The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Hedging Bets on the Afterlife (Chap. IV, Pt. 7)

Aretino, too, drew on personal experience to write a send-up of the dialogues of Plato and the ancients.

In his satire, a prostitute teaches her daughter the tricks of the trade, including how to resell her virginity and fleece naïve lovers: 'I tell thee as a secret: that Man is most happy whom we most hate and disdain.'

Aretino tactfully set this dirt-dishing in Rome but wrote it while living in Venice, surrounded by at least a dozen girlfriends, mistresses and houseboys.

At the same time, he churned out pious guff, belying the modern view that his was a secular age: many Renaissance men opted to hedge their bets on the afterlife.

In a story that may be too good to be true, the dirty old man supposedly died laughing—at a filthy joke about his sister.

As far as I can work out, Aretino's truly great contribution to history was his championing of Titian among Europe's elite.

In return, the Venetian master painted him at least three times, on one occasion casting him as Pontius Pilate—apparently as a compliment, just as the bronze medallions stamped with Aretino's bust on one side and a penis-haired satyr on the other were meant to reflect the root of the word 'satire' rather than imply that he was a 'dickhead.'

'Besides the medallions stamped or cast in gold, bronze, copper, lead and plaster,' Aretino boasted, 'I have had a lifelike copy made of my portrait on the façade of palaces and had it stamped upon comb boxes, on the frames of mirrors and on majolica platters just like Caesar, Alexander and Scipio.'

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For all his knowledge of antiquity, you would think Aretino would have learned a thing or two about hubris.

Despite being the sixteenth-century equivalent of the most photographed man on the planet, Aretino is best remembered today, if at all, as a historical footnote, and then mainly for his porno-poetry.

One of Titian's portraits of Aretino

Most Venetians give you a blank look when you ask about him, and there's no marker on his former mansion to distinguish the decaying palazzo from all the others on the Grand Canal.

In fact, I'm standing on the Rialto Bridge, and I'm not even sure I'm looking at the right one.