Publisher description

The essays gathered together in this volume follow the career of the sixteenth-century courtier-poet Pietro Aretino. Part One introduces the author during the 1520s in Rome with his remarkable first comedy, La Cortigiana. With Aretino’s move to Venice (1527), he found a congenial life-long home in which he could flourish. Yet the transition from courtier poet to poligrafo, vernacular writer for the popular press, was slow and difficult before he adopted a new career model derived from Erasmus; even then, he contemplated abandoning Italy for the Ottoman Empire. Part Two examines his work as a satirist in the mid-thirties with the Ragionamenti, the dialogues that branded him a pornographer when the satiric targets lost their immediacy. He augmented the satiric writings by creating the visual persona of a satirist in various media - woodcut author portraits in books, engravings, and particularly portrait medals. The complementary, verbal-visual relationship is the subject of this pairing. Aretino’s religious writings have not been taken seriously until quite recently. The two essays presented here trace Aretino’s associations with Erasmians, spirituali, heretics, and apostates, arguing that his own convictions were sincere, suggesting that he became a Nicodemite during the gathering Counter-Reformation repression of the 1540s. The concluding essays consider two examples of Aretino’s continuing influence in different media, visual arts and literature: on the brilliant, eccentric artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and on a great English comedy, Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

"A Companion to Pietro Aretino offers exhaustive yet accessible essays aimed at understanding this complex and fascinating author. Its scope extends beyond the field of Italian studies, and includes references to other European literatures, visual arts, music, performance studies, gender studies, and social and religious history. It explores previously neglected areas of Aretino's literary and biographical identity: in particular, his religious writings and their fortune, his relationships to visual arts and music and his fashioning of a public persona. The essays here included support the current scholarly trend that no longer considers Aretino merely as a pornographer, but interpret his work in the light of the contemporary religious debate and cultural crisis"--

After classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance raised the portrait, whether literary or pictorial, to the status of an important art form. Among sixteenth-century Renaissance painters, Titian made his reputation, and much of his living, by portraiture. Titian's portraits were promoted by his friend, Pietro Aretino, an eminent poet and critic, who addressed his letters and sonnets to the same personages whom Titian portrayed. In many of these letters (which often included sonnets), Aretino described both an individual patron and Titian's portrait of that patron, thus stimulating the reciprocal relation between a verbal and pictorial portrait. By investigating this unprecedented historical phenomenon, Luba Freedman elucidates the meaning conveyed by the portrait as an artistic form in Renaissance Italy. Fusing iconographical analysis of the most famous Titian portraits with rhetorical analysis of Aretino's literary legacy as compared to contemporary reactions, Freedman demonstrates that it is due to Titian's many portraits and to Aretino's repeated simultaneous writings about them that the portrait ceased being primarily a social-historical document, preserving the sitter's likeness for posterity. It gradually became, as it is today, a work of art, the artist's invention, which gives its viewer an aesthetic pleasure.

An interdisciplinary exploration of one of the most prolific and controversial figures of early modern Europe. This volume is comprised of seven sections, each devoted to a specific aspect Aretino’s life and works.