Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (review)

Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. By Bette Talvacchia. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 305. Illus. $35.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Bette Talvacchia's Taking Positions is a fascinating and detailed examination of what may be the best-known erotic representations in Western culture: the series of engravings after drawings by Giulio Romano known as I modi, or "The positions." Executed by Marcantonio Raimondi in 1524, the engravings were published three years later with accompanying sonnets written by Pietro Aretino in a work titled I sonetti lussuriosi. The images were notorious throughout sixteenth-century Europe, and while relatively few readers may actually have gotten their hands on a copy, "Aretino's postures" came to be recognized throughout Western Europe as an archetype of erotic art, alluded to by English writers as diverse as John Donne, Thomas Nashe, and Ben Jonson, and reproduced in various forms up to the time of the French Revolution and beyond.

Both the images of I modi and the texts of the sonnets mark significant innovations in the representation of eroticism. Romano's illustrations, which all depict naked men and women in different positions of sexual intercourse, are remarkable not only for their frankness but also for their lack of decorous mythological trappings. Unlike most erotic art from sixteenth-century Italy--Titian's Venus of Urbino, for example--these are images of human beings, not gods and goddesses.

Aretino's sonnets are striking not only in the colloquial directness of their vocabulary but also in their radical combination of form and content. The sonnet is here transformed into a slangy celebration of sexual fulfillment. It is hard to imagine Petrarch (or Sidney's Astrophil) beginning a sonnet with the line: "Open your thighs so that I can clearly see your beautiful ass, with your cunt in view" ["Apri le coscie, accio ch'io veggia bene / Il tuo bel culo, e la tua potta in viso"] (Sonnet 11). Nor are these sonnets male monologues but male-female dialogues. Although, as Talvacchia reminds us, women's voices here remain the product of a male author's imagination, the women are frequently imagined as taking control of the sexual encounter and telling men how to please them.

Since I modi have always been more widely known by reputation than by acquaintance, it is perhaps fitting that so few artifacts related to their dissemination have survived--three copies of the first engraving, a collection of nine fragments of the others, one accomplished woodcut based on the eleventh engraving, and one copy of Aretino's sonnetsillustrated with clumsy woodcuts. Known as the "Toscanini" volume because it was once owned by the son of the famous conductor, this copy of Aretino's sonnets served as the copytext for Lynne Lawner's modern edition, published in 1988 by the Northwestern University Press under the title I modi: The Sixteen Pleasures. Given the paucity of what remains, it is hardly surprising that "the genesis of I modi is wrapped in mystery" (xi). But through an attentive and innovative reading of archival documents, such as records from Giorgio Vasari and Aretino, combined with a precise and cogent analysis of contemporary events, such as the 1527 sack of Rome and Giulio Romano's move from the papal court to the court of Federico Gonzaga in Mantua, Talvacchia provides the most detailed and convincing account to date of the origin of these enormously influential texts and images.

The drawings, created by Romano in Rome in the early 1520s, served as the model for a series of engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi. As unique artifacts, circulating only among a courtly elite, the drawings aroused little comment and no censure. But the broad print dissemination of the mass-produced engravings scandalized Italian society. Thus although Romano was never censured for having created the drawings, Raimondi was briefly imprisoned by the papal authorities. One of those who petitioned for Raimondi's freedom, it seems...