Pietro Aretino (1492 – 1556) was an Italian author, playwright, poet and satirist. Born out of wedlock in Arezzo (Aretino, "from 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 drawings, falling into the hands of an engraver, finally lost him the public patronage of Pope Leo X. After Leo's death in 1521, his patron was Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, whose competitors for the papal throne felt the sting of Aretino's scurrilous lash. The installation of the prudish Fleming Adrian VI ("la tedesca tigna" in Pietro's words) instead encouraged Aretino to seek new patrons away from Rome, mainly with Federico II Gonzaga in Mantua, and with the condottiere Giovanni de' Medici ("Giovanni delle Bande Nere"). The election of his old Medici patron as Pope Clement VII sent him briefly back to Rome, but death threats and an attempted assassination from one of the victims of his pen, Bishop Giovanni Giberti, in July 1525, set him wandering through northern Italy in the service of various noblemen, distinguished by his wit, audacity and brilliant and facile talents, until he settled permanently in 1527, in Venice, the anti-Papal city of Italy, "seat of all vices" Aretino noted with gusto.
From the security of Venice Aretino "kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege," in Jakob Burckhardt's estimation. Francis I of France and Charles V pensioned him at the same time, each hoping for some damage to the other. "The rest of his relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar extortion," was Burckhardt's assessment of a man the 19th century found utterly unprincipled, an abject flatterer, the object of judgmental disgust and yet the father of modern journalism:
"His literary talent, his clear and sparkling style, his varied observation of men and things, would have made him a considerable writer under any circumstances, destitute as he was of the power of conceiving a genuine work of art, such as a true dramatic comedy; and to the coarsest as well as the most refined malice he added a grotesque wit so brilliant that in some cases it does not fall short of that of Rabelais."
- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1855.
Apart from both sacred and profane texts- a satire of high-flown Renaissance neo-Platonic dialogues is set in a brothel- and comedies such as La cortigiana and La talenta, Aretino is remembered above all for his letters, full of literary flattery that could turn to blackmail. They circulated widely in manuscript and he collected them and published them at intervals winning as many enemies as it did fame, and earned him the dangerous nickname Ariosto gave him: flagello dei principi ("scourge of princes").