Who is that Person? Revealed

Titian. Pietro Aretino. Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy.
Italian Renaissance Art. 1 Feb. 2009
  http://www.italian-renaissance-art.com/Titian.html

MLA

"Pietro Aretino." Encyclopedia Britannica. 2007. Britannica.com. 2 Feb. 2009 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/33552/Pietro-Aretino >.

From this source I found a very concise background of Pietro Aretino. He was born in 1492 and lived until he was 62. He lived in Italy and spent his life as a poet, writer, and dramatist. He was known as quite the rebel of his time. His real name is not known, but he created the name he is known by while posing as the bastard son of a noble. In his younger years he tried his hand as a painter. He then moved to Rome and did what he was most well known for, writing “Lewd Sonnets” (Sonnetti lussuriosi). These sonnets were the reason he was forced to leave Rome. While there he had also written satirical works of notable people. He had gained most of his wealth through gifts of kings and nobles who feared the political damage he could do with his writing. He was close friends of the painter Titian, who painted many portraits of him, including the one I speculated on for this assignment.

"Pietro Aretino." Mark Harden's Artchive. 1 Feb. 2009
<http://www.artarchiv.net/doku/museum/Aretino.htm>.

This source spoke of the salacious works of Aretino and all the controversy he created. It explains how he had become known as one of the lewdest and wittiest writers throughout Italy. He did this by writing a fake last will and testament as if it were for Pope Leo X’s pet elephant. In it he had willed the animal’s genitals to a cardinal. One of his most famous works were sonnets he wrote in 1524 to accompany Giuliano Romano’s drawings of sixteen sexual positions. There work together “produced one of history’s most notorious works of erotic art” as the source states. Even Casanova refers to this work of Aretino’s in his memoirs over 200 years later. Aretino was nearly imprisoned for these works. A print version of these ‘Sonnetti Lussuriosi’ along with drawings was created and quickly burned by the Church, leaving none to survive. 

Paolucci, Antonio. "The Portraits of Titian." Mark Harden's Artchive. 2 Feb 2009 .

This source analyzed some of Titian’s works and even included some quotes from Aretino. It tells how Aretino wrote of Titian’s “sense of things in his brush” and then goes on to state that these things were not only physical features of the subject, but of the things that should be highlighted and those that should be subtle which insinuated the social or political standing of the subject. Titian had a sense of creating the “ideal persona of the individual” which concisely made up the subject’s identity to both subject and viewer. It goes on to say that Aretino wrote that his own portrait was “more than a veristic or psychological likeness which breathes, whose pulse throbs and spirit moves in the way I do in life.” Aretino obviously approved of his friends depiction of himself. The portrait depicts Aretino’s “emotional violence, of an irreverent and corrosive intelligence.”