Pietro Aretino is remembered for writing that changed what came after it.
The record lists Pietro Aretino as Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist, and blackmailer (1492-1556).
Pietro Aretino was born at Arezzo in 1492. His recorded nationality is Italy.
Printing had made an author reachable by readers who would never meet them, and vernacular languages were displacing Latin.
He worked as poet, playwright and journalist.
The writing is recorded in Italian.
His name is attached above all to an exchange of letters he had with Michelangelo concerning the latter's fresco The Last Judgment. Reputation in letters is unusually volatile: writers are forgotten for a generation and then recovered by one.
That the work was written from Italy matters: language, censorship and the reach of a publishing industry decide which books travel and which stay local.
Pietro Aretino died in 1556, aged 64. The books remain, which is the only durable form a writing life takes.
