Pietro Aretino, religious writer

Abstract

Although Pietro Aretino's vernacular biblical paraphrases and saints’ lives were popular and greatly admired in the sixteenth century, modern scholarship often has dismissed them as commercial potboilers. This study presents the case that Aretino was a serious reformer in religion and possibly a Nicodemite. It traces his long relationship with Antonio Brucioli, who was an important conduit of Protestant writings and whose reformist Bible translation enabled Aretino's paraphrases. Relying on their letters, it examines Aretino's friendship with Pier Paolo Vergerio and his attraction to Bernardino Ochino, both of whom became apostates, and his reaction to the arrest of his confessor for having Lutheran sympathies. Aretino's biblical paraphrases were esteemed in Italian reformist circles and translated into French by a prior attached to Marguerite of Navarre's court. In England Sir Thomas Wyatt based his Lutheran Penitential Psalms on Aretino's I sette Salmi.

What Wyatt really did to Aretino's Sette Salmi

“…The theory that the unambiguously Protestant Wyatt translated the unambiguously Catholic Aretino, aside from the anachronistic confessional division, is further complicated by the fact that Aretino had reformist sympathies and moved in reformist circles. His sympathies were in many ways inevitable given his experience of corruption in the Papal Court of Clement VII and also due to the situation in Venice, where the reformers clustered around the printers' 36 Moreover, Brucioli's vernacular Bible of 1532 became one of the most popular text amongst the spirituali. To indicate the bond between Brucioli and Aretino we need only point to the fact that Aretino was godfather to Brucioli's two sons.…”