Bembo, Pietro (1470-1547)

Poet, literary theorist and cardinal, won lasting recognition for his enunciation of the principle of imitation, that is, of classical, especially Ciceronian, models, and for his championing of Trecento Tuscan as the basis of the literary vernacular debated in the 'questione della lingua'. Proposing, in De imitatione (1512), Boccaccio as a guide for prose and Petrarch for verse, Bembo adds that, in the case of the latter, imitation of the man as well as of his art is necessary to restore poetry to classical excellence, as Petrarch himself had done.

Son of a noble Venetian envoy to various courts, Bembo received a thoroughly humanistic and cosmopolitan education and grew up unencumbered by linguistic chauvinism. At 20 he wrote fluent Latin, used correct Florentine and would soon acquire some Greek in Messina. The 'Asolani' (1505); Bembo's dialogue on the nature of love, set within a narrative and containing many lyrics, reflects his imitation of Petrarch, his neo-Platonic love for Maria Savorgnan and a similarly conventional passion for Lucrezia Borgia, to whom the work is dedicated, although most of it had been written before he met her at the Este court (1502-03). The equipoise of gravità (serious decorum) and piacevolezza (pleasing gracefulness) in this work and in his Rime (both circulated long before their publication in 1530) brought Bembo an invitation to the Montefeltro court in Urbino. There he began the Prose della volgar lingua (1525), which gives the fullest formal expression to his linguistic doctrines.

Great personal distinction accounts in part for his influence on the development of Italian literature in his century. Bembo was an ideal courtly poet-savant, if there is any truth in Castiglione's portrait of him in Book IV of The courtier. He became cardinal in 1539. Like his great predecessor himself, Bembo has been a victim of 'Petrarchism'. In contrast with his usual vein, the Stanze written at Urbino in 1507 at carnival time are melodiously instinct with that form of love usually classified as inferior in his dialogues. He loved some women other than 'de more platonico': one of them bore him three children.

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