Description
Book SynopsisThe 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
Table of ContentsContents: Preface; Part I Rome: Introduction, Cortigiana (La cortigiana, 1525); A mask for Aretino (Una maschera per Aretino). Part II Venice: Meretrix est stampificata: gendering the printing press; Pietro Aretino: the new man of letters; Go East: Pietro Aretino’s flirtation with Constantinople. Part III The Satirist: Aretino’s prostitutes: the ragionamenti; A satirist’s impresa: the medals of Pietro Aretino. Part IV Religion: Pietro Aretino, religious writer; Aretino, Titian, and ’La Humanità di Christo’. Part V Influence: Before Arcimboldo: composite portraits in Italian medals; Volpone: Aretino’s Venice and Jonson’s Aretino; Index of names.
