Early Book Collections | Ephemeral Renaissance

Pasquino the “Talking Statue,” ca. 1550

At the end of the fifteenth century a statue was discovered near the palace of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, a luxuriant bon vivant who regularly aspired, but failed, to be elected pope. The statue’s shattered torso with its absent arms and lost legs caught the cardinal’s eye, and he had it moved to a public space in Rome’s Piazza Parione. On St. Mark’s Day (April 25) 1501, Carafa had the statue adorned in classical dress and plastered Latin mottos and phrases around it. A new tradition was thus born, for in short time other Romans began pasting their own ephemeral manuscript sheets and scraps, some quite seditious to the Church and state, to the marble statue.

Soon thereafter, the nameless statue was endowed with the name of a fifteenth-century Roman tailor, Pasquino, whose knowledge of politico-religious matters—and the wit by which he turned insults against those politico-religious figures—made him something of a celebrity in the Parione region. At least that is one story dating back to Ludovico Castelvetro’s mid-sixteenth century aetiology. So noteworthy did the statue become for these perennial and often irreverent satires, now known as “pasquinades” in eternal honor of Pasquino, that tourists looking for Piazza Parione today must instead check their guidebooks for Piazza Pasquino.

The so-called “talking statues of Rome” (le statue parlanti di Roma) eventually numbered six in all. Though no marble statue truly “speaks,” Renaissance Romans, much as  Romans even today, pasted countless ephemeral notes, or cartelli, on and around these ancient sculptured figures as lapidary puppets of the vox populi. These present two prints famously represent Pasquino’s statue and Marforio’s statue, one of Pasquino’s “interlocutors,” about which more is said below. The former statue, most likely dating from the Hellenistic period of late antiquity, is believed to depict Menelaus, the Greek soldier whose wife’s abduction, the famed Helen of Troy, prompted the Trojan War of Homeric fame. His missing muscular arms once likely reached out to the fallen soldier of Patroclus, the hero Achilles’s closest companion in both affection and in battle; all that remained by his Renaissance rediscovery are a trunk of torso, groin, and thigh.

Some of these cartelli on Pasquino came to be copied down, anthologized, and sometimes more tame iterations of this ephemeral urban literature came to be printed annually in Giacomo Mazzochi’s Carmina apposita Pasquino. However most, especially cartelli that were mutinous or overly sexual and deemed unworthy of print, are entirely lost to the long shadows of history. It may come as a surprise that a bowdlerized pun on “cazzo” could make it into one of a sixteenth-century printer’s famous prints, but the distance between the printer’s press and the anonymous author’s cartello may have permitted more ribald instances of cartelli to be published as well.

Whether preserved or imagined by the engraver, this suggestive cartello—and the scene of Pasquino in which we find it—comes from the press of Antoine Lafréry (1512−77), possibly printed for Don Antonio Fernandez de Cordoba y Folch Cardona (1550-1606), fifth duke of Sessa in northern Campania, who served as ambassador for Philip II and Philip III of Spain to the pontifical court in Rome between 1590-1604. This engraving would have likely been bound into his personally selected portfolio of Lafréry’s multi-decade publication series of ancient and modern Roman monuments, the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (“Mirror of Roman Magnificence”).

Lafréry, styled Lafreri in Italian, was an eminent (by some accounts the pre-eminent) publisher of his Roman Speculum. His excudit (“published by”) can be seen in the bottom right of his Pasquino sheet: “Ant[onii] Lafreri[i] Formis Romae” (“from the presses of Antonius Lafrerius in Rome”). This print, dating from approximately 1550, closely resembles one issued in 1542 by Antonio Salamanca, who was Lafréry’s competitor before they joined forces as business collaborators between 1553 and 1563.

The artist likely responsible for the engraving was Nicolas Beatrizet, who also possibly composed the colorful poem that appears in the central cartello as an inscription:

Io non son (come paio) un Babbuino
stroppiato, senza piedi, et senza mani,
Nemen con gliatri membri sconi et strani,
La simmia son di Niccolo Zoppino.

Ma son quel famosißimo Pasquino,
che tremar faccio i Signor piu soprani,
Et stupir forastieri, et Paesani
Quando compongo in volgare, o in latino

La mia persona è fatta in tal mamiera
per i colpi, e, hor questo hor quel in accocca
per ch’io dico i lor falli a buona cera

Ma infin ch’io ha l’usata lingua in bocca
non ne fo stima, anchor che’l resto pera
et sempre cantaro, Zara a chi tocca
che se la gente sciocca

Non si vuol rimaner de i falli suoi
chi terra me’ che no’l ridica poi

[“I am not (as I appear) a crippled Baboon, without feet or hands, nor am I—with other crass and exotic parts—that monkey of Niccolò Zoppino. Rather I am that very famous Pasquino who makes the most sovereign lords tremble, and amazes foreigners and villagers when I compose in the vernacular or in Latin. My person is made like so: by blows, I pin people—now this one, now that one—to the wall because I openly tell their faults with a straight face. Yet as long as I have my go-to tongue in my mouth, I don’t care if the rest of me perishes. And I will always sing ‘game over’ to whoever’s offended, because if foolish people don’t want to look at their faults, then whoever knocks me to the ground would do well not to complain later.”]

The final line of the poem is essentially punctuated with our modern English idiom “…or else.” The aposiopesis here implies that whoever insults Pasquino should not complain when he inevitably strikes back at them. Zara (“game over”) was a medieval game of chance, possibly derived from Arabic culture (zahr means “dice,” and its doublet azzardo gives us the word “hazard”).

Pasquino’s statue offered everyday people a chance to bypass patrolled avenues of official discourse (the press, the church, or the court) with insults, gossip, and philippics against religious officials and politicians. But with no book to censor, ban, or publicly burn, Rome’s ecclesiastical ruling class was at a loss at how to silence the “talking statue.” (One anecdote claims they considered throwing Pasquino into the river, effectively drowning his metaphorical voice.) In fact, the carnivalesque accoutrements of St. Mark’s Day (visible at the base of the statue) refer to the central cartello’s playful explanation for the statue’s mutilated form. In any case, Pasquino’s popularity with the people—and profitability for printers who later captured and anthologized many of these cartelli—may well have saved him from permanent destruction.

Equally troublesome for anyone wishing to punish Pasquino, the craze of talking statues moved beyond Carafa’s statue and spread rapidly through Rome, as a second print from Lafréry’s collection attests: his allied depiction of Marforio, a sculpture of the ancient god Oceanus who was one of Pasquino’s “interlocutors” on the Capitoline Hill. The name potentially derives from Martis Forum, the Temple of Mars in the Forum of Augustus, where Marforio may have been first installed. Though the Marforio sculpture was never lost (it had been a famous stop for visitors to Rome for centuries), its promotion to the status of yet another statua parlante post-dates Pasquino’s elevation to this status within the public sphere. Here, Oceanus reclines inside his fountain within the ruins of the Roman Forum while a man in sixteenth-century dress wanders the ancient remnants of the Temple of Castor in the background. Another man in the foreground—perhaps intended to represent the original artist of this engraving—sits beside Marforio, sketching the scene, poised as if lending an ear to “hear” the cartello.

Like Lafréry’s single-sheet engraving of Pasquino, the Marforio was also likely executed ca. 1550 and modeled on an earlier print by Salamanca (though Salamanca’s plate lacks the stone pillars at the bottom in Lafréry’s version). Here Lafréry’s excudit appears once more, this time at bottom left. The bottom right column is inscribed Petri de Nobilibus Formis (“from the press of Pietro de Nobili”) denoting a Roman printer who flourished shortly after Lafréry. Through a series of clever business moves after Lafréry’s death in 1577, Pietro de Nobili gained total control of many of his predecessor’s plates, and helped to standardize somewhat their presentation in subsequent Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae portfolios. These representations of Pasquino and Marforio form an interesting nexus within the world of ephemeral Renaissance printing, one that was, at once, flexible, constantly evolving, and entrepreneurial.

By their nature, the plastic arts of lapidary sculpture aspire to a sense of permanence. They stand in stark contrast, however, to the fleeting and ephemeral quality of the satirical verses and gossipy pasquinades that covered and surrounded Pasquino. Writing these au courant cartelli was only slightly more permanent than spreading intangible rumors by word of mouth. But the nascent world of the printing press preserves those two countervailing qualities at precisely their moment of intersection, from ancient sculpture to the modern-day vox populi (“voice of the people”). In some sense, this single sheet representation of Pasquino is itself a new invention in witnessing the history of Rome’s talking effigies—one they common people could also conceivably buy and assemble for themselves.

—Martin Michalek