User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Say 'ass, cock, cunt and screw'  

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And then in 1524, in Rome, under the very nose of the Papacy, it was done. In the basilicas the candles flickered as Cupid and Priapus and Venus stirred in their tombs beneath the altars. From India and China to Japan's vermilion temples, live gods pricked their ears. Africans who knew neither Christ nor plantation paused in their dances, as the stirring became a rumbling, the rumbling a heaving, the heaving a cracking and the whole vault of Christendom groaned and settled into a different shape.--Eros Denied

In 1524 Pope Clement VII orders the 44-year-old Italian engraver Marcantonio Raimondi (1480-1533) to be jailed. He did not realize it at the time, but he would write history in moral crusading and lay the foundation of a new concept that would conquer the world some three hundred years later: pornography. Raimondi, an engraver who is mainly engaged in copying paintings by contemporaries, ventures to bring a set of sixteen prints to the market that he calls I Modi - Le 16 posizioni (The ways -- or the sixteen pleasures, 1524) (image), of which each print depicts a kamasutrian sex position. It is something unheard of at the time and the collection becomes a succès de scandale. When the Pope also gets the engravings under his nose he immediately puts the artist behind bars.

The colorful Italian Renaissance writer Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) gets wind of the i Modi affair and he succeeds in lobbying Raimondi free. Aretino, a hack writer and slanderer - "scourge of princes" he was called by his contemporary Ariosto - is the prototypical of yellow journalist. He is a man well versed in the art of extorting money from the nobility by writing acerbic and spiteful letters and pamphlets.

He is born the illegitimate son of a woman of easy virtue with noble connections, who furnishes him a position in high society, but his powerful and sharp pen is quickly feared throughout the country. After he secures Raimondi’s release from prison, Aretino instantly smells money in the scabrous prints and decides to write accompanying poems, and the Sonnetti lussuriosi (Lascivious sonnets) are published together with the original prints. Again, the collection suffers from a papal censorship as fierce as it is vicious. Aretino is forced to leave Rome for some time and the hunt for the albums is so thorough that no original copies have survived. Of the poems, only one copy of a copy will be discovered four hundred years later.

Of the original engravings only Position No. 1 (image) survives, as well as a collection of expurgated fragments which are now in the British Museum (image) showing only the heads. Fortunately there are many later copies (set of images) which give us a perfect idea of the salaciousness of the collection of positions.

Why exactly is I Modi considered the first example of pornography? The reason is fourfold. First there is the explicit nature of the drawings and poems: phalli and vaginas are indeed depicted and put into words in more or less obvious detail. Secondly, the prints and poems - so their opponents will surely have stated - only appeal to the lowest instincts of their target audience and with one goal only: to satisfy base cravings. Thirdly, there is the criticism that both Raimondi as Aretino worked with the dishonourable intent to enrich themselves with this collection, today a frequently heard criticism of pornography. Fourthly, and this is the perhaps the most important reason, there is the question of censorship. Censorship only makes sense and can only exist when a work makes its presence felt in the public sphere. Printmaking and the movable type of Gutenberg have made it possible for explicit images and texts to be reproduced en masse and thus penetrate the public sphere. And that is also how they come to the attention of the powers that be. It is no coincidence that the term 'pornography' is primarily reserved for the reproducible arts, unlike the term 'erotic', which is used for paintings and sculptures that have succeeded in staking their place in national museums and prestigious art collections. Art was and is for the elite. Dirty pictures and books have their place among the common people and the elite feared that such material would corrupt them.

I Modi meets the above four criteria to be considered pornography. It is explicit, it serves to gratify basic instincts, it is made for profit only and it belongs to the reproducible arts. That is also the reason this writer does not like the term 'pornography'. It is all too often used as a term of abuse by prudes, prigs and other moral crusaders to incriminate what he refers to as 'erotic'. "I do not know which was worse: the vision of Giulio’s drawings to the eye, or the sound of Pietro’s words to the ear…," writes the 16th-century art biographer Giorgio Vasari on I Modi. The 'Pietro' he mentions refers of course to the author Pietro Aretino, while 'Giulio' Romano was the man who made the designs for Raimondi's engravings. The authoritative Vasari insists that artists should not waste their God-given talents on disgraceful and detestable products. Had the word 'porn' existed, Vasari surely would have used it.

Raimondi, the man who made his engravings based on a series of designs by Giulio Romano (ca. 1499-1546) is known for little more than I Modi. That is not the case with the writer Aretino who would make the Western world heir to a very scurrilous oeuvre at the time of his death, justifying his 'explicit lyrics' by saying that he has little sympathy for the botanical and other euphemisms that were en vogue at the time. Boldly he exclaims:

Speak plainly, and say cu, ca, po and fo [two-letter abbreviations for culo, cazzo, potta and fottere] ; otherwise thou wilt be understood by nobody, if it be not by the Sapienza Capranica, with thy rope in the ring, thy obelisk in the Culiseum, thy leak in the garden, thy key in the lock, thy pestle in the mortar, thy nightingale in the nest, thy dibble in the drill, thy syringe in the valve, thy stock in the scabbard, and the stake, crosier, parsnip, little monkey, the this, the that, the apples, the Missal leaves, the affair, the verbi gratia, the thing, the job, the story, the handle, the dart, the carrot, the root and the shit, mayst thou have it! ... I shall not say in the snout, since thou wilt walk on the tips of thy shoes. Well, say yes for yes, and no for no, or else keep it to yourself. --tr. Peter Stafford, 1970, Odyssey Press.

The above sentences are from the Ragionamenti (1536), a whore dialogue in the style of Lucian, a frivolous take on the dialogues of Plato. Aretino gives us a dialogue in which a spade is called a spade, just as Catullus did in Roman antiquity. He does not mince words in his Sonnetti lussuriosi either:

Come, let us fuck, my soul, let's fuck at once,

Since fucking is what man was fashioned for,

And since you worship pricks as I do cunts,

Without which life would be a fucking bore.

Could man but fuck post mortem, I would cry:

Let's fuck ourselves to death, and wake to fuck

With Eve and Adam, who were doomed to die

By that trick apple and their rotten luck.

What if some craven rascals are nonplussed

By Adam's fate, and shun the treacherous tree?

We lovers know the way to quench our lust,

But come, less chit-chat ; fuck me instantly,

Transfixing heart and soul with one long thrust

Of that great prick that's life and death to me;

And while you are at it, see

If those twin witnesses of every pleasure,

Your balls, can't be included for good measure. --Sonetti_lussuriosi#I, tr. Richard Wilbur.

The irony of that first pornographer Aretino, whose name became a synonym for dirty drawings and lustful lyrics which praise physical love between man and woman, is that he is actually gay or at the least bisexual and that he - wherever he can - alludes to anal sex. The examples are legion. For centuries his name has been associated with coitus per anum.

"... but we are hot," says the lady in the tail of sonnet III to her lover, "and so horny we desire for a prick, / That we are willing to receive the column in the ass."

And in the second quatrain of sonnet II we read "choose a new place when you are bored in the plum / you quite agree: a real man finds his pleasure in the ass too!"

I want him in my ass, - O no, madam, that never,

That's a sin I never want to commit

That sin is reserved for church prelates

Who have squandered their tastes for eternity

He does not shy from attacking others for their alleged immorality. There is a particularly hypocritical letter in which he reprimands Michelangelo for his "indecent" nudes in The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel.

"As a baptised Christian, I blush before the license, so forbidden to man's intellect, which you have used in expressing ideas connected with the highest aims and final ends to which our faith aspires. So, then, that Michelangelo stupendous in his fame, that Michelangelo renowned for prudence, that Michelangelo whom all admire, has chosen to display to the whole world an impiety of irreligion only equalled by the perfection of his painting! Is it possible that you, who, since you are divine, do not condescend to consort with human beings, have done this in the greatest temple built to God, upon the highest altar raised to Christ, in the most sacred chapel upon earth, where the mighty hinges of the Church, the venerable priests of our religion, the Vicar of Christ, with solemn ceremonies and holy prayers, confess, contemplate, and adore his body, his blood, and his flesh? (...) The pagans, when they modelled a Diana, gave her clothes; when they made a naked Venus, hid the parts which are not shown with the hand of modesty. And here there comes a Christian, who, because he rates art higher than the faith, deems it a royal spectacle to portray martyrs and virgins in improper attitudes, to show men dragged down by their shame, before which things houses of ill-fame would shut the eyes in order not to see them. Your art would be at home in some voluptuous bagnio, certainly not in the highest chapel of the world. Less criminal were it if you were an infidel, than, being a believer, thus to sap the faith of others." --source

The indignation Aretino shows here is spurious. He's just angry because master Michelangelo has refused him a work of art that he unsuccessfully tried to obtain through blackmail. Michelangelo's revenge is sweet. He portrays Aretino as St. Bartholomew in a detail of that very Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, the work Aretino fulminates against so hypocritically. In this scene Aretino wears his own flayed skin, in its folds, we see the face of Michelangelo.