Vanquished Bodies, Weaponized Words: Pietro Aretino’s Conflicting Portraits of the Sexes and the Sack of Rome

Vanquished Bodies, Weaponized Words: Pietro Aretino’s Conflicting Portraits of the Sexes andthe Sack of RomeAuthor(s): Jessica GoethalsSource: I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 2014), pp. 55-78Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center forItalian Renaissance StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/675763 .

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GENDER IN EARLY MODERN ROME

Vanquished Bodies, Weaponized Words:Pietro Aretino’s Conflicting Portraits ofthe Sexes and the Sack of Rome

Jessica Goethals, University of Pennsylvania

IN THE SUMMER OF 1527 , Pietro Aretino sent Federico Gonzaga a pair of

poems as a gift for the patronage extended to him after a 1525 attempt on his life

necessitated a flight from Rome. The subject of these verses may well have sur-

prised their recipient, who found before him two highly disparate depictions of

the savage Sack of Rome begun that May. As the symbolic climax of the Italian

Wars waged for decades between the major European and Italian powers, the

invasion of Rome shocked Europe in its brutality and sacrilege. Lost to the Span-

ish and German soldiers of Emperor Charles V, Rome plunged into a violent state

of bedlam and ruin exacerbated by famine, plague, and flooding. The city suf-

fered drastic losses in life and capital—by one estimate, murder, disease, and flight

halved the population by the end of the year—and eyewitness accounts of the

perpetrated horrors circulated throughout Italy and beyond.1 At the moment in

which Aretino sent these poems, the imperial soldiers were still within the city’s

gates, the Roman citizens were still being subjected to terrifying ordeals, and

Pope Clement VII remained imprisoned within the Castel Sant’Angelo without

recourse or rescue.

Contact Jessica Goethals at [email protected] of the research for this essay were conducted with the assistance of a grant from the Gladys

Krieble Delmas Foundation. I would like to thank Julia Hairston for the invitation to join this clusterand am grateful to her as well as to Jane Tylus and the anonymous reviewers for their comments andsuggestions. I also extend my warm thanks to Virginia Cox, Kenneth Gouwens, and Shannon McHugh,who read drafts of the piece at various stages of its gestation, and to Nicola Catelli, who generouslyshared his book Scherzar coi santi: Prospettive comiche sul Sacco di Roma (Parma, 2008) with me. I haveopted to cite his articles on the topic because of their wider international availability.

1. For a history of the May 6, 1527, Sack, see Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome 1527 (New York,2004).

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 17, number 1. © 2014 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard UniversityCenter for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2014/1701-0002$10.00

55



In taking up his pen while the occupation raged with no end yet in sight,

Aretino became one of the first to write about and interpret the Sack of Rome.

One of his two poems captured the elegiac tone with which the tragedy was

widely reported. The other took aim at Rome and its Curia with biting satire. In

answering the implicit question of how the Sack ought to be represented, how-

ever, in both poems Aretino identified as one of its core, if not its primary, char-

acteristics the sexual abuse that it entailed—even as those offenses were ongoing.

Recent years have witnessed a growing scholarly interest in the depiction of

the Sack, beginning with André Chastel’s watershed study, The Sack of Rome,

1527. Some of these explorations have underscored the almost total absence of

Italian artistic representations and the relative dearth and despondency of Latin

literary ones; others have begun the important process of tracing the origins, ob-

jectives, and thematic contents of the many vernacular portrayals.2 To date,

however, the Sack’s relationship to issues of gender has not yet attracted the

scholarly attention that any historical occurrence defined by its widespread sex-

ual violations and corporeal tortures might reasonably be expected to prompt.

With few exceptions, such as Nicola Catelli’s work on sexual spectacle in La

puttana errante and Laurie Shepard’s excellent analysis of the impact of rape in

Gl'Ingannati, the grisly afflictions suffered during those nine months and their

representations in written texts of all kinds, from letters to lamenti and histories

to comedies, have gone largely unexamined.3 This is not to say that scholars have

not noted the rapes and torments of the Sack—although the sexualized abuses of

Roman men have been generally overlooked—but rather that they tend to im-

plicitly dismiss them as what St. Augustine called “the customs of war.”4 Yet we

would do well to better incorporate gender and the body into developing dis-

2. See André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. Beth Archer (Princeton, NJ, 1983); KennethGouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Boston, 1998);Massimo Miglio, Vincenzo De Caprio, Daniel Arasse, and Alberto Asor Rosa, eds., Il Sacco di Romadel 1527 e l’immaginario collettivo (Rome, 1986); Nicola Catelli, “Scherzar coi santi: Prospettive co-miche sul Sacco di Roma,” Critica letteraria 34, no. 3 (2006): 463–82; Giulia Ponsiglione, La “ruina” diRoma: Il sacco del 1527 e la memoria letteraria (Rome, 2010); and Jessica Goethals, “Spectators of theSack: Rhetorical ‘Particularity’ and Graphic Violence in Luigi Guicciardini’s Historia del sacco diRoma,” Italian Studies 68, no. 2 (July 2013): 175–201.

3. Lorenzo Venier, La puttana errante, ed. Nicola Catelli (Milan, 2005), 7–11; Laurie Shepard,“Siena 1531: Genesis of a European Heroine,” Quaderni d’italianistica 26, no. 1 (2005): 3–19. Also seeMargaret A. Gallucci, Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in RenaissanceItaly (New York, 2003), 109–42.

4. St. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge, 1998), I.vii.10–11. Curiously, only the scholars of Aretino note the sexual torture of men but as footnotes and asides.See Danilo Romei, “Pas vobis, brigate: Una frottola ritrovata di Pietro Aretino,” La rassegna dellaletteratura italiana 90 (1986): 429–73, 457; and Catelli, “Scherzar coi santi,” 474 n. 24.

56 | I TATTI STUDIES IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE SPRING 2014



cussions on the Sack as a stimulant for writing. In introducing her study of eroti-

cism in the Renaissance, Bette Talvacchia aptly asserted that sexual representation

is just as relevant as any other “historical documentation” of the Renaissance.5

Considering the ways in which the sexually violated body—male and female—came

to be represented on the page allows us to sharpen and deepen our understanding

of cultural responses to this troubling event and the early modern imagination of

war’s consequences more broadly.

It would be most unwise, of course, to bandy about words like “documenta-

tion” when discussing the works of Pietro Aretino. A Roman court poet of hum-

ble Tuscan origins who became Venice’s leading poligrafo and, arguably, por-

nographer, Aretino constructed an enduring reputation as a self-mythologizer

and—in Ariosto’s famed appellation—the “scourge of princes.” He spared few

words that did not either promote himself (or those championing his interests)

or malign his enemies. Given how frequently he turned to the Sack, it seems

evident that he wished to become one of the predominating voices on the sub-

ject. Employing an array of genres—prophecies, letters, poems, comedies, and

dialogues—he drew diverse portraits of it, from the poignantly tragic to the

absurd and ribald, for over thirteen years. Through this deluge of imagery, he

permitted himself to mold the catastrophe to the arc of his own self-narrative,

that is, his flight from Rome to Mantua and ultimately to Venice. His writing on

the subject falls into three chronological categories. The first encompasses pre-

Sack satirical prophecies written from the Gonzaga court, most notably the Iudi-

cio over pronostico de Mastro Pasquino Quinto Evangelista de l’anno 1527 predict-

ing an invasion of Rome by “Todeschi tracananti in vino italico” (Germans

quaffing Italian wine).6 Over the summer of 1527, Aretino next wrote five works

dedicated exclusively to the Sack that exhibit a remarkable range and fluidity in

response to the tragedy. Aside from the poems here under consideration, and an

eroticized lamento (Italia afflitta, nuda e miseranda) addressed to the king of

France,7 these include a pair of diplomatic letters sent to Charles V and Clement VII

pressing for the clemency of the former and offering consolation (with the occa-

5. Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1999),ix.

6. Pietro Aretino, Scritti di Pietro Aretino nel Codice marciano It. XI 66 (=6730), ed. Danilo Romei(Florence, 1987), 54–55.

7. The lamento is available in ibid., 125–37. It was once rather inexplicably attributed to FrancescoGuicciardini. For evidence for Aretino’s authorship, see “Per l’attribuzione del capitolo ‘Italia afflitta’:Non Francesco Guicciardini, ma Pietro Aretino,” Filologia e critica 12, no. 2 (May–August 1987):234–51. On the phases of Aretino’s writing, also see Nicola Catelli, “Pietro Aretino e il Sacco diRoma,” Campi immaginabili 32–33 (2005): 22–45.

Vanquished Bodies, Weaponized Words | 57



sional thorn) to the latter.8 The Sack reemerges in Aretino’s oeuvre as a leitmotiv

in the 1530s. Although never again the principal subject of one of his works, it

reappears within the context of popular adage, prophecy, dialogue, and novella as

fodder for bawdy jokes as well as commentary on the state of Italian and Roman

affairs.

Aretino’s vision of the Sack is both sorrowful and salacious, pitying and con-

demnatory, and never is this so clear as in the Gonzaga poems: the 218-line ele-

giac Deh, havess’io quella terribil tromba and the 795-line carnivalesque Frottola

di Maestro Pasquino (Pax vobis, brigate).9 Readers have found it difficult to

square these structurally and tonally disparate works and tend to conclude that

they showcase the dichotomy of Aretino’s personal emotional response to the

news of the Sack: his grief as a former inhabitant of the city and his retaliatory

pleasure in his adversaries’ downfall.10 Undoubtedly this is partially the case, but

I also find persuasive Nicola Catelli’s suggestion that in these works Aretino

highlights his literary prowess by writing about the same event in two different

manners.11 The question is not merely one of shifting between the melancholy

and the sardonic, however. The poems offer two contradictory means of envi-

sioning the reported horrors of the Sack through divergent depictions of the

body—without giving precedence to one or the other—and thus of understand-

ing the tragedy’s impact on Roman gender identities, both feminine and mas-

culine.

Aretino’s knowledge of what befell Rome derived largely from the letters

circulating throughout Italy during the summer, such as those transcribed by

Marino Sanudo, and also presumably from word of mouth.12 The task he gives

himself is exploring how those stories could be variably presented and thus

interpreted through a canzone (which Dante had called the noblest form of lyric,

fit for “illustrious poets”) and a frottola (a form of popular “loquacious” poetry at

8. Pietro Aretino, De le lettere di M. Pietro Aretino (Venice, 1538), 6r–7r. Paul Larivaille hypothe-sized that Aretino’s irritation at not receiving any papal response to this letter, supposedly written atthe behest of Clement himself, prompted him to renew his anticlericalism in Pax vobis. Paul La-rivaille, Pietro Aretino (Rome, 1997), 132.

9. Danilo Romei has published both poems with substantial notes, including on variations be-tween manuscript versions. For Deh, havess’io, see Aretino, Scritti, 60–76. The frottola is available in itsentirety in Romei, “Pas vobis, brigate.”

10. Romei, “Pas vobis, brigate,” 431; and Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 133–34.11. Catelli, “Pietro Aretino,” 44.12. See, e.g., the letters transcribed in Marino Sanudo, I diarii, ed. Federico Stefani, Guglielmo

Berchet, and Nicolò Barozzi (Venice, 1879–1902), vol. 45, esp. cols. 185–90, 202–5, 218–20, 234–38.Helpful here are Romei’s exhaustive notes.




times, although not always, satirical in nature).13 Highlighting the rape and tor-

ment of women, including Rome personified, the canzone portrays the event

within domestic, intimate spaces as an affront to the integrity of the body, home,

and family resulting from an unarmed masculinity. The frottola instead opens

into the public sphere of the city streets with references to sodomy, cannibaliza-

tion, and genital torture as imaginatively inflicted on Pasquino, Rome’s “male”

talking statue. Told from Pasquino’s perspective, the poem describes the violation

of both women and men in mordant terms again linked to the Romans’ inability

to engage in virile combat or sage leadership.

On the one hand, Aretino becomes representative of writers on the Sack, both

in its wake and beyond, in that he has—after but two months—already set forth

the various ways in which the Roman body was (or was imagined to be) harmed

and could thus be depicted. On the other, he is unique among them in that he

rejects the notion of a single reaction, as the discordant portrayals of this literary

diptych impede any univocal interpretation. In short, these two works—written

by the same poet, at the same moment, about the same event, but with entirely

different poetic registers—exemplify and can thus be read as a case study of the

divided and uneasy attitudes of contemporaries toward the corporeal fate of

Rome and her citizens at the hands of imperial soldiers.

AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE ON LANGUAGE

Accompanying both poems but introducing the canzone in particular was a note

from Aretino to his patron. Dated July 7—the marquis would send his thanks for

both poems the very next day—it deplores the Sack as an assault worse than that

of Carthage, Jerusalem, or Troy, a tragedy against both man and God that should

elicit the tears of anyone bearing love for the Italian peninsula. At the same

time, however, Aretino stakes out a linguistic freedom with which to write about

it. In presenting his stylistic choices, he indicates that—as was his wont anyway—

he will reject the delicacies of the Petrarchism obsessing so many pens of his day.

He does so not out of ignorance but rather because “la passione che diede quella

bona robba di mona Laura a ser Petrarcha fu più dolce che questa che ci dà

Roma coda mundi per gratia de li Spagnuoli et de i Thodeschi, che, per Dio,

bisognerìa per isfogarsi che per parole fosseno spiedi & archibusi” (the passion

that that nice bit of goods Lady Laura gave to Sir Petrarch was sweeter than this,

13. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge, 2005), II.iii.8. SabineVerhulst, La frottola (XIV–XV sec.): Aspetti della codificazione e proposte esegetiche (Gent, 1990), here25.




which, thanks to the Spaniards and Germans, gives us Rome, the ass of the world;

by God, in order to give vent one needs pikes and harquebuses for words).14

While Aretino’s letter has been described as an apologia for the canzone’s

supposedly subpar literary style,15 it seems more likely that his reference to ag-

gressive, assailing words declares his intent to make the Sack and its torments a

subject for poetry in a way that flies in the face of prevailing dictates on taste and

decorum. On the topic of the disastrous Italian Wars, for example, the inter-

locutors of Baldassarre Castiglione’s Cortigiano leave uncontested Ludovico da

Canossa’s suggestion that “meglio è passare con silenzio quello che senza dolore

ricordare non si può” (it is better to pass over in silence that which cannot be

remembered without pain), a line that—but for the refusal to speak—echoes

Aeneas’s famous first words on Troy.16 Similarly, in his Prose della volgar lingua

Pietro Bembo argues that poets should avoid those arguments and registers that

are “vile, rough, or malicious” and contrasts a Petrarch who chose both his sub-

jects and his language judiciously with a Dante who—when coarsely and graph-

ically describing the tormented bodies of hell—ought to have employed a more

“graceful” and “honorable” voice or kept silent altogether.17 Despite willfully

overlooking the fact that Petrarch included political poems amid his amorous

verse and that he himself follows a Petrarchan rhyme scheme in his canzone,

Aretino signals his intention to contrast the refined “messer Sovente et ser

Unquanto et don Quinci” (Master Ofttimes, Sir E’er, and Lord Thence) of the

Petrarchans with his weaponized words.18 In so doing, he would seem to push the

pendulum back toward a Dantean language of the tormented—rather than enam-

ored—body. Violent acts, he suggests, require violent words. The example of his

poems asserts that no part of what happened in Rome is too lowly for depiction.

THE FUNEREAL CANZONE

The fall of medieval and early modern cities often engendered lamenti storici, a

form of anonymous popular verse personifying the city as a violated woman

bemoaning the tribulations endured by her populace and calling out for deliver-

14. Aretino, Scritti, 58–59. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.15. Romei, “Pas vobis, brigate,” 432.16. Baldassarre Castiglione, Il cortigiano, ed. Amedeo Quondam (Milan, 2002), 78 (bk. I, sec. 7,

para. 19).17. Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua: Gli Asolani; Rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Milan, 1989),

138 (bk. II, sec. 5).18. Aretino, Scritti, 58.




ance.19 The Sack of Rome was no exception, and lamenti describing its horrors

quickly found their way into circulation. Aretino’s first poem, Deh, havess’io

quella terribil tromba, taps into this tradition. Mirroring the contents and style of

the genre, Aretino depicts the Sack as an infernal attack on the body, imagined

foremost as the rape of Rome: “Di magio il sexto l’unica Madonna, / del gran

mondo colonna, / violata, mendica et genuflessa, / lorda di sangue, altrui pianse

et se stessa” (On the sixth of May the sole Mistress / and pillar of this great world /

violated, begging and on her knees, / bloodstained, cried for others and herself).20

The work surveys the corporeal torments, indignantly condemns the acts of sac-

rilege committed (such as the conversion of churches, including St. Peter’s, into

horse stables), and closes with an appeal for mercy to Charles V. Lacking the ir-

reverence with which Aretino often wrote about the Sack, the elegiac poem wins

the somewhat puzzled appreciation of scholars for its “declamatory but sincere pa-

thos” and “sublime and tragic style.”21 By imitating the lamenti storici, Aretino

successfully proffers an example of despondent writing, one that will rely on a ten-

sion between an assailed femininity and an enervated masculinity.

Foregrounding the feminine, Aretino presents the city as a woman who weeps

as she sees how “l’intatte alme donzelle / sforzavano gli iniqui desideri” (iniqui-

tous desires forced themselves upon / the untouched maiden souls).22 So too are

we confronted with babes cut from the womb, torn from their cradles, thrown

from the balconies of their homes, or clutched in the arms of murdered moth-

ers as they “dolce suggeva[no] de le mamme intatte / vie più sangue che latte”

(sweetly sucked from breasts’ unbroken ducts / more blood than milk).23 When a

father is killed before his son, the anguish and terror are those of the witnessing

mother who enfolds their bodies “ne le braccia sue stanche” (within her tired

arms).24 These are fairly standard scenes associated with the Sack and sieges at

large. More unique within this body of texts is Aretino’s next image, where we

enter into domestic, intimate spaces and witness “la donna fida e ’l sposo acceso, /

pur dianzi al casto letto agiunti insieme, / satiar del giovin sangue il coltell’empio”

19. On Italian lamenti storici, see Antonio Medin, Lamenti de’ secoli XIV e XV (Florence, 1883);Giorgio Varanini, ed., Lamenti storici pisani (Pisa, 1968); and Vittorio Rossi, Storia letteraria d’Italia:Il Quattrocento, 11th ed. (Milan, 1973), 238–39.

20. Aretino, Deh, havess’io, lines 25–28.21. See Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 135; and Rosalma Salina Borello, Testo, intertesto, ipertesto:

Proposte teoriche e percorsi di lettura (Rome, 1996), 116.22. Aretino, Deh, havess’io, lines 32–33.23. Ibid., lines 57–68.24. Ibid., lines 35–42.




(the devoted woman and her enamored spouse, / brought together before their

chaste marriage bed / sating the cruel knife with young blood).25 Delicate and

tragic, these lines on the devoted bride and her loving groom slain within their

bedchamber set up the almost requisite Lucretia-inspired death of a Roman who

cleansed her “corrupted body” by casting herself into the lethal waters of the

Tiber.26

Aretino’s focus on women reflects their centrality in literary and documentary

Sack texts. This visibility is attributable in part to biblical depictions of Rome as

the divinely castigated Whore of Babylon. Contemporaries revisited many of

these in the Sack’s wake, suggesting that Rome’s ravagement was symbolically

anticipated and retrospectively underscored.27 It also bears a strong relationship

to the topos of Rome or Italy, often interchangeably, as a suffering woman, mem-

orably portrayed as “serva Italia, di dolor ostello” (enslaved Italy, dwelling of

pain) by Dante.28 This feminized portrait of a dejected or lacerated political body

appears throughout the Italian Wars, as in Machiavelli’s description of an Italy

who is “headless, without order, beaten, stripped, torn, overrun, and subject to

every sort of ruin.”29 These two images of femininity—carnal and victimized—

come together in the post-Sack preoccupation with the sexual violation of

women. To give but a few examples, a published Letra del sucesso et gran cru-

deltade fatta drento di Roma che non fu in Hierusalem o in Troia così grande

decries the disgraces that befell ladies, nuns, and very young girls,30 while the

amorous escapades of a heroine after her rape by Spanish soldiers spurs the plot

of the comedy Gli Ingannati staged five years later.31 This focus on rape as one of

the Sack’s gravest atrocities did not dissipate with time; to the contrary, later

writers further dramatized it. Some highlighted stories of salvation. This deliver-

ance could come through divine miracle, such as that of a nun described in

Ottavio Panciroli’s Tesori nascosti dell’alma città di Roma (1625) who, despite

25. Ibid., lines 43–45.26. “corpo . . . corrotto.” Ibid., lines 71–84.27. On such apocalyptic interpretations, see Chastel, Sack of Rome, 49–90; Massimo Firpo, Il

Sacco di Roma del 1527 tra profezia, propaganda politica e riforma religiosa (Cagliari, 1990); andPaolo Picca, Il sacco di Roma nel 1527: Profezie, previsioni, prodigi (Rome, 1929).

28. Dante, Purgatorio, Canto VI, 76. Also see Natalia Costa-Zalessow, “Italy as a Victim: AHistorical Appraisal of a Literary Theme,” Italica 45, no. 2 (1968): 216–40.

29. “sanza capo, sanza ordine, battuta, spogliata, lacera, corsa, et avessi sopportato d’ogni sorteruina.” Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe, ed. Giorgio Inglese (Turin, 1985), XXVI.3.

30. Marina Beer, Donatella Diamanti, and Cristina Ivaldi, eds., Guerre in ottava rima, 4 vols.(Modena, 1989), 2:857–64.

31. Accademici Intronati di Siena, La commedia degli Ingannati, ed. Florindo Cerreta (Florence,1980). See esp. Shepard, “Siena 1531.”




her physical charms, temporarily became so ugly that no soldier desired her or

her sisters.32 It might also result from acts of cunning by which women saved

themselves, such as a romana described in a seicento Roman manuscript who

escaped the invaders’ attention by disguising herself as a man.33 Counterbalanc-

ing such tales of preserved honor was evermore crisply imagined savagery. An

account in this same manuscript, for example, portrays soldiers stuffing hand-

kerchiefs into the mouths of the donzelle so that they could not scream during

their defilement.34

The social meanings given to the assault of women during this period are

difficult to untangle. In her work on rape in the visual arts, Diane Wolfthal notes

that ancient and medieval accounts saw sexual attacks against the women of a

vanquished population as a “legitimate seizure of booty”—property surrendered

like any other—and that even early modern war treatises sanctioned rape in such

instances.35 However, the mercenary-fought wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries prompted a more critical view that emphasized the soldiers’ depravity

and immorality, and by the sixteenth century artistic prints on the “miseries of

war” increasingly portrayed—and thus condemned—these offenses.36 If we can

take Wolfthal’s analysis as accurate, then Sack literature would seem to partici-

pate in such a shift and Deh, havess’io particularly so, emphasizing as it does the

torments of the Sack as primarily blows to women’s bodies, families, and homes.

If the diletta donna Rome fell “into the hands of dogs and ruthless monsters,”

Aretino argues, it is because she was left “of counsel and of weapons unarmed

[inherme].”37 Commentators widely placed the blame for such helplessness at the

feet of Clement VII for both his poorly chosen advisors and his foolhardiness in

signing a truce with the emperor’s representatives that the latter had little inten-

tion of honoring. Thus duped, and in financial straits, the pope dismissed many

of the mercenaries guarding the city. As the enemy approached, the Vatican pro-

hibited citizens from fleeing but refused to properly arm them, ensuring their vul-

nerability.38 I have argued elsewhere that Adriana Cavarero’s association of hor-

rorism with the inerme (unarmed, defenseless) can be a useful lens through which

32. Ottavio Panciroli, Tesori nascosti dell’alma città di Roma (Rome, 1625), 196.33. Biblioteca Angelica, Codice Angelicano 1002, 246–47.34. Ibid., 227.35. Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternative (New York, 1999),

2, 64–67, and 97.36. Ibid., 101–2.37. “in man de i cani e de spietati mostri . . . inherme di consigli et d’armi.” Aretino, Deh,

havess’io, lines 21–23.38. Hook, Sack of Rome, 130–46.




to examine literary representations of Sack brutality.39 In Cavarero’s reading, horror

is the physical repugnance (manifested as a bristling or freezing sensation) experi-

enced by a spectator to an “atrocious scene” of violence enacted on a vulnerable,

unarmed body. The victim of the horrific act, she stresses, is not “the hero, the

combatant at the height of his virility, the champion of reciprocal massacre pre-

pared to suffer vulnus [wound] on his own body, but rather the infant, the baby.”40

Certainly in Aretino’s Rome the imperiled body is often female, but it can also be

male. The poem portrays no city defenders, points to no vanquished heroes. Aside

from a brief mention of men as the general objects of an unspecified torture,41 the

male figures that appear within the presentation of the Sack’s tribulations are those

who fell beside their wives and mothers as well as those who killed their daughters

at the final hour in order to save their honor from the libidinal furies of the en-

emy.42 Letters suggest that such mercy killings did occur, but within the context of

Aretino’s canzone these lines do more than extend the connection between the

Sack and an assault on women.43 Rather, the emphasis on women underscores the

imposed impotence of the city’s men in protecting them. That we have before us a

horrific scene akin to that analyzed by Cavarero is suggested by the canzone’s only

real view on the male body, the “spectacle” of Rome’s honorable men splayed for

days unburied on the ground (“gli honorandi / huomeni stansi senza sepoltura /

spetacul ch’ a la morte fa paura”).44 The unwise military and political decisions of the

Vatican placed Roman men in precisely the “condition of passivity” that submits

them to a “violence [they] can neither flee from nor defend against.”45 This ener-

vation or emasculation of the male citizens secures their deaths and engenders the

assault on their women. Faced with the absence of masculine valor, the reader of

Deh, havess’io confronts a Rome disproportionately populated by female victims

of the Sack, women whose loss of honor, domestic tranquility, and bodily integ-

rity says as much about the state of Roman masculinity as of femininity.

39. Goethals, “Spectators of the Sack,” 194.40. Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York, 2009), 26.41. “Sofrir vidde martyro et duro scempio / il buon frate al fratello, et bramar tale / morir per non

morire, e altri non volse” (Brother saw brother suffer torment and harsh slaughter and longed only todie in order not to die). Aretino, Deh, havess’io, lines 49–51.

42. “Vidde il pio genitor ch’a l’hore extreme / pose la figlia, a ciò restassi illeso / il caro fior, dipudicicia exempio” ([Rome] saw the merciful father who at the final hour killed his daughter so thather dear flower remained unscathed, an exemplar of modesty). Ibid., lines 46–48.

43. See, e.g., Francesco Gonzaga’s description of such paternal killings in the May 9 letter toFederico transcribed in Alessandro Luzio, Fabrizio Maramaldo: Nuovi documenti (Ancona, 1883),79–81.

44. Aretino, Deh, havess’io, lines 96–98.45. Cavarero, Horrorism, 30.




The canzone’s frame heightens this critique. Consistent with his promise to

write with weapon-like words, Aretino does not introduce this poem entirely in

the guise of a traditional lament. While Italian lamenti rely on prosopopoeia,

permitting the assailed city-as-woman to decry her cruel fate, this text is instead

more consistent with ultramontane traditions in which the poet himself speaks.46

Whereas the lamenti on the Sack of Rome address the reader with the voice of a

victimized woman, the canzone’s narrating persona is that of a male would-be

singer of epic: “Deh, havess’io quella terribil tromba / ch’altamente cantò di Troia

il pianto, / o equali al suggetto almen gli accenti! / Foss’io, Vergilio, te; te, foss’io

tanto / che dir potessi il duol, ch’in ciel rimbomba, / de l’alma et diva madre de le

genti!” (Alas, would that I had that terrible trumpet / that resonantly sang of the

weeping of Troy, / or at least words equal to the subject! / Would that I were you,

Virgil; that I were equal to you / that I could tell of the pain that in the heavens

resounds / of the beneficent and divine mother of the peoples).47 Beyond the

conventional rhetorical declaration of being inadequate to his subject, Aretino

offers up Rome as a subject as worthy of epic as any other annihilated city. But

ultimately this poem cannot become epic or epic-like—cannot portray a single

battle scene and must remain a lamento—precisely because in Rome there is no

Virgilian hero, there are no warriors. He himself would underscore this point in

an extended parody of Virgil in his Dialoghi (1536), to which we will return

below. Rather than with a virile Rome or a new city founded in its image, the

poem concludes on a more equivocal note. On the one hand, the narrator pleads

for Charles’s mercy by emphasizing that Italy has become the handmaiden to his

barbarous troops (Italia ancella / de le malvagie tue barbare schiere) but insists

that “we are all your family now” (omai siam tutti de la tua famiglia).48 On the

other, he offers the emperor an ultimatum: cease the carnage in Rome or face

the wrath of Rome’s allies. Italy, alongside France and England, is pronounced

the guardian of a Rome that would not or could not defend itself: “Italia in mano

ha ’l tèlo” (Italy has its arrows in hand).49 Military force and masculine vigor still

exist—just not within a dominated and possessed Rome.

The sympathetic exploration of femininity as a victim of male sexual de-

pravity, in the case of the soldiers, and militaristic impotency, in the case of

Rome’s would-be defenders, sits at the canzone’s textual core. What might have

been a tale akin to that of Aeneas can only remain a lament. In this guise, Aretino

46. On this key distinction, see Medin, Lamenti, 5.47. Aretino, Deh, havess’io, lines 1–6.48. Ibid., lines 176–77, 193.49. Ibid., line 203.




presents an example of elegiac writing capturing a licit, somewhat traditional

means of articulating the horrors of war on primarily female victims. His next

poem, the frottola, takes a diametrically opposed path through the satirical and

illicit exploration of both male and female suffering.

THE MORDANT FROTTOLA

The last among Aretino’s pasquinades, the Frottola di Maestro Pasquino (Pax

vobis, brigate), stands apart even within this racy group as the “most imposing

and ferocious, most impudent and scandalous.”50 The frottola is a work of stun-

ning Schadenfreude composed largely at the expense of Aretino’s curial enemies.

Because scholars have been understandably drawn toward its vindictiveness and

irreverence, however, an analysis of its structure, its relationship to Deh, havess’io,

and its impact on how we see the Sack has not been especially forthcoming.51

If Deh, havess’io offers a moving but partial picture of the Sack, the frottola

promises the contrary: “Ora, senza licenzia, / dirò, bench’io sia fioco / chi mandò

Roma a·ssacco e quando e come” (Now, without leave / I will tell, though I am

hoarse, / who set sack to Rome and where and how).52 One must approach any

claims to authority while dealing with the prickly figure of Pasquino with cau-

tion and often incredulity. Yet it is nevertheless true that this pasquinata shares

a structure with chronicles and other poetic histories, such as Eustachio Cele-

brino’s La presa di Roma and Luigi Guicciardini’s Historia del Sacco di Roma.53

The poem dedicates nearly 150 lines to the war itself, from the siege of Milan to

the imperialists’ movement south toward a meagerly accoutered Rome. In the

following four hundred lines Aretino gives an all-encompassing (albeit acutely

indecorous) portrayal of the Sack’s torments. The final two hundred lines assign

blame for and anticipate the consequences of Rome’s fall. The frottola therefore

maintains an analytic frame that governs its otherwise carnivalesque turmoil.

One might conclude that the work parodies or perverts other historicizing texts.

Given its remarkably early composition, however, Pax vobis is more likely to

have initiated than imitated the cronica poetica narrative framework as applied

to the Sack. Moreover, little within Aretino’s survey of torments appears contrary

50. Romei, “Pax vobis, brigate,” 432.51. As noted, the primary exception is Catelli, “Scherzar coi santi.”52. Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 10–12.53. Eustachio Celebrino, La Guerra di Camollia e La presa di Roma: Rime del sec. XVI, ed.

Francesco Mango (Bologna, 1886; repr., 1969); Luigi Guicciardini, Historia del Sacco di Roma, avail-able in Il Sacco di Roma del MDXXVII: Narrazioni di contemporanei, ed. Carlo Milanesi (Florence,1867), 1–244.




to fact or goes unsaid by other writers; his poem would have jarred contemporar-

ies less for its contents than for its coarseness and venom.

In his elegy, Aretino deplores the defenselessness with which the Vatican

saddled its citizens by focusing his narrative attentions on the repercussions for

the most vulnerable of them. He reiterates the attack in this half of the poetic

diptych, but his criticism that Rome fell “senza troppa battaglia” (without much

of a fight) is less exclusively a commentary on the pope than a disparagement of

the Roman men tasked with defending the city after Clement dismissed the

professional combatants.54 At the first breach of the walls, these stopgap soldiers

infamously turned tail and fled, an act of cowardice for which they were roundly

lambasted by contemporaries, as in La presa e lamento di Roma, where a “slow

and sluggish” defense of the city by “[her] bewildered men, like lost souls” opened

wide the city gates to the enemy.55 Aretino similarly attributes the military disaster

and the resultant terrors to the pusillanimity of the “yellow-bellied” defenders.56

In this more pointed critique of Roman virility, the frottola more thoroughly

envisions the tragedy on both the female and the male body.

Although Pasquino claims to have witnessed the women’s fate with “gran

compassione,” Aretino depicts them not as “violated” but “fucked” and arrays

them in a manner that cannot but recall his infamous Sonetti lussuriosi reprinted

later that same year.57 The original circulation of these pornographic sonnets, in

which Aretino narrates the bawdy series of sexual positions (I modi) sketched by

Giulio Romano and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, caused such scandal as

to have reportedly precipitated the attempt on his life and his escape from

Rome.58 For an example, we can look to the nun ravaged by a German “in front”

and a Spaniard “in back,”59 recalling the wanton woman in the seventh sonnet

who inquires whether her lover will penetrate her “behind or in front” and the

epilogue’s mockery of readers who relish the spectacle of girls taken “both in

front and behind.”60 Following these objectifying lines on the nun’s violation, the

54. Aretino, Pax vobis, line 210.55. “per mia difesa far più pigra e lenta / li mei smarriti, come gente perse, / restor, e allor gli fu le

porte aperte.” In Antonio Medin and Ludovico Frati, eds., Lamenti storici dei secoli XIV, XV, e XVI, 3vols. (Bologna, 1969), 3:363.

56. Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 210 and 214–26.57. For a similar view, see Nicola Catelli, “Una miriade di frammenti: Note su Pietro Aretino e il

Sacco di Roma,” in L’elmo di Mambrino: Nove saggi di letteratura, ed. Giovanni Ronchini and AndreaTorre (Luca, 2006), 9.

58. Talvacchia, Taking Positions, 4–19.59. Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 250–55.60. See the reproduction and translation of the sonnets in Talvacchia, Taking Positions, 198–227,

here 207 and 227.




portrait of a world a rovescio is completed with the image of a converted courte-

san whose resistance to assault causes her death and the figurative reconversion

of her genitals into a potential source for gold coin: “I’ viddi la Pagnina, / . . .

ch’un la volse chiavare, / et ella, ch’ebbe già / giurato castità, non volse farlo; / ma

·ssì fece adirarlo, / che la scannò di botto; / poi il tedesco arlotto e manicoldo, /

per avere qualche soldo, / cercògli in culo e in potta, / né mai trovovvi cotta di

tesoro” (I saw Pagnina, / . . . whom one [of the soldiers] wanted to screw / and

she, who had already / vowed chastity, did not want to do it; / but she so angered

him, / that he abruptly slit her throat; / then the swinish and villainous German, /

looking to find some coins, / looked for them in her ass and pussy, / but didn’t

find a scrap of treasure there).61 Upending the categories of honest and dishon-

est women, Aretino follows this troubling vignette of the courtesan’s resistance

by condemning the city’s gentlewomen, none of whom followed ancient Lucretia

to her honorable death—contradicting the comparable passage inDeh, havess’io.62

Despite his predilection for the scurrilous, Pasquino still professes repugnance

at the abuse of the women and the population at large. Even more strongly than

in Deh, havess’io, where events occur before the eyes of personified Rome, Are-

tino translates the experience of horror—whose etymological connection to bris-

tling, goose bumps, and chills is the linchpin of Cavarero’s study on such vio-

lence—onto the body of his eyewitness narrator through an ironic image of stone

that responds like flesh: “E triemo, aggiacchio e sudo / quando io penso che

Roma / visto ho in un sacco doma e rovinata. . . . Mi s’arriccia ogni pelo / quando

io ripenso questo” (And I shiver, turn icy and sweat / when I think that I saw

Rome / subdued and ruined in a Sack. . . . Every hair bristles / when I think back

on this).63 If, however, the frottola exhibits “an oscillation between compassion

and amusement,”64 no such ambiguity in response is afforded to Aretino’s ene-

mies. Pasquino’s shivers are interspersed with chuckles at the expense of those

foes who necessitated his flight from Rome.

Prominent are invectives against the “papa cazzo” (dick pope) or “papessa

pidocchiosa” (greedy papess) buried alive (“seppellito vivo vivo”) in the Castel

Sant’Angelo; a 150-line harangue blamed Clement for the war and pictures the

repercussions he will still suffer.65 At the figurative and literal center of the poem

are Curia members who suffered or died during the Sack, a list of rivals (includ-

61. Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 256–67.62. Ibid., lines 268–73.63. Cavarero, Horrorism, 7; Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 52–54 and 142–43.64. Catelli, “Pietro Aretino,” 30.65. Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 201, 730, 492, 600–768.




ing Gian Matteo Giberti, Francesco Berni, and Paolo Giovio) that Pasquino

recites with unmasked enthusiasm. Their misery occurs at the wish of an exas-

perated deity who no longer tolerates their crimes: greed, corruption, sexual im-

propriety—including being both a sexual top and a bottom—and, the final straw,

the assassination attempt against Aretino.66 Interpreting the Sack as a holy cas-

tigation necessitated by ecclesiastic improprieties was well-trodden ground, but

the transformation of the Sack into a divine vendetta intended to redress the

wrongs Aretino himself suffered is without parallel.67

Through his proxy, Pasquino, Aretino overlooks the punishment of these men

and conveys a vivid picture of their corporeal suffering:

Fra ’mille mia dolori

ch’ho riso de’ poltroni

legati pe’ coglioni [son] da’ nemici,

che mugliano, e mendici,

sentendoli strappare,

e veggon che grattare gli fan purtanto.

Poi gli fan fare il canto

un staffil sulla pancia

e ogni or[a] la mancia a staffilate.

D’acque fredde e ’nsalate

fanno lor gli argomenti

e mille altri tormenti mane e sera;

e ciascun[o] si dispera

ch’a quel modo han trovati

e danar sotterrati e altre cose.

[Amidst my thousand pains / at least I laughed at the sluggards / bound

together by the testicles by their enemies, / who bellow and beg, / feeling

themselves torn, / and seeing that every so often they make them scratch

an itch. / Then with whips across the belly / they make them sing out / and

every hour pay up for their lashes. / They make enemas for them / out of

cold water and bitter herbs / and a thousand other torments; / And each

despairs / that in this way they found / their buried money and other

possessions.]68

66. Ibid., lines 313–420.67. See ibid., lines 718–29. Also see Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, 133–34; Romei, “Pax vobis, brigate,”

431; and Catelli, “Una miriade di frammenti,” 10.68. Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 388–402.




Paraded about the city, these clerics are the victims of sexualized torments

that for Aretino prompt not horror but laughter. That the objective is to further

emasculate these already enfeebled men is clear when we consider, for example,

that the cold water enemas described in the Sonetti lussuriosi as a fitting punish-

ment for whoever has a small penis (“chi ha picciol cazzo”) are here anally in-

jected by force.69 Although many of his enemies were safely confined within the

Castel Sant’Angelo, the poet submits clerics as a class to voyeuristic mockery by

Pasquino. While in these details Aretino is again consistent with reported stories,

in one case the urge to defy historical fact proved too great. Arriving in his list at

Paolo Giovio, Pasquino maliciously asserts that—rather than being in the Castel

Sant’Angelo—the historian was being strafottuto (fucked again and again) by im-

perial soldiers, an experience that he enjoyed but for which he had not expected to

pay up.70

Through satire and personal vendetta, Aretino introduces the subject of men’s

sexual victimization into his writing on the Sack, although with none too sym-

pathetic a touch. Pasquino’s laughter derides the prelates, but as a witness he

partakes in their fate. In him Aretino uniquely creates a “male” counterpart to

the violated Rome who watches the Sack in Deh, havess’io and other lament

literature. Through this figure, the reader moves beyond the sadism associated

with the prelates’ torment and considers the impact on the male population as a

whole. In the passage cited above, Pasquino relishes in the sight of his enemies

being whipped, torn, penetrated, and bound together by their genitals. The ref-

erence to his own pains draws the reader back to the frottola’s opening lines,

where the first act of perpetrated violence is against the statue himself. Although

his torment produces sheets of sonnets rather than the treasures his captives seek,

his “body” suffers the same abuses as other men in Rome:

In el cul ferri caldi,

tutti e coglion pelati,

credendo che ducati in chiocca avessi . . .

e co’ denti m’han mozzi ambo gli orecchi,

e anche ebbi parecchi

crudi di corda tratti.

69. In Talvacchia, Taking Positions, 203 and 207.70. Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 424–29. For more on Giovio, gender, and the Sack, see Kenneth

Gouwens’s “Meanings of Masculinity in Paolo Giovio’s ‘Ischian’ Dialogues,” in this issue.




[Hot swords in my ass / both testicles skinned (or plucked/singed) / be-

cause they believed that I had ducats in droves . . . / and with their teeth

they cut off both my ears / and I also had plenty / of cruel jerks of the

cord.]71

Violated and objectified like the slain converted courtesan, Pasquino embodies

the array of corporeal abuses leveled at men during the Sack. But mocking the

potential for readerly sympathy, such testimony becomes satirical when deliv-

ered by an ancient stone torso whose mutilation occurred long before the Sack.

The least surprising of the torments are the tratti di corda, “jerks of the rope”

or strappado. In this common form of civil and military capital punishment, the

accused was hoisted off the ground and then dropped by a rope tied around his

wrists from behind.72 The imperialists employed the strappado as a means of

extracting ever greater ransom by pushing the body to its limits.73 Next, the

targeting of the genital and anal regions of the body connects Pasquino to the

men he watches. It is important to note that while many writers and commen-

tators addressed attacks on male sexual organs, in explicitly acknowledging the

rape of Roman men by the imperial soldiers Aretino stands nearly alone. I have

encountered only one other direct discussion of this surely factual physical

abuse, a seventeenth-century manuscript history of the Sack condemning the

lecherous “wolves” for having assailed the bodies not only of women but also of

men (“nè solo quei malvaggi ne’ corpi delle donne ma in quelli anco degl’huomini

sceleratam[en]te operavano”).74 Not only has Aretino included this side of the

history, but his narrating witness has—like Lady Rome in the canzone—himself

been raped.

Even the prominence of testicular torture has not been adequately reflected

in modern scholarship. Pasquino’s mention of removing the skin or hair from

the testes could be an adaptation of the ritual practice of shaving and searching

a torture victim’s body for talismans that could ward off pain.75 However, it more

likely refers to just these kinds of sexualized abuses to which Sack writing often

alludes. The historical veracity of this torment is underscored by official testi-

71. Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 34–36, 39–41.72. Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago,

2001), 96. Silverman’s comments on torture in France also seem applicable to the Italian context.73. See, e.g., the case of Luca Tardolo described in Pierio Valeriano, Pierio Valeriano on the Ill

Fortune of Learned Men: A Renaissance Humanist and His World, ed. and trans. Julia Haig Gaisser(Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), 168–69.

74. Del sacco di Roma, Biblioteca Marciana ms. It. VI. 79 [=6178], 44v.75. Silverman, Tortured Subjects, 65–66, 95.




monies, such as that of a certain Iohanni Michelius who reports having been

“suspended for an hour by the testicles.”76 Allusions to the ordeal emerge in texts

across the spectrum, from a popular Successo de’ Pasquino professing that those

who escaped it were fortunate indeed (“O beati che non fur in questo loco / et

suspendendo in alto con testicoli”),77 to Pietro Corsi’s poem Romae urbis exci-

dium, where men are strung up “by that one part of the body that public decency

covers . . . to betray gems and precious vases and gold that they had never

possessed,”78 to Pierio Valeriano’s dialogue on the tribulations that befall liter-

ary men, in this case the philologist Giuliano da Camerino who jumped to his

death after having endured the strappado by the testicles.79 Similarly, one finds

references to castration, as in a Credo di Romani that seeks divine reprisal for

“chi straziati da cordi, chi privati / de membri genitali e chi ciechati / Chi morti e

chi squartati, chi frustati” (racked by cords, those deprived / of their genitals and

those blinded / Those killed and quartered, those whipped).80 Francesco Pesaro,

the archbishop of Zara, offers an elucidating, although harrowing, picture of the

Sack as he experienced it from within the Castel Sant’Angelo. After describing

having seen men escape their torments by throwing themselves to their deaths

and a disheveled woman in her underdress run from a house and jump into the

Tiber, Pesaro asks his reader to imagine what else happened in Rome if the noc-

turnal screams and the testicles found along the roadsides during the day were

any indication.81 Such a sight proved so disturbing to one Arrivabene Gavardo

that the abuse of the genitals and other extremities—an ordeal to which men of

all walks of life were subjected—encapsulates the very subject of torture in his

eyewitness letter.82

How ought we to interpret these passages? The immediate or surface objective

of such tortures was the extraction of further booty. However, it seems unwise to

assume that the purpose was purely monetary, particularly when contemporaries

were quick to attribute Rome’s fall to the effeminate peccancy of her prelates and

the martial impotency of her defenders. As we noted above, the rape of women

76. Transcribed in Emma Condello, “ ‘Ulterius non extendo’: Due testimonianze inedite del saccodi Roma del 1527,” in Scrivere il volgare fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Nadia Cannata and MariaAntonietta Grignani (Ospedaletto-Pisa, 2009), 225–35. Condello makes helpful note of similar accounts.

77. Beer, Diamanti, and Ivaldi, Guerre in ottava rima, 2:864 and 870. Despite the reference toPasquino, this is not one of Aretino’s works.

78. Cited and translated in Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance, 83.79. Valeriano, On the Ill Fortune of Learned Men, 146–49.80. In Beer, Diamanti, and Ivaldi, Guerre in ottava rima, 2:853.81. “per le strade son stati veduti molti testiculi”; see Sanudo, I diarii, 46, col. 141.82. Arrivabene Gavardo, “Dil Sacho di Roma,” Archivio storico lombardo 4, no. 3 (September

30, 1877): 626–37.




was also connected to the idea of military spoils, but it further connoted the

humiliation of the romane as well as the romani who could not or failed to

protect them. So too does this sexualized torture of men carry with it ulterior

aims of dishonor, degradation, and an emasculation both symbolic and literal.

Scholarly analyses of the victimization of early modern European men are in

shorter supply than one might like.83 In their absence, it is illuminating to turn

to studies on gender violence in the New World, which often provide an invalu-

able overview of ancient and global practices that elucidate the behaviors of the

early modern conquerors. Richard Trexler’s work proves especially helpful on

this front, given his interest in the connection between gender, humiliation, and

warfare. Looking at sexual punishments, including castrations and anal eviscera-

tions, as a means of debasing enemies across time and continents, he suggests

that they were aimed at branding men as “dependent and thus not fully male:

either as defenseless, passive males, or as women” in a way that was often perma-

nent.84 Sexual torment and disfigurement communicated at the most visceral

level the virile dominance of the conqueror and the enervated submission of the

vanquished. If, as Paula Findlen argues in her study of Renaissance erotica, por-

nographers claimed to “[lay] bare the truth” through a medium that shockingly

displayed “those who had power and those who succumbed to it,” Aretino uses

the corporeal obscenity of Pas vobis to scandalously broadcast the Romans’ yield-

ing to an external dominating force.85 Like later writers who included such scenes

in their depictions of the Sack, Aretino does not merely catalog the historical tor-

tures of the male body but, using Pasquino as a symbol of masculine Rome, offers

a lens with which to see post-Sack Rome itself: as mastered and unmanned.

We find one last affliction in Pax vobis: the biting off of Pasquino’s ears.

While the image of soldiers tearing off the statue’s marble ears with their teeth is

humorously absurd, it may allude to the stories of cannibalism that surface in

other accounts of the Sack. The consumption of flesh is often associated with

the sack of cities in the popular imaginary. When attributed to starvation, the

perpetrators are almost exclusively women.86 When instead connected to bat-

tlefields and moving troops, accusations of cannibalism paint a picture of a

83. Silverman’s Tortured Subjects is an excellent start in this direction.84. Richard C. Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European

Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 14–20.85. Paula Findlen, “Humanism, Politics, and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in The Invention

of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York,1993), 77 and 103.

86. On accounts of cannibalism during Roman and Byzantine antiquity, see Dionysios Ch.Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic




savage, inhuman enemy, as was the case during the Italian Wars at large.87 In

several cases from Sack literature, however, the cannibalistic act is not performed

by famished women or bloodthirsty combatants but is instead forcibly enacted

by Roman men on their own bodies. We encounter autoanthropophagy in La

presa e lamento di Roma and the Romae lamentatio in the description of a friar

who, captured after he tried to escape the imperialists’ clutches, was forced to

consume his own roasted ears and nose (“Gli for l’orecchie tronche e ’l naso via /

Poi fattogliel mangiar caldo arostito”).88 Possibly influenced by these texts,

printed in 1527 and circulated for several years thereafter, Luigi Guicciardini

includes a similar description in his graphic 1537 history, stating that in the

streets of Rome one witnessed men to whom were given their own roasted ears,

nose, or testicles to eat (“a chi fu dato mangiare i propri orecchi, o il naso, o i

testicoli arrostiti”).89 As was the case of some seicento depictions of female rape,

later texts aggrandized the brutality of these scenes. The spurious seventeenth-

century Ristretto di Roma imitating Guicciardini, for example, tells of one man

who threw himself from the window after his ears and nose were cut off and

another who grabbed one of his captives’ daggers and plunged it into his own

heart while waiting for his rotisseried testicles to finish cooking.90 As I have

argued elsewhere while looking specifically at the case of Guicciardini, such texts

symbolically subjugate the Roman men to an external, dominating power that

compels them to perform the ultimate in humiliating acts, the perpetration of

harm against one’s own body.91

Aretino’s statue is not, of course, deprived of his testicles, nor is he compelled

to engage in self-consumptive acts. Yet cannibalism is a subject to which Aretino

repeatedly alludes, with three separate references to personages being arrostiti.92

Moreover, the continuity between the passages from other sources cited above

and his focus on the ears is curious, with Aretino making a rather clever play on

words with the phrase “m’han mozzi ambo gli orecchi.” The ingestion of Pas-

Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics (Burlington, VT, 2004), 85–87, and, on the 410 Sack ofRome, 224–25.

87. To give one example with a connection to the Sack, Alfonso de Valdés’s imperial apologeticdialogue charges papal soldiers with roasting on a spit infants cut straight from their mothers’ bellies.Alfonso de Valdés, Diálogo de las cosas acaecidas en Roma, ed. Rosa Navarro Durán (Madrid, 1992),104. The work is also available in an English translation, Alfonso de Valdés and the Sack of Rome:Dialogue of Lactancio and an Archdeacon, trans. John E. Longhurst (Albuquerque, NM, 1952).

88. Medin and Frati, Lamenti storici, 3:364 and 374.89. Guicciardini, Historia del Sacco di Roma, 226.90. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Fondo Vittorio Emmanuele 1686, 24r–25r.91. See Goethals, “Spectators of the Sack,” 193–94.92. Aretino, Pax vobis, lines 235, 513, and 643.




quino’s stone ears reifies the notion that cannibalism makes men less than hu-

man. At the same time, as an epithet meaning a scoundrel or trickster—especially

one with a deceptive tongue—a mozzorecchi referred to someone whose ears had

been cut off as a defamatory municipal castigation. The severing of noses and

ears, as well as hands, was a part of early modern capital punishment.93 Aretino

seems to blend in a humorous vein what may have been real or legendary ac-

counts of torment with Pasquino’s own identity as a cunning rascal. Rather than

being punitively cleaved from his body, his telltale missing ears were bitten off by

soldiers. At the same time that this scene approximates Pasquino to the tortured

men of Rome, the allusion to the mozzorecchi simultaneously warns the reader

that the words of the roguish statue fall outside of what is socially permissible or

reliable.

This twist on the frottola as a poem of jest further dramatizes Pax vobis as a

carnivalesque text in which societal norms are overthrown. Combining many of

the attributes that governed carnival rituals—which Edward Muir has catego-

rized as food, sex, play, and violence, including images or pantomimes of sexual

transgressions, dismemberment, and cannibalization—the poem embraces the

common view that sacked Rome became a world a rovescio, or as Aretino him-

self calls it in the letter to Gonzaga, Roma coda mundi.94 Our “eyewitness” or

“chronicler” reveals himself to be instead a master of ceremonies whose self-

description alerts us to (or, this being Pasquino, reminds us of ) his dishonorable

and obfuscating use of language. A far cry from external force that might literar-

ily and militarily compensate for the absent masculine vigor in Deh, havess’io,

the words of Pasquino point with both laughter and tears to the victimization

of men and women, the culpable and the innocent—a cycle with no ennobling

resolutions envisioned.

UNCERTAIN SENSES

Does Aretino’s clever allusion to the unreliability of Pasquino as witness and

narrator suggest that he intends for his reader to look instead to the canzone as

a more dependable representation of the Sack? To the contrary, the poet-as-

narrator of Deh, havess’io—as opposed to Rome-as-witness—alerts his audience

to the potential speciousness, or at least the shortcomings, of this account as

well: “Ma può dir chi non vidde i casi rei? / Troppo sono obligato agli occhi miei”

93. Florike Egmond, “Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy—a Morphological Investigation,” inBodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed.Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Burlington, VT, 2003), 97–106.

94. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (New York, 2005), 94–124.




(But can he who did not see the wicked event speak? / Too constrained am I by

my own eyes).95 Aretino would later stretch this motif of the questionable au-

thorial voice further in Day Two of the Dialoghi in which the Roman whore

Nanna schools her daughter Pippa in the tricks of the trade, the Sack serving as

a lengthy tutorial on how men betray women. A parody of Aeneas’s relationship

to Dido lifted straight from Books II and IV of The Aeneid—the kind of satirized

borrowing that Findlen memorably called “masturbating with the classics”—the

story is about a baron who washes up on a great lady’s shores after escaping

from Rome like a rodent.96 Quoting Aeneas himself (“se bene mi rinovano i

dolori, a dirgli cominciarò”; even though it renew my sorrow, I will begin to tell

it), the utterly unappealing baron relates the fall of Rome.97 By recounting the

Sack for the purposes of seducing the lady, who will share Dido’s same sad fate,

he earns Nanna’s curse against his pretty face and honeyed talk (“maladetta sia la

cera e il mèle”).98 Yet Nanna becomes the ventriloquist for the baron’s tale—

leading Pippa to joke that she has “snitched Virgil’s fourth book”—and telling

even a “tattered bit” of it brings anguish to both herself and her daughter, a

sorrow she deems appropriate to Christians.99 Her version of events knits to-

gether the caustic—like the prelates hauled up to safety in the Castel Sant’Angelo

with “fire singeing their assholes”—and the heart-wrenching, such as the sound

of “husbands, blood streaming from their wounds, calling for their lost wives,”

making of the canzone’s lament and of the frottola’s satire one fused text.100

Readers find themselves before representations of the Sack that clearly echo

eyewitness accounts but that emerge somehow tainted by Pasquino’s defamatory

ears, the poet-narrator’s absent eyes, and, finally, the baron’s honeyed tongue.

Not being one to simply report or record, Aretino engages in the imaginative

exercise of demonstrating diverse ways in which the circulating news could be

envisioned. It is perhaps easy for the reader to want to dismiss the frottola out

of a sense of disgust at its vulgarity. By placing the two poems side by side, how-

ever, Aretino would seem to suggest that such a jettisoning is arbitrary. The mourn-

ful perspective of the canzone is just as much an imagined construction—that is,

95. Aretino, Scritti, lines 69–70.96. Findlen, “Humanism, Politics, and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” 77.97. Pietro Aretino, Sei giornate: Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia, 1534; Dialogo nel

quale la Nanna insegna a la Pippa, 1536, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari, 1969), 220–21. Englishtranslations are from Aretino, Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1994), here 243.

98. Aretino, Sei giornate, 219.99. Ibid., 230 (trans. 253), 222–23 (trans. 254).100. Ibid., 222 (trans. 244).




no more legitimate or authoritative—as the frottola and is therefore just as suscepti-

ble to dismissal.

One of the primary tools at Aretino’s disposal in this endeavor was the pre-

sentation of the sexual assault of both men and women and the Sack’s impact on

femininity and masculinity. As the most atrocious, painful, and worrying ele-

ments of the tragedy—those with the greatest impact on the contemporary

imagination—these issues could be adapted in order to shape the reader’s emo-

tional response to each poem. By giving a “licit” and an “illicit” picture based on

the same set of historical facts, Aretino essentially showed that the Sack and all

it entailed could and should be addressed by literature but denied that there

could be any unified or codified way of doing so. In his hands, reactions to the

Sack’s brutality become disparate, unstable, contradictory. Under the eyes of his

male and female witnesses, the only common threads are the critique of Roman

masculinity—whether enfeebled by force or by fear—and the poet’s own wield-

ing of weaponized words.

A man known for building up and tearing down the reputations of powerful

figures as it suited him, Aretino as a voice about the Sack of Rome must be

judiciously approached. After all, the marquis whose attention and patronage he

was seeking responded with a note of thanks for the “most pleasing frottola and

most erudite canzone,”101 whereas—according to a letter by one of Aretino’s cor-

respondents in Rome later published in the Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino and

thus of dubious objectivity—the pope he wished to punish supposedly responded

to the frottola by bursting into tears and, letting the text fall from his hands,

confessing that its author had been wronged in Rome.102 One is also faced with

the thorny question of tracing the poems’ precise impact; although the afore-

mentioned letter states that the frottola, if not both poems, was printed in Siena,

the only extant copies are in manuscript. That said, as one of the first writers

about the tragedy, Aretino either influenced or predicted the ways in which it

would be approached over the following months, years, and decades and must

therefore play a leading role in the ongoing scholarly project of rethinking the

Sack’s cultural impact. Swiftly distilling the accounts circulating up and down the

101. “piacevolissima frottola et la dottissima canzone.” The letter is transcribed in AlessandroLuzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni a Venezia e la corte dei Gonzaga (Turin, 1888), 71.

102. Girolamo Montaguto’s letter (erroneously dated December 1537 rather than 1527) thenrefers specifically to Aretino’s feud with the datary, Gian Matteo Giberti, who was behind the assassi-nation attempt. Teodorico Landoni and Francesco Marcolini, eds., Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino, 4vols. (Bologna, 1968), 1:339–40. Also see Romei, “Pas vobis, brigate,” 432–33.




peninsula, he centered in on gender identities and the sexually tormented bodies

of Rome as the lens through which to articulate what happened during the inva-

sion and why. Precisely because Aretino insists on a fractured rather than coher-

ently unified response to atrocity, he offers us the age’s broadest picture of the

gendered Sack of Rome.




Documents

Vanquished Bodies, Weaponized Words: Pietro Aretino’s Conflicting Portraits of the Sexes and the Sack of Rome