La cortigiana
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Pietro Aretino's La cortigiana is a parody of The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione.
The book features the adventures of a Sienese gentleman, Messer Maco, who travels to Rome to become a cardinal. He would also like to win himself a mistress, but when he falls in love with a girl he sees in a window, he realizes that only as a courtier would he be able to win her. In mockery of Castiglione's advice on how to become the perfect courtier, a charlatan proceeds to teach Messer Maco how to behave as a courtier: he must learn how to deceive and flatter, and sit hours in front of the mirror.
- LA CORTIGIANA is the second of Aretino’s “Medusa works,” the other being, as we have seen, the RAGIONAMENTI. In both THE COURTEZAN and the DIALOGUES, the author flays relentlessly the vices of an age — his own. In the play, it is the court of Rome under the Medici Popes which is the target for Aretino’s annihilating satire, the victim of his merciless realism. It is to be remembered that Pietro had himself lived at court and knew whereof he wrote. He had fared none too luckily there, had been driven out once on account of his SONNETS and, in the end, barely escaped with his life. He never forgot nor forgave the attempted assassination by the papal favorite, Giberti. This accounts for his animus in the matter — Aretino was never without a bias — but the picture he gives us is, we are forced from the accounts of other writers to believe, hardly overdrawn. --translation by Samuel Putnam[1]
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