Introduction

Machiavelli [is] more respectful, and civil: Aretino [is] more impetuous, and fantastic[.]4 [O]f all stiles I most affect & striue to imitate Aretines, not caring for this demure soft mediocre genus that is like water and wine mixt together; but giue me pure wine of it self, & that begets good bloud, and heates the brain thorowly: I had as lieue haue no sunne, as haue it shine faintly, no fire, as a smothering fire of small coals, no cloathes, rather than weare linsey wolsey.6 As Marlene Eberhart demonstrates in her contribution to this special issue, Aretino was known for his copious language, which builds upon quotidian details to conjure up the sensory experiences of city life.7 Nashe similarly uses copia to pile up sensory images to describe the Aretine mode of writing: it should be like drinking a full-bodied wine, like the warmth of the sun or a coal fire, and nothing like the feeling of a scratchy material on your skin. In contrast, Nashe barely mentions Machiavelli as an individual, instead referring to others as being ‘false hearted Machiuillions’ or of ‘Machiauilisme’ as a form of ‘hypocrisie […] all vnder-hand cloaking of bad actions with Common-wealth pretences’.8 Indeed, while English dramatists helped forge the ‘stage Machiavel’ caricature of a ruthless political schemer, poets and playwrights such as Thomas Wyatt, John Donne, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare, referenced, translated, adapted and rewrote Aretino's diverse works for English readerships and audiences with greater ambivalence. Much like Machiavelli, Aretino's name ultimately became synonymous with anti-Italian prejudice and xenophobia.9 Demonstrating this turn in fortunes, is the example of the London publisher John Wolfe. Despite his publication of numerous works by Machiavelli and Aretino in the 1580 s, by 1593 Wolfe's press issued John Eliot's Ortho-Epia Gallica, in which one interlocutor claims that foreign-born language teachers ‘have empoysoned by the venime of their skill, our English nation, with the bookes of Nicholas Machiavell, and Peter Aretine, replenished with all filthinesse and vilanie, who deserve for their pains a few swings of the strapado […]. Men should banish such plagues out of a Christian common-wealth’.10 Indeed, like Machiavelli, Aretino's influence spread across Europe.11 Unlike his counterpart, however, Aretino's significance gradually deteriorated over time, until he was primarily remembered as a blackmailer and pornographer – a remembrance that does him a great disservice, and which has maintained to the present day, outside of specialist circles. By 1711, Joseph Addison, writing on the subject of satire, could assert that ‘Aretine is too trite an instance. Everyone knows that all the Kings of Europe were his tributaries. Nay, there is a Letter of his extant, in which he makes his Boasts that he had laid the Sophi of Persia under Contribution’.12 Much pivots on the word trite: Addison both acknowledges Aretino's enormous influence and powerful connections, but also how he has become commonplace, hackneyed. By the nineteenth century, Aretino's life had become picaresque, even romantic, as Philarète Chasles' 1834 biography, L'Arétin, mingled the facts and fictions that had been so carefully distinguished by Aretino's great eighteenth-century biographer, Count Giammaria Mazzuchelli.13 Chasles' work influenced the apocryphal paintings of Aretino by the nineteenth-century neoclassicists Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1848), who painted Tintoretto threatening Aretino with a pistol (Fig. 1), and Anselm Feuerbach, who depicted the famous myth of Aretino dying of laughter (1854).14 It was not until the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely thanks to the impeccable archival work of Alessandro Luzio, that Aretino's long road to historical recovery could begin – only to be interrupted again by the tumult of two world wars.15 This special issue seeks to underline Aretino's extensive cultural importance in the early modern period, and re-examine the intersecting networks of influence in which he was situated: political, artistic, religious, literary, and traversing and connecting all of these. It aims to recover the historical Aretino, and his posthumous histories within our period, for an Anglophone readership for whom he is so often little more than a name or a footnote. As part of this process, this issue seeks to highlight the substantial work being carried out by Italian scholars, such as the major editorial project of the Edizione Nazionale (1992–) of Aretino's complete works, organized under the auspices of Paolo Procaccioli, which includes scholars such as Marco Faini, Élise Boillet, Danilo Romei and Paolo Trovato. The issue also, crucially, aims to showcase the latest Anglophone work that is being done on Aretino, a great deal of which has been produced by the contributors to this volume. Our issue is by no means alone in its ambitions, however, and is indebted to scholarship from across the disciplines of early modern studies. In recent years the rehabilitation of Aretino's reputation through the recognition of his centrality to diverse fields of cultural production has gathered pace. In the Anglo-American critical tradition the process began in the 1990s in the discipline of art history, thanks to the work of Luba Freedman (1995), Bette Talvacchia (1999) and Raymond Waddington (2004, 2013, 2018), whose work on Aretino remains indispensable.16 This process could begin thanks to the aforementioned scholars of the Edizione Nazionale, who provided long overdue standard editions of Aretino's opera omnia – the same opera omnia which had been prohibited by the Catholic Church in the year following his death, and which marked the first step in the decline of Aretino's reputation. Theatre history has also supported Aretino's recuperation, as scholars such as Michele Marrapodi (2007), Celia R. Daileader (2007), Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi (2010), and Andrew S. Keener (2014) have examined the extent of Aretino's influence upon early modern English dramatists and staging.17 Book history has overlapped with dramatic influence, as the work of Kate De Rycker (2015) has shown, which has examined the role of the printer John Wolfe in circulating Aretino's works in England (and beyond), and the different ends to which Aretino was put – both as libertine exemplar (2019) and sexual moralist (2015b).18 It was Wolfe's editions of the banned Aretino – the Quattro Comedie in 1588, and the Ragionamenti in 1584/1589 – that put his works in the hands of Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare, Harvey and Nashe, amongst others. The material and archival turns have produced a wealth of important Aretino material, especially as such turns subtend other subject disciplines. James Grantham Turner's work on Aretino and the I modi scandal – when Aretino famously produced sixteen explicit sonnets to accompany Marcantonio Raimondi's engravings after Giulio Romano's original sketches – have shown how a careful use of archival materials can put long-standing critical myths to bed.19 This work culminated in Turner's magisterial study, Eros Visible (2017) which set Aretino's writings within a wider milieu of sex-positive philosophy at both court and studio.20 Indeed, Aretino's role in the history of sexualities is significant – he is central, for example, to Ian Frederick Moulton's Before Pornography (2000), and plays a key role in Rictor Norton's Myth of the Modern Homosexual (1997; 2016).21 Fluid in his sexuality, and promoting such fluidity in his works – most notably in the Ragionamenti – the various condemnations of Aretino as a sodomite during his lifetime, and the fear that he could feminize entire national cultures (in England and France, for example) have seen him feted in recent criticism as a champion of diverse sexualities.22 Before the archival was a turn, however, and following the tradition established by Luzio, a great deal of archival work had been carried out on Aretino, which emphasized his roles in political and social history. Perhaps the most significant in the Anglophone critical tradition was Christopher Cairns' Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice (1985), which drew out just how embedded Aretino was in political and civic structures of power.23 It is this same level of archival detail that informed Paul Larivaille's superlative 1997 Italian biography of Aretino.24 The political, of course, went hand in hand with the religious for Aretino, and his role in religious history – not just due to his close and fraught relationship with Pope Clement VII, but due to his religious writings and ambitions – has been examined by Raymond Waddington (2006), Élise Boillet (2007; 2017; 2021) and William T. Rossiter (2015).25 Most recently, both preceding and following the Uffizi exhibition, there have been some major continental Aretino volumes, which bring together a number of the most important international scholarly voices since the essential two-volume conference proceedings from Italy, the US and Canada in 1995.26 2019 saw the publication of the collections ‘Inchiostro per colore’: Arte e artisti in Pietro Aretino, released to coincide with the curtailed Uffizi exhibition, and Pietro Pictore Arretino, the proceedings of a conference held in Venice in October 2018.27 These volumes return to the enormous and complex issue of Aretino and the art-world, from the circles in which he moved in Rome and Venice, to his close relationships and occasional disputes with Titian, Michelangelo and his fellow Aretine Vasari (to which one must add Sebastiano del Piombo, Tintoretto, and Sansovino, amongst myriad others), to his importance as an art critic. Indeed, Aretino was a byword for art criticism in his own time – Lodovico Dolce's influential 1557 treatise on art was entitled Aretino – and beyond: Aretino's collected and edited writings on art were published in three volumes from 1957–1960.28 More recently, in 2021 Aretino's position as a major cultural figure was confirmed by the publication of the Brill Companion to Pietro Aretino (2021), which serves as a wide-ranging compendium of Aretino scholars from the past thirty years, surveying his various fields of cultural influence. The scale of the present issue means that it cannot compete with those monumental recent volumes but nor does it seek to do so. Rather we aim to complement, acknowledge, and build on what has gone before. We draw on the range of overlapping cultural jurisdictions which the Brill volume addresses, just as we acknowledge that the current Aretine revival has been driven in large part by art history. This issue rather intends to bring together some of the most intellectually exciting Anglophone scholars to present Aretino to a wider readership of early modern scholars – to those for whom Aretino does remain a name or a footnote, as well as those who are deeply steeped in his history, influence and mythologies. We are collectively committed to showcasing Aretino's profound importance within the field of cultural production, how that came to be, and how he can and does speak to a wide range of early modern disciplines. The challenge remained how to do so, but the solution was clear from the start. Aretino represents a new cosmopolitan identity, his writing permeated by urban culture and economy. Aretino was drawn to and prospered in cities, and to cities that were held in a nexus of diverse international and intercultural exchanges – from the university town of Perugia, to the court of Rome, to early modern Europe's mercantile heart in Venice. Aretino befriended the rulers, the politicians, the diplomats, the artists, the scholars, and the publishers, each of whom represented a particular form of cosmopolitan exchange and transnational urbanity. It was the city that fired Aretino's imagination, that gave him the material for his letters, plays and dialogues – where the language and rhythms of the streets and piazze made themselves heard in Aretino's representations, howsoever impetuous and fantastic they might be. It was the city that was his canvas and which filled his senses – the sights of the gondolas laden with food, the rituals and dresses of the carnival, the artworks in the palazzi and churches, the satires plastered to public statues, the squares filled with music of the street-singers.29 This Aretine conception of the city-as-sensorium accords with renewed critical interest in the early modern lived and living urban environment.30 Fabrizio Nevola has propounded ‘an approach to street life that views the city as an ecosystem’ whereby ‘the fertile spaces for new research in this area arise from interstitial locations or mediating figures that are the product of the vibrant life of streets’.31 Aretino constitutes such a mediating figure, but one who occupies the interstices between streets and courts, bringing each to the other – as exemplified by his alter-ego Pasquino. Moreover, as Nevola notes, this emphasis upon the urban ecosystem is not to forgo traditional approaches to the cityscape, so much as to confirm the interdependencies ‘between the physical and the social fabrics of the city’.32 Aretino captures the spatial experience of living in the chaotic and persistently changing environment, peopling his plays, dialogues, and letters with characters who both thrive and are caught out by the anonymity of city life. Importantly, those who knew how to live in cities could live in any city, without being citizens of nowhere. Aretino could write to Thomas Cromwell, or the Constable of France, or Cosimo de' Medici, or Vittoria Colonna, knowing that he could speak to them as fellow metropolitans, in his and their own social languages. It is precisely this quality that allowed Aretino to prosper in cities far beyond his physical reach or immediate sphere of influence – in London both Harvey and Nashe could hear and identify with Aretino's voice, just as his banned religious works could be heard by Catholics almost a century after his death in Douai. Each one of the in this issue is a different of Aretino's in to and the enormous influence he had in the and century, and how his name became a byword for the in the The in the present volume the which has driven and informed the recovery of Aretino's By upon Aretino's our issue his to the of a new cultural identity, and also the between the aforementioned and the disciplines that in a and As there is a careful in the in which are The issue with William T. of the circles of cultural production in which Aretino moved during his early years in which are in his letters, and by the artistic, and within the town of the These in by Aretino's of in the to his as he in which his his of Aretino as he was – he became the of – while his letters themselves to the of the urban of scholars, poets and all a role in Aretino's and cultural after his of and provided him with a for influence within a he for Rome and Venice. It was in that Aretino became a most after he had his hand at first the was published in Venice for a publisher in and its as Pietro Pictore Pietro Aretino – The in both its and its the influence of the established who as Aretino's in It is no that the which Aretino's writing is as Moreover, his of his position in the history of art and his close with the of the all to Aretino's years in As in the it is a town with sights and – what Marlene in her a In Aretino the he later and It was also in Perugia, but also through his early in by his that he As in her the great of Rome provided the for Aretino's of the of Rome, which Aretino had in and which him some following the on his by that him to from the in Aretino that his in the Ragionamenti of the whose of the of Rome to the and of a was an of also how Aretino's is of a than a of more immediate of the Aretino's own Aretino's of the of the from its in the of the in the by Giulio which the of Rome, while in the we the on his by It was Giulio Romano's sketches that to the I modi scandal we and serves to of Aretino's within It is this and in particular Aretino's with Sebastiano del Piombo, that is the of on Aretino in As notes, Sebastiano was Aretino's in Rome, where they both came to at the same time, and where they from the same – the and Giulio de' Medici, who became Pope Clement it is a that is in for example, his with Titian, or his fraught relationship with In the extent of that with a of Aretino's experience of The of Aretino and James Grantham with the of his extensive urban the in The urban is a that the a of and more than the of more even than the of the also a from the city – the of could be within the of of the as Aretino and his circles in his later social and of in the so he and his at in his years and works – a time of and when he the and of the major who as Aretino his in Turner's Aretino's of the environment, especially its spaces and In to his famous of Venice, Aretino's of remembered Rome an of the urban Venice when others and her when others her when others her when others her her in her her with and to Venice, and thanks to whose through her and Venice to for […]. is a to for no one can over others or seeks to do so, while has been by the it was the the Ragionamenti and the that largely carried Aretino's across the major cities of In John Wolfe published Aretino's Quattro Comedie in and in in the of the became the standard for almost years, until the Edizione as Kate De Rycker in her Aretino's in early modern England is his reputation as a banned thanks to a of his role in the I modi which his of the – a which gave to the characters depicted in the sixteen sexual – with that of the images This was largely due to the of which – banned or by their – were known more by reputation than by until ultimately any set of sexual could become known as a spatial approach to this De Rycker that the of images to the English who to conjure up the of and This of a or to the spaces of the city was also by Aretino in his first As De Rycker Aretino Rome as a in which the as well as the of and are both and spaces for the who must this world from the As De Rycker the critical of Aretino's early modern reputation as a banned pornographer is this Andrew S. Keener John of Aretino's upon the of within its religious in early modern the within its Catholic and Moreover, is not an within the history of Aretino's – the first of Aretino's work English was Thomas of the almost a century in of the of what become the English as Keener in a city known for its English Catholic to of Venice, was an international where ‘the between different between and public and a and urban that the of produced and how they Keener the and in to the Catholics with religious and with particular emphasis on the dresses the in the of for This is the first Anglophone issue to Aretino, together the diverse disciplines through which Aretino can be political and histories of art history, history and to name a is a figure long overdue a return to wider not the blackmailer and pornographer of but a figure who was by and who was both and to some of the most important of the whose name and spread across Europe as a byword for and and whose influence upon English culture has not been As the Uffizi Aretino has been and in his it is time for the Anglophone world to do the return to Aretino might be than Machiavelli, but he is no It is in the that he his and came to and others to in his This was confirmed by the he gave the of the

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