This article explores Pietro Aretino’s pasquinade production as a crucial phase in the construction of his public and literary persona that is characterized by a peculiar effacement of the author’s voice. The article then focuses on issues of anonymity and authorship in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with special attention devoted to the connections between the pasquinade and Burchiellesque traditions and the idea of the author that emerges from them. In particular, the article reflects on ideas of the mask, and of literature as a game in which pre-existing materials are ceaselessly reassembled. These views are ultimately reconnected to a sceptical view of reality as fundamentally ungraspable. Cet article explore la production de pasquinades de Pierre l’Arétin comme une phase cruciale dans la construction de son personnage public et littéraire, caractérisé par l’effacement particulier de la voix auctoriale. L’article se concentre donc sur les questions de l’anonymat et de la présence auctoriale durant les quinzième et seizième siècles, et porte plus particulièrement sur les liens entre pasquinades et traditions burchiellesques, ainsi que sur la conception de l’auteur qui en émerge. Plus précisément, on y réfléchit sur la notion de masque et sur la littérature comme jeu où le matériel préexistant est continuellement réarrangé. Finalement, il apparaît que ces perspectives relèvent d’une vision sceptique de la réalité, laquelle reste fondamentalement insaisissable.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Faini, M., (2025), "“E poi in Roma ognuno è Aretino”: Pasquino, Aretino, and the Concealed Self", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Faini, Marco. "“E poi in Roma ognuno è Aretino”: Pasquino, Aretino, and the Concealed Self." Renaissance and Reformation 40 (1): 2017. 161-186. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v40i1.28452. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.