L’Arétin et la Bible (review)

The years 1534 and 1535 were prolific for writer Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), best known to posterity as a satirist and as the “scourge of princes.” In less than a year’s time, his first three religious works, La Passione di Giesù, I sette salmi della penitentia di David, and I tre libri della Humanità di Christo, came out. He also published the Ragionamenti, which includes the dialogue of a courtesan instructing her daughter in the profession, and La cortigiana, a comedy that relentlessly dispels any notions of the courtier as noble. In L’Arétin et la Bible, based on her doctoral dissertation, Élise Boillet sees this varied textual production as evidence that Aretino considered religious works as significant a part of his ambitious literary program as profane ones. She asserts that “les œuvres religieuses ont une importance capitale dans l’image que l’Arétin souhaite donner de lui-même aux princes dont il cherche à obtenir les faveurs comme à ’l ensemble de ses contemporains” (40). Aretino was well aware of the popularity of devotional texts, and indeed his early religious works went through multiple editions.

In her exhaustive study of the Passione, I sette salmi, and the Humanità di Christo, which Aretino dedicated to judiciously chosen men of power, Boillet seeks to rehabilitate these texts traditionally relegated to a minor status. After an informative introduction that contextualizes all of Aretino’s religious writing and a first section on early sixteenth-century devotional literature, each of the three works is examined in a separate section. The three sections begin with editorial details of each work, followed by an analysis of the principal themes and imagery, doctrinal content, sources, and stylistic and rhetorical characteristics. Boillet demonstrates how Aretino, without formal theological training, creates a cohesive, “organic” (438) trilogy in adapting biblical and apocryphal sources (including different translations of the Vulgate into Italian), and in using elements from biblical legend and the religious and secular poems of authors such as Petrarch and Sannazaro. Her painstaking analysis — she even times the length of the adaptations of the psalms when read aloud — successfully illuminates Aretino’s precision and rigor in drawing from his sources, in expressing appropriately orthodox religious dogma, and in employing figurative language. He refrains from criticizing the church in these texts and dedicates himself to creating works that serve a didactic, spiritual function and that showcase his literary prowess. Boillet elucidates the novelty of the works in their incorporation of aspects of various genres, from the novel to religious poetry, the references to contemporary religious painting, and the variety in linguistic register, from a simpler, less figurative prose to one heavy with similes and paradoxes.

One compelling characterization mentioned throughout this book concerns the theatricality of the three works. Aretino is particularly adept at rendering the drama, or what Boillet terms “drame personnel” (374), of biblical stories. He often focuses on episodes popular in sacre rappresentazioni, but he also, in the phrasing that Boillet often uses, sets the stage for the most compelling or emotional episodes of, for instance, David’s penitence or the life of Christ. She notes how the staging (mise en scène) of crowds in various episodes, the choreography and movement of characters, and the structure and sequence of scenes evoke the theater. Aretino reveals himself to be a mannerist religious writer, writes Boillet, especially in episodes such as the conversion of Mary Magdalene in the Humanità di Christo. This sequence, the only one in the text that Aretino takes from non-biblical sources, includes a graphic if not erotic depiction of self-flagellation. A subsequent moment — and this is not the only one — in which Mary Magdalene, blinded by tears of repentance, bumps into a column (“urtò in una colonna, credendosi uscir della porta” [522]), which Boillet interprets as a serious element of the conversion narrative, leaves one pondering the possibility of an ironic subtext...