The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester is exhibiting the works of Marcantonio Raimondi (c.1480–1534), a printmaker who collaborated closely with the great Renaissance artist Raphael. The reproductions of Raphael’s paintings that Raimondi undertook helped spread artistic knowledge across Europe. It sounds respectable, even staid. Yet there’s another side to this craftsman that might make you prick up your ears.
He helped invent pornography. Raphael, who employed Raimondi, was at the centre of a circle of sexual libertarians in Renaissance Rome. They hung out at the villa of Agostino Chigi, banker to the Vatican, who held wild parties in his garden by the Tiber and owned erotic art including a lewd statue of the horny greek god Pan. Chigi was a libertarian – he apparently only married his mistress Francesca Ordeaschi to legitimise their four children after they’d lived together for years, and he also had an affair with the famous courtesan Imperia Cognati. The mood at his villa was hedonistic. One regular guest was the writer Pietro Aretino, who wrote of the erotic art in the villa: “Why shouldn’t the eye see what delights it most?”
In the bedroom Chigi shared with Ordeaschi, Il Sodoma – the Sodomite – painted a fresco of Alexander the Great going to bed with his wife Roxane. Raphael himself painted the most famous frescoes in the villa – today called the Villa Farnesina – but according to his biographer Vasari, writing in 1550, he couldn’t work properly because he was so distracted by the sex addiction Vasari says he suffered from. So Raphael’s lover had to be given a bedroom at the villa. He could paint, then go to bed with her, then paint a bit more.
According to Vasari, it was Raphael’s insatiable sex drive that killed him in 1520 at the age of 37. He came home in the morning exhausted by a wild night of passion, fell into a fever and died. Raphael left his business – he’d employed a huge team – to his most talented assistant Giulio Romano, and he wondered how to use Raimondi’s printing skills. He came up with an outrageous idea.
Romano drew a series of explicit illustrations of sex acts and gave these to Marcantonio Raimondi to engrave and print in 1524 under the title I Modi – which translates as The Positions. I Modi takes the sensuality of Renaissance art – all those nudes by Titian – and turns it into frank pornography. The pope would probably have turned a blind eye to drawings being passed around in Chigi’s villa. But by printing I Modi, Raimondi made it popular and accessible. He was thrown into jail.
Romano, meanwhile, had left Rome and was safely ensconced as a court artist in Mantua. So Raimondi languished in prison by himself and his dirty book was seized and destroyed.
The outrageous writer Aretino came to the rescue. Not only did Aretino petition the pope to release Raimondi but after getting him out of prison wrote 16 filthy sonnets to go with the pictures. In 1527 I Modi was reissued with Aretino’s licentious poems and became a bestseller all over Europe.
The English dramatist Ben Jonson mentions I Modi in his play Volpone. His friend Shakespeare only ever names one Italian artist: it is Giulio Romano. Does Shakespeare’s name-checking Romano in The Winter’s Tale suggest he knew about the filthy pictures in I Modi?
The huge success of this scandalous creation was a fusion of erotic art – which has always existed – with the new invention of printing. It was the first printed pornographic bestseller. It opened the floodgates for porn to pour off the presses and, eventually, proliferate on computer screens. Who says Renaissance art is genteel?
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