In course of time calumny became universal, and the strictest virtue was most certain of all to challenge the attacks of malice.Of the great pulpit orator, Fra Egidio of Viterbo, whom Leo made a cardinal on account of his merits, and who showed himself a man of the people and a brave monk in the calamity of 1527, Giovio gives us to understand that he preserved his ascetic pallor by the smoke of wet straw and other means of the same kind.Giovio is a genuine Curial in these matters.He generally begins by telling his story, then adds that he does not believe it, and then hints at the end that perhaps after all there may be something in it.But the true scapegoat of Roman scorn was the pious and moral Adrian VI.A general agreement seemed to be made to take him only on the comic side.He fell out from the first with the formidable Francesco Berni, threatening to have thrown into the Tiber not, as people said, the statue of Pasquino, but the writers of the satires themselves.The vengeance for this was the famous 'Capitolo' against Pope Adriano, inspired not exactly by hatred, but by contempt for the comical Dutch barbarian; the more savage menaces were reserved for the cardinals who had elected him.The plague, which then was prevalent in Rome, was ascribed to him; Berni and others sketch the environment of the Pope with the same sparkling untruthfulness with which the modern _feuilletoniste _turns black into white, and everything into anything.
The biography which Paolo Giovio was commissioned to write by the cardinal of Tortosa, and which was to have been a eulogy, is for anyone who can read between the lines an unexampled piece of satire.It sounds ridiculous at least for the Italians of that time--to hear how Adrian applied to the Chapter of Saragossa for the jawbone of St.Lambert; how the devout Spaniards decked him out till he looked 'like a right well-dressed Pope'; how he came in a confused and tasteless procession from Ostia to Rome, took counsel about burning or drowning Pasquino, would suddenly break off the most important business when dinner was announced; and lastly, at the end of an unhappy reign, how be died of drinking too much beer--whereupon the house of his physician was hung with garlands by midnight revellers, and adorned with the inscription, 'Liberatori Patriae S.P.Q.R.' It is true that Giovio had lost his money in the general confiscation of public funds, and had only received a benefice by way of compensation because he was 'no poet,' that is to say, no pagan.But it was decreed that Adrian should be the last great victim.After the disaster which befell Rome in 1527, slander visibly declined along with the unrestrained wickedness of private life.
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But while it was still flourishing was developed, chiefly in Rome the greatest railer of modern times, Pietro Aretino.A glance at his life and character will save us the trouble of noticing many less distinguished members of his class.
We know him chiefly in the last thirty years of his life, (1527-56), which he passed in Venice, the only asylum possible for him.From hence he kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege, and here were delivered the presents of the foreign princes who needed or dreaded his pen.Charles V and Francis I both pensioned him at the same time, each hoping that Aretino would do some mischief to the other.
Aretino flattered both, but naturally attached himself more closely to Charles, because he remained master in Italy.After the Emperor's victory at Tunis in 1535, this tone of adulation passed into the most ludicrous worship, in observing which it must not be forgotten that Aretino constantly cherished the hope that Charles would help him to a cardinal's hat.It is probable that he enjoyed special protection as Spanish agent, as his speech or silence could have no small effect on the smaller Italian courts and on public opinion in Italy.He affected utterly to despise the Papal court because he knew it so well; the true reason was that Rome neither could nor would pay him any longer.
Venice, which sheltered him, he was wise enough to leave unassailed.
The rest of his relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar extortion.
Aretino affords the first great instance of the abuse of publicity to such ends.The polemical writings which a hundred years earlier Poggio and his opponents interchanged, are just as infamous in their tone and purpose, but they were not composed for the press, but for a sort of private circulation.Aretino made all his profit out of a complete publicity, and in a certain sense may be considered the father of modern journalism.His letters and miscellaneous articles were printed periodically, after they had already been circulated among a tolerably extensive public.
