The question still remains to be asked how Aretino, Berni's avowed enemy, obtained possession of the MS. Berni had many literary friends. Yet none of them came forward to avert the catastrophe. None of them undertook the publication of his remains. His last work was produced, not at Florence, where he lived and died, but at Venice; and Albicante, Aretino's tool, was editor. In the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to answer this question authoritatively. Considerable light, however, is thrown upon the mystery by a pamphlet published in 1554 by the heretic Vergerio. He states that Berni undertook his rifacimento with the view of diffusing Protestant doctrines in a popular and unobtrusive form; but that the craft of the devil, or in other words the policy of the Church, effected its suppression at the very moment when it was finished and all but printed.[480] Here, then, we seem to find some missing links in the dark chain of intrigue. Aretino's phrase maldicentia is explained; his menace to Francesco Calvo becomes intelligible; the silence of Berni's friends can be accounted for; and the agency by which the MS. was placed in Albicante's hands, can be at least conjectured. As a specimen of Berni's Lutheran propaganda, Vergerio subjoins eighteen stanzas, written in the poet's purest style, which were addressed to Battista Sanga, and which formed the induction to the twentieth Canto. This induction, as it stands in Berni's Innamorato, is reduced to seven stanzas, grossly garbled and deformed in diction. Very few of the original lines have been retained, and those substituted are full of vulgarisms.[481] From a comparison of the original supplied by Vergerio with the mutilated version, the full measure of the mischief practiced upon Berni's posthumous work can be gauged. Furthermore, it must be noticed that these compromising eighteen stanzas contained the names of several men alive in Italy, all of whom were therefore interested in their suppression, or precluded from exposing the fraud.
The inference I am inclined to draw from Signor Virgili's researches, combined with Vergerio's pamphlet, is that the Church interfered to prevent the publication of Berni's heretical additions to Boiardo's poem. Berni's sudden death, throwing his affairs into confusion at the moment when he was upon the point of finishing the business, afforded an excellent occasion to his ecclesiastical and personal opponents, who seem to have put some pressure on his kinsmen to obtain the MS. or the sheets they meant to mutilate.[482] The obnoxious passages may have been denounced by Aretino; for we know that he was intimate with Vergerio, and it is more than probable that the verses to Sanga were already in circulation.[483] Aretino, strange to say, was regarded in clerical quarters as a pillar of the Church. He therefore found it in his power to wreak his vengeance on an enemy at the same time that he posed as a defender of the faith. That he was allowed to control the publication, appears from his letters to Calvo; and he confided the literary part of the business to Albicante. His threats to Calvo have reference to Berni's heresy, and the maldicentia may possibly have been the eighteen stanzas addressed to Sanga. The terror of the Inquisition reduced Berni's friends to silence. Aretino, even if he had not denounced Berni to the Church, had now identified himself with the crusade against his poem, and he was capable of ruining opponents in this unequal contest by charges they would have found it impossible to refute. The eighteen stanzas were addressed to a secretary of Clement VII.; and men of note like Molza, Flamminio, Navagero, Fondulo, Fregoso, were distinctly named in them. If, then, there is any cogency in the conclusions I have drawn from various sources, Berni's poem, and perhaps his life, was sacrificed to theological hatred in combination with Aretino's personal malice. The unaccountable inactivity of his friends is explained by their dread of being entangled in a charge of heresy.[484]
Enough has been already said about Berni's imitators in the burlesque style. Of satire in the strict sense of the term, the poets of the sixteenth century produced nothing that is worth consideration. The epistolary form introduced by Ariosto, and the comic caprices rendered fashionable by Berni, determined the compositions of Pietro Aretino, of Ercole Bentivoglio, of Luigi Alamanni, of Antonio Vinciguerra, of Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara, of Cesare Caporali, and of the minor versifiers whose occasional poems in terza rima, seasoned with more or less satirical intention, are usually reckoned among the satires of the golden age.[485] Personal vituperation poured forth in the heat of literary quarrels, scarcely deserves the name of satire. Else it might be necessary in this place to mention Niccolò Franco's sonnets on Pietro Aretino, or the far more elegant compositions of Annibale Caro directed against his enemy Castelvetro.[486] Models for this species of poetical abuse had been already furnished by the sonnets exchanged between Luigi Pulci and Matteo Franco in a more masculine age of Italian literature.[487] It is not, however, incumbent upon the historian to resuscitate the memory of those forgotten and now unimportant duels. The present allusion to them may suffice to corroborate the opinion already stated that, while the Italians of the Renaissance were ingenious in burlesque, and virulent in personal invective, they lacked the earnestness of moral conviction, the indignation, and the philosophic force that generate real satire.
CHAPTER XV.
PIETRO ARETINO.
Aretino's Place in Italian Literature and Society—His Birth and Boyhood—Goes to Rome—In the Service of Agostino Chigi—At Mantua—Gradual Emergence into Celebrity—The Incident of Giulio Romano's Postures—Giovanni delle Bande Nere—Aretino settles at Venice—The Mystery of his Influence—Discerns the Power of the Press—Satire on the Courts—Magnificent Life—Aretino's Wealth—His Tributary Princes—Bullying and Flattery—The Divine Aretino—His Letter to Vittoria Colonna—To Michelangelo—His Admiration of Artists—Relations with Men of Letters—Epistle to Bernardo Tasso—His Lack of Learning—Disengagement from Puristic Prejudices—Belief in his own Powers—Rapidity of Composition—His Style—Originality and Independence—Prologue to Talanta—Bohemian Comrades—Niccolò Franco—Quarrel with Doni—Aretino's Literary Influence—His Death—The Anomaly of the Renaissance—Estimate of Aretino's Character.
Pietro Aretino, as I have already had occasion to observe, is a representative name in the history of Italian literature. It is almost as impossible to slur him over with a passing notice as it would be to dwell but casually upon Machiavelli or Ariosto, Cellini or Poliziano, in reviewing the Renaissance. Base in character, coarse in mental fiber, unworthy to rank among real artists, notwithstanding his undoubted genius, Aretino was the typical ruffian of an age which brought ruffianism to perfection, welcomed it when successful, bowed to its insolence, and viewed it with complacent toleration in the highest places of Church, State, and letters. He was the condottiere of the pen in a society which truckled to the Borgias. He embodied the infamy and cowardice which lurked beneath the braveries of Italian Court-life—the coarseness of speech which contradicted literary purism—the cynicism and gross strength of appetite for which convention was a flimsy veil.[488] The man himself incarnated the dissolution of Italian culture. His works, for the student of that period, are an anti-mask to the brilliant display of Ariosto's or of Tasso's puppets. It is the condemnation of Italy that we are forced to give this prominence to Aretino. If we place Poliziano or Guicciardini, Bembo or La Casa, Bandello or Firenzuola, Cellini or Berni, Paolo Giovio or Lodovico Dolce—typical men of letters chosen from the poets, journalists, historians, thinkers, artists, novel-writers of the age—under the critical microscope, we find in each and all of them a tincture of Aretino. It is because he emphasizes and brings into relief one master element of the Renaissance, that he deserves the rank assigned to him. In Athens Aristophanes is named together with Sophocles, Thucydides and Plato, because, with genius equal to theirs, he represented the comic antithesis to tragedy, philosophy and history. In Italy Aretino is classed with Machiavelli and Ariosto for a different reason. His lower nature expressed, not an antithesis, but a quality, which, in spite of intellectual and moral superiority, they possessed in common with him, which he exhibited in arrogant abundance, and which cannot be omitted from the survey of his century. The alloy of cynicism in Machiavelli, his sordid private pleasures, his perverse admiration for Cesare Borgia, his failure to recognize the power of goodness in the world, condemn him to the company of this triumvir. The profligacy of genius in Ariosto, his waste of divine gifts upon trifles, his lack of noble sentiment, his easy acquiescence in conditions of society against which he should have uttered powerful protest, consign him, however undeservedly, to the same association.[489]
Pietro was born at Arezzo in 1492. His reputed father was a nobleman of that city, named Luigi Bacci. His mother, Tita, was a woman of the town, whose portrait, painted as the Virgin of the Annunciation, adorned the church-door of S. Pietro. The boy, "born," as he afterwards boasted, "in a hospital with the spirit of a king," passed his childhood at Arezzo with his mother. He had no education but what he may have picked up among the men who frequented Tita's house, or the artists who employed her as a model. Of Greek and Latin he learned nothing either now or afterwards. Before growing to man's estate, he had to quit his native city—according to one account because he composed and uttered a ribald sonnet on indulgences, according to another because he robbed his mother. He escaped to Perugia, and gained his livelihood by binding books. Here he made acquaintance with Firenzuola, as appears from a letter of the year 1541, in which he alludes to their youthful pranks together at the University. One of Aretino's exploits at Perugia became famous. "Having noticed in a place of much resort upon the public square a picture, in which the Magdalen was represented at the feet of Christ, with extended arms and in an attitude of passionate grief, he went privily and painted in a lute between her hands." From Perugia he trudged on foot to Rome, and entered the service of Agostino Chigi, under whose patronage he made himself useful to the Medici, remaining in the retinue of both Leo X. and Clement VII. between 1517 and 1524. This period of seven years formed the man's character; and it would be interesting to know for certain what his employment was. Judging by the graphic descriptions he has left us of the Roman Court in his comedy of the Cortigiana and his dialogue De le Corti, and also by his humble condition in Perugia, we have reason to believe that he occupied at first the post of lackey, rising gradually by flattery and baser arts to the position of a confidential domestic, half favorite, half servant.[490] That he possessed extraordinary social qualities, and knew how to render himself agreeable by witty conversation and boon companionship, is obvious from the whole course of his subsequent history. It is no less certain that he allowed neither honor nor self-respect to interfere with his advancement by means which cannot be described in detail, but which opened the readiest way to favor in that profligate society of Rome. His own enormous appetite for sensual enjoyment, his cynicism, and his familiarity with low life in all its forms, rendered him the congenial associate of a great man's secret pleasures, the convenient link of communication between the palace and the stews.[491]