Pietro Aretino

The immensely prolific and talented Czech printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) was employed as an artist and cataloguer in the household of Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel, who was one of the greatest art collectors of his era, between 1636 and 1644. The Earl, a victim of the English Civil War, fled overseas and died in 1646; Hollar himself moved with his family to Antwerp in 1644, where this etching would have been made. The return of political stability led to Hollar's return to London in 1652, where he lived and worked until his death.

Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) was a homosexual Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer who wielded immense influence on contemporary art and politics and invented modern literate pornography. Tuscan in origin, Aretino worked in Rome for several years where he knew Michelangelo; making many powerful enemies in the Church, he decamped to the anti-Papal Venice in 1527, where he became a close friend of Michelangelo's Renaissance rival, Titian. His notoriety is alluded to in the Italian inscription, which was the original epitaph on his top. It translates as 'This is Pietro Aretino, the Tuscan poet, Here Aretino, the Tuscan poet, lies, who all the world abused but God, and why? he said he knew him not.'

This etching by Hollar is third-generation: it is based on an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, which in turn is supposedly based on a portrait of Aretino by Titian which has not survived. This attribution is somewhat improbable: the original design for Marcantonio was probably by the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo, although the name of Giulio Romano -with whom Marcantonio collaborated on the famous book of sexual positions I modi - has also been proposed. It may date from the early moment of Aretino's career, when he was still an unknown newcomer to Rome and he and Giulio were working for the wealthy papal banker Agostino Chigi. An alternative view is that the print was executed about 1525 as an expression of gratitude by Marcantonio to Aretino, who had negotiated the engraver's release from prison following papal (and wider public) outrage at the publication of  I modi. The Latin inscription on Raimondi's engraving highlights the subject's virtuousness and piquantly contrasts with that of the epitaph.

See:

http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/tag/wenceslaus-hollar/

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?obj ectId=3489888&partId=1&searchText=hollar+aretino&page=1

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/342704

Richard Pennington, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar 1607-1677 (Cambridge, 1982, 2002), p. 229 (no. 1346).

Dr Mark Stocker             Curator, Historical International Art       April 2017