Resurrection

ARETINO, SCOURGE OF PRINCES --Thomas Caldecot Chubb -- Reynal & Hitchcock ($3.50).

Two centuries ago, Pietro Aretino's fame was still such that Joseph Addison could doubt whether a single man alive did not know who he was. Today, except to literary specialists, his name is the mildest of pornographic hearsay. Thomas Caldecot Chubb's somewhat frumpish but thoroughgoing biography should do a lot toward resurrecting him.

Starting as a hill town cobbler's son, Aretino became the most powerful and popular writer in Europe, was perhaps the greatest and certainly the dirtiest master of low vernacular prior to Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Through blackmail, stark flattery, incredible effrontery, and a genius for spotlighting weakness wittily, he forced most of the greatest men of his time to pay his way and to acknowledge him as equal. His great friend Titian described him as "a condottiere (gangster boss) of literature." Biographer Chubb compares his fame to that of Byron, his influence to that of Voltaire.

So low-born as to be nameless, Aretino took his name from his town, Arezzo, where he was born on Good Friday of the year Columbus sighted America. (Good Friday, as his enemies loved to remind the world, was the legendary birthday of the Antichrist.) Mature and restive at 15, he quit home. He worked, during the next few years, as a servant in Rome, a street singer, a hostler in Bologna, a moneylender's agent, tax collector, mule driver, hangman's assistant, miller, courier, pimp, mountebank, swindler, galley slave. At 24 he got into the service of Agostino Chigi, one of Rome's biggest business men. He had already published a book and was watching his chance. It came in the death of Hanno, fat Pope Leo X's pet elephant.

Aretino wrote the beast's Last Will & Testament, assigning Hanno's various organs to those cardinals they most scandalously fitted. Leo made him his court jester, and on the next fat chance--a series of verses burlesquing the deadlocked conclave that followed Leo's death--Aretino made himself famous all over Europe.

After that Aretino began working the nobility. The crooked Marquis of Mantua, violent Giovanni della Bande Nere became patrons and friends. Then through miscalculating some smart moves he was nearly murdered, moved to Venice for safety. He spent the rest of his life there. Emperor Charles V and the Doge were among his patrons. He spent his cadgings bottomlessly on himself, on poor people, and on the women and artist bums who swarmed his house. He tirelessly promoted his friend Titian; managed, by two extraordinary letters, to scare Francis I out of an alliance with Turkey; quarreled with everyone from his own secretaries to Michelangelo.

In the midst of this stertorous and priapic life, in a house so crowded that travelers mistook it for an inn, Aretino cranked out an enormous mass of writing --plays, letters, parody horoscopes, obscene dialogues, an uninspired epic, religious tracts, florid and fulsome eulogies.

Of this bulk Thomas Chubb grants that most of it was ephemeral. But by no means all. The five comedies, which were the first breath of life on the Italian stage since Plautus, would be actable today but for the censor. (Author Chubb queasily avoids quoting any of the rough stuff.) The Ragionamenti, in which, in stark-naked language, two whores talk over the tricks of their trade, is "among the great books of all time." Of the letters, perhaps 500 of a total 4,500 pages are "among the best writings of the Renaissance ... as readable as if they had been written today." Chubb is sure an anthology of the best letters would automatically become a classic.

Sample of the Aretine prose (a description of a servants' hall): "You eat off a tablecloth of more colors than a painter's apron. It makes you vomit to think about it ... four slices of buffalo cheese so hard and dry that it gives us a colic that would kill a statue . . . two anchovies to serve as an antipasto ... a few Sardinian weeds, burned not cooked ... a certain bean soup. . . .

Early in 1556 an enemy made public prophecy of Aretino's death within the year. Through the spring and summer Aretino remained hale and potent, "the handsomest old man in Venice." But one October night, drinking in a tavern, he fell backward to the floor. He was dead of apoplexy before morning.

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