A Dissertation on Invective

Renaissance Invective

Born in 1304, Petrarca is sometimes considered the father of humanism, and sometimes considered the father of humanistic invective, the reviver of the classical invective tradition. In the introduction to his 2003 edition of Petrarca’s Invectives, David Marsh writes

Petrarca’s literary and social success did not come without a price, and he came under attack from various quarters. As a response to such attacks, Petrarca’s invectives offer a vital picture of his thought [...] He evidently viewed them as important, since he took the trouble to revise and publish them in his lifetime.

In his four invectives, Petrarca assails representatives of four prestigious sources of authority in medieval Europe: the science of medicine (Invective contra medicum), ecclesiastical dignity (Contra quendam magni status), scholastic philosophy (De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia), and French culture (Contra eum qui maledixit Italie).

Petrarca does not confront his enemies (who are left unnamed) with the classical accusations of poor upbringing, physical defects, and the like, “preferring instead to rely on abusive epithets to denigrate his opponents.” “Petrarca’s abusive language describes his adversaries with reference to three denigrating topics: human stupidity and madness, bestial traits and behaviors, and repellant substances like urine, vomit and sewage.”

His invectives are full of classical allusions, and he does appeal to classical precedent for his virulence, although, as Marsh notes, he “employs far more abusive language than the Latin models that he cites.”

In writings such as Invective contra medicum, his critique is partly literary, justified, Petrarca implies, by the literary pretensions of his opponents:

You betray yourself by your own evidence as the noxious fumes of your ill-curdled eloquence spread far and wide [...]

You call yourself a philosopher and a physician; and then you add a third title: lord of rhetoric. Since you delight in titles, we may add a fourth: you are a large and deep sewer, as Seneca says. [pp. 35, 41-43]

In his 2005 book Early Renaissance Invective and the Controversies of Antonio da Rho, David Rutherford writes [pp. 1-7]:

When one reflects on the range of Renaissance literary ill humor, in both poetry and prose, that is loosely called ‘humanist invective,’ a few observations come to mind. First of all, most of it was written subsequent the two works considered here: Antonio da Rho’s Apology against a Certain Archdeacon and his Loathsome Sycophant Accomplices (1427-28) and his Philippic against Antonio Panormita (1431/32). Among the antecedents that loom large, we find Petrarca’s four invectives mentioned above and Lorenzo Marco de’ Benvenuti’s and Leonardo Bruni’s invectives against Niccolò Niccoli at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Roughly contemoprary with Rho’s Phillipic, Francesco Filelfo composed many of his one hundred Satires, some of which are in fact poetic invective and not satire [...]

Ennio Rao [...] has raised a crucial question [...] ‘Is the humanistic invective to be considered a literary genre? [...] Rao acknowledges the fifteenth-century return to the ‘three-fold division of oratory’ in the classical manuals [...] [but] concludes that like the ‘hodge-podge’ called satire that the Romans claimed as uniquely theirs, ‘the claim can be made for the humanists that they were the creators and practitioners of … a meta-genre’ that included prose, verse, undelivered orations, open letters, philosophical treatises, dialogues, and commentaries.’

[...] Ennio Rao discusses how Jerome [ca. 342-420], for example, had shown the way to take invective from its judicial or deliberative setting, which at minimum imagined an oral delivery, and to give it a strictly literary form, mostly in letters [...]

Given that the humanists were driven to perfect their Latin style, with no little snobbery involved, it comes as no surprise that oratio inepta would loom large in their invectives [...] One may ask why this specific subject, which was only one of the three themes and one of the ten or fifteen possible topics, constitutes a break with the genre or the creation of a new genre? My own inclination is to regard what the humanists were doing as a maturation of the genre of classical invective as had Jerome in shifting it from oration to letter. I also regard poetic invective as a separate tradition (and a distinct genre) going back at least to Ovid and including Claudian [...] By the early fifteenth century, humanists usually worked with a good understanding of the rules governing these genres. Some, like Antonio da Rho with rhetorical invective and Antonio Panormita with poetic invective, resorted readily to their preferred genre.

[Side note: Is invective a genre or an adjective? Is there an art to it? In Nicolas Wagner's "La polémique et le 'Code de la Nature' de Morelly (1754)," in the 1985 collection Le Discours polémique: aspects théoriques et interprétations, he writes that "Paradoxically, literature manuals accord no place to the category of polemic; it's never as part of a genre that a polemical text enters the French literary corpus. To speak more generally, the poetics of the polemical text seem to not exist at all ..."]

Later, Rutherford writes:

Although Cicero had an important place in medieval education, for many Renaissance humanists (e.g., Rho) he came to represent the greatest achievements of Latin prose literature. Study and imitation of his orations, letters, and treatises (many recirculated after centuries of neglect) formed something like the ‘core curriculum’ for a Renaissance humanistic education. [p. 17, n. 74]

The two longest series of excerpts on “Vilifying” to appear in Rho’s Rhetorical Imitations are quotations from Jerome and from Rho’s own Philippic [...] Jerome would merit serious consideration as the “archetypal master” of the strictly literary, epistolary invective adopted by the Renaissance humanists [...] Jerome also legitimized elements of invective that certain cultural assumptions and the requirements of effective prosecution had earlier held in check. In the Roman court, an invective that went too far would be regarded not as legitimate invective (accusatio) but malediction (maledictum or convicium), that is, as mere insulting or cursing one’s opponent [....] Jerome effectively erased the theoretical distinction by importing language from the Imprecatory Psalms and by resorting to the Christian practice of cursing or anathematizing heretics. [pp. 20-21]

Rho, whose admiration glows in his frequent reference to “my Jerome,” recognized that the saint at times appeared to have completely lost self-control. If Rho did not doubt the ethics of following Jerome in his more extreme passages, he at least hesitated about the efficacy of doing so. To be sure, Rho could in his own way be extreme, even cruel [...] But Rho could not easily reconcile Jerome’s vicious and abusive language with his own Christian ethics and Franciscan profession [...] Rho, in short, took precautions to be more restrained [...] Many humanists, when writing their own invectives, did not share Rho’s scruple. [p. 22]

Rho, in many respects like the Franciscans generally, valued rhetoric in large part because it served preaching. [p. 26]

Rho’s Apology against a Certain Archdeacon and his Loathsome Sycophant Accomplices [c. 1426-28] seems to have resulted from Rho’s failure to win a certain chair of theology, perhaps because of his history of teaching pagan authors. In this piece, he also discusses “our contemporary, a certain Antonio Panormita, whose genius will not be condemned but his life someday will be unless he writes serious verse subsequent to his filthy ones (as Virgil did).” Rutherford says the remark was inoffensive enough at the time, but came to be seen as increasingly barbed as Panormita became ever more controversial. And so Rho was drawn into a literary row that produced the Anonymous Invective [1429-30] (probably by Rho) and the Philippic [c. 1431-2] (definitely by him):

The chorus of condemnation that rose against [Panormita's] The Hemaphrodite, especially from Franciscan quarters, has led some to see Rho’s Philippic simply as one more, and perhaps the most forceful, Franciscan attack on The Hemaphrodite. This interpretation misses the mark in that Rho’s Philippic attacked Panormita and not The Hemaphrodite.

Among the faults Rho attributed to Panormita was bad literary style, in particular a “‘paucity of words,’ that is, his limited vocabulary.”

Ennio Rao, who apparently intends to eventually publish a book on humanistic invective, has so far published at least one article of use to us, “The Humanistic Invective as Literary Genre,” in the 1989 volume of the Selected Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Foreign Language Conference, pp. 261-7. He focuses here on the exchange of vitriol between Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla in 1451, “which overshadow all previous efforts in the medium”:

A Catalan youth, a pupil of Valla, had annotated some of Poggio’s letters, pointing out several errors of grammar and syntax. Poggio, holding the master responsible for his pupil’s work, unleashed a scathing invective against Valla … He imagines Valla borne on a cart made of giants’ bones along a street covered with ram fleeces, holding a sphynx in his right hand and a phoenix in his left, his brow wreathed with laurel branches from which hang sausages …

Valla replied with a monumental invective … an exposé of Poggio as a perfidious liar, master of lust, adulterer, drunkard and corruptor of youth … The device used is the dialogue. Excerpts of Poggio’s invective are put in his own mouth and Valla confounds his adversary in the presence of assenting judges …

Valla showed some moderation in this initial reply, focusing chiefly on a discussion of literary matters. Poggio, however, set no such limits to his poisonous pen in his next reply, no less than three Orationes … At a mock trial presided by Cacus, Rhadamanthys and Pluto, Poggio dooms Valla to Hell, where Arius and other heretics await his arrival …

As soon as Valla heard of Poggio’s new attack, he countered with two compositions which he entitled Apologus, consisting of two ’scenici actus.’ Parodying the philosophical dialogue … [they include a discussion of] the question of whether the spoken language of ancient Rome differed from the written language …

One would expect Poggio to take the cue from thsi work and treat some equally serious subject. Instead, in his fifth invective he resorted once again to base ad hominem insults …

Happily, after scouring the Latin language for two years in their search for obscene words with which to hail down scorn upon one another, Poggio and Valla finally succumbed to the invitations and the protests of fellow humanists to lay down their weapons.

Rao notes that the dialogue form “afforded an opportunity to vilify and confound the opponent by putting into his mouth weak and ridiculous arguments from which he could not extricate himself. Because of the mordant nature of the invectives and the choleric state which usually bred them, we rarely find in them well-modulated, subtle Socratic irony. We find, rather, the excoriating sharpness of Juvenal and causticity of Martial’s epigrams. Poggio had a particular admiration for the satirist Lucian … [and] we also recognize the slapstick humor of Aristophanes and of Seneca’s Apocolocynthosis. Yet another form, used effectively by Facio, Valla and Salutati, is that of the commentary, or textual exegesis, consisting of the quotation of excerpts from the opponent’s work, followed by comments of a grammatical, stylistic or other nature.”

Rao notes in conclusion that “If the scope, creative fancy and erudition of their invectives make Poggio and Valla masters of the genre, they were not without rivals. For between 1352 and 1451 more than 100 invectives were written, most of them in the latter 50 years. The invective had in fact become in the 15th century the favorite weapon of the humanists in their numerous struggles, whether the matrix of their enmity lay in political, religious, literary differences, or simply in personal antipathy. The authors of the invective represent a veritable Who’s Who of humanism. Some of them were so skilled that they helped refine the conventions of the invective while conferring to it a prodigiously rich variety of forms. The evolution, nay the revolution wrought upon the invective is one of the most remarkable facts about the humanistic period.”

In her article “Defaming the Courtesan, Satire and Invective in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, eds. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon, 199-208, Courtney Quaintance writes

Invectives against women began pouring from Italian presses sometime after 1527, when the brilliant satirist Pietro Aretino settled in Venice and published his scandalous Sonetti lussuriosi, a sequence of pornographic sonnets featuring some of Rome’s most notorious courtesans. Along with Aretino’s infamous courtesan dialogues, the Ragionamenti (1534-36), this text became archetypal for a circle of aspiring literary pornographers including Niccolò Franco, Antonfrancesco Doni, and the Venetian patrician Lorenzo Venier, whose two scurrilous invectives against Venetian courtesans, Il trentuno della Zaffetta and La puttana errante (The Wandering Whore) were published together in a single volume at Venice in 1531.

La puttana errante targets Elena Ballerina, a Venetian courtesan whom Lorenzo accuses of having robbed him during one of his visits to her home …

Lorenzo’s other satiric poem, La Zaffetta, recounts in graphic and obscene detail the trentuno (thirty-one) — a pseudonym for gang rape — inflicted upon the Venetian courtesan Angela dal Moro by a procession of eighty peasants, fishermen, gondoliers, and other men of low social standing. In the opening stanzas of the poem, the author sets forth two reasons for its conception. First, he claims to want to confirm, once and for all, his own authorship of La puttana errante, which had been erroneously attributed to his teacher Aretino. Second, he must make Angela’s disgrace public in order to appease his friends, because “anyone who withholds words from his friends is no friend at all.” Addressing himself to the courtesan, the poet firmly ensconces himself in the old-boy network of Venetian patricians, feigning helplessness in the face of his posse’s wishes: “You know that if someone wants to screw you he will do it both forwards and backwards. So what I am supposed to do if everyone wants me to make a poem out of your trentuno?”

A likely motive for Lorenzo’s literary attack on Angela Zaffetta is not revealed until the penultimate stanza of the poem, when the poet confesses that he — like his male protagonist – has also been scorned by the courtesan. Whether this passage actually evolved from some real historical incident, as some scholars have believed, is beside the point. The Zaffetta is part of a centuries-old tradition of misogynist texts that use satire as their primary weapon. Thus, inherent in the very nature of the text is the satirist conscious attempt to merge reality with fiction. The words achieve what the rapes would have: public defamation and humiliation of the courtesan. Angela pleads with her lover to keep her disgrace a secret, the author tells us, but in no time, “every brothel in full of talk of Angela, and the news of her trentuno has spread throughout Venice. In the entire city, not one man can be found who does not praise the man who did it to her.” The satirist here skillfully calls attention not only to Angela’s disgrace, but also to his own accomplishment.

—–

Looking now at the French Renaissance, we have first of all the interesting example of Marguerite de Briet, who in the sixteenth century published a collection of letters that included several “invective letters.” Written under the pen-name Hélisenne de Crenne, the letters’ narrator and stories are presumed to be fictional, although the stories appear to draw on some of the author’s real-life experiences. In their introduction to the 1986 collection A Renaissance Woman, Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault write that the letters “tell the story of a conflict between a husband’s abstract accusations and his wife’s concrete refutations. The subject of this collection is the moral integrity of womankind” (p. 12). The invective letters are both highly original and indebted to precedents such as Cicero:

Invective letters were also an ancient classical genre revived during the age of humanism. Christine de Pisan is credited for using the word “invective,” as Petrarch had done some years before. Helisenne could have come across the word in the aforementioned manual of epistolary style published in 1535 by Denys Janot, Pierre Fabri’s Le grant et vray art de pleine rethorique utille proffitable et necessaire a toutes gens qui desirent a bien elegantement parler et escripre, one section of which deals with instructions for writing “lettres missives de invective” [...] Since the fourteenth century, long, elegant private letters were being written, circulated, and published with a reading public in mind. [p. 9]

According to the authors, she also knew Ovid’s twenty-one Heroides, “complaints in verse attributed to famous mythological women and intended for their unfaithful lovers.” Her text is full of references to Christian and ancient authors alike, and unsparing, even violent in its prose. The conclusion to the final letter runs:

This is my final word, as I don’t want to write anything more, except to assure you of my desire to see you old, crippled, blind, deaf, mute, indigent, and destitute. If Atropos cuts the thread of your miserable life because you do not have in you the strength to tolerate such calamities, I hope that your body will remain unburied, that it will become a prey for leopards, famished wolves, lions, bears, tigers, and all ferocious beasts, who will satisfy their violent hunger on you.

With this wish, I shall end my letter; as not to forget your companions, tell them I hope that what befell Dathan and Abiram will befall them as well.

Dathan and Abiram were buried alive.

In her article in Invectives: Quand le corps reprend le parole, “Les Epistres invectives d’Hélisenne de Crenne (1539),” Emily Butterworth writes [rough translation mine]:

Let us consider the hate and anger in these letters. Portrayed as irrational and excessive, these two passions nonetheless affect the writing of invective. In so doing, I will treat three conceptions of invective that emerge from the text: invective as pleasure that contributes to the construction of a community; invective as magic that retains something of the active power of speech [pouvoir efficace des paroles]; and invective as contamination. Every response to hate and anger risks being contaminated by it, and the fear of auto-contamination forces itself upon the text. What’s more, the invective text indicates a slippage — or even an equivalence — between linguistic and physical violence. [p. 176]

(I would add that invective provides pleasure in another way — by providing a show of breaking the bounds of decorum, as well as the more general bounds of self-restraint that are imposed upon everyone in childhood.) Butterworth notes that Erasmus advocated verbal combat based on classical models (”a denigration of the accusation, [then] a counter-accusation of stupidity, pride and aggression in the adversary,” she writes), but pretended to enter it into reluctantly and with little conscious preparation (”it’s not my intention here to learn the art of malediction”). (Petrarch made similar protestations, according to Sari Kivistö’s 2002 book Creating Anti-Eloquence [p. 13], which cites p. 134 of Petrarch’s A Disapproval of an Unreasonable Use of the Discipline of Dialectic (1950)).

So too does Hélisenne de Crenne tell her audience that she has no choice but to respond to her opponents’ venom in kind. She expresses the hope that her invectives will help instruct others. To quote Butterworth, “Relying upon arguments that satirists such as Molière will later use, the author declares it her duty to reveal and publish the faults and vices of others, for the edification of the many, and [...] for the ’salvation and use’ [salvation & utilité] of the person targeted.” [pp. 185-86]

Butterworth, incidentally, also clarifies the history of the French usage of the word “invective”:

“Invective” was a relatively new term in French when it appeared in the Epistres invectives in 1539; Christine de Pisan had used it to denote energetic and lively discourse, in 1404, but its first occurence in the sense of “hurtful language” [langage injurieux] dates from 1519.

(For her approach, Butterworth relies in part on a 1995 article by Thomas Greene on Rabelais that I’ll discuss later.)

—–

Moving on, what about Renaissance art criticism? There seems to have been no shortage of nasty gossip about artists in Renaissance times, but not a whole lot of lengthy attacks in print. In an article on “The Leaven of Criticism in Renaissance Art” published in the 1967 volume Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, E.H. Gombrich argues, citing Julius Schlosser Magnino’s 1956 La Letteratura Artistica, that

If by the criticism of art we mean the detailed assessment of both the merits and the shortcomings of an individual work of art, the large bulk of writings on art bequeathed to us by the Renaissance will be found to be disappointingly poor in this respect … Later in the cinquecento the debate of the schools resulted in the discussion of the relative importance of disegno and colore, but though this antagonism afforded some opportunity for sniping at Michelangelo or Titian, even here the writers hardly came to grips with concrete problems of criticism.

Much of the unprinted gossip about artists and their works of course originated with other artists. Gombrich notes (p.38) that Giambologna for example seems to have been rumored to only be capable of small works. Gombrich argues that as a result of peer jibes, artists gravitated to dimonstrazione, “the display of problem solutions in art.”

In his 1994 book The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art, Norman E. Land writes on Renaissance prose and poetry that dealt with art:

The vast majority of Renaissance poems on art give praise, even if sometimes limited [...] There are, however, poems of blame, a genre in which Andrea Michieli, called Strazzola, seems to have specialized. Strazzola’s poetic denunciations, which are aimed at Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, and a painter named Ombrone da Fossombrone, are valuable, however, because part of his adverse criticism refers to the effect of bad works of art, or what for him were bad works, on the viewer. [p. 95]

One poem concerns “a large, female figure, whose identity we are not told, by Gentile Bellini.” Strazzola writes from the viewpoint of the painted figure:

By everyone I am called the giantess,

Composed by Gentile Bellini, painter:

He would have made me even larger,

If he had not been given conscience.

Everybody who sees me badly painted

Cannot prevent himself from laughing

In anger, and he who has design looks and passes by,

Judging as if I were an old shoe,

But the sublime and excellent hand

Of Giovanni his brother, which is near,

Insults me even more than those tongues do.

I am called the mean and foolish canvas,

About which people go mumbling,

As if I were a bothersome hornet,

O Jove, high and divine,

Make known his error to this ignoramus,

Whom one may call a pedant among painters.

Land writes that in another poem, “the poet says that Gentile, ‘wanting to paint an ermine, painted a cat scraping its claws,’ implying a general lack of competence in imitating nature [...] just as Carpaccio, Strazzola says in another poem, made a drawing of four hands that looked like otter-skin gloves with the fur worn off.” The source for Land’s information on Strazzola is an 1895 article by Vittorio Rossi in the Giornale storico della letteratura italiana.

Strazzola got comeuppance in his own time (in the form of dueling satires and practical jokes), and from the 20th century observer Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., who in his 1936 book Venetian Painters called him a “drunken satirical poet” [p. 81] and “a formidable poetaster, an ignoble frequenter of taverns and brothels” [p. 60]:

This venomous poetaster marks Gentile as “a puffed up knight with golden spurs”; warns Carpaccio that to imitate Gentile is madness, and finally calls him the “very pedant of painting.” In this rank abuse there was just enough truth to hurt. No fineness of character, no dignity of achievement fully guarantees anyone against the Strazzolas of this world. I presume Gentile was too busy to brood over this extravagant abuse. But the episode, insignificant in itself, has a rather general bearing.

Whenever an artistic style changes, the innovators and their critical champions select from the outgoing generation a villain, envisaging him generally as a tyrant and oppressor who seeks to cramp the style of generous youth [...] For my generation, in painting, it was that considerable and worthy artist, Meissonier; for my grandfather’s generation it was Jacques Louis David [...]

Now such personifications of an oppressive past are generally purest mythology, old age being normally intent on its own affairs and perhaps only too willing to let eager youth go its own way. But the trouble with this sort of mythology is that, however absurd, it sticks [...] For a couple of centuries, even in Venice, Gentile was rarely mentioned without calling him stupid, which he never was, or dry, which he was for good reason. [pp. 60-61]

Prose art criticism seems to have been somewhat less colorful than Strazzola’s verses. According to Carl Goldstein (The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 4. (Dec., 1991), pp. 641-652), much of it was written simply to boost local dignity. It was heavily indebted to the classical genre of epideictic rhetoric (as Michael Baxandall had earlier demonstrated), alternating praise with censure, but as far as I can tell it rarely partook of extreme negativity, casting only modest disdainful glances at unfavored individuals, who were of course usually from competing localities. As Goldstein notes, Vasari criticized Uccello for obsessing over perspective. Another artist is said to have thought “of nothing but pleasure, worked when he pleased and only cared about dressing himself like a mountebank.” Bellori wrote that Caravaggio “supressed the dignity of art.”

I noted while reading Cellini’s autobiography (Symonds translation) that he sometimes disparaged his fellow artists, though not often at much length. Cellini does have quite a few unkind words for his artistic rival Baccio Bandinelli, who himself levelled ad hominem accusations at Cellini. At one point Cellini writes: “I fostered hope in my heart by noticing how many thousand ducats had recently been squandered upon ugly pieces of bad sculpture turned out by that beast of a Buaccio Bandinelli.” Later:

… In reply to this appeal, so kindly made me by the Duke, I spoke as follows: “My lord, your most illustrious Excellency must please to know that Baccio Bandinello is made up of everything bad, and thus has he ever been; therefore, whatever he looks at, be the thing superlatively excellent, becomes in his ungracious eyes as bad as can be. I, who incline to the good only, discern the truth with purer sense. Consequently, what I told your Excellency about this lovely statue is mere simple truth; whereas what Bandinello said is but a portion of the evil out of which he is composed.” The Duke listened with much amusement; but Bandinello writhed and made the most ugly faces—his face itself being by nature hideous beyond measure—which could be imagined by the mind of man …

“You must know that it pains me to point out the faults of your statue; I shall not, however, utter my own sentiments, but shall recapitulate what our most virtuous school of Florence says about it.” The brutal fellow kept making disagreeable remarks and gesticulating with his hands and feet, until he enraged me so that I began again, and spoke far more rudely than I should otherwise have done, if he had behaved with decency. “Well, then, this virtuous school says that if one were to shave the hair of your Hercules, there would not be skull enough left to hold his brain; it says that it is impossible to distinguish whether his features are those of a man or of something between a lion and an ox; the face too is turned away from the action of the figure, and is so badly set upon the neck, with such poverty of art and so ill a grace, that nothing worse was ever seen; his sprawling shoulders are like the two pommels of an ass’ pack-saddle; his breasts and all the muscles of the body are not portrayed from a man, but from a big sack full of melons set upright against a wall. The loins seem to be modelled from a bag of lanky pumpkins; nobody can tell how his two legs are attached to that vile trunk; it is impossible to say on which leg he stands, or which he uses to exert his strength; nor does he seem to be resting upon both, as sculptors who know something of their art have occasionally set the figure. It is obvious that the body is leaning forward more than one-third of a cubit, which alone is the greatest and most insupportable fault committed by vulgar commonplace pretenders. Concerning the arms, they say that these are both stretched out without one touch of grace or one real spark of artistic talents, just as if you had never seen a naked model. Again, the right leg of Hercules and that of Cacus have got one mass of flesh between them, so that if they were to be separated, not only one of them, but both together, would be left without a calf at the point where they are touching. They say, too, that Hercules has one of his feet underground, while the other seems to be resting on hot coals.”

THE FELLOW could not stand quiet to hear the damning errors of his Cacus in their turn enumerated. For one thing, I was telling the truth; for another, I was unmasking him to the Duke and all the people present, who showed by face and gesture first their surprise, and next their conviction that what I said was true. All at once he burst out: “Ah, you slanderous tongue! why don’t you speak about my design?” I retorted: “A good draughtsman can never produce bad works; therefore I am inclined to believe that your drawing is no better than your statues.” When he saw the amused expression on the Duke’s face and the cutting gestures of the bystanders, he let his insolence get the better of him, and turned to me with that most hideous face of his, screaming aloud: “Oh, hold your tongue, you ugly…” At these words the Duke frowned, and the others pursed their lips up and looked with knitted grows toward him. The horrible affront half maddened me with fury; but in a moment I recovered presence of mind enough to turn it off with a jest; “You madman! you exceed the bounds of decency. Yet would to God that I understood so noble an art as you allude to; they say that Jove used it with Ganymede in paradise, and here upon this earth it is practised by some of the greatest emperors and kings. I, however, am but a poor humble creature, who neither have the power nor the intelligence to perplex my wits with anything so admirable.” When I had finished this speech, the Duke and his attendants could control themselves no longer, but broke into such shouts of laughter that one never heard the like. You must know, gentle readers, that though I put on this appearance of pleasantry, my heart was bursting in my body to think that a fellow, the foulest villain who ever breathed, should have dared in the presence of so great a prince to cast an insult of that atrocious nature in my teeth; but you must also know that he insulted the Duke, and not me; for had I not stood in that august presence, I should have felled him dead to earth.

I read now in Margaret Gallucci’s 2003 book that the George Bull translation, revised in 1998, is considered the authoritative one, if also somewhat unsatisfactory — “For instance, the Parisian judge’s clarification that Caterina accused Cellini of performing sexual acts ‘outside the canal’ normally used for sexual intercourse is translated by Bull as merely ‘another way’”; I’ll have to look at it later.

She notes that indeed Cellini was not the only of Bandinelli’s contemporaries to loathe the Hercules and Cacus: “numerous artists and writers heaped vituperative abuse upon Bandinelli,” sometimes in the form of sonnets, a popular form for praise and abuse. In one sonnet, Cellini wrote:

Let everything go up Bandinelli’s ass,

and if he has no brain,

in one way or another, I promise you

that everything will go up Giorgetto’s ass.

If he no longer enjoys it,

his pure wife will take it in the ass

and fulfuill all her desires. [tr. Gallucci]

In her final chapter, Gallucci places Cellini’s writings in the context of contemporary notions of honor, manliness and violence; perhaps we will return to these later as well.

[Re Bandinelli, see also "Poesie in vituperio del Bandinelli," by Detlef Heikamp, in Paragone (XV, n. 175, 1964, pp. 59-68)]

Pietro Aretino’s epistolary attack on Michelangelo is another notable case study. For several years Aretino attempted to solicit from Michelangelo some small work for his collection, through letters and intermediaries. In his letters, Aretino mixed flattery with bragging, threats, censure and artistic advice (concerning the Last Judgment). “And so I, whose praise or criticism is so powerful that the glory or dishonor of men depends on me alone, but who am, nevertheless, of little worth and in myself nothing, I salute Your Grace…” [translations from Samuel Putnam's 1926 edition of The Works of Aretino. By the way, Aretino's selected writings appeared in their first French translation in 1845, apparently not including the letters. See here for the Symonds translation.] Finally, in November of 1545, Aretino wrote his most scathing letter, which in 1550 was published in redacted form. Putnam seems to have translated the 1545 version:

Messer, now that I have seen copies of the Last Judgment, I recognize in the conception and execution the celebrated charm of Raphael. But, inasmuch as I am a Christian who received the holy baptism, I am ashamed of the unbridled liberty which you have taken with what ought to be the supreme end of virtue and the Christian faith. This Michelangelo, so great in his glory, this Michelangelo who astonishes all the world, has shown to men that he is as far removed from piety as he is near to perfection in his art …

[You] deprive the angels of their celestial glory and the saints of their terrestial modesty … you, a Christian, have arrived at such a degree of impiety that you dare, in the chapel of the Pope, to offend the modesty of martyrs and of virgins. Of a truth, it would have been better for you to deny Christ altogether than, believing in him, to turn into derision the faith of your brothers. Be assured that Heaven will not permit the criminal audacity of your art to remain unpunished. The more astonishing this picture is, the more surely will it be the tomb of your glory! …

if the mountains of gold which you have received from Julius II have not been able to incite you to fulfill your duty by completing the promised mausoleum, what may a man like me hope? In putting into your own pocket the money of another and in being false to your word, you have done what you should have done, and that is called theft!

Aretino subsequently advises the Pope to destroy the Last Judgment, explaining to Michelangelo that “if you had listened to the directions which I gave you … nature would not now have to blush at having given so much genius to a man like you. On the other hand, my letter would have been a defense of your work against all the hatreds and all the jealousies throughout eternity.”

Melinda Schlitt writes, in “Painting, Criticism, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Age of the Counter-Reformation,” published in the 2005 collection Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, that “In his criticism of the painting Aretino adopts the broad, ideological position of the conservative reformers in arguing that sacred imagery (for which the Last Judgment had become the paradigm) should be accessible and inspiring to the faithful masses rather than to the learned few … It is important to note, as Barnes has insightfully observed, that the nature and content of Aretino’s criticisms make the most sense in light of prints of the Last Judgment that were available by 1550, thus creating a wider and more diverse audience for the painting beyond the closed circles of the papal court and other priviliged viewers. It is also significant that prints were the primary medium through which the majority of critics formulated their objections rather than through a first-hand knowledge of the painting.” (Bernadine Ann Barnes’s 1998 Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: The Renaissance Response examines the matter in greater detail, esp. pp. 74-88. Newer translations of Aretino’s letter can be found in Barnes, in Linda Murray and Peter Murray’s 1984 translation of Andre Chastel, A Chronicle of Italian Renaissance Painting, as well as in Robert Klein and Henri Zerner’s 1989 book Italian Art, 1500-1600: Sources and Documents.)
On a final note, artists, e.g. Botticelli, made their own painted commentary on slander, see the Calumny of Apelles. For more on this, see David Cast’s 1981 The Calumny of Apelles: A Study in the Humanist Tradition and Jean Michel Massing’s 1990 Du texte à l’image: La Calomnie d’Apelle et son iconographie. (Cast reviewed Massing’s book in the Spring 1994 Renaissance Quarterly.)

[Note: See also L'invettiva, arma preferita dagli Umanisti nelle lotte private, nelle polemiche letterarie, politche e religiose, by Dott. Felice Vismara (Milano, 1900), which is outdated and error-ridden, but useful. And the 2000 dissertation by Michèle Guillemont, Recherches sur la violence verbale en Espagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (aspects sociaux, culturels et littéraires).]

[Thanks to Ross Finocchio for his assistance.]

30 May 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment

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