The Ways of Giulio Romano: the true story of a hardcore work

by Federico Giannini (Instagram: @federicogiannini1), published on 29/06/2012
Categories: Works and artists / Disclaimer

Today we nonchalantly frequent sites such as Youporn, Playboy and so on without taking any risks, but once upon a time, as we all know, it was not so easy to access certain content, and two artists, for attempting to disseminate erotic images, risked a lot (and centuries later we have lost too, because we no longer have the original works): we had already talked about it in an episode of our podcast but we also repropose in the blog, in a little more detail, what is one of the most curious events in the history of art. The artists in question are Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi, and the work we are talking about is The Ways: we deal with this subject also because, given the tenor of the story, you can well imagine that there are several sites on the web that talk about it, often out of turn, so since we like careful disclosure we want to provide you with an account that, however brief, is as accurate as possible.

Let’s start right away by clarifying what we are talking about: The Modi are (or rather: were, because as we said before we are no longer in possession of the originals) a series of sixteen drawings so called because the subjects are none other than sixteen couples depicted in different positions "during lovemaking,^"1 to use a periphrasis of Franco Ambrosio. To be more precise, sixteen couples depicted in as many explicit sexual relationships, all in different positions. It is Giorgio Vasari who explains how we are to understand the word “Modes”: the art historian from Arezzo says that in Giulio Romano’s work we can see "in how many different ways, attitudes and poses dishonest men lie with women^"2 (easy to see how Vasari provides a negative reading of the work). It is interesting to note the use of the adjective “dishonest”: we are in the age of the Counter-Reformation and such was the right adjective, according to the morals of the time, to indicate, among other things, a sexual practice that did not meet with the approval of the Church3.

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If we remain in the realm oferotic art, or more distinctly pornographic art since Modi are often associated with pornography4, we are dealing with a work of primary importance because according to the American scholar Bette Talvacchia (Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut), who has devoted many studies to Giulio Romano and the Modi, the drawings by the artist who was a pupil of Raphael would constitute the first case in Italy of a series depicting sexually explicit situations and put on the market through the medium of the press,5 probably precisely with the intention of disseminating the work to the public in order to make a profit. We do not know if there was a commissioner, indeed: it is very likely that Giulio Romano acted on his own initiative6, and the most up-to-date hypotheses want the drawings to have been made shortly before the artist’s departure for Mantua, where he was called by Federico II Gonzaga7 (it therefore appears unfounded lipothesis circulating on many websites, according to which it was the marquis of Mantua himself who commissioned the drawings). The latter event, Giulio Romano’s call to Mantua, saved the artist a lot of trouble.

In fact, at the same time, Marcantonio Raimondi drew from Giulio’s drawings a series of engravings that were published and distributed and soon found a rapid spread (clandestine, of course) throughout Europe.8 Vasari, in his Vita di Marcantonio Bolognese e daltri intagliatori di stampe (Life of Marcantonio Bolognese and other engravers of prints ), provides us with several details of the affair involving Giulio Romano’s fellow engraver: the works were banned and poor Raimondi was put in prison, and he only managed to get out of it thanks to the intervention of some of his influential friends. Vasari mentions Cardinal Ippolito de Medici, a cousin of Pope Clement VII, and Baccio Bandinelli, an artist protected by Clement VII from the days when Giulio de Medici had not yet ascended to the papal throne: they probably not only got him out of prison but also saved his life.9 Truly a lot for an artist who had only (“only,” clearly, in the eyes of those reading today) engraved and distributed erotic images that perhaps, jokingly, we might even consider the forerunners of those of today! But such was the morality of the time. Giulio Romano, on the other hand, fortunately did not suffer the leco of the events that were taking place in Rome at the same time.

We said earlier that the Modi were the first case in Italy of paintings of explicit sex scenes and what is more thought to be put on the market. We might ask what prompted Giulio Romano to test the terrain of pornography, and to answer this question we have to place ourselves in that particular context of interest in antiquity (particularly Roman antiquity ) that had characterized the Renaissance: an interest that took the form of the direct study of what remained of classical art (and let us not forget that Giulio Romano, whose real name was Giulio Pippi, was from Rome, and therefore had spent his entire existence in contact with classical art). Again Bette Talvacchia speculates that Giulio Romano was in possession of some spintriae10. By this latter term we mean "tesserae, 20-23 mm in diameter, characterized by various erotic depictions on one side [...], accompanied on the other side [...] by a Roman numeral, generally from I to XVI.^"11 We do not really know what the spintriae were used for, but according to the lipothesis most accepted by scholars, they were perhaps tokens used to pay for services in postriboli12. It is conceivable that Julius Romano had come into possession of such tokens (and with this would also explain the presence of some spintriae in the Gonzaga collections) and would have been prompted to represent sixteen designs by virtue of the numbering of the coins (we do not know for sure: it is a hypothesis) thinking that the numbers indicated a sort of list of positions13. Thus it would perhaps derive from this Renaissance interest in antiquity the idea behind the Modi: an interest in antiquity that was also embodied in the depiction of sex scenes.

Soon the great man of letters Pietro Aretino was also interested in the Roman artist’s Modi, so much so that he published sixteen sonnets (the very famous Sonetti lussuriosi, or rather the Sonetti sopra i XVI modi) each of which commented on one of Giulio Romano’s drawings. Giving an account of the continuation of the affair is again Giorgio Vasari: "a ciascun modo fece Messer Pietro Aretino un disonestissimo sonetto, in tanto che io non so che io fusse qual fusse più, o brutto lo spettacolo dei disegni di Giulio allocchio, o le parole dellAretino aglorecchi.^"14 We are still in 1524, Pietro Aretino was in Rome, and moreover he pleaded, together with the other characters mentioned earlier, the cause of Marcantonio Raimondi (of whom he was a friend) and antagonized the papal date Gianmatteo Giberti, with whom he had heated clashes, so much so that on July 28, 1525, the man of letters from Arezzo was also stabbed by a hitman, a Bolognese named Achille della Volta: it was this lepisodio that made Pietro Aretino leave Rome forever, who then went to Mantua to the court of Federico Gonzaga and then moved again in 1527, this time to Venice15.

But back to Giulio Romano’s Modi... in conclusion, what remains of all this five centuries later? Very few things. The original drawings have been completely lost, while of Raimondi’s engravings only two survive, one preserved at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the other at theAlbertinain Vienna while some fragments are in the British Museum in London16. However, we can imagine what the originals might have looked like because a collection of sixteenth-century woodcuts survives, placed to illustrate Pietro Aretino’s ^sonnets17, and we can still get a somewhat deeper idea through a series of engravings from about 1526 by Jacopo Caraglio (based on a design by Perin del Vaga, but also with contributions by Rosso Fiorentino, according to the usual Vasari18), which although not reproducing the Modi was inspired by the work of Giulio Romano: it is the Loves of the Gods, which differed from the Modes precisely because the protagonists were gods of antiquity and not ordinary people (as in Giulio’s drawings), in whom perhaps the viewers could identify more. Caraglio’s series was able to survive better first because it was more sweetened than the Modi and second because the choice to make ancient gods the main characters meant that censorship was not as strict as it was toward Giulio’s series.

However, our regret today is that we can no longer have the original drawings (and, of course, that we have only a few surviving fragments of the engravings) of what was the first modern pornographic work designed for an audience, a work that left its mark since it had a vast influence both on later art (we have just seen the example of Caraglio’s engravings) and on morality, and Pietro Aretino ’s willingness to somehow defend the work by means of sonnets and by working to get Marcantonio Raimondi out of prison is another fine testimony: a testimony that tells us about some men who tried to defy their era (whether intentionally or not we do not know, but in fact that is what happened) and today they have remained in history for this as well.

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Notes

1. Franco Ambrosio, Giulio Romano, Mondadori, 1992 (p. 9) ↑

2. Giorgio Vasari, Vita di Marcantonio Bolognese e daltri intagliatori di stampe in Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, 1567 ↑

3. See Massimo Firpo, Notes on a biography of Reginald Pole in Rivista storica italiana, CXIII, 2001, III (p. 886). ↑

4. See, for example, Elena Parma Armani, Perin del Vaga: lanello mancante, SAGEP, 1986: Modi is described as “decidedly pornographic” (p. 70). ↑

5. Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture, Princeton University Press, 1999 (p. XI) ↑

6. Ibid ↑

7. See Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art, University of Chicago Press, 2011 (p. 223) ↑

8. Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture, Princeton University Press, 1999 (p. 7) ↑

9. See the entry devoted to Giulio Romano in Francesco Milizia, Le vite de più celebri architetti dogni nazione e dogni tempo, 1768 ↑

10. Cf. Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture, Princeton University Press, 1999 (p. 49ff.) and Bette Talvacchia, Figure lascivi per trastullo de lingegno in AA. VV., Giulio Romano, exhibition catalog (Mantua, September-November 1989), Electa, 1989↑.

11. Alberto Campana, Le spintriae: Roman tesserae with erotic depictions in La donna romana. Images and everyday life, proceedings of the conference (Atina, March 7, 2009), Editrice Diana, 2009 (p. 43). The online version of the essay is available this address. ↑

12. Ibid (p. 46) ↑

13. See Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art, University of Chicago Press, 2011 (p. 237) ↑

14. Giorgio Vasari, Vita di Marcantonio Bolognese e daltri intagliatori di stampe in Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, 1567 ↑

15. For a concise view of the story, see Giulio Ferroni, Storia della letteratura italiana: dal Cinquecento al Settecento, Einaudi, 1991 (p. 131 ff.) and Pietro Aretino, Tutte le commedie, edited by Giovanni De Sanctis, Mursia, 1968 (p. 23 ff.) ↑

16. See Lóránd Zentai (ed.), Sixteenth-century Northern Italian Drawings - Ã?szak-Itáliai Reneszánsz Rajzok, exhibition catalog (Budapest, March-June 2003), Szépmuvészeti Múzeum, 2003 (p. 74) ↑

17. Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture, Princeton University Press, 1999 (p. 5) ↑

18. See Giorgio Vasari, Vita di Perino del Vaga pittor fiorentino and Vita del Rosso pittor fiorentino in Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, 1567 ↑

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