The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Compromising Positions -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 3)

The fact that both Columbus and Fallopius published their 'discoveries' in Venice was no coincidence.

As a standalone rival to Rome and the center of the richest, most stable empire in Italy (if not the world), the city built on the water was an oasis for rebels and troublemakers during the Renaissance.

Alongside many legitimate advances in art and learning, this official tolerance inevitably bred bastard offspring. 

Whereas Venetian maestros like Titian and Tintoretto painted the first modern eroticized nudes—naked women stroking themselves and scenes of 'heroic rape'—lesser artists cranked out smut on their newfangled printing presses.

Glamorized violence:
The Rape of the Sabines
as reimagined during the Renaissance

By the sixteenth century, the Most Serene City, the nexus where East met West, had become the first mass-media porn capital and Europe's center of illicit sex.

Venice's reputation as a safe haven for hellions made it a natural home for Pietro Aretino.

Born the same year that Columbus stumbled into the Americas, Aretino was a satirist who made his fortune by mocking the great and not-so-good.

A suck-up par excellence, a hypocrite for hire and possibly the first modern journalist, 'the Divine Aretino' managed to transform himself into a sixteenth-century celebrity, styling himself the Scourge of Princes. One biographer sums him up as a 'man who lived on libel and blackmail and respected nothing but art.'

But even that was subject to negotiation.

COMPROMISING POSITIONS

When critics in the Vatican were lambasting Michelangelo for the nudity in his Last Judgment, Aretino sided with the philistines who demanded that the naked images in the Sistine Chapel be loinclothed.

Barely two decades earlier, the writer had had his own clash with papal authority in an incident that created erotica as we know it today.

The trouble seems to have begun with an act of Vatican graffiti by a protégé of the Renaissance master, Raphael.

One of the more colorful versions of the story claims that Giulio Romano was so miffed that the Pope was late in paying him that he decorated the Hall of Constantine—a celebration of Christianity conquering paganism—with sixteen scenes of fornicating couples.