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.

Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) was an influential Italian author, playwright, poet and satirist. He is credited with inventing modern literate pornography.

Summers (p. 242 and p. 367) mentions two works by Aretino with some homoerotic content: I piacevole ragionamenti (Diverting dialogues) written 1534-1536, and Il Marescalo (The Stablemaster), a comedy. -- dm.

A biography of Vittoria Colonna, a confidante of Michelangelo, the scion of one of the most powerful families of her era, and a pivotal figure in the Italian Renaissance Ramie Targoff’s Renaissance Woman tells of the most remarkable woman of the Italian Renaissance: Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara. Vittoria has long been celebrated by scholars of Michelangelo as the artist’s best friend—the two of them exchanged beautiful letters, poems, and works of art that bear witness to their intimacy—but she also had close ties to Charles V, Pope Clement VII and Pope Paul III, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino, Queen Marguerite de Navarre, Reginald Pole, and Isabella d’Este, among others. Vittoria was the scion of an immensely powerful family in Rome during that city’s most explosively creative era. Art and literature flourished, but political and religious life were under terrific strain. Personally involved with nearly every major development of this period—through both her marriage and her own talents—Vittoria was not only a critical political actor and negotiator but also the first woman to publish a book of poems in Italy, an event that launched a revolution for Italian women’s writing. Vittoria was, in short, at the very heart of what we celebrate when we think about sixteenth-century Italy; through her story the Renaissance comes to life anew.