‘I was Born in One City, but Raised in Another’: Aretino's Perugian Apprenticeship

According to his apocrypha, Aretino was forced to flee his hometown of Arezzo after penning some anti‐papal verses. Similarly, it is claimed that he fled Perugia ten years later after painting a lute into the hands of a depiction of the Maddalena, which stood in one of the town's piazze. Neither anecdote is true, but they point to Aretino's early reputation for both poetry and painting. In 1512, the Opera nova del fecondissimo giovene Pietro pictore Arretino was published in Venice. It was the first work by Aretino to appear in print, and the fruit of the formative time he spent in Perugia, where he was part of an urban circle of poets, artists and scholars. It was a circle and a metropolitan environment he sought to recreate in Rome and Venice. This article draws together Aretino's letters to his lifelong Perugian friends and the poems in the 1512 volume in order to examine the correspondence between their rhetorical and discursive modes. This examination shows that Perugia was the crucible of Aretino's self‐fashioning. It was in Perugia that Aretino became a poet. Where also, it would appear, he almost became a painter (pictore); a training that would equip him to become one of the most significant writers on art of the sixteenth century. The Opera nova shows Aretino mastering the vernacular poetic traditions available to him before, ultimately, rejecting them all in favour of himself. Perugia was the city where, with a little help from his friends, Aretino became Aretino.

Like Caporali, Aretino is identified as both poet and painter, and more emphatically as the latter. It is possible that Caporali's painting of the Madonna features the hand of Aretino himself, whose love of art would be lifelong. This possibility raises a series of questions: when and why did Aretino arrive at and depart from Perugia? What was he doing there? Who were his circle? And how does Aretino's Perugian apprenticeship shape our understanding of his career(s) and the means of his rise to fame in Rome and Venice? I contend that in Perugia we find the blueprints for Aretino's later years -both in terms of his networks and voice -and the creation of his public identity. Crucially, Aretino's artistic apprenticeship was to be the crucible of his painterly prose. Aretino's Perugian cityscape is reconstructed by triangulating his later letters, which recall his youth, the publication of the Opera nova, and the significance of the addition to the Caporali altarpiece. What we discover is not only the plurality of Aretino's informal training in the humanities during his years in Perugia, but also their complex cultural interfusion. The city is recalled as an earthly paradise of intermingling music, art, poetry, learning, and intense friendships -Aretino paints a picture of Perugia as a nostalgic haven against his present disillusion, to which he can return via his epistolary. It is a cityscape organized not by topography, but by ethnography. There are of course references to specific locales and features throughout the letters, but above all Aretino's Perugia is bustling with people. The Etruscan and medieval walls of the hilltop university town were, after all, punctuated by over twenty gates, which made it a cultural hub between Florence to the north, and Rome to the south, welcoming an influx of travellers and students. We might in fact think of Aretino's time in Perugia as his college years.

LE BRIGATE PERUGINE: ARETINO'S CIRCLE AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
As with almost every other aspect of Aretino's life, his departure from his hometown of Arezzo is larded with anecdote. It has, for example, been repeatedly claimed that Aretino left under a cloud, on account of some critical verses he wrote about papal indulgences. 6 However, this allegation was the invention of Girolamo Muzio. 7 Muzio's claim was made two years after Aretino's death, appearing in a letter of 3 May 1558, to Giovanni Bernardino Scotti, Cardinal Trani. Pope Paul IV had made Trani a member of the Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), the Holy Inquisition, which was responsible for rooting out heresy and enforcing the Index librorum prohibitorum. Muzio was writing to report false 6   doctrine and heresies published in Aretino's religious work, the Humanità di Christo (1535). He was evidently successful, as Aretino's opera omnia were prohibited the following year. Muzio needed to prove Aretino was an inveterate heretic, hence the anecdotal allegation, the source for which was not provided. However, we can suggest a time-frame for Aretino's sojourn in Perugia, identify the circles in which he moved and the lifelong friendships he forged, and offer some hypotheses regarding how he spent his time there. In a letter of June 1548 to the jurist and poet Antonio Mezzabarba, Aretino recalls how it was 'more than forty years' since he first underwent an epiphany after hearing one of Mezzabarba's sonnets: 'at Perugia the sweetness of your sonnet in praise of your bella donna at that time penetrated my soul. Immediately my spirit was enamoured of poetry […] having tasted the sweetness of that manna'. 8 Aside from the revelatory momentousness of the occasion, this letter also confirms that Aretino arrived in Perugia before June 1508. In the records of entrants and departures of the Collegio di San Girolamo, one finds a 'Petrus de Aretio' listed as arriving on January 28, 1507. 9 As Maria Silvestrelli records, the college's constitution required it to house forty impecunious foreign students, in addition to two chaplains and a familia of servants, specifying various kitchen staff. 10 Petrus de Aretio is listed amongst the familia, and Silvestrelli argues it is very likely that he was employed 'in a subordinate position' but 'in close contact with the ambit of students and professors whom he will address in familiar terms in the years to come'. 11 Indeed, Mezzabarba was one of a circle of scholars, poets and artists who were integral to Aretino's cultural education, or rather concentric circles, which he called 'le brigate Perugine'. 12 He maintained close contact with certain friends for the rest of his life, whilst others proved useful acquaintances. His inner circle included the aforementioned painter, architect and poet Giovanni Battista ("Bitte") Caporali, Giambernardino Cusse, Carubino da Benedette, and a friend named Friano. 13 His wider circle also included Alessandro Vitelli, the condottiere who later led the Medici militia; the surgeon Lucalberto Podiani, who also la bella donna vostra a quel tempo, subito il mio spirito se innamorò de la poesia […] gustavo la soavità de la manna'. I have translated both dolcezza and soavità as sweetness, although they have different connotations beyond this context. Aretino's use of them here comes uncharacteristically close to Neoplatonism; he refers to 'the great Bembo', Petrarchan Neoplatonist par excellence, in the same letter. 9  Perugia at the turn of the sixteenth century had shrunk to roughly a third of its size in its late thirteenth-century heyday; the population had decreased from around 34,000 in 1285 to around 12,000 in 1498, increasing slightly to 'between 13,095 and 13,775 in 1511' during Aretino's residence. 16 The reassertion of papal authority in 1506 by Pope Julius II, which diminished the rule of the dominant Baglioni family and brought peace to the city after almost thirty years of factional in-fighting, evidently contributed to its growth spurt, and likely informed Aretino's relocation in January 1507. 17 Once a third of the size of Florence and Venice, equal in stature to Verona, Bologna, Padua and Siena, by the end of the fifteenth century it was a fifth of the size of Florence and a third of the size of Verona. medieval family clans, such as the Baglioni and Oddi, had nevertheless consolidated and expanded their power during this period of the city's contraction, constituting 'the economic and political elite of the Renaissance city'. 18 Aretino thus arrived in a relatively compact, centralised, interconnected city shaped by clan kinship networks or alberghi. Indeed, as we shall see, Aretino's letters to his Perugian circle are marked by a sense of enclosed intimacy, whereby the cityscape is its community. Whether it was by strategy or dint of good fortune, Petrus de Aretio made his way to the Studium, which provided a means of accessing the social enclosure. 19 As Sheri Shaneyfelt notes in her discussion of the Società del 1496, a Perugian artists' cooperative, its members were 'highly visible, prominent members of the community' who were fully integrated into the life of their city and were well respected not just as artisans but also as citizens, as a result of the high status of the civic positions that they held. They were entrusted not only with representing the painters' guild internally within the Perugian commune but with representing the commune itself beyond its borders, extra civitatem. 20 The Società was a collaborative community, established in part to meet the demand for religious artworks -which was significant as Perugia was a dependency of the Papal States -especially those which were in or after the style of the city's celebrated son, Pietro Perugino. As noted, Aretino's mentor in Perugia, Giovanni Battista Caporali, was taught by Perugino, alongside Perugino's more famous pupil, Raphael. Caporali also collaborated with members of the Società (such as Sinibaldo Ibi and Eusebio da San Giorgio; both of whom were later elected to Perugia's General Council) and appraised their works. 21 The number of religious commissions and the collaborative networks in Perugia led Sylvia Ferino Pagden to describe the city as 'one large bottega' or artists' workshop. 22  artistic centre of the city. This means of infiltrating elite or influential civic circles via its painters, poets and thinkers was of course a practice Aretino repeated with great success in Venice, where he ingratiated himself with the young patrician class. 23 As such, Perugia was more than a bottega for Aretino, and in more ways than one. In his Street Life in the Italian Renaissance, Fabrizio Nevola notes how the three literary-dramatic modes -pastoral (satire), comedy and tragedy -were represented by Sebastiano Serlio as theatrical scaenarum frontes in his Libro de prospettiva (On Perspective) of 1545. As Nevola notes, Serlio's account and representation of 'the "comic scene" stands out for its architectural variety, where a rich mix of Gothic and classical forms combines to shape a diverse urban environment […] imitat[ing] the streetscape that would have been prevalent in the cities of the time'. 24 This description of the mixed comic scene -arguably Aretino's preferred mode -certainly accords with Benedetto Bonfigli's cityscapes of Perugia, and even, unintentionally, with Berto di Giovanni's votive banner (1526) depicting Perugia and its roiling mass of citizens that hangs in the cathedral of San Lorenzo. The scenographic configurations of the major dramatic modes thus provide a useful model for considering how Aretino variously remembers Perugia as pastoral, as comedy, and as tragedy. For Aretino, the city was theatre, hence the blurred boundaries between the civic audience and its representation in his comedy La Cortigiana. And for Aretino theatre was variously representative and multi-modal -poetic, painterly, and musicalas indeed was his experience of Perugia.
Aretino's letters to his Perugian friends glow with nostalgia, and frequently show a more intimate side to his correspondence. Paul Larivaille has rightly noted a sense of sincere affection for his formative years in Perugia, but there is also a careful rhetoric of nostalgia that operates across these letters, which intersects with a series of other recurrent tropes. The starting point is the distance between past and present, a distance the letters to the Perugia circle seek to elide. Thus, writing to Alessandro Vitelli on 5 May 1537, Aretino recalls their time together with Giovanni dalle Bande Nere before the great condottiere's death in 1526. Interestingly, Aretino frames his present and past selves in a Petrarchan idiom. Giovanni's son, Duke Cosimo, 'does not know the one I was then, nor perhaps the one I am now', recalling Petrarch's memory of his 'juvenile error,/when I was in part another man from that which I am now' in the opening sonnet of the Canzoniere. 25  Petrarchism, and vernacular poetics more widely; it was later that he adopted his equally studied antipetrarchismo. In his later letters to his Perugian friends he frequently echoes the idiom of Petrarchan poetics, as if he has slipped back into the role of the aspiring young poet of their memories. This is entirely appropriate, of course, given that Petrarch thematised the distance between present and past selves, and measured it through insistent commemoration. He writes to Caporali on 3 August 1537 that 'I am [still] that good companion that I was in those days […] and the burden of the years would seem light if I were not grown fat'; a sentiment that becomes a trope. 26 Here again Aretino approaches the language of the Petrarchan anniversary poems: Vero è 'l proverbio, ch'altri cangia il pelo anzi che 'l vezzo, et per lentar i sensi gli umani affecti non son meno intensi The proverb is true, that our hair changes before our vices, and though the senses slow down, the human passions are no less intense. (Rvf 122.5-7) 27 Ultimately, this trope, and Aretino's, are variants upon Matthew 26:41, which Petrarch renders as 'Lo spirto è pronto, ma la carne è stanca' (Rvf 208.14): the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Yet, the act of reading and writing the Perugian letters is a means of both spiritual and carnal rejuvenation. Indeed, the act of reading is an embodied, sensuous experience for Aretino, which offers a return to the prelapsarian 'garden where my youth flowered'. 28 Perugia is frequently configured as a demi-Eden -the city's pastoral mode -where youth is not only recalled, but relived, effected here by his euphonic formula: giardino/gioventù.
Aretino's reversion to the Petrarchism of his Perugian gioventù, his epistolary rejuvenation, seeks to confirm that he remains the youthful poetic spirit he once was, and his letters to the Perugia circle are often marked by his poetic self-consciousness. 29 As we shall see, the poems Aretino com-26 Lettere, I.169: 'io sono quel buon compagno ch'io era a quei tempi […]. E il carco de gli anni mi parebbe leggieri se io non fusse grosso'. Cf. Lettere, II.70: 'onde col tener sempre giovane la volontà, spero non sentir mai vecchia la carne. […] è buona a raffrenare il corso de gli anni' ('by keeping my will ever young, I hope never to feel old in my flesh […] it is good to rein in the running of the years'); Lettere, IV.448: 'lodato sia Cristo, non sento scropolo alcuno di vecchiaia, e da un poco di grossezza in fuora, tengo in me le medesime prosperità che mi teneva prima' ('praised be Christ I do not feel any of the difficulties of old age, and aside from a little outward thickening, I hold in me the same prosperity that I did before'). 27  Aretino's efflorescent language of gardens see J.G. Turner's contribution to this issue. 29 We find it again in a later letter to Mezzabarba (Lettere, V.33) concerning 'your prudent judgment upon my composition' ('[il] giudizio fatto da la di voi prudenza sopra la di me composizione'). posed in Perugia following his conversion, and published as his Opera nova in 1512, are steeped in the same Petrarchan motifs and conceits. In the letters Aretino is then performing his younger self to prove his constancy -'I am that I was' -but also his constancy with his brigata: 'Bitte [Caporali] is me, and I am Bitte'. 30 Yet, despite such rhetoric, Aretino's affections in these letters, the emotional and sensual recall of his juvenile error, are by no means insincererhetoric is used to enhance, not counterfeit, the emotion. In a letter sent to Oradini on 15 July 1542, Aretino speaks of the benevolence which he 'had, has, and always will have' towards his Perugian friends, and how he feels misery and joy when he hears of their ills and felicities. 31 Perugia was engulfed in bitter violence from the 1520s to the early 1540s -the city's tragic mode -as the powerful Baglioni family warred against the Papacy, which ultimately exerted its control over the town, culminating in the construction of the mighty fortress Rocca Paolina, which necessitated the destruction of the college of San Girolamo. 32 As such, the representation of Perugia in Aretino's letters during this period shifts at times from heaven to hell, or vice versa, as when he writes in September 1549 to congratulate Giulio Oradini on the appointment of Giulio della Rovere as Papal legate to Perugia: 'Our Lord has made a paradise of Perugia, that was an inferno'. 33 Set against the turmoil of the 1530s, Aretino's rhetoric of feeling increases in his letters to the Perugian inner circle. His letter to Carubino di Benedetto, dated August 14, 1538, opens by relating how Carubino's previous letter not only reminded him of 'the cordiality of old friendships', but of how 'superfluous it is to renew words due to old certainties', before embarking on a pseudo-Ciceronian discussion of friendship. 34 The tone is contemplative, and almost physically intimate. In his letter to Caporali of 3 October 1537 he writes, while waiting for him to visit, that 'your letters instead satisfy the desire I have to embrace and kiss you; by God I embrace you and kiss you reading them, so write to me often'. 35 This is a recurrent trope of the Perugian correspondence, whereby the letter performs embodiment.
Caporali evidently shared Aretino's nostalgic sentiments, returning them in a sonnet published in his 1540 Rime: 30 Letter to Giulio Oradini, July 1548. Another Petrarchan trope, the becoming of the beloved (see for Aretino even enjoys recalling his giovenile errore in his letter to Carubino of April 1549: As soon as I received your letter -given to me by your own grandson -no less with the heart than with the hand I felt myself become wholly tender again through some kind of intrinsic affection, which I don't know how to speak with my tongue, but rather express with my soul. It refreshed in my mind the loving fraternal conversation [conversazione] that together we exercised in the dear spring of our years. Although we would still do the exact same if we were together, in the grateful winter of our years, and perhaps with a greater, more agreeable pleasure. 37 The term conversazione here translates insufficiently as conversation; in the early modern period it also suggested a community, as recorded in the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612): 'il conversare, e la gente stessa unita, che conversa insieme'. 38 Aretino's Perugia was a community of 36 Caporali, Rime, sig. A1 v . 37 Lettere, IV.448: 'La lettera che da parte vostra mi ha dato il vostro istesso nipote, nel subito pigliarla non meno con il core che con la mano, sentimmi tutto rintenerire da quel non so che di affetto intrinsico, il quale non si se dire con lingua, se bene si exprime con l'animo. Egli mi rinfrescò ne la mente quella amorevole conversazione fraterna, che insieme esercitammo ne la cara primavera de gli anni. Benché faremmo il simile, se stessimo apresso, nel grato verno della età nostra ancora, e forse con un piacere assai piú lieto e ameno'. 38  or at least of Aretino's conversazione. 46 A common form of homosexual relationship in early modern Italy was pederasty, itself partly legitimized as another example of Graeco-Roman cultural imitatio.
One can see how Fusco reached his conclusion as Aretino was part of a homosocial circle that included at least one openly homosexual member, and his relationship, as he himself framed it to at least three members of that circle, was as a student embarked upon a paideia or programme of study, however, informal. One of Aretino's teacher-figures, as we have already seen, was Mezzabarba, who first enflamed Aretino's soul with poetry. A second figure was a certain Francesco Buontempi. 47 (Fig. 4). To mark the strambotti giving way to the sonnets, a statement appears, which reiterates the author's double expertise: 'Alquanto cose de uno adolescente arretino/Pietro, studioso in questa facultà et in pittura' ('Some things [poems] by Pietro, a young man from Arezzo, studious in this faculty and in painting'). 50 In the sonnet which follows, the author explains that he did not take up his pen of his own volition: 46   There is, as we have seen, a Francesco Buoncambi of Perugia to whom Aretino writes in the first volume of Lettere. 52 It is not impossible that Buoncambi is Bontempi, as the two families were very close. 53 Conversely, it is unlikely that there were two poets named Pietro Aretino living in Perugia in 1512. This being the case, we are faced with accepting that Aretino was studying to be an artist in Perugia.
That Aretino had trained to be an artist makes a great deal of sense, of course. His responsiveness to art, the way in which he spoke about it, described it, and anatomized it, made him something of an authority and arbiter of taste. The treatise on art by Aretino's former secretary and longtime friend, Lodovico Dolce, which was written in response to Vasari's Lives of the Painters, was entitled L'Aretino. 54 In the mid-twentieth century Aretino's writings on art were collected and edited by Fidenzio Pertile and Ettore Camescasca -they filled three volumes. 55 Crucially, Aretino sought to imitate the techniques of the visual arts in his writing, which one might describe as painterly. In his letter to Michelangelo containing Aretino's own conception of the Last Judgement, the emphasis throughout is on disegno, in accordance with the Florentine tradition. In his letter to Titian describing the bustling life of the Grand Canal as he looks upon it from his window, the technique is one of colorito, in accordance with the Venetian tradition. 56 Aretino seeks not only to describe works of art, but to reproduce the immediate experience of engaging with something brilliantly conceived and executed, both at the level of overall effect and at the level of detail. In doing so he does not attempt to produce a detailed ekphrasis or reproduction of the work's content, but seeks to emulate verbally the process whereby it was produced, adding rhetorical colour to his design, or departing from his design by adding colour upon colour. He uses this same technique to capture arresting scenes and the sensations they create at the moment of observation, in the same way an artist might. His writing, in other words, seeks to recreate the experience of aesthesis in his reader. When we read Aretino's descriptions of an artwork, a scene, an object, or even a sex act, we do not just see it reproduced, we feel its effects. Through this technique he originates an entirely new way of writing about art, beginning a tradition which was still influential in the writings of William Hazlitt and Walter Pater in the nineteenth century. The Opera nova's description of Aretino as being 'studious in this faculty and in painting' is entirely prescient in its encapsulation 52  of the faculties which produce what we might call the 'mature' style of his masterpiece, the Letters. What, however, does 'this faculty' mean? Petrus de Aretio was not, it seems, enrolled as a student at the Collegio di San Girolamo. 'Faculty' here means the poetic tradition, to which he was introduced by Mezzabarba, encouraged by Bontempi, and trained by Caporali. Caporali is surely Aretino's maestro in Perugia, being himself a poet and a painter. Aretino's time spent in Perugia certainly corresponds to the time required to complete an apprenticeship, even if it were not a formal cursus. 57 It is certainly more credible that Luigi Bacci was funding Aretino's studies under Caporali than to believe he was paying for him to be sodomized by a bureaucrat. There may well have been a 'Socratic' element to their relationship, as Caporali was almost twenty years Aretino's senior (ca. 1475-1555). If Aretino arrived in Perugia in January 1507, he would have been fifteen, and Caporali thirty-two, which was not unusual for a pederastic relationship -we recall that Friano kept carved in his heart the image of his latest Ganymede. Caporali could well have taught Aretino to paint and to study poetry, as whilst he is primarily known as a painter -and as the son of a greater painter, Bartolomeo Caporali -he was also a poet.
The question of why the Opera nova was published in Venice is less problematic. It was not uncommon for publishers to send works to Venice -the print capital of Europe -to be printed. The Cartolari publishing family, for example, who were based in Perugia, sent works to Niccolò Zoppino, the publisher of the Opera nova. 58 Caporali's mother was Brigida Cartolari, so it is not impossible that Caporali was instrumental in the publication. The question over the title of the publication is similarly straightforward: it is not Pietro Aretino's new work so much as a new work by Pietro Aretino. The title speaks to the market; by calling it the Opera nova Aretino (or Caporali, or the Cartolari) was acknowledging a public voracious for new titles. It was this awareness of his reading public's tastes and habits that helped to make the Letters such a success.
What kind of work is the Opera nova? Surprisingly, it is learned, and confirms that Aretino did have some kind of education in poetry. 59 Surprisingly, because Aretino would later condemn all pedantry, convention, and Petrarchism, especially the kind of Neoplatonic Petrarchism that had been made de rigueur by the cultural arbiter Pietro Bembo in 1525. 60  own Rime, which were published much later, in 1540. Aretino's seemingly programmatic study and imitation of earlier poetry puts pay to another myth surrounding his time in Perugia: that he was an autodidact who learned about literature due to his time spent working in a bookbinder's shop. A 1603 poetry anthology published in Vicenza for the Venice-based printer Barezzo Barezzi includes Francesco Berni's capitolo Contra Pietro Aretino, which dates from the 1520s. The poem is accompanied by an anonymous printed commentary which asserts that Aretino's first job was as a bookbinder in Perugia. 61 Mazzuchelli suggested that the reason Aretino never mentioned this job was out of shame, but that whilst working in the bindery he began to read the books, and then began to write, developing a reputation as an uomo letterato. 62 Mazzuchelli's wishful thinking and the anonymous commentary share a source: Aretino himself. Aretino later developed his autodidactic, iconoclastic public image, claiming no education but what his mother taught him, and a contempt for learned pedants. This is the most likely reason he never made reference to the Opera nova in later years -it predates and undermines that image. Aretino -like Petrarch before him -championed his own ignorance, and -like Petrarch before him -he was being insincere. 63 Of course, it might seem strange to compare Aretino to the figure against whom he (ostensibly) defined himself -Petrarch was the forefather of Latin humanism, and in terms of vernacular poetry Petrarchism signified a series of prescribed formulas, rules and words which would become prerequisites for any aspiring poet. Despite having died in 1374, he dominated the poetry of the sixteenth century. He was also from Arezzo. 64 In his first collection, Aretino had clearly not yet renounced Petrarchism. 65 The recurrent themes of the Opera nova are love, death, time, fame and fortune. Aretino follows the Trionfi of Petrarch, which have the same emphases. 66 He also follows the most important Petrarchan poet of the fifteenth century, Serafino dell'Aquila, from whom he learned the art of the strambotto. 67 Serafino represents the lirica antebembiana, the Petrarchan tradition as it was before Bembo's reformulation of it. If we were in any doubt that Aretino began his career not as a bookbinder but as a Petrarchist, we need only compare the opening lines of Petrarch's sonnet sequence, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, with Aretino's opening strambotto in the Opera nova: Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva 'l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore quand'era in parte altr'uom da quel ch'i' sono, del vario stile in ch'io piango et ragiono fra le vane speranze e 'l van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono. (Petrarca, Rvf 1.1-8) 68 You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound Of those sighs whereby I nourished my heart In my first juvenile error When I was in part another man from the one I am now, Of the varied style in which I weep and talk, Between vain hopes and vain melancholy, Where there is anyone who understands love through experience I hope to find pity, not only pardon.
You who hear my lamentable verse, Flee bitter Love and his torch, 69 Since through the impious pursuit I have lost time And severed my ship from the good star And everything upright I found turned away At the approach of such a little boat. Flee, all, the amorous desire Which brings complaints, hardship, anxieties and misery. 70 Aside from the opening line, which is a conventional echo -compare Serafino's 'Voi ch'ascoltate mie iuste querele' or Gaspara Stampa's 'Voi ch'ascoltate in queste meste rime' -Aretino's poem abounds with Petrarchan commonplaces. The little boat (barca/navicella) that is put asunder from its guiding star recalls Petrarch's Rvf almost unconsciously (see Rvf 270. 65). One finds these echoes of Petrarch, Serafino and Dante, amongst others, in every poem in the collection. Indeed, Aretino had evidently internalised Petrarch's rules on imitation. 71 Some of Aretino's poems are pleasantly conceited, whilst others, such as this opening strambotto, are somewhat disjointed collections of typical tropes. None of the poems ever quite matches the musical brilliance and structural control of Petrarch himself. Perhaps Aretino knew this, and it was one of the reasons for his subsequent turn against Petrarch(ism). Or perhaps Aretino disapproved of the Neoplatonic Petrarch of the sixteenth century, who seemed to put words in the fourteenthcentury poet's mouth, preferring instead the more traditional approach of Serafino. We know that Aretino favoured an ethos of naturalism in his writing (albeit offset by his painterly mannerism), as one of the few writers he ever praised was Erasmus: 'who has enlarged the confines of the human genius, and by imitating himself has remained in the memory of men as the only model of himself'. 72 Nevertheless, the collection reveals a careful study of poetic traditions, which likely came in part from Caporali, but also from the streets of Perugia itself.

THE CAPORALI ALTARPIECE: SHOWCASING THE VERNACULAR
As noted at the outset, Caporali's Madonna and Child was painted in 1510-12, when Aretino was writing and publishing his first collection of poems. It does not have its meaning alone, but must be viewed in relation to Raphael's Ansidei Madonna (1504-1505). 73 In Raphael's painting, the Madonna is holding a book. Its size, rubrication and gilt edges suggest it is a Latin breviary (Fig. 2) 78 The lauda in Caporali's altarpiece, a popular song painted for the Latinate friars, exemplifies the porous membrane of cultural exchange. As Edward Dent noted over a century ago, '[w]e may assume from the fact of the hymn being painted on the picture that it was a favourite with the congregation, and therefore fairly representative of popular taste at the time'. 79 It ought to be noted also that Umbria was the cradle of the laude tradition. 80 Moreover, the extant laude not only show that they were apt to be performed in monastic institutions, but a number of the cantasi come pieces dating from the early sixteenth century originated in convents. Indeed, the proximity and interchangeability of the laude and cantasi come traditions was underlined by the publisher Filippo Giunti in his foreword to the 1563 collection of laudi spirituali made by the Dominican monk Fra Serafino Razzi, in which he recommends that the musical settings of the laude in the volume should replace the 'foolish' tradition of 'sing it like this or that'. 81 Interestingly, the Caporali showcase confirms 'the likelihood that the laude were sung polyphonically', as it includes musical notation for four voices, which in turn reinforces the argument that the cantasi come repertory corresponded with 'the newer, four-part settings of the formally compatible canti carnascialeschi' or carnival songs. 82 The painted hymnal is polyphonic, set for four voices: on the painted verso is the notation for superius and tenor, on the recto altus and bassus (see Fig. 3). 83 How does this painting relate to our knowledge of Aretino in Perugia? It does so on two levels: the first pertains to Aretino's conferred status in the Opera nova; the second pertains to the sensorium of the Perugian cityscape, and Aretino's experience of it. 84 The Opera nova, as we have seen, repeatedly insists that Aretino was a painter as well as a poet: Pietro Pictore Arretino. Yet there is no record of his fledgling artistic career. There is, however, an anecdote, a distortion which, I contend, is apocryphally connected to the painting of the Madonna. In his commentary on the Rime di Cesare Caporali, his grandson Carlo recorded that in a piazza in Perugia which Aretino frequented was a painting of the Magdalene at the feet of the crucified Christ. She was depicted in an attitude of mourning, with her arms open. According to the anecdote, Aretino returned to the piazza by night and painted a lute into her open arms. 85 Mazzuchelli cautiously noted that Carlo Caporali lived a century after Aretino, and offered up no source or authority for the anecdote. 86 Yet Carlo was the grandson of Cesare, who was the illegitimate son of Canon Camillo Caporali, the brother of Aretino's mentor, Bitte, who painted the S. Girolamo altarpiece. As such, it's not impossible that a story had passed through history into the distortions of anecdote. It was not the Madonna, but the Maddalena. All of the same emphases are there, but rearranged: the religious artwork, the musical addition, the fusion of the religious and the secular. So is it possible that Pietro the painter-poet from Arezzo had a hand in the Caporali altarpiece?
Aretino himself writes in strambotto 17 from the Opera nova that 'il pictor parla di gesti e disegni' ('the painter speaks of deeds and designs'). 87 On a literal level this is just what artists discuss. Yet it also suggests that paintings might be read as texts: il pictor parla. This certainly accords with the words put into Aretino's mouth by his friend and former amanuensis, the scholar Lodovico Dolce, in his treatise on painting, entitled L'Aretino: FABRINI: This definition of yours is simple and appropriate; equally, the resemblance you note between the poet and the painter is fitting, in that some men of parts have called the painter a "mute poet" and the poet a "speaking painter." 88 We recall how Aretino is described in the Opera nova as 'studioso in questa facultà e in pittura' ('studious in this faculty [poetry] and in painting'). 89 One can see how the anecdote of the lute painting might have emerged from the Caporali painting, and Aretino's possible addition to it. Perhaps, then, it was not that Aretino painted a lute into the hands of the Maddalena, but that he painted a popular hymn, complete with full musical score, into a portrait of the Madonna, 87  where it occupied the traditional position of the laudatory angel with lira da braccio. Indeed, the anecdote functions as an inverted metaphor of the cantasi come tradition: the hymn which borrows its music from popular song becomes a symbol of popular music (the lute) being added to the religious subject. What evidence is there, however, that the hymn in the showcase was Aretino's work? Caporali's painting is the only surviving record of this hymn's existence. 90 It consists of two stanzas, the first of which is as follows: known in Perugia in 1510-1512, and still familiar to a Venetian audience in 1542, when Aretino's play was written. Yet no other copies of it survive, so its continued currency is in question. Of course, many popular songs and hymns are lost, so this is not a watertight theory, but one would expect at least another extant witness if the poem had remained well-known after almost thirty years. The alternative argument is that it was not still popular, but meant something to Aretino. Notably, he switches the name Maria for Madonna; possibly a remembrance of the subject of the painting that incorporated the lauda, even if it is here being secularised. 93 This, of course, does not prove Aretino had a hand in the painting -without knowing of other paintings by Aretino by way of comparison, definitive proof cannot be provided -but when one considers the title repeatedly conferred upon Aretino in the Opera nova, 'Pietro Pictore Arretino', his close relationship with Caporali, the appearance of the painted hymn in his later play, the claim in the anonymous Rialto poem, and his lifelong obsession with art, one can make the argument that the Caporali showcase might have been the work of Aretino -the only known painting to which he ever contributed. 94 Where might Caporali and Aretino have heard such a song, aside from the convent? Well, anywhere and everywhere, the courts and piazze. Popular songs were part of the sensorium of the city, performed by the street singers, the canterini, who were to be heard in every Italian city, and who were regularly employed in an official capacity by the priors of Perugia. 95 A well-known canterino, Niccolò Zoppino, is referred to in two separate works by Aretino. In the first day of the Ragionamenti, Pippa recalls 'that Zoppino who, when he sings on his bench, all the world rushes to hear him'. 96 In Lo Ipocrito also -the same work in which we find the lines from the Caporali lauda -Zoppino is recalled, 93 Although the lines from the lauda are immediately followed by a comic reference to scripture and song: when the young Tanfuro has to apologise for arriving late because he stopped 'to hear Zoppino sing a thousand songs on his bench'. 97 It was the same Zoppino who published Aretino's Opera nova in 1512. 98 Zoppino, like Aretino, belies the critical dichotomy between poesia d'arte and poesia popolare, between the literary and the paraliterary. Indeed, Aretino's first published work bears many traces of the canterini tradition, including its frontispiece; in the foreground a courtly lady crowns a poet, but the eye is drawn to the central figure playing the lute (Fig. 4). Moreover, the title Opera nova recalls the phrase used by various street-singers at the close of their performances, when they would sell their wares, as Rospocher notes of one of Zoppino's barzellette: The song eventually closes with another clear performative element, the customary request to pay the singer for his 'cossa novella' -the pamphlet that recorded the performance of his verses […]. 99 The Opera nova thus recalls the cosa novella, the new work available to the audience who are presently hearing its performance. Indeed, at the close of the preface to his reader, Aretino -in a voice which offers us a glimpse of the tone we recognise so readily in the Lettere -advises his reader to 'at least read them, and, if disgusted, you do not wish to keep them in your house, sell them to the booksellers to make covers for others, or to the grocers to wrap fish, and it will be no shame to you or trouble to me'. 100 The melodies for the bestknown songs of the canterini in turn furnished the laude of the cantasi come repertory. The lauda in the Caporali altarpiece is not, we recall, a book of hours or a hymnal; rather it resembles one of the 'cheap printed editions' hawked by a canterino at the close of his performance. 101 Moreover, and more so than Caporali in his 1540 Rime, the poetic forms of the Opera nova, which are announced in its subtitle -'zoe [