Pietro Aretino

Pietro Aretino was an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist, and blackmailer who wielded influence on contemporary art and politics and developed modern literary pornography.

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 Sonetti Lussuriosi (Lust Sonnets) written to accompany Giulio Romano’s exquisitely beautiful but utterly pornographic series of drawings engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi under the title I Modi finally caused such outrage that he had to temporarily flee Rome.

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).