Pasquino and the Talking Statues of Rome

Strip away the marble and the mechanism is instantly familiar: a public channel nobody owns, an author who is gone by morning, a barb aimed squarely up at power, and an authority that cannot find anyone to punish. Rome built this five hundred years before the imageboard, out of a broken statue in a busy square. It is the deepest historical root of anonymous, public, effectively uncensorable mockery of the powerful — and it is still running.

The form: the anonymous public lampoon

A pasquinade (also “pasquil”) is “a form of satire, usually an anonymous brief lampoon in verse or prose,” and can be read as a kind of literary caricature. Compared with other satirical forms it “tends to be less didactic and more aggressive, and is more often critical of specific persons or groups” (Wikipedia). The genre is named for the Pasquino statue and works by posting anonymous political commentary on a public sculpture; since the sixteenth century Romans “used [Pasquino] to post anonymous political commentary,” a practice with antique precedent, since “during the Roman Empire, statues would be decorated with anonymous brief verses or criticisms” (Wikipedia).

In a city with no free press, this was the press. Most pasquinades were “political satire, reacting to contemporary developments,” and functioned as “a source of news and opinions, in lieu of non-existent or rare press” (Wikipedia). The Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries describe the notes themselves — the folk name was cartelli — as the voice of the crowd: “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” (Johns Hopkins). The verses gave the stone a voice its readers did not have: the statues “acted as places for public dialogue, when anonymous authors pasted short Latin verses satirizing the pope and other authority figures onto or beside their forms,” verses that “animated them with a power of speech that was forbidden to ordinary Romans” (JSTOR Daily).

Pasquino himself

Pasquino is a battered Hellenistic-style statue — perhaps third century BC, perhaps a Roman copy — a fragment depicting Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus. It was unearthed in the fifteenth century in Rome’s Parione district and now stands in the Piazza Pasquino near Piazza Navona, at the northwest corner of the Palazzo Braschi (Wikipedia).

The tradition has a founder. Cardinal Oliviero Carafa found the shattered statue near his palace at the end of the fifteenth century and moved it to the 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,” inaugurating the annual custom of dressing and posting it (Johns Hopkins). Wikipedia records the same event and its consequence: Carafa “draped the marble torso of the statue in a toga and decorated it with Latin epigrams on the occasion of the Feast of Saint Mark,” and soon after Romans began “writing… satirical poems in broad Roman dialect” and “attaching them to the Pasquino” (Wikipedia).

The name is the one soft spot in the record. By tradition it comes from a local wit — most accounts say a tailor. The statue was named after “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” (Johns Hopkins). Wikipedia reports the same derivation — a nearby tailor “renowned for his wit and intellect” — while noting it is received tradition rather than firmly documented (Wikipedia). Fittingly, the patron saint of anonymous mockery is himself only half-identifiable. What the statue stood for is not in doubt: per Wikipedia it “spoke out about the people’s dissatisfaction, denounced injustice, and assaulted misgovernment by members of the Church,” and the rhetoric scholar Christopher J. Gilbert, quoted by JSTOR Daily, calls Pasquino “first and foremost… a living voice of and for the popolo [people]” (Wikipedia; JSTOR Daily).

Marforio and the Congregation of Wits

Pasquino was not alone; he was the first node in a network. The talking statues collectively were the “Congregation of Wits” (Congrega degli arguti), “an outlet for a form of anonymous political expression in Rome” that “began in the 16th century and continues to the present day” (Wikipedia). Six statues make up the group: Pasquino, Marforio, Madama Lucrezia, Abbot Luigi, Il Babuino, and Il Facchino (Wikipedia).

Marforio was the one who answered. The lounging river-god figure was “sometimes used to post responses to writings posted on Pasquino, creating a repartee between the two statues” — a written call-and-response staged across the cityscape (Wikipedia). The form was a question on one statue and the punchline on another; the canonical surviving example is from the Napoleonic era, with Marforio asking, “Pasquino, why has oil got so expensive?” and Pasquino answering, “Because Napoleon needs it to fry republics and anoint kings” — an exchange widely repeated in the period and recorded by the modern sources rather than by any single primary document (Wikipedia; JSTOR Daily). The other members each gave the network another posting surface: the Babuino (a figure so ugly Romans likened it to a baboon), Il Facchino (a barrel-carrying porter), Madama Lucrezia (a colossal Roman bust), and Abbot Luigi (a toga-wearing figure), so that shutting one down did not shut down the conversation (JSTOR Daily).

“Pasquinade” enters the language: the Barberini barb

Pasquino’s fame turned his name into a common noun in several languages. The English pasquinade means an anonymous satirical protest, and the genre “became popular in early modern Europe, in the 16th century,” spreading well beyond Rome (Wikipedia). The form propagated with named practitioners — Pietro Aretino and the printer Giacomo Mazzocchi in Italy, Clément Marot in France, and Thomas Elyot’s Pasquill the Playne (1532), “probably the first English pasquinade” (Wikipedia).

The most famous single specimen took down a pope by punning on his family name. “Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini” — “What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did” — was aimed at Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini) and his family, mocking the damage their building projects did to ancient Rome (Italian Wikipedia). The jibe had a concrete referent. In 1625 Urban VIII had the bronze beams stripped from the portico of the Pantheon and melted down for the baldachin over the altar of St. Peter’s and for cannon at the Castel Sant’Angelo — so the Barberini pope had looted Rome worse than any invader (Italian Wikipedia). Authorship, as with the best anonymous work, is contested: the line is commonly attributed to Monsignor Carlo Castelli, ambassador of the Duke of Mantua, drawing on a remark circulating at the papal court that is itself credited to Urban VIII’s own physician, Giulio Cesare Mancini, around 20 September 1625 (Italian Wikipedia).

The Church could not suppress it

The problem for the authorities was structural, and the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries state it plainly: “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’” (Johns Hopkins). This is the uncensorability of the anonymous public channel, stated in period terms.

They tried anyway, and the attempts read as a catalogue of the ways power fails against anonymity. In the 1520s Pope Adrian VI proposed throwing Pasquino into the Tiber; by tradition the plan was abandoned on the argument that the silenced statue would only croak more loudly from the riverbed, like a frog (JSTOR Daily; Wikipedia). When guards were posted at Pasquino, the Romans simply migrated their commentary to the other statues — the exact dispersal that turned the Congregation of Wits into a network rather than a single point of failure (Wikipedia). The penalties escalated to death: Pope Benedict XIII in the 1720s “issued an edict that promised a death sentence for anyone who left verses at the statues,” and the historian Laurie Nussdorfer, cited by JSTOR Daily, records that as early as 1636 “an aristocrat had lost his head in Rome merely for possessing a manuscript of ‘pasquinades’ that made fun of Urban VIII’s government” (JSTOR Daily).

None of it worked. The practice “began in the 16th century and continues to the present day,” and in 2011 messages criticizing then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s sex scandals appeared at the statues (Wikipedia; JSTOR Daily). Capital threats cannot stop a channel with no author to execute.

The through-line to anonymous trolling

Pasquino is the pre-modern proof of concept for a mechanism the Fires books trace forward into the imageboard age, and the mapping is close to one-to-one.

The barbs point up. A pasquinade targets popes, cardinals, and patricians — the people who can silence a named critic — not private individuals, which is the clean historical case of satire against power rather than a mob against a target (JSTOR Daily). The channel is uncensorable for a reason that has not changed: with no book to burn and no byline to punish, the censorship machine has nothing to grab, and you cannot deplatform a poster who has no platform and no name (Johns Hopkins). The distributed form defeats the single point of failure — guarding Pasquino only pushed the traffic to Marforio and the rest, a mesh rather than a server (Wikipedia). The call-and-response is the thread: a barb on Pasquino, the reply on Marforio the next morning, a public, asynchronous, many-authored conversation in stone and paper — the ancestor of the forum thread and the quote-tweet dunk (Wikipedia). And the pasquinade fed directly into early-modern anonymous print satire across Europe, through Aretino, Marot, and Elyot — the same lineage that runs from the anonymous pamphlet to the anonymous post (Wikipedia).

That last point is why there is deliberately no name at the center of this page. The whole apparatus works because nobody can be identified; anonymity here is the load-bearing feature, not a bug. It is the same principle the glossary attaches to the hack ethic — that identity is orthogonal to the value of the speech, and that shielding the author is what makes speech against power possible. The MIT hack, catalogued in the corpus’s history of the hack ethic, inherits the rule the talking statues wrote in stone: be anonymous. The nearest analog on the social pole — the anonymous voice on the other end of an untraceable line — is documented in the corpus’s history of the prank call. Pasquino is the argument that anonymous, public mockery of the powerful is not a twenty-first-century internet artifact but a five-hundred-year-old civic technology with a marble ancestor in a Roman square.