Now, too, Aretino composed the most popular of his plays—La cortigiana, The Courtesan. Like most Italian comedies of the Renaissance, it followed the Plautine tradition of servants making fools of their masters, arranging intrigues for them, serving as their panders and their brains. But Aretino added something of his own: his burlesque and bawdy humor, his intimacy with prostitutes, his hatred of courts—above all, of the papal court —and his uninhibited transcript of life as he had seen it in the brothels and palaces of Rome. He laid bare the hypocrisies, timeserving, humiliations, flatteries required of the courtier; and in a famous line he defined slander as “telling the truth”; it was his pithy apologia for his life. In another Aretino comedy, Talanta, the title character is again a prostitute, and the story turns on the tricks she plays upon her four lovers, and her ways of squeezing money out of their agitation. Another play, Ipocrita, was an Italian Tartuffe; indeed, Molière is a French continuation of the Aretine comedies, deodorized and improved.
In the same year that produced these idyls of the stews, Aretino composed a long series of religious works—Tee Humanity of Christ, The Seven Penitential Psalms, The Life of the Virgin Mary, The Life of the Virgin Catherine, The Life of St. Thomas, Lord of Aquino, etc. They were largely compounded of fiction, and Pietro confessed that they were “poetical lies,” but they won him the plaudits of the pious, even of the virtuous Vittoria Colonna. In some quarters he was regarded as a pillar of the Church. There was talk of making him a cardinal.
It was probably his letters that sustained his fame as well as his fortune. Many of these were eulogies addressed to the eulogized, or to persons near them. They were frankly intended to elicit gifts, pensions, or other favors; sometimes they specified what was to be given, and when. Aretino published—printed—these letters almost as soon as he wrote them; this was necessary to their extractive power. Italy snapped them up because they provided an indirect intimacy with famous men and women, and because they were written with an originality, vivacity, and force unequaled by any other writer of the day. Aretino had style without seeking it. He laughed at the Bembos who polished their stanzas into perfect lifelessness; he ended the humanist idolatry of Latin, of correctness and grace. Pretending to be ignorant of literature, he felt free from cramping exemplars; he accepted in his writing one overruling rule: to enounce spontaneously, in direct and simple language, his experience and criticism of life, and the needs of his wardrobe and larder. Amid the mountain of hypocritical rubbish of these letters some diamonds can be found: tender epistles to a favorite ailing harlot, lusty accounts of his domestic history, a sunset described in a letter to Titian almost as brilliantly as Titian or Turner could paint it, and a letter to Michelangelo suggesting, for The Last Judgment, a design much more appropriate than that which the artist used.
Aretino’s understanding and appreciation of art were among the better qualities of his character. His most intimate male friends were Titian and Sansovino. Together they had many a feast, usually graced with feminine company usually venal; and there, when the talk turned on art, Aretino could hold his own. His letters sang the praises of Titian to a host of possible patrons, and won Vecelli several lucrative commissions, in which Pietro may have shared. It was Aretino who persuaded the Doge, the Emperor, and the Pope to sit to Titian for portraits. Titian painted Aretino twice, and each time made a masterpiece of mountainous and vulgar vitality. Sansovino, pretending to carve an Apostle, placed the old satyr’s head on a sacristy door in St. Mark’s; and perhaps Michelangelo, in The Last Judgment, portrayed him as St. Bartholomew.
He was both better and worse than he was painted. He had almost every vice, and was accused of sodomy. His hypocrisy made his own Ipocrita seem by comparison sincere. His language, when he set his mind to it, could be a cloaca maxima of filth. He could be brutal and unmanly, as when he gloated over the fallen Clement; but he had the grace to write, later: “I am ashamed that in censuring him I did so in the depth of his afflictions.”17 He was physically an unabashed coward; but he had the courage to denounce powerful persons and highly cherished abuses. His most visible virtue was generosity. He gave to his friends and the poor a large part of what he received in pensions, earnings, gifts, and bribes. He waived royalties on his published letters, so that they might be sold more cheaply, and acquire wider fame and higher value. He was annually near bankruptcy with Christmas giving. Giovanni delle Bande Nere said to Guicciardini: “I yield to no man in generosity, unless it be to Messer Pietro, when he has means.”18 He helped his friends to sell their pictures and (as in the case of Sansovino) to get release from jail. “Everybody comes to me,” he wrote, “as if I were a custodian of the royal treasury. Let a poor girl be confined, and my house pays the expenses. Let anyone be put into prison, and the cost falls upon me. Soldiers without equipment, strangers down on their luck, stray cavaliers without number, come to my house to refit.”19 If at times he had twenty-two women in his house, it was not that they constituted his harem; some were nursing unexpected infants, and found a refuge under his roof; we note that a bishop sent him shoes for one of these women. Many of the women whom he used or succored loved and honored him; six favorite courtesans proudly called themselves “Aretines.”
He had whatever virtue is implied by abundant animal spirits; in private he was a good-natured animal who had never learned a moral code. He thought—with some excuse in those times—that no person of any consequence had any real moral code. He told Vasari that he had never seen a maiden whose features did not betray a touch of sensuality.20 His own sensuality was gross, but to his friends it appeared to be merely the spontaneous exuberance of life. Hundreds of people found him lovable; princes and priests delighted in his conversation. He had no education, but he seemed to know everybody and everything. He became human in his love for Giovanni delle Bande Nere, for Caterina and the two children she bore him, and for frail, consumptive, gracious, faithless Pierina Riccia.
She came into his household as the fourteen-year-old wife of his secretary. They lived with him, and he played father to her; soon he loved her with a consuming and solicitous paternal affection. He reformed his morals, kept, of his mistresses, only Caterina and their babe Adria. Then, just as he was simmering down to respectability, a Venetian nobleman, whose wife he had charmed, accused him in court of blasphemy and sodomy. He denied the charges, but dared not face the exposures and chances of trial; conviction would have meant long imprisonment or death. He fled from his house, and hid for weeks with friends. They persuaded the court to dismiss the charges; Aretino returned to his home in triumph, cheered by crowds on both sides of the Grand Canal. But he was heartbroken to find in Pierina’s eyes that she thought him guilty. Then Pierina’s husband deserted her. When she came to Pietro for consolation he made her his mistress. She developed tuberculosis, and for thirteen months was near death; he nursed her with anxious tenderness, and brought her back to health. At the height of his devotion she left him for a younger lover. He tried to convince himself that it was better so, but from that day his spirit was broken, and old age advanced upon him triumphantly.