Aretino would not have questioned any of this. As if to illustrate it, he asked the Mantuan ambassador to solicit for him from Federigo “two pairs of shirts worked with gold… two pairs worked in silk, together with two golden caps.” When these took too much time in coming he threatened to annihilate the Marquis with a diatribe. The ambassador warned Federigo: “Your Excellency knows his tongue; therefore I will say no more.” Soon four shirts worked in gold arrived, and four of silk, and two gold caps, and two silk hats. “Aretino,” wrote the ambassador, “is satisfied.” Pietro could now really dress like a duke.
This second period of Roman prosperity was ended by a cloak-and-dagger romance. Aretino composed an insulting sonnet on a young woman employed in the datary’s kitchen. Another of Giberti’s household, Achille della Volta, attacked Aretino in the street at two o’clock in the morning (1525), stabbed him twice in the chest, and so severely in the right hand that two fingers had to be cut off. The wounds were not mortal; Aretino healed rapidly. He demanded the arrest of Achille, but neither Clement nor his datary intervened. Pietro suspected the datary of planning to have him murdered, and he decided that the time had come for another Italian tour. He moved to Mantua, and resumed his service with Federigo (1525). A year later, hearing that Giovanni delle Bande Nere was marshaling a force to check Frundsberg’s invasion, a secret atom of nobility stirred in him; he rode a hundred miles to join Giovanni at Lodi. All the ink in his veins tingled at the thought that he, the poor poet, might become a man of action, might even carve out for himself a principality, and be himself a prince, and no mere literary menial of a prince. And, indeed, the young commander, as generous as Don Quixote, promised to make him a marquis at least. But brave Giovanni was killed, and Aretino, putting aside the helmet he had received, returned to Mantua and his pen.
He composed now a mock giudizio, or almanac, for 1527, predicting absurd or evil fates for those he disliked. Furious against Clement for giving Giovanni delle Bande Nere inadequate and vacillating support, Aretino included the Pope among the victims of his satire. Clement expressed surprise that Federigo should harbor so irreverent an enemy of the papacy. Federigo gave Aretino a hundred crowns, and advised him to get out of the papal reach. “I will go to Venice,” said Pietro; “only in Venice does justice hold the scales with an even balance.” He arrived in March, 1527, and took a house on the Grand Canal. He was fascinated by the views across the lagoon, and by the teeming traffic of what he called “the fairest highway in the world.” “I have determined,” he wrote, “to live in Venice forever.” He addressed a letter of lordly compliments to the Doge Andrea Gritti, praising the majestic beauty of Venice, the justice of her laws, the security of her people, the asylum she offered to political and intellectual refugees; and he added, magnificently: “I, who have stricken terror into kings… give myself to you, fathers of your people.”9 The Doge took him at his own estimate, assured him of protection, assigned him a pension, and interceded for him with the Pope. Though invitations were to come to Aretino from several foreign courts, he remained a loyal resident of Venice through-out his remaining twenty-nine years.
The furniture and art that he gathered into his new home attested the power of his pen, for they were given or made possible by the generosity or timidity of his patrons. Tintoretto himself painted the ceiling of Pietro’s private apartments. Soon the walls shone with pictures by Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giulio Romano, Bronzino, Vasari; there were statues by Iacopo Sansovino and Alessandro Vittoria. A rich ebony casket contained the letters received by Aretino from princes, prelates, captains, artists, poets, musicians, and noble dames; later he would publish these letters in two volumes totaling 875 closely printed pages. There were carved chests and chairs, and a walnut bed fit for Pietro’s now ample form. Amid that art and luxury Aretino lived and dressed literally like a lord, dispersing charity to the neighborhood poor, entertaining a host of friends and a succession of mistresses.
Where did he get the means to support so lavish a life? Partly from the sale of his writings to publishers, partly from gifts and pensions sent him by men and women who feared his scorn and sought his praise. The satires, poems, letters, and plays that rushed from his pen were bought by the most alert or important people in Italy, all eager to see what he had to say about personalities and events, and delighting in his blasts at the corruption, hypocrisy, oppression, and immorality of the times. Ariosto inserted into the 1532 edition of Orlando furioso two lines that added two titles to Pietro’s name:
Ecco il flagello
De’ principi, il divin Pietro Aretino—10
“Behold the Scourge of Princes, the divine Pietro Aretino”; soon it became the fashion to speak of the coarsest and most scurrilous major writer of the age as divine.
His renown was Continental. His satires were at once translated into French; a bookseller on the Rue St. Jacques in Paris made a fortune retailing them.11 They were welcomed in England, Poland, Hungary; Aretino and Machiavelli, said a contemporary, were the only Italian authors read in Germany. In Rome, where his favorite victims lived, his writings were sold out on the day of their publication. If we may take his own estimate, his receipts from his various publications amounted to a thousand crowns ($12,500?) a year. Moreover, in eighteen years, “the alchemy of my pen has drawn over 25,000 gold crowns from the entrails of various princes.” Kings, emperors, dukes, popes, cardinals, sultans, pirates were among his tributaries. Charles V gave him a collar worth 300 crowns, Philip II another worth 400; Francis I a still more costly chain.12 Francis and Charles competed for his favor with promises of fat pensions. Francis promised more than he gave; “I adored him,” said Aretino, “but never to get money from the stirring of his liberality is enough to cool the furnaces of Murano” (the suburb where the glass industry of Venice was concentrated).13 A knighthood was offered him, without income; he refused it, remarking that “a knighthood without revenue is like a wall without Forbidden signs; everybody commits nuisances there.”14 So Pietro pledged his pen to Charles, and served him with unwonted fidelity. He was invited to meet the Emperor at Padua; on reaching that city he was hailed by a crowd, like a modern celebrity. Charles, out of all those present, chose Aretino to ride beside him through the city, and told him: “Every gentleman in Spain knows all your writings; they read everything of yours as fast as it is printed.” That night, at a state banquet, the son of the shoemaker sat at the Emperor’s right hand. Charles invited him to Spain; Pietro refused, having discovered Venice. Sitting beside the conqueror of Italy, Aretino was the first example of what was later called the power of the press; nothing like his influence would appear again in literature until Voltaire.
His satires hardly hold our attention today, for their force lay mostly in pointed allusion to local events too tied to the time to have lasting significance. They were popular because it is hard for us not to enjoy the excoriation of others; because they exposed real abuses, and courageously attacked the great and powerful; and because they brought all the resources of the language of the streets to the uses of literature and gainful literary homicide. Aretino exploited the human interest in sex and sin by writing Ragionamenti—conversations—among prostitutes about the secrets and practices of nuns, wives, and courtesans. The title page announced the book as “The Dialogues of Nanna and Antonia… composed by the divine Aretino for his pet monkey Capricio, and for the correction of the three states of women. Given to the printer in this month of April, 1533, in the illustrious city of Venice.”15 Aretino here anticipates the rollicking ribaldry and epithetic frenzy of Rabelais; he revels in four-letter words, and achieves some startling phrases (“I’d wager my soul against a pistachio nut”); and he indites such lively descriptions as that of the pretty wife of seventeen—the “finest little piece of flesh that I think I ever saw”—who, married to a man of sixty, took to sleepwalking as a way of “jousting with the lances of the night.”16 The conclusions to which the dialogues come is that courtesans are the most praiseworthy of the three classes of women, for the wives and nuns are faithless to their vows, while the courtesans live up to their professions and give an honest night’s labor for their pay. Italy was not shocked; it laughed with delight.