Ragionamento nel quale Pietro Aretino figura quattro suoi amici. Che favellano de le corti del mondo, & di quella del cielo. N.pl., n. pr., n.d. [not before 1538]

8vo. [68] leaves. Collation: A-H⁸ I⁴. The last leaf is a blank. Woodcut portrait of the author on the title page.

Rare early edition. The Ragionamento nel quale Pietro Aretino figura quattro suoi amici, che favellano delle corti del mondo, e di quella del cielo, also know as “Ragionamento delle Corti”, which was first published by Francesco Marcolini in 1538, is related for style and satirical intent to the famous Aretino's erotic Ragionamenti or Dialoghi featuring the characters of Nanna, Antonia, and Pippa and printed between 1534 and 1536. The work subsequently underwent at least six reprints, including the present edition, all of which are extremely rare, before being included in the London-based typographer John Wolf 1584 collected edition of all Aretino's Ragionamenti.

In the present Ragionamento, Aretino “completely overturns Castiglione's utopia, condemning the figure of the intellectual-courtier, who is no longer the enlightened advisor to a prince who embodies all virtues, but an individual devoted to intrigue, lies, and the constant pursuit of personal gain [...] The court is described as a terrible place, where vice and corruption reign under the constant threat of violence. At court (so declares one of the characters in the Ragionamento), one lives in familiarity with death. The reversal is completed when, in the Ragionamenti, Aretino replaces the discussion of the qualities of the perfect courtier with those of the perfect prostitute, as if the two figures mirrored each other” (G. Montinaro, L'utopia rovesciata di Aretino, in: “Biblioteca di via Senato”, IV, 2011, p. 7).

In the “Ragionamento delle Corti”, divided into two parts, the author presents some of his friends conversing in the famous Venice garden of the printer Francesco Marcolini, who was a close friend of Aretino and the editor of all of his works in the 1530s and 1540s. The interlocutors are Lodovico Dolce, Francesco Coccio and Pietro Piccardi in both parts, and Giovanni Giustiniani who appears only in the second.

Pietro, the son of Tita Bonci and a cobbler named Luca Del Tura, was born in Arezzo in the momentous year 1492. With typical disregard for propriety, he sometimes claimed to be the bastard of the nobleman Luigi Bacci, who kept his mother as a mistress. In all his publications, however, he adopted the nom d'artiste Pietro Aretino. He received little education and lived, for some years poor and neglected, picking up such straps of information as he could. Still very young he was banished from Arezzo on account of a satirical sonnet which he composed against indulgences. About 1506 he moved to Perugia, where he obtained the protection of Francesco Bontempi. In that town he also got acquainted with many poets and painters, among them Agnolo Firenzuola, who became a partner in his many dissolute adventures. In those years he wrote a collection of poems, Opera nova (Venezia, Zoppino, 1512), his first published work. After a brief stay in Siena, where he was serving Agostino Chigi, he settled in Rome in 1517 and entered the refined court of Leo X. Like his friend Bernardo Accolti, called Unico Aretino, Pietro became soon very popular for his audacity and effrontery that made him both loved for the laugh and sympathy he communicated, and respected for fear of falling victim to his terrible satirical tongue. He was able to become the confidant of politicians and diplomats and close friend of artists and poets. From them he gathered a wealth of anecdotes and secrets, which he used to put himself at the center of Roman social life. Aretino had to flee briefly in 1524 after publishing some sonnets to go with a series of banned engravings by Giulio Romano showing positions adopted in love-making; and once more, this time permanently, in 1525, when the chief target of his pen, Bishop Gian Matteo Giberti - a man Clement could not afford to offend publicly - nearly succeeded in having him assassinated. To the end of the Roman period and the beginning of his stay in Mantua dates back the composition of an unfinished poem on the Gonzaga family, later published under the title Marfisa (1532).

In 1527 Aretino moved to Venice, where he remained for the rest of his life. There he became friend of the painters Jacopo Sansovino and Titian, who made the famous portrait of him later reproduced in many of his editions. In Venice Pietro could count on various protections and therefore live a very lavish and libertine life. He used to send more or less favorable predictions and laudatory or defamatory texts to mighty people all over Europe, according to his sympathies and the benefits he could get from them. They began to fear him and cover him with gifts and titles to enjoy the favor of his pen. In Venice Aretino started also publishing systematically his new writings in association with the typographer Francesco Marcolini: devotional works like I sette salmi de la penitenza di David (1534), Umanità di Cristo (1535), and Vita di Maria Vergine (1540); profane and scandalous texts like the celebrated Ragionamenti (1534-1536); comedies like Il Marescalco (1533), La Cortigiana (1534), L'Ipocrito (1542), La Talanta (1542), and Il Filosofo (1546). His most original creation inaugurated a new literary genre: a series of six books of letters, which were published from 1537 onwards. With these Aretino had achieved perhaps the most monumental act of self-production in early modern history. Though he was explicit in his condemnation of linguistic pedantry, the vigour, colour and inventiveness of his prose is the result of great care, usually well concealed beneath a surface of apparent spontaneity. His letters reveal him as a nimble thinker, a writer capable of expressing a wide range of feeling, a gifted and - for the time - uniquely sympathetic appreciator of the works of his artist friends, among whom Titian was prominent.

In the 1540s he quickly understood that the political and religious climate was rapidly changing. His production became exclusively religious and he began writing tragedies (Horatia, 1546) instead of comedies. Despite this new strategy he could not obtain the cardinal's hat he had aspired for so long. In 1553 he made his last trip to Rome in company of Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino. In his last years he had to face the criticism of his former friend Anton Francesco Doni, which followed that, even harsher, expressed ten years earlier by Nicolò Franco, another of his former pupils. Aretino died in Venice in 1556. His death was due to apoplexy, but according to popular account, by falling over backward from his chair in a fit of laughter at an obscene story told him by his sister (cf. P. Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, Salerno, 1997, passim).

Edit 16, CNCE2402; P. Aretino, Ragionamenti delle corti, F. Pevere, ed., Milan, 1995; P. Aretino, Dialogues, R. Rosenthal, ed., Toronto, 2005.

(bound with:)

GELLI, Giovanni Battista (1498-1563). La Circe di Giovambatista Gelli accademico fiorentino. Nuovamente accresciuta & riformata. Florence, Lorenzo Torrentino, 1562.

8vo. [96] leaves. Collation: A-M⁸. Medici's woodcut arms on the title page. Author's woodcut portrait on title-page verso. Woodcut historiated initials. Roman and italic types.

Third Torrentino edition (first 1549, second 1550), bearing the original dedication to Cosimo de' Medici dated 1548. This satirical work is based on the story of Ulysses and his crew in Homer's Odyssey, in which they are transformed into animals by the sorceress Circe. Although Ulysses persuades her to change them back, only one of the men, a philosopher who has become an elephant, agrees to return to his original state. The others' refusal is an ironic reference to Pico della Mirandola's famous passage about the potential transformation of humans into animals or angels. Through this fable, Gelli satirizes various aspects of his own society, particularly corruption, immorality and ambition. (cf. A.L. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy. The Rebellion against Latin, Florence, 1976, pp. 161-221).

Circe, in the author's corrected and revised version printed by Torrentino in 1550, was highly successful and was reprinted and translated several times. It also exerted considerable influence on Italian literature and on foreign authors such as Montaigne, La Fontaine, and Swift (cf. R. Tissoni, Per il testo della Circe di G.B. Gelli, in: “Studi di filologia italiana”, 20, 1962, pp. 99-136).

Gelli was born into a modest family and trained as a shoemaker. Mostly self-taught he benefited from the learned conversations in the Rucellai Gardens (a kind of forerunner of the Florentine Academy). His desire to share with common people like himself the vast storehouse of knowledge accumulated by the intellectuals of his day led him not only to compose many original works, but also to translate others (e.g. Euripides' Hecuba, ca. 1551). He became one of the earliest members of the Academia degli Umidi (later Accademia Fiorentina), and composed the famous Capricci del bottaio (1546), La Circe (1549) and two successful prose comedies. He was appointed official commentator on Dante in 1553, but his first Dante lecture had taken place as early as 1541. One of his lifelong desires was to advance the fortunes of the Italian vernacular against those of Latin (cf. A. Piscini, Gelli, Giovan Battista, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, 53, Rome, 2000, s.v.).

Edit 16, CNCE20594; D. Moreni, Annali della tipografia fiorentina di Lorenzo Torrentino impressore ducale, Florence, 1819, pp. 353-353, no. III.

Two works in one volume (148x95 mm). 18^th-century mottled calf gilt, morocco lettering piece on spine, red edges, marbled pastedown (top of the spine newly repaired, hinges weakened). On the front pastedown bookplate of the Turin collector Livio Ambrogio. Pietro Aretino's name inked out on the title page of the first work, some staining on the title page of the second work, occasional foxing, margins cut short, all in all a good copy.

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