International Conference “Pietro Pictore Arretino.” A Word in Favour of Renaissance Art

17 – 19 OCTOBER 2018
VENICE, ISLAND OF SAN GIORGIO MAGGIORE

This conference on Pietro Aretino has been promoted in collaboration with La Sapienza University of Rome, the University of Roma Tre, the University of Tuscia di Viterbo, KNIR-Royal Netherlandish Institute of Rome,  and the Committee for the National Edition of the Works of Pietro Aretino. There will be four conference sessions: “Perugia and Rome: education, relations with the worlds of Raphael and Michelangelo, the Modi”; “Venice: the ‘triumvirate’ with Titian and Sansovino, Aretino as sponsor and patron”; “ekphrastic Aretino”; and “Aretino and art criticism”.
Writers and art historians will reflect on Aretino’s interest in and knowledge of artistic matters, his relations with artists, and the influence of his words on the development of the language of Renaissance art.
In the years when the commissioning of “state portraits” and art collecting became widespread practices, Aretino was a public figure, a self-proclaimed “secretary of the world”, who regularly played a role as
mediator between sovereigns and ministers, on one hand, and artists, on the other, especially Titian, whom rulers commissioned to make their public effigies. The conference will explore Aretino’s exchanges in the field of art not only with the recognised masters (from Raphael and Michelangelo to Sebastiano del Piombo, Giulio Romano, Titian, Sansovino and Tintoretto), but also with leading figures in religious and political life, cardinals, ministers, statesmen and fashionable literati (such as Pietro Bembo), thus fostering a diplomacy
of dispatches, conducted with mixed fortunes from the 1520s to the 1550s. Aretino excelled in this practice, and the conference will gauge its scope and illustrate its ramifications.