2
The year 1492 is seen in European history as an axis around which the ages turn; in reality, it was perhaps a moment where symbolic events came to stand in for the culmination of some long-developing, grand historical processes, and the beginning of new cycles. In Spain, the year started with the defeat of Muhammad XII, the emir of Granada, marking the end of eight hundred years of Muslim rule in Spain following a campaign of ‘Reconquista’, or reconquest, that had lasted just as long. The two victorious Catholic kingdoms, Castile and Aragon, united to become Spain through the marriage of their rulers, Isabella I and Ferdinand II respectively, who subsequently expelled all of Spain’s Jews. Within a month, the ‘Catholic Monarchs’ had met with Christopher Columbus to finalise their support for his attempt to reach Asia by travelling west across the Atlantic Ocean, and by the end of the year he had landed in modern-day Cuba, bringing with him the full terror of the colonial project that was to unfold.
For many, it is seen as the year which birthed the modern world. That year, on Good Friday, the holiest day of the Christian calendar, was born one of the most profane gays in history: Pietro Aretino. Aretino would be remembered across Europe for centuries to come as a transgressive writer and sodomite who so revelled in sin that his very name because synonymous with good fucking. For our purposes, however, his life and work is also symbolic of a shift between a mediaeval and a modern way of looking at, talking about, and writing about sex.
Despite arriving on Good Friday, his early years were hardly auspicious. It is thought he was the son of a shoemaker called Luca Buta in Arezzo, a town south of Florence in Tuscany, Italy. His mother was Tita Bonci, a courtesan.1 Their relationship, if they ever had one, certainly did not last long. His father left for a career in the military, and young Pietro abandoned his father’s surname, choosing to be known instead by the demonym of his town, ‘Aretino’. He remained estranged from his father for his whole life, but his mother’s work was to become an obsession for him in his writing, and in later life he had a portrait of her commissioned, which an adversary suggested was not his mother, but the Virgin Mary, such was the depth of his blasphemy.2
He did not stick around in Arezzo for long. In his late teens he left the city in a hurry, having written a poem that was deemed offensive to the Church. So began a career of pissing off all the right people at just the right time, because in Perugia he found a city that he loved, that he regarded as ‘my true fatherland because there I grew to manhood’, and a new role, training to become a painter.3 Painting was to become a passion, although there is little evidence he excelled in it. For the remainder of his life, however, he loved the company of other artists.
Attitudes towards sodomy varied across the Italian states. The governing body of Venice had, at the start of the fifteenth century, established a Collegium sodomitarum for the purposes of investigating sodomy in the city, resulting in hundreds of public burnings in the Piazzetta San Marco.4 However, Florence, under the control of the Medici family (to whom Aretino became closely tied), chose to monetize sodomy on a large scale. Christopher Chitty describes this regime as a ‘persecution of sodomy [that] represented more of a tax or rent collected from its population than a rabid moral campaign of repression and punishment’. This increased informing and prosecution, given that there was a general understanding that the accused would be fined but not put to death, as the public felt that informing on homosexual behaviour was a simpler, less serious process.
Florence’s extensive records suggest that sodomy was widespread, helping to ‘secure business deals and patronages’ among rich men and ‘as a way to form friendships and political affinity groups’ among poorer, politically disenfranchised labourers, and the ability to regulate this behaviour (especially cross-class social contact) and monitor it was more politically useful than to stamp it out.5 Chitty also suggests that one reason for this relatively tolerant position within a continental practice of execution was that the Medicis’ hold on power relied upon a high degree of popular consent in a city where sodomy was a regulated civic norm: ‘too many convictions, seemingly disproportionate convictions of poor rather than rich men, and punishments that might be perceived as excessive threatened to turn the lower strata of the city against the regime’.6
The Florentine experience of sodomy as part of the functioning social system and the rise of both cultures of sodomy and its persecution in the early modern world suggest, in Chitty’s reading, an intimate relationship between homosexual sex, class struggle, and the development of capitalism. It also puts paid to many contemporary liberal readings of the persecution of sodomy and homosexuality as some kind of primitive urge that exists in superstitious societies or ‘lower classes’, with the idea that we are progressing in a straight line through education towards tolerance. Such an understanding of changing attitudes towards homosexual behaviour, Chitty states, tends
to assume that antihomosexual sentiment is a sort of timeless ideology given vent by social crisis. Tolerance gets negatively conceived as the absence of homophobia; however, the very publicness of cultures of sodomy suggests that something more than the absence of fear and panic allowed such cultures to flourish, something positive or constitutive, perhaps solidarity with sexual outlaws, or opposition to the dominant culture.7
A Florentine Renaissance culture where sodomy, encouraged by a rediscovery of earlier Mediterranean homosexual cultures such as the Romans and Greeks, was widespread is a useful tool for us to challenge a popular reading of gay history that sees four thousand years of repression flower into a late twentieth-century golden age of tolerance, largely thanks to Western democracy. The value of your freedom may go down as well as up. It’s also useful to help us understand the huge popular acclaim that Aretino garnered in his lifetime, for nothing could describe him better than the phrase ‘sexual outlaw in opposition to the dominant culture’, and the ordinary people loved him for it.
It was in Perugia, and barely out of his teens, that Aretino published his first collection of poetry, Opera nova, in 1512, demonstrating the key talent of the satirist: the ability to ape the styles of others, to inhabit their words with his own mischievous ideas.8 Emulating the lyrical mode of writers like Pietro Bembo and Plutarch, Opera nova was a form of courtly lyric that, presumably, Aretino hoped would open doors to the social circles of the powerful. He soon had the opportunity to try that out as at twenty-four he left the city under a cloud, due to ‘an alteration made by him in a picture on a sacred subject’,9 allegedly painting a lute into the hands of a supplicating Mary Magdalene in a painting in a public building.10
He headed for Rome, where he took a position in the household of Agostino Chigi, a banker from a prestigious Sienese family. It was quite the city for a young satirist to find himself in. Only three years before, Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici had been elected pope in the Papal Conclave of 1513. The second son of the immensely powerful Florentine banker Lorenzo the Magnificent who had ruled that city, Giovanni, now using the papal name Leo X, had lived through the revolutionary tumult that had overturned Florence during the ascendancy of the hell-fire prophet and reformer Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola was a preacher who saw in Florence a pit of sodomy, fornication, and sin. Firing the people of Florence up with his promises of divine retribution, he began a series of ‘bonfires of the vanities’, burning anything regarded as idolatrous, extravagant, or immodest in order to purify the populace. After Lorenzo died and Florence’s old enemy, Charles VII of France, crossed the Alps into Italy, Savonarola took the opportunity to finish the cleansing, overthrowing Giovanni’s elder brother, Piero ‘the Unfortunate’.
When Piero and Giovanni were forced from the city, Savonarola declared Christ the King of Florence, and continued his campaign to purge the city of vice and tyranny. However, Giovanni, who swiftly became a cardinal, had his revenge. In 1497 Savonarola was excommunicated, and the following year, as popular opinion turned against him and his moral reforms, he was added to the bonfire himself. In 1512, Giovanni recaptured the city with papal soldiers, returning the Medicis to power.
When Giovanni was elected pope the following year, his rule in Rome and, by proxy, in Florence, could not have been more different. Where Savonarola burnt art, Pope Leo commissioned it, and on a vast scale. He spent huge amounts of money on goldsmiths and musicians, he enjoyed ‘buffoons’, hunting, and parties, and, most differently to Savonarola, it seems likely he practised sodomy himself.11 He also pushed ahead with work on the great new basilica for the Vatican, St Peter’s, under its new architect, Raphael; to fund work, he authorised the sales of even more ‘indulgences’, a sort of ‘get out of purgatory free’ card that the wealthy could buy to smooth over their entry to heaven. It was Leo’s indulgences that pushed Martin Luther over the edge, and led to him nailing his ‘95 Theses’ to the church door in Wittenberg, leading to a Reformation that, unlike earlier attempts at ‘purifying’ the Church, actually stuck. For Luther, it wasn’t just the indulgences; it was also the man-on-man action that symbolised the collapse of the Roman Church’s authority. In 1531 Luther would write of a papal decree or ‘bull’:
More remarkable yet, in the same bull they decided that a cardinal should not keep as many boys in the future. However, Pope Leo commanded that this be deleted; otherwise it would have been spread throughout the whole world how openly and shamelessly the pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy. I do not wish to mention the pope, but since the knaves will not repent, but condemn the gospel, blaspheme and revile God’s word, and excuse their vices, they, in turn, will have to take a whiff of their own terrible filth. This vice is so prevalent among them that recently a pope caused his own death by means of this sin and vice. In fact, he died on the spot.12
We cannot know how much Luther understood about the mechanisms of anal, but it seems unlikely that Pope Leo X (to whom he’s referring here) was, indeed, fucked to death. Still, it paints a vivid picture of Rome and the Church during Leo’s papal rule, and the objections to it. What better place for Aretino to make his mark!
The debauched city, with its courtly intrigue, was the sort of hothouse in which Aretino thrived. He began to write a series of pasquinades. The ‘Pasquino’ is a battered old classical statue that was dug up in the fifteenth century and sits on a street corner near the Pantheon. It became a tradition for people to post short poems and skits on the statue, satirical and political in nature, opposing injustices and corruption, especially within the Church. A pasquinade follows this model, and Aretino revelled in the form.
Following the humanist poets of the Renaissance, who looked back to classical antiquity for models of purity, much poetry of Aretino’s time was formal, and elevated in tone. Aretino bucked this trend, adopting an earthy language of the street, a vernacular for ordinary folk that emulated the jokes and smut that resounded around the taverns and brothels of Rome.13 His wit was rapier-sharp, and he took no prisoners in his attacks on the rich and powerful. It should be no surprise to us to learn that, in contrast to the humanists’ high ideals, this bawdy gutter tongue was wildly popular amongst working people. In his hands, he grasped control of the form, so much so that, across Europe, Aretino was Pasquino.14 The use of this vernacular form suited his interests; he wrote opportunistically, as a good satirist should, on the exciting news of the moment. Therein lay an irony: it was because of this quick, accessible skill that Aretino was so popular in his life, but that same thing dated him once the context of the contemporary became history.
One of his most famous alleged satires was published in 1516, on the death of Pope Leo’s beloved elephant, Hanno, a gift from the king of Portugal. The pope was so upset, he commissioned no less than Raphael himself to paint Hanno’s portrait in fresco, but did not commission Aretino’s (anonymously published) pasquinade, which took the form of a ‘Last Will and Testament’ dictated by Hanno himself. In it ‘Hanno’ donates parts of his bodies to various cardinals and priests, including his cock to one Cardinal di Grassi, well known for fathering illegitimate children, ‘so that he can become more active in the incarnation of bastards’, and his bollocks ‘to the Most Reverend Cardinal of Senegaia so that he will become more fruitful in progeny, and in the more merry procreation of the Antichrist with the Reverend Julia of the nuns of Saint Catherine of Senegaia’.15 It was a riotous success, even to the mourning pope; and as a result, Aretino’s career began, as he was commissioned to write for Roman aristocrats who were motivated partly by amusement and partly by the fear they might end up on the wrong side of his pen.
Yet life was always a risk for Pietro; soon Leo X followed his beloved elephant to the grave, dying of pneumonia (rather than, as Luther claimed, being fucked to death). A new papal conclave began, and the city was thrilled by the high gossip of the event. Aretino was put on the payroll by one Giulio de’ Medici, cousin of the late pope, who himself wanted the top spot. Not only was that a smart decision by de’ Medici, it was also a smart decision by Aretino: his man garnered the most support within the conclave. Having his patron become pope would secure his position within the city, and so Aretino set to work in perhaps his most energetic creative burst to date, producing scores of poems daily that lampooned and libelled Giulio de’ Medici’s competitors.
The plan backfired when de’ Medici fluffed his political manoeuvrings, resulting in the election of the dour Dutchman Adriaan Florensz Boeyens as Pope Adrian VI. The dusty Adrian, unlike his fun-loving predecessor, did not see the funny side of Aretino’s attacks, demanding the Pasquino statue be hurled into the Tiber when he arrived in the city in August of 1522. Aretino fled the city and returned to Florence, but having so angered Pope Adrian, he brought an unwelcome heat to the Medicis’ city, and the pope was demanding they turn him over.16
They sent him away, but only to live with a cousin from a secondary branch of the family, Lodovico de’ Medici, better known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere. Giovanni was a ruthless man of vicious and unsuppressed appetites, and so inevitably they became firm friends. His new best friend was a condottiero, a captain of a group of mercenaries known as the Bande Nere, after their habit of dressing in black to mourn the passing of Pope Leo X. As a thirteen-year-old, Giovanni had been exiled from the city by the post-Savonarola regime for having been the accomplice in the rape of a sixteen-year-old boy, and for accidentally killing another child.17 He was a teenager when he first went to war, and still in his early twenties when Aretino befriended him a decade later, but with a reputation for being an audacious adventurer. Aretino was also gaining a reputation: for his ability to blackmail and extort the wealthy nobles who lived in fear of his pen, he became known as ‘the scourge of princes’.
Yet Adrian’s dreary rule was not to last.18 The following year, in April, he suppressed the Pasquino’s feast day, but by September he was dead; by November Giulio de’ Medici had been elected as Pope Clement VII, and Aretino could return to the Holy City.19
Presumably feeling reasonably secure with his old patron on the papal throne, he took up a new writing project: I Modi, or The Ways. The work was a collaborative one. Alongside erotic illustrations by the engraver Marcantonio Raimondo, Aretino wrote short, bawdy captions.
Like the Renaissance humanists who looked back to the classical world for inspiration, Raimondi and Aretino depicted scenes of mythical Roman and Greek figures: unlike the Renaissance humourists, though, their depictions came complete with engorged penises, women playing with their genitals, and sex acts in various positions (hence the title, The Ways). Aretino’s sonnets place the asshole, rather than the cunt, as the site of primary pleasure for the participants, with one woman proclaiming in Sonnet 8, ‘If I were a man, I wouldn’t want cunt.’ It is this morphing between male and female, according to academic Keir Elam, that ‘transforms the aggressive heterosexuality of the images into a primarily homoerotic literary event’.20 To translate that into the vernacular which Aretino might have used, we could instead think of him as an ass-man rather than a tits man. Again we see that it is the nature of the sexual act, and not the gender of the lovers, that was at the heart of understanding sexuality.
The erotic drawings were presumably for a private collection. It was not uncommon for nobles to have such ‘erotic art’ for their own private wank-bank, but Raimondi and Aretino’s contribution had significant impact. It is one thing for the cultured elites to stroke one out to high art; quite another to reproduce such images for the ordinary person in mass-produced prints, and these ‘postures’ were seen as little more than a manual for sex. A former friend turned bitter rival, Cardinal Gian Matteo Giberti, brought an accusation of obscenity against Aretino for his set of pornographic sonnets. Raimondi was thrown into jail and Aretino again had to scuttle out of the city.
He refused to apologise for his work, and it’s in this mode that we see Aretino at his best, a sexual libertine who was in a state of permanent revolt against the sexual moralism of Church and society, which he saw as little more than rank hypocrisy and prudishness. He wrote:
I amused myself by writing the sonnets that are seen beneath the figures, the wanton memory of which I dedicate by leave to the hypocrites, out of patience with their villainous judgment and with the hoggish custom that forbids the eyes what most delights them. What evil is there in seeing a man possess a woman? Why, the beasts would be more free than we! It seems to me that that which is given us by nature for our own preservation ought to be worn round the neck as a pendant and in the hat for a medal.21
A hoggish custom indeed. He returned to the service of his friend Giovanni delle Bande Nere for a while, with whom he had stayed in contact by letter. In fact that very year he’d complained to Giovanni that a terrible fate had befallen him: he had fallen for a woman. He told Giovanni that he should not worry, of course, for ‘we all return to the ancient great mother, and if I escape with my honour from this madness, will bugger as much as much and as much for me as for my friends’. The sentiment is hardly out of character for a man who described himself as ‘a sodomite from birth’.22
He also visited his friend the Duke of Mantua, a trusted business adviser who also helped arrange his love life, procuring young men for him in a series of letters in which the Duke apologised for not knowing the particular ‘kept boy’ that Pietro was after.23 It was in Mantua that Aretino wished to enter court life, and indeed the dynamics of the Duke’s house provided fruitful pickings for his work long after he left, in plays such as La Cortigiana (The Courtesan), La Ipocrita (The Hypocrite), and especially Il Marescalco (The Stableman), in which the Duke of Mantua forces his stablemaster to marry, much to his dismay. The play depicts the homosocial world in which Aretino lived, with the poor, put-upon bride-to-be cast in misogynistic tones. Yet the story has a happy ending when it is revealed that the wedding is a practical joke, and his new ‘wife’ is a page boy, Carlo da Fano. The stablemaster’s relief is palpable: ‘Well doesn’t it seem better to you, that I see you laughing at a lie, than that you see me crying at the truth?’24
Yet Aretino never settled at the court. He was again in Rome in July of 1525, and again writing his pasquinades, when Cardinal Giberti attempted his final revenge, sending an assassin who stabbed Aretino five times, damaging his hand, a wound from which he never recovered. That was enough for him, and he left Rome for good. The following year we find him again with his friend’s band of mercenaries, the Bande Nere, who were busy fighting in the War of the League of Cognac, where the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of the House of Habsburg was fighting an alliance of the pope and Francis I, King of France, to drive Charles V from the Italian states.
It was during a battle at the end of 1526 that Giovanni was shot by a small cannon. Aretino was there for the gruesome amputation that followed, writing that when the doctor called for eight or ten men to hold Giovanni down during the procedure to saw through his leg, the man proclaimed, ‘Not even twenty would hold me.’ He bravely bore the operation, even declaring upon its completion, ‘I am healed,’ but it was not to be, and he died shortly after in Aretino’s arms.25
With his closest friend dead, finding himself out of favour with the Duke of Mantua, and in fear of his life in Rome, Aretino fled again, this time to Venice. In this most anti-papal of Italian states, rich in commercial wealth and welcoming to artists, he finally found a place to thrive without (much) fear.
Here, he was at the height of his powers as a satirist and libeller. His pen was now so feared that he commanded great respect not just from the ordinary citizens who read his work, but from the most powerful men in the world. Europe at the time was riven by the feud between Francis I, the King of France, and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. With this crown, plus the crown of Spain, and dominion over the Netherlands and much of Italy, Charles V encircled Francis, who, like many European monarchs, feared the domination of the Habsburg ruler.
Their rivalry was also fiercely personal: a number of times Francis even challenged him to have it out, mano a mano. It was perhaps inevitable that both men would either seek out the help of ‘the Divine Aretino’, or otherwise become his victim. At one point, according to the historian Jacob Burckhardt, ‘Charles V and Francis I both pensioned him at the same time, each hoping that Aretino would do some mischief to the other.’26 This practice, seemingly devoid of any genuine personal commitment to the politics of the day, was incredibly lucrative, although he could spend it as fast as he earned it. He even took money from Cosimo de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence and the son of his late friend Giovanni delle Bande Nere (remember that Giovanni’s real name was Lodovico de’ Medici), who sent him rolls of cash that had been perfumed.
At the same time, it was an understandably risky affair; as with modern columnists, it was easy to make powerful enemies. Yet Aretino was incredibly skilful as a politician acting for the party of himself. A testament to this is that, after only a few years in Venice, the Doge of the Venetian Republic, Andrea Gritti, intervened with the pope on Aretino’s behalf. It was a significant milestone for Aretino, and seemingly guaranteed him the support and protection of the republic in which he was to make his home.27 He wrote in praise to the doge, ‘I, who have stricken terror into kings … give myself to you, fathers of your people.’28
Flattery, Aretino knew, gets you everywhere, and in this case, a pension to live there with.
The doge’s support is highly symbolic. It shows that Aretino now enjoyed something more than simply the favour of the powerful, but rather power himself, not through the wealth, titles, or armies that the princes enjoyed, but through the power of his pen. He enjoyed so much public support, he was what might today be called an opinion-maker. All this was possible thanks to the technological innovation of the printing press and the publishing industry. It is this new method of communication of which he was the master, and which ironically was both the cause and solution to so many of his problems: the cause, because while obscene literature previously existed within the ranks of the nobility, publishing allowed Aretino to circulate his writings much more widely, raising the fears of popes and princes; and the solution, because the mass appeal of his work protected him.
It is not too far a stretch to situate Aretino in the same dynamic as Martin Luther, whose success lay not just in the message, but in the skilful way it was disseminated. Both used the printed word to build a base of immense power, understanding literature not simply in the relationship between a text and a reader, but within a wider framework as a commercial venture. Increasing the scale of the dissemination of texts, something that had become easier as the printing press slashed the cost and speed of accessing the written word, meant Aretino could write on the pressing issues of the day and circulate the ideas widely and quickly. He also published well-received collections of his witty letters, and, realising they were what sustained his fame and therefore his power, waived his royalties so that they could be sold cheaper, to more people.29 Aretino’s biographer claimed this made him ‘the founder of the European Press’, but his interests, as we have seen, lay not just with the politics of the day, but with a more earthy discussion that would see his poems and satires flying from the stands: sex.30
Settled in Venice, Aretino began work on a set of writings that became one of his best-known pieces, The Ragionamenti. Composed of two separate pieces of prose writings, The Ragionamenti take the form of a dialogue. They’re meant to parody, to an extent, the hugely popular dialogues of the Renaissance that are modelled on the classical Socratic dialogue, with the main character Nanna, an aging Roman courtesan, discussing three social roles for women with her daughter Pippa, and with her confidante, Antonia. Over the course of three days she explains the paths and opportunities her daughter might enjoy in life.
On day one, she tells of Pippa’s possible life as a young nun in a sex-obsessed convent, and the corruption of a church where cardinals fuck nuns in orgiastic gatherings. On the second day, she describes the life of a married woman, too dull to contemplate for a woman with any passion, and on the third, the life of a courtesan and sex worker, which offers freedom and empowerment compared to the previous two. This, she suggests, is a good life for her daughter,31 and unlike nuns and wives, courtesans are the only ones to stay true to their vows.32
It goes without saying that Aretino’s vision of the life of women is a thoroughly male one, processed through the eyes of a misogynistic culture. Yet the work is also a sharp deviation from the traditional representations of women within Renaissance culture; as with all his work, he consistently returns the tropes and characters of his work from an idealised, humanistic perspective to an earthy, realistic vernacular. As Nanna says, ‘Speak plainly and say “fuck”, “prick”, “cunt”, and “ass” if you want anyone except the scholars at the University of Rome to understand you.’33 His world is a gritty and material one, where people must do what they will to survive, and where others are as much a vehicle for realising your own needs and wants as they are sources of potential human connection.34
It is not hard to see how the talented and puckish son of a humble shoemaker who has talked his way into royal courts, has been stabbed by the assassins of cardinals, has infuriated popes and sweet-talked emperors and finally done good with his own palazzo in Venice, teeming with ducats, might have landed upon such a philosophy. His belief was that the flattery of courtesans and the willingness of sex workers to impress kindness in the service of their own income was a worthy model of, and for, literature.
Finally he was happy, living just off the Grand Canal in a large house called ‘Casa dell’Aretino’ in which he could entertain his friends, especially his closest friend, the painter Titian, who painted his portrait many times.35 Tintoretto decorated his ceiling personally, while he bought work from other great painters of the age, like Sebastiano del Piombo and Giorgio Vasari. While he continued to draw fat pensions from across Europe, he was frequently short of cash, because amongst his many virtues he was generous to a fault, giving his money freely to the poor. His big house was full of young women in need, often single mothers or women needing refuge – at one point twenty-two lived with him.
He had relationships with women, including Caterina Sandella, whom he refused to marry, hating the institution, but with whom he had two daughters, Adria and Austria, upon whom he doted, calling Adria ‘the most engaging creature imaginable’, and saying that ‘Austria is as dear to me as life’.36 There was no need to legitimize their births, he said, for ‘they are legitimate in my heart’.37
Yet it seems the habit of sodomy was, indeed, lifelong. Towards the end of his life he was accused of blasphemy and sodomy by a Venetian nobleman, and was forced to flee again, briefly. But his friends persuaded authorities to drop the charges, and on his return the ordinary people of Venice gathered along the Grand Canal to cheer him. He also found favour again with the Church, being made a Knight of St Peter by Pope Julius III, but as ever, he was more concerned with the financial reward than the honour. ‘A knighthood without revenue’, he had written upon being offered a pension-free bauble from Francis I, ‘is like a wall without Forbidden signs; everybody commits nuisances there.’38
A man of such generosity and earthly tastes was right to be concerned; in 1554 he was evicted from his Venice home after failing to pay rent.39 Although he became more religious towards the end of his life, writing a number of pious texts, his love of the rough, bawdy vernacular stayed with him to the last. According to popular tradition, in late October 1556, he was told a particularly dirty joke, of which his own sister was the punch-line. Finding it hilarious, he died laughing. From contemporary sources, it seems unlikely that this was the case, but for his death to be the subject of such a story suggests he was still held in high esteem amongst ordinary people.40
Aretino’s legacy is mixed. The tone of the coverage of his life, and especially his writings on sex, tends to fluctuate according to the morals of the age. The Victorian author William Roscoe, with the typical pearl-clutching prudishness of the age, called him ‘disgracefully notorious … unprincipled and licentious’ and said his writings displayed a ‘depravity of taste and morals’.41
Even his generous biographer Edward Hutton said the ‘man was a monster’, but a monster produced by an ‘evil’ that had swept through Europe during the later Renaissance.42 Upon his death, Aretino’s literary power withered, devoid of the lifeforce – Aretino himself – that had allowed it to thrive, metamorphosising with each change of political and social current. Three years after he died, all his books were added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Catholic Church’s list of banned books that emerged in response to both the Reformation and the rise of the printing press. He had a huge influence upon society and literature in the late Renaissance, bringing the vernacular and everyday into the political sphere and countering the refinement of the influence of Latin. Yet he was soon reviled in polite society as little more than a smut-peddler, precisely because his satires, so cutting and timely when written, dated when those circumstances changed.
Ironically, it was his erotic writings that guaranteed his longevity. His works were translated, including into English, and it’s certainly possible that both in terms of setting and formal innovations, Shakespeare may well have been influenced by them. Indeed, the only Renaissance artist to whom Shakespeare ever refers (in The Winter’s Tale) is Aretino’s erstwhile collaborator, Giulio Romano. Certainly, the English diarist Samuel Pepys, something of a connoisseur of filthy books, was more than aware of Aretino, claiming that King Charles II’s mistress, Barbara Palmer, knew ‘all the tricks of Aretin that are to be practised to give pleasure’ – a reference to The Ways, no doubt.43
But while history has deemed him a Bad Gay, perhaps history can also redeem him, for in his life we see a man who understood the hypocrisies of the powerful and pious, and used those hypocrisies against them to give himself the good life of friendship and partying he wanted. Surely that is why they hated him, and what might make him an unusual queer icon.