Pietro Aretino (, ; 19 or 20 April 1492 – 21 October 1556) was an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer, who wielded influence on contemporary art and politics. He was one of the most influential writers of his time and an outspoken critic of the powerful. He gained prominence through his politically charged writings and biting satire, which targeted powerful figures, including monarchs and popes. His works spanned various genres, including poetry, drama, and religious commentary, but he is particularly noted for his lampoons and erotic literature. Owing to his communications and sympathies with religious reformers, he is considered to have been a Nicodemite Protestant.
Aretino was a good friend and publicist of the Venetian artist Titian, who painted his portrait three times. Aretino is also remembered for an exchange of letters he had with Michelangelo concerning the latter's fresco The Last Judgment.
Aretino was a key figure in 16th-century Italian cultural and literary circles, earning both admiration and condemnation for his fearless critique of authority. His relationship with leading artists and his role as an adviser to rulers cemented his reputation as a formidable intellectual and social commentator.
Life His father was Luca Del Tura, a shoemaker from Arezzo, in Tuscany, Italy, who abandoned his family to join the militia. The father later returned to Arezzo, finally dying in poverty at the age of 85, unforgiven by his son, who never acknowledged the paternal name, taking Aretino (meaning 'Arretine, from Arezzo') as a surname.
His mother was Margherita, known as Tita, Bonci. Either before or after the abandonment (it is not known which), she entered into a lasting relationship with a local noble, Luigi Bacci, who supported Tita, Pietro and his two sisters and brought up Pietro as part of his own family.
Aretino spent a formative decade in Perugia, before being sent, highly recommended, to Rome. There Agostino Chigi, the rich banker and patron of Raphael, took him under his wing.
When Hanno the elephant, pet of Pope Leo X, died in 1516, Aretino penned a satirical pamphlet entitled "The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno". The fictitious will cleverly mocked the leading political and religious figures of Rome at the time, including Pope Leo X himself. The pamphlet was such a success that it started Aretino's career and established him as a famous satirist, ultimately known as "the Scourge of Princes".
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 (Lust Sonnets) written to accompany Giulio Romano's exquisitely beautiful but utterly pornographic series of drawings engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi under the title finally caused such outrage that he had to temporarily flee Rome.
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 Dutch pope Adrian VI ( in Pietro's words) instead encouraged Aretino to seek new patrons away from Rome, mainly with Federico II Gonzaga in Mantua, and with the condottiero 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,A member "of Giberti's household, Achille della Volta, attacked Aretino in the street at two o'clock in the morning (1525), stabbed him twice in the chest, and so severely in the right hand that two fingers had to be cut off." Will Durant, The Renaissance: The Story of Civilization, vol. 5, ch. XXII (1953). 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, anti-Papal city of Italy, "seat of all vices", Aretino noted with gusto.
He was a lover of men, having declared himself "a sodomite" since birth. In a letter to Giovanni de' Medici written in 1524 Aretino enclosed a satirical poem saying that due to a sudden aberration he had "fallen in love with a female cook and temporarily switched from boys to girls...." (My Dear Boy).In Titian's Pietro Aretino (The Frick Collection, 2020, p. 27), Xavier Salomon writes that Aretino's "sexual excesses [were] directed in equal measure toward women and men.... The young targets of his interests became known as the 'Aretine' and the 'Aretini' (the Aretino girls and the Aretino boys)." In his comedy , the lead man is overjoyed to discover that the woman he has been forced to marry is really a page boy in disguise. While at court in Mantua he developed a crush on a young man called Bianchino, and annoyed Duke Federico with a request to plead with the boy on the writer's behalf.Sheila Hale, Titian: His Life (HarperCollins, 2012), p. 241.
Safe in Venice, Aretino became a blackmailer, extorting money from men who had sought his guidance in vice. He "kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege", in Jacob Burckhardt's estimation. Francis I of France and Charles V pensioned him at the same time, each hoping for some damage to the reputation of the other. "The rest of his relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar extortion", according to Burckhardt. Addison states that "he laid half Europe under contribution."
At one time, Aretino owned the painting by Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.Wisse, Jacob. "'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror': Parmigianino's Brilliantly Warped Perspective" The Wall Street Journal, 24 January 2025.
Aretino is said to have died of suffocation from "laughing too much".Waterfield, Gordon, ed. (1966). First Footsteps in East Africa. New York: Praeger Publishers, p. 59 footnote. The more likely truth may be that he died from a stroke or heart attack.Xavier Salomon, Titian's Pietro Aretino (2020), p. 58.
Writings
Apart from both sacred and profane texts – a satire of high-flown Renaissance Neoplatonic dialogues is set in a brothel – and comedies such as and , Aretino is remembered above all for his letters, full of literary flattery that could turn to blackmail. They circulated widely in manuscript and he collected them and published them at intervals winning as many enemies as it did fame, and earned him the dangerous nickname Ariosto gave him: ("scourge of princes"). In 1559, three years after Aretino's death, his entire oeuvre was listed in the papal Index of Prohibited Books.
is a parody of Castiglione's , and features the adventures of a Sienese gentleman, Messer Maco, who travels to Rome to become a cardinal. He would also like to win himself a mistress, but when he falls in love with a girl he sees in a window, he realizes that only as a courtier would he be able to win her. In mockery of Castiglione's advice on how to become the perfect courtier, a charlatan proceeds to teach Messer Maco how to behave as a courtier: he must learn how to deceive and flatter, and sit hours in front of the mirror.
Portrayals by artists
Aretino was a close friend of Titian's,"The relationship between the writer and the painter became particularly close over the almost thirty years Aretino spent in Venice." Xavier Salomon, Titian's Pietro Aretino (2020), p. 38. Aretino 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." Sheila Hale, Titian: His Life (2012), p. 229.Pietro Aretino, "Letters About Titian from the first, fourth, and fifth books of letters, 1538, 1548 and 1550", in Carlo Corsato, ed. (2019). Lives of Titian, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, pp. 113–144. Aretino "described and praised the painter [Titian] in numerous letters, which were published in book form and became sixteenth-century best-sellers." Gayford, Martin (2023). Venice: City of Pictures. London and New York: Thames & Hudson, p. 104. who painted his portrait three times: a 1527 portrait in the Kunstmuseum Basel,Kunstmuseum Basel.In Apollo magazine (20 September 2019), Frick curator Xavier Salomon makes the case that the portrait in Kunstmuseum Basel is the 1527 portrait of Aretino that Titian painted for the Marquis of Mantua, Frederico Gonzaga. Subsequently, the museum attributed it to Titian. Tizian (Vecellio, Tiziano) (zugeschrieben / attributed to)Irene Brooke writes that the portrait in the Kunstmuseum Basel is a copy of a lost portrait of 1527. Brooke, Irene, Review of Waddington, Raymond, Titian's Aretino: A Contextual Study of All the Portraits, in The Burlington Magazine, 161 (August 2019), pp. 702-703. a 1537 portrait in the Frick Collection, and a 1545 portrait in the Pitti Palace. Luba Freedman cites a fourth portrait, from "not later than 1535", but Xavier F. Salomon, director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, writes that "there is no evidence that it ever existed".In Titian's Portraits Through Aretino's Lens (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. 36, Freedman writes: "The four recorded portraits of Aretino by Titian were painted for (1) the Marquis of Mantua, Federico Gonzaga, in 1527; (2) the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, not later than 1535 (the year he was poisoned); (3) the Venetian publisher Francesco Marcolini, most probably in 1537; (4) the Duke of Florence, Cosimo I de' Medici, in 1545." In Titian's Pietro Aretino (2020), p. 45, however, Xavier Salomon writes that "there is no evidence that it [the portrait for Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici] ever existed."Fabian R. Alfie writes, " Among Titian's five documented portraits of Aretino, two have been lost, one was sent to Francesco Marcolini (1538), and another was sent to Duke Cosimo I de' Medici (1545). Titian is also credited with a woodcut print and may have been responsible for a second." Review of Waddington, Raymond, Titian's Aretino: A Contextual Study of All the Portraits, in Quaderni d'italianistica, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2021, p. 303. Titian also portrayed Aretino as Pontius Pilate in his painting "Ecce Homo",Ecce Homo Not to be confused with Ecce Homo (Titian). in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna,Sheila Hale, Titian: His Life (2012), p. 433; Luba Freedman, Titian's Portraits Through Aretino's Lens, p. 36. (Freedman refers to the painting as "Pilate Presents Jesus Christ Before the People.") "as a nameless soldier in the crowd" in "Alfonso d'Avalos Addressing his Troops", in the Prado Museum, Madrid,Luba Freedman, Titian's Portraits Through Aretino's Lens, p. 36, which refers to the painting as "Allocution of Alfonso d'Avalos, Marchese del Vasto." and next to a self-portrait in "La Gloria", also in the Prado.At the Museo del Prado website, under "Collection," the discussion of "La Gloria" states, "On a lower level are two elderly bearded men identified as Pietro Aretino and Titian himself in profile." However, Xavier Salomon writes, "[O]ften in art history things get repeated over and over again and become 'facts'. There is no reason for Aretino to be in Titian's Gloria and the man usually identified as Aretino barely looks like him. I am absolutely convinced it is not him."
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. Fabian Alfie, however, writes that the "chain was a gift from King Francis I of France."Alfie, Fabian, Review of Waddington, Raymond, Titian's Aretino: A Contextual Study of All the Portraits, in Quaderni d'italianistica, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2021, p. 303. In his strictly-for-publication letters to patrons Aretino would often add a verbal portrait to Titian's painted one.