The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Renaissance Smut -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 4)

With or without Romano's blessing, Rome's top engraver then copied the copulating couples and started circulating prints of the Sixteen Positions in 1524 among gentlemen in the know.

What happened then isn't entirely clear.

Aretino had good relations with the Pope—he'd been gifted a pension for praising him in verse—and some say the poet persuaded Clement VII to show the offending artists clemency.

Unfortunately, the pontiff soon found out that Aretino had been in on the game all along—he'd even composed verses for each Position.

The Pope ordered the prints destroyed and all three men arrested, but Aretino went on the lam.

That's how he wound up in Venice, where the authorities were only too happy to thumb their noses at Rome.

Thanks to his ceaseless self promotion, the poet also managed to rebrand Romano's artworks as his own, making them known to posterity as Aretino's Positions.

In a twist that provides some solace to us scribes, it's actually the low-tech portion of the package that's survived down the centuries.

A French take on Aretino's Positions
(Paul Avril, 1892)

The Vatican destroyed all of Romano's original images—except for a few scraps secreted in libraries—so there's no way of knowing exactly what each Position involved.

However, countless artists have hazarded a guess, based on Aretino's gleefully explicit dialogues:

'In the end, a small cock is unseemly if decorum is to be observed in the pussy,' observes the woman in Sonnet Three.

To which her lover replies:

Whoever has a tiny cock and sticks it in a pussy
Deserves an ice-water enema.
Whoever doesn't have much can screw ass day and night,
But those of us who've got it merciless and proud
Always satisfy their desires in the pussy. 

'It is true,' the woman concludes, 'But we are so greedy for dick that we want a spire in front and behind.'

Clearly, an appreciation of small penises was one thing the Renaissance didn't inherit from the ancients.