Pietro Aretino - The Scourge of Princes

ARETINE. The name is infamous. Why ? 

Was the man really the monster he is universally represented to have been from his time to our own? His legend, as the French say, would seem to affirm it. There we read of one who was born in a hospital, the son of a courtesan, and boasted of it; who was without name, without family, without friends and protectors, without education; who at thirteen years of age robbed his mother and fled to Perugia; who at eighteen fled from Perugia to Rome, where he robbed his master, Agostino Chigi, and presently appeared as the creature of Cardinal de’ Medici, whom he supported with an infinite wealth of libel, calumny and the most vile and shameless abuse of his rivals for the Papacy, after the death of Leo X; who was kicked out of Rome for writing the notorious Sonetti Lussuriosi for Raimondi’s infamous engravings; who wandered as a vagabond over Italy, a blackmailer and a beggar; who became a friar in Ravenna, but whom even the Capuchins were obliged to vomit; who fled to Venice and in the freedom of that great Republic lived like a prince on begging and threatening letters; who kept a harem and worse in his palace on the Grand Canal, for no vice was a stranger to him and no calumny too outrageous; who hung a picture of the Virgin in his house and said it was a portrait of his mother and thus declared himself to be Antichrist; who was the spy of Italy’s worst enemies, Charles V and Francis I, and who died as a dog dies without a thought of repentance in the midst of a howl of blasphemy and laughter; over whose grave was written : 


Qui giace l’Aretin poeta tosco, 

Che disse mal d’ ognun, fuor che di Dio, 

Scusandosi col dir, non lo conosco. 


Was Aretino really the monster this legend portrays, or is he now to be whitewashed : with the discovery of new documents, on better evidence than our forefathers possessed to be at any rate excused with Alexander VI and Lucrezia Borgia or acquitted altogether with Machiavelli?