At some period towards the close of the fifteenth century, a mutilated ancient statue was accidentally dug up in Rome, and it was erected on a pedestal in a place not far from the Ursini Palace. Opposite it stood the shop of a shoemaker, named Pasquillo, or Pasquino, the latter being the form most commonly adopted at a later period. This Pasquillo was notorious as a facetious fellow, and his shop was usually crowded by people who went there to tell tales and hear news; and, as no other name had been invented for the statue, people agreed to give it the name of the shoemaker, and they called it Pasquillo. It became a custom, at certain seasons, to write on pieces of paper satirical epigrams, sonnets, and other short compositions in Latin or Italian, mostly of a personal character, in which the writer declared whatever he had seen or heard to the discredit of somebody, and these were published by depositing them with the statue, whence they were taken and read. One of the Latin epigrams which pleads against committing these short personal satires to print, calls the time at which it was usual to compose them Pasquil’s festival:—
Jam redit illa dies in qua Romana juventus
Pasquilli festum concelebrabit ovans.
Sed versus impressos obsecro ut edere omittas,
Ne noceant iterum quæ nocuere semel.
The festival was evidently a favourite one, and well celebrated. “The soldiers of Xerxes,” says another epigram, placed in Pasquil’s mouth, “were not so plentiful as the paper bestowed upon me; I shall soon become a bookseller”—
Armigerûm Xerxi non copia tanta papyri
Quanta mihi: fiam bibliopola statim.
The name of Pasquil was soon given to the papers which were deposited with the statue, and eventually a pasquil, or pasquin, was only another name for a lampoon or libel. Not far from this statue stood another, which was found in the forum of Mars (Martis forum), and was thence popularly called Marforio. Some of these satirical writings were composed in the form of dialogues between Pasquil and Marforio, or of messages from one to the other.
A collection of these pasquils was published in 1544 in two small volumes.[94] Many of them are extremely clever, and they are sharply pointed. The popes are frequent objects of bitterest satire. Thus we are reminded in two lines upon pope Alexander VI. (sextus), the infamous Borgia, that Tarquin had been a Sextus, and Nero also, and now another Sextus was at the head of the Romans, and told that Rome was always ruined under a Sextus—