Background
Aretino was born in Arezzo, a Tuscan hill town, on Apr. 20, 1492. His parents were Luca, a shoemaker, and Tita, a beautiful plebeian.
playwright satirist writer poet
Aretino was born in Arezzo, a Tuscan hill town, on Apr. 20, 1492. His parents were Luca, a shoemaker, and Tita, a beautiful plebeian.
Pietro Aretino had little formal education, leaving home at 14 to become a vagabond, a street singer, a mule driver, a hangman's assistant, and perhaps a galley slave. He was an art student in Perugia, but was expelled for painting a lute in the hands of the Virgin Mary.
In 1516 Aretino went to Rome. There he was a servant in the household of banker Agostino Chigi. It was here that he wrote a witty, ribald satire, The Testament of the Elephant, which attracted the attention of its principal victim, Pope Leo X. Leo found a place for him in his court.
When Leo died in 1521, Aretino enlisted his vitriolic pen on behalf of Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later Pope Clement VII, by writing a series of sarcastic poems that were called pasquinades because they were hung on the statue of Pasquino near the Piazza Navona. He left Rome when Adrian VI was pope; returned after the election of Clement; but had to flee again when some flagrantly indecent sonnets gave his enemies the chance they were looking for. For the next few years he alternately served the Marquis of Mantua and the great Medici warrior, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, until Giovanni died in battle, and the Marquis complacently agreed to have Aretino murdered if Clement wished. In 1527 Aretino sought refuge in Venice, living there, with only two or three brief trips to the mainland, until he died.
At Venice, he reached his apogee of fame and fortune. He rented a palace on the Grand Canal and hung it with masterpieces by virtually every great artist of the day. He maintained a harem of lovely ladies known as the Aretines. He held a literary court of brawling secretaries, most of whom were minor writers. He became the friend and business manager of Titian. The latter painted many portraits of him, one of which now hangs in the Frick museum in New York. He also discovered that by having many benefactors he could dispense with subservience to one patron. By playing skillfully on princely desire for flattery and fear of abuse, he had earned ten thousand crowns by 1537. The Emperor Charles V was the most notable of those paying tribute to him.
At Venice he wrote and published most of his works. These included his later comedies (his best comedy, La Cortegiana, was published in 1521); his potboiler religious works; his unfinished epic, Marfisa; his vivid but pornographic Ragionamenti; and the six volumes of his letters.
His description of the death of Giovanni delle Bande Nere is excellent war correspondence. His attack on Francis I for his alliance with the Turks is a forthright political editorial. His advice to Michelangelo on how to paint The Last Judgment is perceptive art criticism.
Pietro Aretin's letters have contributed greatly to his present-day reputation for they anticipate almost every aspect of modern journalism.
His description of the death of Giovanni delle Bande Nere is excellent war correspondence.
His advice to Michelangelo on how to paint The Last Judgment is perceptive art criticism.
In 2007, the composer Michael Nyman set Aretino's Sonetti lussuriosi to music under the title 8 Lust Songs.
