Pietro Aretino constantly flaunts his originality and uniqueness as a writer. This essay seeks to show that, on the contrary, his authorial figure arises from a rewriting and a ‘refiguring’ of Lucian, especially as far as the centrality of paradox and of parrhesia are concerned. The present study reinterprets or adduces hitherto ignored evidence (consisting of both textual and iconographic materials, such as portraits, marche editoriali, and medals) in order to reconstruct some key aspects of Aretino’s relationship to Lucian, thus questioning the traditional idea of the writer’s unfamiliarity with the processes of imitatio of antiquity. Aretino’s approach to Lucian is investigated on three different levels, i.e. the level of intertextuality, of themes and genres, and of authorship. Firstly, the analysis inspects how Aretino’s Dialogo was influenced by a specific collection of vernacular translations of Lucian (I dilettevoli dialogi, 1525). Furthermore, the essay unveils the close relationship between Dialogo and Lucian’s De parasito as a model of paradoxical eulogy, thereby showing that Aretino’s text not only reverses the structures of relevant literary genres (e.g. the Platonic dialogue) but also originates from a ‘positive’ imitation of other generic templates (such as the Lucianistic paradoxical encomium). Finally, new findings about the sources of Aretino’s motto veritas odium parit and of its iconography shed light on the way Aretino fashions himself as a parrhesiastes by reproducing and transforming – and therefore imitating – Lucian’s figura auctoris.
