get enough of the upstart celebrity’s amusing, scandal-mongering and perverse rhetoric, his praise of whores, his vivid pornography and above all his apparent intimacy with powerful rulers over whom ordinary people had no control. The world watched in wonder as this man from nowhere dared to advise, flatter, slander and stand up to princes who ruled by divine right.
Unequalled as a self-publicist, he knew the value of projecting images of his face, which was strikingly good-looking in his youth, as widely as possible. He once boasted that he had ‘not only been sculpted in lead, silver, bronze, gold, but also painted on canvas, panel, and wall’,19 and was pleased to note that his features appeared even on decorative objects such as mirrors and door knockers. He commissioned nearly as many portraits of himself as did the emperor Charles V of himself. Some six of the portrait medals he circulated across the courts of Europe survive; on the obverse of one of them his beard and hair are composed of erect phalluses, another is inscribed with the words ‘Truth engenders hatred’. Most of the numerous painted portraits he commissioned – from Sebastiano, Tintoretto, Francesco Salviati, Vasari, Moretto da Brescia and Marcantonio Raimondi, as well as at least three from Titian – have fared less well. But in Titian’s freely painted portrait of his friend in vigorous middle age (1545, Florence, Galleria Palatina) we see all the robust, sensuous, arrogant, maverick, grandiose energy of the man, filling the picture space as he filled rooms, and perhaps sense an element of competition between the wordsmith and the painter he called his brother, pal, unique friend and honoured gossip, but who he knew could say more with a few strokes of his brush than even his words could convey.
FIVE
The Triumvirate of Taste
Fornication and sodomy, fraud and swagger, high politics, wordy warfare and material ambition were not the only fields in which Pietro Aretino, that ‘literary brigand’, as Titian called him, operated both as a promoter and censor.
JAMES CLEUGH, THE DIVINE ARETINO, 1965
Pietro Aretino landed at the jetty in front of the doge’s palace on 27 March 1527. He came with a single servant, a reputation as a loud-mouthed troublemaker, and the remains of 100 crowns given him by Federico Gonzaga, whose guest he had been in Mantua, to speed him on his way. Two of his Medici patrons had recently died, Leo X in 1521 and Leo�
��s cousin Giovanni in 1526. He had grown bored with life at the provincial Mantuan court. The Marquis of Mantua was glad to get rid of him for the time being; and Aretino was aware that his free-wheeling pen, which had been issuing relentless attacks on the pope, might make his presence in Venice equally inconvenient for Andrea Gritti’s government. When he looked up Titian within days of his arrival, neither could have guessed that Aretino would become a fixture in Venice, that their friendship would turn out to be the most enduring, warmest and most mutually useful relationship in both their lives, or that Aretino, Titian and Jacopo Sansovino would come to be known as Andrea Gritti’s Triumvirate of Taste.
The story of Aretino’s life up to that point was not one that would have recommended him to a less broadminded doge. He was born on Good Friday 1492 in a hospital for the poor in Arezzo, the Tuscan town he adopted as his surname. His mother, Tita, was a beauty who modelled for local painters. Her husband, Luca, was a cobbler who was probably Pietro’s father, although it sometimes suited him better to claim that he was the bastard son of an Aretine nobleman, Luigi Bacci, who kept Tita as his mistress. Although he learned to read and write and quote the Bible, he liked to boast that he had never gone to school or had a tutor. With no formal classical education to refine his intellect, he developed the fluent, vigorous vernacular Tuscan that he would wield against the rulers of a world that he viewed through the magnifying glass of his own tremendous ego. Although extremely well read he railed all his life against pedantry. Martin Luther, ‘the worst pedant of all’, had used his ‘assassination of the dead’ to provoke ‘heresy against our Faith’. In a letter1 entitled ‘Against Pedantry’ he advised one of the secretaries who had helped him compile the first volume of his published letters, to:
