Note 12 — THE Metamorphoses of Venus

Pierre Bayle, in his Dictionary, under Pierre Arétin: “There is a Dialogue between Maddalena and Giulia, entitled La Puttana Errante (The wandering whore), in which are exhaustively treated i diversi congiungimenti (the different modes of intercourse), to the number of thirty-five. Aretino, though the book has always been printed under his name, disowns it, declaring it to be the work of one of his pupils named Veniero.” Brunet, Manual du Libraire (Book dealer’s Handbook). “The Puttana errante, a little book, very rare, quite worthy of Aretino in view of the obscenities it contains, but which has been erroneously attributed to him. Lorenzo Veniero, a Venetian nobleman, is the real author. He published it to avenge himself on a Venetian courtesan named Angela, whom he designates under the insulting name of Zaffetta, that is to say, in the Venetian dialect, daughter of a police-spy.”

[Bayle, Forberg and many other writers have confused the Puttana errante, a poem by Lorenzo Veniero and a burlesque parody of the Romances of chivalry, with the Dialogue between Maddalena and Giulia, a prose work to which the Elzevirs gave the title properly belonging to the poem. Neither one nor the other is the work of Pietro Aretino. See note at end of vol. VI. of the Dialogues du divin Pietro Aretino (Dialogues of the divine Pietro Aretino), Paris, Liseux, 1879, 3 vols. 18°, and London, 1880, 3 vols. 18°. [Note of French Translation of Forberg, Manuel d’Erotologie classique, Paris, Liseux, 1882.]]