by Sheila Hale
Use the diction that your own ears have taught you … The best way to rival Petrarch or Boccaccio is to articulate your own ideas in a style as beautiful and skilful as theirs, but not to plunder them of this or that idiom, which today sounds stilted … It is nature, without the slightest effort, that produces the pure metal. There was once a wise painter who, when asked what models he copied, pointed in silence to a group of human beings. He meant that he studied only life. Consider the nerve and the sinew … Be sculptors of what you feel, not painters of miniatures.
Although he shared his dislike of pedantry with his older contemporary Baldassare Castiglione, he was in every other respect the polar opposite, and self-consciously so, of the author of the most influential manual of courtly behaviour ever written. Aretino throughout his life made a point of despising the princely courts that attracted some of the best talents of his day: ‘The court … is the hospital of hope, the tomb of life, the wet nurse of hatred, the breeder of envy, the matrix of ambition, the marketplace of lies, seraglio of suspicion, prison of harmony, the school for deceit, the home of adulation, the paradise of vice, the inferno of virtue, purgatory of goodness, and the limbo of joy … Life is about not going to court.’2
He was thirteen or fourteen when he left home and walked to Perugia, where he tried his hand at painting3 and at shocking the bourgeoisie with vulgar pranks, such as repainting an image of St Mary Magdalen as the prostitute she had once been and exposing himself at a window, before fetching up in Leo X’s Rome where he soon found employment in the household of Leo’s banker, the fabulously wealthy Agostino Chigi, who was then building his Villa Farnesina in Trastevere. One of his after-dinner tricks was to have his servants throw the silver plates and dishes into the Tiber (where they were caught in submerged nets). The cardinals, princes, famous writers and artists who attended Chigi’s lavish parties were delighted by the handsome young jester, whose witty gossip could make even his blushing targets roar with laughter. At first they didn’t mind being lampooned by Pasquino, the ‘talking statue’ near Piazza Navona, which was the posting place for supposedly anonymous satirical poets with axes to grind; and Aretino didn’t bother to hide behind Pasquino: ‘Take care that Aretino be your friend/for he’s a bad enemy to wrong.’ The hedonistic Pope Leo, who revelled in the company of clever men – and who, as a Florentine, had no objection to having Romans lampooned – liked him so much that he invited him to join the papal court.
It was there that Aretino met Leo’s cousin, Giovanni de’ Medici, the greatest mercenary soldier of his day. The first commander to dress his army in uniform, Giovanni adopted the sobriquet dalle Bande Nere (of the Black Bands) when he changed his army’s colours from white to black as a sign of mourning after Leo’s death. Six years younger than Aretino, Giovanni quickly became the dearest friend he would have before he met Titian. The writer, who was a physical coward, admired the dashing warrior’s raw and reckless courage. It made him feel protected, while the soldier enjoyed the company of the most eloquent and amusing man he had ever met, who could terrify with his pen as he could with a sword; and who shared his taste for whoring and his impatience with the imprisoning atmosphere of court life. Much later, eleven years after Giovanni had been fatally wounded in battle, Aretino wrote to his friend’s son, Cosimo de’ Medici, the first Duke of Florence, that he had been Cosimo’s father’s other father, as well as his brother, friend and servant.
Aretino was already sizing up the potential as a patron of Leo’s cousin and most likely successor, the alarmingly virtuous and subtle Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. He composed unsolicited pasquinades supporting the candidature of Giulio and denouncing his rivals, one of whom was the dour Dutch cardinal Adrian Dedal. When Dedal was crowned pope instead of Giulio, the Scourge made off for Bologna, from where he continued his attacks on the killjoy pope. Giulio, as pope in waiting, was in a difficult position. Since he could scarcely afford to make an enemy either of the reigning pope or of his relentless tormentor, he did what he could to keep the loose cannon away from Rome. He persuaded Federico Gonzaga to entertain Aretino at his court in Mantua. When Aretino showed signs of boredom there, he suggested that he should join Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, who was then encamped at Reggio.
Adrian died in September 1523, and when Giulio de’ Medici succeeded him in November as Pope Clement VII, nothing could keep Aretino away from Rome, where, however, he made the mistake of alienating the powerful Gianmatteo Giberti, the officer charged with dating and registering all documents issued by the pope. His second miscalculation was a bit of mischief inspired by some sketches tossed off by his old friend Giulio Romano, who was in Rome at that time finishing frescos started by the late Raphael. The sketches, as Vasari described them, illustrated ‘the various attitudes and postures in which lewd men have intercourse with lewd women’. I Modi (The Positions), were engraved by another of Aretino’s friends, Marcantonio Raimondi, causing the outraged Clement to throw him into prison and to order that all impressions be destroyed. Aretino intervened successfully with the pope on Marcantonio’s behalf, but couldn’t resist circulating in manuscript sixteen sonnets to accompany a copy of the engravings.4 Many years later he justified his pornographic work in a letter to a friend, a Brescian physician, condemning hypocritical censorship, which ‘forbids the eyes to see the very things which most delight them’.
What evil is there in seeing a man possess a woman? … It is the very source from which gush forth rivers of people … the Sansovinos, the Titians, the Michelangelos and after them the popes, the emperors, and the kings. It has begotten the loveliest of children, the most beautiful of women, and the holiest of saints …
Aretino had gambled that the Church would object less to his texts than to the engravings, which were objectionable because they showed sexual acts considered less likely to produce children than the missionary position. Nevertheless his sonnets gave Giberti exactly the excuse he needed to demand that Clement have Aretino imprisoned or executed as a corrupting influence. Pietro fled home to Arezzo before accepting an invitation from Giovanni dalle Bande Nere to join him at Fano on the Adriatic, where the soldier was engaged in some piracy in order to pay his debts. The two friends galloped north to meet Francis I, who was encamped near Milan. The Most Christian King of France was enchanted by the witty writer’s personal charm. Aretino used Francis’s favourable opinion of him as a passport to re-enter Rome, where the chameleon pope and Giberti were at that time backing the French presence in Italy. Two sycophantic odes in praise of Pope Clement and another dedicated to Giberti, and by the end of November 1524 Aretino was lording it once again in the Holy City, where Clement made him a Knight of Rhodes and awarded him a fixed pension.
Aretino/Pasquino resumed his attacks on Giberti. And this time he paid the price. In the early hours of the morning of 28 July 1525, while riding home from a late party, Aretino felt the full force of Giberti’s anger when a masked man seized the bridle of his horse, stabbed him twice in the chest and severed two fingers of his right hand. He only just survived. Having quickly learned how to write with two fingers and a thumb, he left Rome for the safety of Federico Gonzaga’s court at Mantua, where he spent a dull winter relieved only by the presence of Giulio Romano, who was working with assistants on the frescos for the marquis’s Palazzo Tè.
In the summer he escaped the boredom of the court to the camp of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, who was commanding a large contingent of papal and French forces in Lombardy. By the autumn, when Giovanni had not been paid by either the pope or the French king, he considered joining the imperial ranks. Aretino persuaded him to stay loyal to the pope, but soon had reason to regret his advice. In November 1526 when Giovanni was fighting at Governolo, thirteen kilometres south-east of Mantua, to prevent the advance on Rome of the emperor’s landsknechts, Aretino was with him when Giovanni’s right thigh was broken by a cannon ball fired by Alfonso d’Este’s pro-imperial army. On Aretino’s insistence, Giovanni was carried through a blinding snowstorm to Ma
ntua where he died in the night of 30 November. Three weeks later Aretino wrote to Giovanni’s treasurer in Florence a long account of the last hours of the beloved friend who had been the light and purpose of his life. The letter is so moving in its sincerity and profound grief that even Aretino’s fiercest critics must admit that it goes some way towards redeeming his reputation as a self-serving cynic. When the doctors advised amputation, Aretino reminded his friend that ‘wounds and loss of limbs are the collars and the medals of those who serve Mars’.
‘Let it be done,’ he answered me.
At this the doctors came in, and, praising the fortitude of his decision, gave him some medicine and went to prepare their instruments. At suppertime he began to vomit, and he said to me, ‘This was the omen that warned Caesar. I must now think of other things than life.’ … But when the time was come and the surgeons came in with their instruments they asked for eight or ten strong assistants to hold him down during the terrible sawing. ‘Not even twenty could hold me,’ he said, smiling. Then he sat up and with a perfectly calm face he took the candle in his hand to give light to the doctors. I rushed out of the room and put my fingers to my ears …
Aretino, Federico Gonzaga and Federico’s brother-in-law the Duke of Urbino did what they could to comfort the great commander. In the evening Federico came to his bedside, kissed him and begged him to ask one favour. ‘Giovanni said, “Love me when I am dead.”’ The marquis replied: ‘That heroism by which you have gained such glory will make you not merely loved but adored by myself as by all others.’ Aretino concluded his tribute with an attack on the pope, whose irresolution and inadequate military support in the face of the imperial and Lutheran advance had allowed a heroic commander gifted ‘with as much amplitude of soul as any man that ever lived’ to die like a common soldier.
In short, everyone envied him but no one could imitate him. I only wish I were lying when I say that Florence and Rome will soon find what it means not to have this man among the living. Yet I think I can already hear the cries of the pope who thinks he has won by losing him.
After Giovanni’s death Aretino stayed on at the Gonzaga court, entertaining himself and his host by drafting a performance version of his first comedy, entitled Il Marescalco (The Stablemaster), about a homosexual stablemaster who takes a wife after being tricked into believing that his marriage will please the Duke of Mantua. (In the version written between 1527 and 1530 he took the opportunity, as he often did, to praise his favourite artists: ‘Titian, the only rival of nature; Sansovino, the half of a new Michelangelo, and Sebastiano, more than divine’.) While in Mantua he could not resist relieving his feelings of grief with further rages against the pope. He called Clement ‘a sorrier wretch than Adrian’, and twisted the knife by predicting, in his prognosis for the year 1527, entitled ‘The Prophecy of Messer Pasquino, the Fifth Evangelist’, the disaster that the emperor’s mercenary soldiers would shortly inflict on the Holy City. The Mantuan ambassador in Rome wrote to Federico that he had been informed that a little book by Pietro Aretino that had just appeared in Rome was full of slander about the pope, the cardinals and the other prelates of the pope’s court.
It is dedicated to Your Lordship, and has caused much scandal here. It is thought strange that in view of your relations with the Pope and his cardinals as a Captain General of the Church you should allow such a book to be published in Mantua under your auspices and name …
The marquis was strongly advised to dismiss the Aretine from his court, or, in case the pope did not consider dismissal punishment enough, to prepare to arrange for the slanderer’s assassination. Federico had no intention of murdering a guest who amused him and who had promised to glorify his reign with an epic poem, to be entitled Marfisa, which was to be based on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. But he was frightened by his ambassador’s communication. (He had also been put off, as a robust heterosexual, by a crush Aretino had developed on a young man at court called Bianchino, and had turned down a request to plead with the boy on the writer’s behalf.) Aretino, who could also wear a moralist’s hat when it suited his mood, shared the widespread disapproval of Federico’s depravity, his frivolous, self-pampering way of life, his womanizing and his open adulterous passion for Isabella Boschetti. While Giovanni dalle Bande Nere had been courting death fighting for the pope, the captain of the pope’s Church had made excuses to stay at home pleading illness (he did in fact suffer periodically from retention of urine) while enlarging his collection of prize breeds of horses, dogs, falcons and rare animals, dining on the most refined dishes, surrounding himself with every luxury, and offering his sword as Aretino put it, ‘to the temple of Venus’. They parted amicably enough nevertheless.
The Sack of Rome, although he genuinely regretted it, had enhanced Aretino’s reputation in Venice. He had seen it coming; and the pope, who had not, was a changed man. While in captivity Clement covered his handsome jaw line with the long beard that he wore as a sign of mourning for the rest of his life. He let it be known that he wished he had taken the Oracle’s advice. The emperor, for his part, inevitably regretted the devastation wreaked by his armies on the Holy City. Aretino lost no time before taking advantage of their penitential mood. Only weeks after the Sack, when Clement was still in prison, he addressed from Venice two astoundingly self-important open letters, the first to the emperor, the second to the pope. He advised the emperor to release the pope, to show clemency without which ‘fame has no wing … But who would not set his hopes upon the excellent, courteous and religious majesty of Charles V? He is ever Caesar and ever august.’ This was followed by a lecture in writing delivered to the imprisoned Clement, who should turn to Jesus in his prayers and not blame his situation on Fate. Since it was God’s will that had delivered him into Caesar’s hands His Holiness must think only of forgiveness, not of revenge. The emperor was the cornerstone of the Church, just as Clement was its father, and it was now up to the pope to make the peace.
If either ruler had taken his advice the course of events over the subsequent years would have been very different, and he might have been rewarded with a papal benefice, or even the cardinal’s hat that he had his eye on, preposterous though it may seem, then and for years to come. But both emperor and pope ignored his pompous advice, and the doge soon insisted that Aretino should change his tune with the Vicar of Christ, whom Venice needed as a friend. Aretino duly lavished panegyrics on Clement, and by May 1530 had persuaded him that he was a reformed sinner who would from then on be ‘the good servant I was when my talents, nourished by your appreciation, took up arms against all Rome during the vacancy of the throne of Leo’. Clement sent him a gold collar and granted him copyright for his epic poem Marfisa throughout the Papal States.
In the next few years Aretino attached himself to the circle of scholars and artists around the French ambassador in Venice, while issuing praises of the French king, a campaign of flattery that had the advantage of being in line with Andrea Gritti’s Francophilia. But when Francis’s promises of a reward came to nothing Aretino warned him that the furnaces of Murano burning in his honour would grow cold unless he kept his word. At last, in November 1533, the king sent him a gold chain weighing five pounds5 and worth 600 scudi. It was hung with enamelled gold pendants in the form of vermilion tongues inscribed in white lettering with the words ‘LINGVA EIVS LOQVETVR MENDACIVM’ (His tongue shall speak a lie).6 Aretino’s acknowledgement of the magnificent gift with its ambivalent message was a characteristic mixture of servility, ingratitude and veiled threat.
Unfortunately, your gifts arrive so late that they are as useful as food is to a man who hasn’t eaten for three days: by then he is so frightened that the very smell of the food he cannot taste either kills him or makes him dangerously ill. By God, a lie is as much at home on my tongue as is truth on the tongue of a priest! … If I say that you possess all the rare virtues, fortitude, justice, clemency, gravity, magnanimity, and knowledge, am I a liar?7
The king ignored him, and Aretino anno
unced his intention to move to Constantinople, ‘in his miserable old age to seek his bread in Turkey, leaving behind among our holy Christians all the pimps, the flatterers and the hermaphrodites …’,8 where he would ‘preach the charity of Christian princes … who constrain poor men of merit to go to Turkey where they will find more courtesy and more piety than they find cruelty and asininity here. Thus the Aretinos of this world are forced to worship pashas and janissaries …’9 But of course he couldn’t tear himself away from the lagoon city, the centre of his world and the best vantage point from which to monitor events unfolding in Europe and decide how they could be turned to the advantage of Venice and himself.
Having convinced Andrea Gritti of his value to the Republic, he never failed in his allegiance to the doge he called his ‘father’. Given the formal protection of the government, he had no difficulty in reconciling his own interests with those of the Republic; and he dedicated much of his vast literary output and his unparalleled skills as a propagandist to advertising the virtues of his adopted home and its superiority over the old Rome. Did he also act as a secret agent? If so, any written references to his role, if there were any, were destroyed, and he himself never mentioned in his letters his conversations with patricians in positions of power. But his immunity to charges of blasphemy, sodomy and failure to pay rent does at least suggest that his journalist’s nose for what was going on in Venice and abroad was of value to the state.
When Titian painted his first, now lost, portrait of Aretino shortly after his arrival in Venice, Aretino knew he had found the friendship that would fill the place in his heart previously occupied by Giovanni dalle Bande Nere. ‘Titian’, as he put it later, ‘is I and I am Titian. Titian is another myself.’ The painter shared a number of qualities with the heroic soldier: courage, an exceptional mind intensely focused on his particular vocation, and a fiercely independent spirit. Like Giovanni, Titian was a mercenary who would serve the highest bidder without sacrificing his professional integrity. Like Giovanni he had a sense of humour but no head for literature and was therefore all the more impressed by his new friend’s wit and talent for verbal spin. Titian and Aretino, furthermore, were both self-made men, groundbreaking originals, and foreigners in a Venice that stimulated and freed their artistic sensibilities and where they preferred to live and work away from the courts on which they nevertheless depended for the lavish way of life they both enjoyed. This is not to say that they were not useful to one another. Aretino, who was aware of a shift of taste in the courts from literature to art, used his friendship with Titian and Sansovino to protect and enhance his reputation. Titian without Aretino might not have had access to the great courts of Europe for which he would paint some of his masterpieces. Their relationship was not without an element of mostly playful competition: Aretino liked to insist that while painting and sculpture represent appearances, it is only writing that can penetrate the minds and souls of men. But Titian was grateful to find an ally, however vulgar and ridiculously egomaniacal, who saw straight into the soul of his painting, and could talk and write about it with an understanding unfettered by sterile theory or scholarly pretensions. Art criticism, before Aretino wrote about it in the vernacular with his heart as well as his head, was written by painters or in Latin, and was therefore accessible to very few people. Titian, however, was bound to be affected by his friend’s sensitive eye and passion for painting, and some of his later religious paintings are so close to the religious works which Aretino began writing in the 1530s that the resemblance cannot be accidental. And Aretino, despite his theories about the superiority of writing, his scene painting, his forte as a writer, often seems to reflect Titian’s way of looking at the world: ‘Messer Titian’s paintbrush is my pen.’10
