Pietro Aretino

From xyclopedia - the history of pornography and sexual expression

Pietro Aretino (1492 - 1556) was an Italian author, playwright, poet and satirist who wielded immense influence on contemporary art and politics. Born out of wedlock in Arezzo, very casually educated then banished from his native city, Aretino spent a formative decade in Perugia, before being sent, highly recommended, to Rome. There Agostino Chigi, the rich banker and patron of Raphael, took him under his wing. Aretino prospered, living from hand to mouth as a hanger-on in the literate circle of his patron, sharpening his satirical talents on the gossip of politics and the papal curia, and turning the coarse Roman pasquinade into a rapier weapon of satire, until his sixteen ribald Sonetti Lussuriosi written to accompany Giulio Romano's exquisitely beautiful but utterly pornographic series drawings engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi under the title I Modi finally lost him the public patronage of Pope Leo X.