Aretino's Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art (review)

Like the figures on portrait medals that he distributed to potential patrons, Pietro Aretino's carefully constructed public image has been worn flat over the centuries. Indeed, its contours have eroded to the point that many contemporary scholars succeed only in discerning either the father of European pornography or a scurrilous rogue who deftly used the burgeoning print technology to bolster his own reputation while blackmailing others. Raymond B. Waddington's impeccably researched study dismantles such limiting characterizations of Aretino. Waddington restores depth and subtlety to Aretino's self-portrait by positioning his sexually charged writings and personal emblems, the satyr and Priapus, in the context of a multimedia project of self-representation involving engravings, medals, paintings, and words.

In chapter 1, Waddington forcefully challenges the superficial assessment of Aretino as mere pornographer by likening his sexualized self-projection to the medieval and Renaissance paintings described by Leo Steinberg as openly depicting Christ's genitals in order to underscore the divinity's humanity. Aretino's identification with the satyr and Priapus represents a rejection of the religious deprecation of sexuality that was informed by "both contemporary classicism and subversive religious thought" (4) of the reformist movements afoot in Venice. Through an insightful comparative reading of Petrarch's ekphrastic sonnets and the infamous Sonetti lussuriosi which gave voice to the figures in Marcantonio Raimondi's erotic engravings I Modi, Waddington argues convincingly that Aretino utilized these sonetti caudati, poems with and about "tail," to establish himself as a counter-Petrarch who scripted a collaborative rather than competitive relationship between the visual and verbal arts.

When not accused of licentiousness, Aretino is often denigrated as a hack more concerned with keeping the presses rolling than honing his craft. In chapter 2, Waddington's perceptive analysis of Aretino's print history reveals that the prolific nature of his later career belies the difficulty with which he transformed himself from Roman court poet to Venetian poligrafo. In the years separating his flight from Rome and his success in print, Aretino reinvented himself by forging a seemingly artless style, what Waddington terms "'vulgar' vernacular" (46), from Bembo's authorization of Italian as a literary language and Erasmus's call for a colloquial Latin.

While Erasmus stamped the motto "his writings will present a better image" on his portrait medal, Aretino astutely recognized that the advent of new technologies in both the fields of printing and casting meant that words and pictures together could better serve his efforts at self-projection than either could alone. Tracing the evolution of author portraits in editions of Aretino's Letters from the 1530s, in chapter 3 Waddington demonstrates that these engravings so closely aligned the author's visage with the literary genre to which he gave birth — the collection of vernacular letters by a living author — that his portrait became a symbol for the genre that was printed even in books of letters authored by others.

In chapter 4, Waddington handily overturns previous interpretations of Aretino's satyr medals by demonstrating that for his earliest public, the satyr functioned not as a negative figure of crude sexual aggression, but as an instrument of truth, following the dominant (false) etymology that equated the satyr with satire. In a medal depicting a satyr head covered in erect phalli, Waddington discerns the intertwining of bodily and verbal ejaculations, concluding that in the author's personal iconography "the satyr's sexuality cannot be separated from his innocent truth-telling and satiric exposure of vice" (111).

In the final chapter, Waddington turns to painted portraits that depict humanist visions of the satyr derived from Alcibiades' description of Socrates as Silenus and Marsyas. In stylized portraits, Aretino appears satyr-like, a Silenus whose grotesque exterior conceals his divine interior. Waddington notes that Tintoretto's The Contest between Apollo and Marsyas, commissioned by Aretino...