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From Scribal Publication to Print Publication: Pietro Bembo's Rime, 1529-1535

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SOURCE: Richardson, Brian. “From Scribal Publication to Print Publication: Pietro Bembo's Rime, 1529-1535.” The Modern Language Review 95, no. 3 (July 2000): 684-95.

[In the following essay, Richardson traces how Bembo circulated his poems in manuscript while at the same time he “set about using the resources of the Venetian printing industry in order to consolidate and enhance his reputation as a poet.”]

The Venetian patrician Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) is recognized today as the crucial figure in the Petrarchan lyric poetry of sixteenth-century Italy: not the most gifted poet of the century, but the one who by his example set the standard for the rigorous imitation and emulation of his fourteenth-century model. As he approached his sixtieth year at the end of the 1520s, his poetic reputation was high: high enough, indeed, for verse to have been wrongly ascribed to his pen.1 However, his influence in this field had been established only in part, since until then the only poems he had had printed were those that formed part of the Asolani, and none of these was an example of the prime Petrarchan metric form, the sonnet.2 In contrast, his use of print had already helped to assure his pre-eminence in other areas of his literary activity. Thanks to his Asolani (first printed in 1505), Bembo was recognized as one of the two greatest living Italian writers of prose combined with poetry (Sannazaro was the other), and he was thought to be the leading expert in the history and language of Italian literature, by virtue of his editions of Petrarch and Dante (1501 and 1502) and especially through the printing of his Prose della volgar lingua (first edition, 1525). A factor that must have made him begin to think about adding a collection of lyric verse to his list of printed works was the revival of his interest in writing sonnets after he had left Rome and returned to a more leisurely life in the Veneto in the 1520s.3 On the other hand, it was still the norm that authors did not make such collections public through the medium of print. Although in the first three decades of the sixteenth century epic poets had begun to make use of the opportunities offered by print, as one can see from examples such as the first two editions of Ariosto's Orlando furioso in 1516 and 1521, only a small number of living poets had seen their lyric verse printed, and printings of such verse were not normally sponsored directly by the author. Furthermore, much of the poetry printed was of broad appeal, coming from writers such as Serafino Aquilano or Olimpo da Sassoferrato.4 However, by 1529 Bembo decided to break with the indifference or mistrust lyric poets had conventionally shown towards the press. A selection of Rime was duly printed for him in 1530 and was followed by a second selection in 1535. This pioneering initiative, together with the posthumous publication of printed editions of Sannazaro's Rime later in 1530, gave a decisive impetus to the development of Italian Petrarchism and to the use of print in this genre. The aim of this article is to study this example of the advent of print publication alongside scribal publication, first considering the essential role the latter continued to play in Bembo's circulation of his new verse in the key period from 1529 to 1535, and then examining how he nevertheless also set about using the resources of the Venetian printing industry in order to consolidate and enhance his reputation as a poet.

I begin with a specific example of the diffusion of a new poem by Bembo. In March 1530, writing a letter to his younger friend Vettor Soranzo in Bologna, he added a postscript to say that he was enclosing a second version of a sonnet he had sent to Soranzo earlier, in a draft version that must have been for Soranzo's eyes only. The sonnet in question, beginning ‘Quel dolce suon, per cui chiaro s'intende’ (Rime, CXXIII), was addressed to Veronica Gambara, in reply to one she had addressed to Bembo.5 Bembo now asked Soranzo, in effect, to publish this second version by giving it to three close friends from their circle and also to anyone else Soranzo wished (‘a chi vi parrà’). As a member of the papal court, Soranzo was well placed to make the sonnet public among cultured men and women. Not until six days later did Bembo send the sonnet to Gambara herself with an accompanying letter; this was almost a secondary consideration. News of the exchange of sonnets, but not the sonnets themselves, had reached Bembo's friend Francesco della Torre in Verona by the end of May, and Bembo published the sonnet for at least the third time by sending both it and Gambara's sonnet to della Torre in response to his request to see them. Soranzo, in fact, never received the sonnet directly from Bembo, probably because of warfare in central Italy. But the scribal network had been busy. The poem had reached Soranzo indirectly by 8 June in Rome, when it was well enough known for him to say that in that city it was ‘on everyone's lips’ (‘in bocca d'ognuno’). Only later did Bembo republish the sonnet, this time giving it much wider diffusion, when he included it in the second printed edition of his Rime in 1535.6

A first point to note here is that Bembo made a clear distinction between private diffusion, within a strictly limited inner circle, and making his work available to the public at large. When he sent a first redaction of a sonnet with a letter to one of a small handful of close friends, he usually specified that it was not for publication and could go no further than the recipient and perhaps one other trusted friend, because he would normally want to revise it at least once.7 Private diffusion was also important to poets of this period if the composition had a consolatory function. Thus, when Gambara wrote a sonnet for Bembo following the death of his beloved Morosina in August 1535, she asked Pietro Aretino to deliver it to Bembo and said that Aretino was to copy it later only if Bembo allowed.8 Another case in which diffusion was strictly limited was when a composition was being sent to a more experienced poet with a request for advice or emendation. The authoritative position of Bembo led, as one would expect, to his receiving a number of such approaches.9

After a relatively short period of reflection about a poem of his own, and possibly some minor changes, Bembo would then give the recipient or recipients permission to act as its secondary publishers, giving the poem wider circulation in the same way as patrons were sometimes asked to do. Thus he published “Sonnet CXXIII,” or at least thought he was doing so, first by telling Soranzo that he could release it, and then by sending it to Gambara, to his friend in Verona, and maybe to others as well. Releasing a text to friends in this way, without setting a limit on its circulation, constitutes what Harold Love, in his excellent study of scribal publication in seventeenth-century England,10 calls a ‘weak’ sense of publication. Such publication is distinct, on the one hand, from publication in a more active or ‘strong’ sense. But it is also clearly distinct, on the other hand, from restricted circulation, since, in Love's words, the text has ‘ceased to be a private possession’ (p. 36), and the surrender of control over the future use of the manuscript has taken place ‘in a context where there was some practical likelihood of the text entering public channels of communication’ (p. 40). Bembo signalled such publication by careful use of an instruction such as ‘do what you want with it’, ‘give it to whoever you like’, or of the verb uscire (to go forth); he thus explicitly allowed diffusion yet at the same time preserved decorum by affecting an attitude of indifference towards the process.11

The example of “Sonnet CXXIII” suggests, too, that scribal publication was still effective in the case of lyric poetry, even at a date more than sixty years after the introduction of the printing press to Italy. Bembo knew that his sending forth a sonnet would trigger off a flurry of avid copying and recopying by others, so that the poem would circulate from one network of acquaintances to others. His correspondence in this period provides other such examples of sonnets being sent on to one or more other readers after secondary copying.12 From a modern point of view, this system of diffusion might seem rather slow and limited in scope, unsatisfactory for both author and reader, in comparison with the simultaneous arrival on the market of perhaps a thousand copies of a printed edition, but as can be seen, in the right circles sonnets could circulate rapidly enough in manuscript.

Circulation by handwriting, when carried out by amateurs, also had the advantage of being free of any taint that might derive from association with the printing industry. Printed books inevitably had an association with commerce, whereas even manuscripts written by a professional scribe were not necessarily distinguishable from those copied by amateurs. Publication in print might also expose an author to accusations of vanity. Vincenzo Calmeta, writing in the earliest years of the sixteenth century, observed that poets no longer followed the custom of the ancients, who rarely published their collected works during their lifetime but preferred to send some minor works (‘qualche operetta’) to special persons, keeping the best for further correction, in order to gain some lasting reputation (‘qualche perpetuità’) after their death. Now, he lamented, because of the easy availability of printers, arrogant ambition (‘la boriosa ambizione’) reigned and, as soon as a poet had written a composition, he had it printed in order to achieve a name for himself. A collection of poetry in print, he warned, could also show up the shallowness of the talent of someone such as Antonio Tebaldeo; it was far preferable to hear a single composition by such a poet recited or sung once every week or two.13

As Calmeta's comments might suggest, authors in this period did not necessarily see it as a disadvantage of scribal publication that their poems should normally be distributed piecemeal rather than in collected form. They did not use the term canzoniere often and, even when a collection of poetry was put together, it did not necessarily tell chiefly of love for a single woman, in the manner of Petrarch's Canzoniere.14 Nor was Petrarch's concern with the careful ordering of his collection shared by his sixteenth-century imitators. This may have been partly due to the fact that there was only limited awareness of the principles of Petrarch's ordering. When Bembo edited Petrarch in 1501, he largely respected the poet's final organization of the Canzoniere, but two other editors of Petrarch, Alessandro Vellutello and Sebastiano Fausto, considered there was no definite evidence for it and introduced their own, in 1525 and 1532 respectively.15 As regards Bembo's own poems, he had probably envisaged the publication of a collection in manuscript at an earlier stage but had not pursued the idea. When he was still a member of the court of Urbino, in late 1510 or early 1511, he made a selection of his verse with the aim of presenting it to the Duchess of Urbino, Elisabetta Gonzaga.16 The manuscript providing the evidence for this (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, It. IX. 143 (= 6993)) was written on paper, perhaps by Bembo himself, and was not intended for presentation. Presumably he envisaged the initial publication of the collection through the medium of another manuscript to be copied on vellum and dedicated to the Duchess; there is no evidence that at this stage he was thinking of having the collection printed. Between 1510 and 1513 he continued to correct the collection, but eventually he abandoned this project. As Marco Santagata has remarked, the ‘strong’ Petrarchism of Bembo paradoxically did not demand the creation of a collected ‘libro di rime’, while the ‘weak’ Petrarchism of the previous century had favoured experimentation with it.17 The selection Bembo eventually published in the Rime of 1530 has rightly been described by Marti as ‘una “raccolta”, insomma, a posteriori e senza storia; non certo un “canzoniere”’ (Marti, p. 452). The putting together of this selection does seem to have led Bembo to compose the Petrarchan proemial sonnet ‘Piansi e cantai lo strazio e l'aspra guerra’, which was published only in print rather than in manuscript. On the other hand, it is notable that at the end of the 1530 Rime, the ballata of repentance ‘Signor, quella pietà, che ti constrinse’, composed for the Urbino collection in about 1510 in order to provide an obvious parallel with Petrarch's concluding canzone to the Virgin, was now followed by three recent sonnets on the deaths of friends (Rime, CXLV-CXLVII).18 This supplement recalls, though on a much smaller scale, the third section of Vellutello's edition of Petrarch, in which the editor grouped poems addressed to persons other than Laura.

Another important reason why the scribal publication of single lyric poems continued to flourish, even in the age of print, was that it fulfilled an important social function, both for the author and for the other participants in the operation. Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti has pointed out that collections of verse from the fifteenth century, and especially from the second half of that century, were predominantly made up of texts that were originally diffused singly because they were linked with particular social moments such as falling in love, mourning, the sending of gifts, thanks, congratulations, and, occasionally but rarely, contemporary political events (Tissoni Benvenuti, p. 26). It has also been observed by W. Theodor Elwert that in the sixteenth century, lyric verse was increasingly addressed to or concerned with the poet's friends (both male and female) and protectors.19 Since poems often referred to specific events, they needed to be transmitted rapidly, before they lost some of their freshness and relevance. This transmission on the part of sixteenth-century authors normally took place within the framework of their correspondence: a poem accompanied a letter or was occasionally included as part of the text of a letter. One of the benefits of this direct form of communication was the immediacy and the privileged nature of the initial contact it allowed between the poet and the recipient; thus Bembo could send verse written in ink he claimed to be scarcely dry.20 Yet lyric poems were acts of communication rarely if ever intended only for private reading by one person. Poets also wrote for a peer group made up of known and even unknown people with like tastes, and publication in manuscript allowed them to nourish their relationships with these readers. Bembo sent “Sonnet CXXIII” to Gambara only after its initial publication through Soranzo. Sometimes he sent a poem to its addressee not directly but via an intermediary.21 The system of scribal publication also allowed those, like Soranzo, who were used by the author as secondary publishers to cultivate links with their own networks of friends. Bembo himself benefited by being part of such networks, since in this period his correspondents were able to send him poems written by authors such as Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, Angelo Colocci, and the exiled Spaniard Garcilaso de la Vega.22 Those who belonged to the networks of publication could build up their own personal miscellanies of the poems that came their way, using them as a source of pleasure or perhaps as a source of inspiration for verse of their own, as in the case of a collector who appended to his or her manuscript of Venetian lyrics a handy list of nouns found in the collection with the various adjectives used to qualify them.23

The social function of verse could also be demonstrated in the context of oral publication.24 Calmeta implied that the normal mode of diffusion of courtly poetry was for a performer to sing it to an accompaniment played by himself on a lute. He made several references to the publication of verse by such singer-lutenists, whom he termed ‘citaredi’. Only after their recital was finished might they leave behind written copies of what they had sung, by which he may have meant printed copies (Calmeta, p. 4). Performances by the poet Serafino Aquilano, wrote Calmeta, had the power to move listeners of all kinds: ‘Nel recitare de’ soi poemi era tanto ardente e con tanto giudizio le parole con la musica consertava che l'animo de li ascoltanti, o dotti o mediocri o plebei o donne, equalmente commoveva’ (pp. 75-76). Serafino sang his verse to music which was, it seems, deliberately understated (‘stesa e piana’, literally ‘extended and even’) in order to throw the brilliance of his words into relief (pp. 21-22). Such skill in recitation was, according to Calmeta, probably the most important factor in the success of courtly poets. Many instrumentalists and singers saw that it was performance rather than composition that had brought Serafino fame (‘la forza dil recitare più che dil comporre li aveva dato fama’) and that his manner pleased rulers, learned men, and fair women alike; they thus set about imitating him, learning his tunes and words, so that both he and ‘molti altri citaredi’ contributed to the diffusion of his verse throughout Italy (pp. 64-65).25 In the dialogue described in the Asolani, Bembo does make his characters sing poems to a lute or viol accompaniment, but in real life he seems to have frowned on this method of publication because of its associations with popular poetry and hasty composition. When once he wanted to tell Francesco Maria Machiavelli just how poor he found some stanzas Machiavelli had sent for his opinion, the rebukes he chose were that he found them ‘più tosto da sentir recitare che da leggere’ (‘fit to be heard recited rather than to be read’) and that they must have been written in a few days (Lettere, III, no. 1330, 10 February 1532). These are comments one would expect from a man who believed that no tongue was truly worthy of being called a language unless it was used in writing for literary purposes (‘non si può dire che sia veramente lingua alcuna favella che non ha scrittore’ (Bembo, Prose e rime, p. 110)). That is not to say that in Venetian society oral recitation could not still have some part to play in diffusing high-flown poetry. In a letter of 1532 Bembo referred to his having heard Marcello Palone recite his Latin verse in Venice, and Nicolò Franco asked the Venetian patrician Domenico Venier, in a letter of 1536, for a copy of a sonnet he said he had heard Venier recite.26 But in the case of Bembo's “Sonnet CXXIII,” one should not take too literally that reference by Soranzo to the poem being on everyone's lips.

Bembo's lyric poems, then, normally continued to be first published in this period in the traditional manner, by hand and as compositions that stood on their own. At the same time, following his renewed interest in composing lyric poetry, by the late 1520s he had reached the point at which he could return to the idea of making public a collection of his Rime. On this occasion, however, he chose to publish through the medium of print, and he turned to the Venetian press of Giovanni Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio and brothers. Preparations were well in hand by September 1529.27 The Rime came out in 1530 as one of a group of works Bembo published at the same time: he also arranged for Nicolini to print the revised Asolani, his Latin dialogues, and the Stanze written in 1507. The decision to publish his Rime in this way, and together with these other works, was a particularly bold one. Until then, probably only one Italian poet had taken it upon himself to organize a complete printed collection of his own lyric poems: Gian Giorgio Trissino, another patrician from the Veneto, whose Rime appeared in an elegant edition in Vicenza at some time in 1529 at his own expense, and also as part of a sequence of works by the same author.28 It may be that the example of Trissino played a part in Bembo's decision to send his own Rime to the press in order to establish his own contrasting poetic standards, but Bembo's plans could well have been made, at least in outline, before he learned of or saw the Vicentine edition. Certainly, his own collection was eventually to prove the more influential; as with many other works of Trissino, this one was strikingly original but too idiosyncratic to invite imitation.

Apart from possible rivalry with Trissino, what, one may ask, were the motives that led Bembo to take this unusual step? The main one would naturally have been a desire to give wider diffusion to his verse, following the reawakening of his poetic inspiration, than scribal publication allowed, and hence to gain greater renown. When in 1538 he was trying to persuade a reluctant Vittoria Colonna to allow him to have her poems printed in Venice under his supervision, he argued thus: ‘Né bisogna dire: “io non curo la gloria del mondo”, ché queste son parole. La gloria, che può venirne dalle buone opere, non è da essere sprezzata, anzi, amata e tenuta cara da ogni santissima anima’ (Lettere, IV, no. 1967 (8 November 1538), to Carlo Gualteruzzi). But there would have been other motives, which can be related to the question of authorial control: first, over the selection of the poems, their ordering, and the accuracy of the published text. This would have been a matter of great importance to someone as punctilious as Bembo. In order to have the last word in these matters, he would have had to ensure proper scrutiny of the printing process, since those in the printing-house could hardly be relied on to be accurate, and thus the poet, who now lived in Padua, had operations in Venice overseen on his behalf by his friend and secretary Cola Bruno, with some assistance from Soranzo in matters of content.29 It is known that Bembo was sent a copy of at least the first of the sheets to be printed, and he was probably sent all the others as they appeared, so that if necessary he could note any corrections in a list at the end of the volume (see the description of this edition in the Appendix; in the event, the list on folio E10r contained only three errors). By having the collection published in print, Bembo could establish and diffuse a text that was authoritative and would remain stable, at least until the next edition. In contrast, in the chain of scribal copying there was every possibility that others would misattribute poems, circulate old redactions or poems now rejected, or introduce involuntary or even deliberate changes. Even fairly superficial alterations to the language of his poems, such as the northern Italian patina introduced into the Bolognese manuscript of the Rime, which probably dates from between 1528 and June 1529, would have been deeply unwelcome to Bembo.30 It is worth noting that he did not allow himself to have particularly high expectations of the accuracy of the scribes (‘scrittori’) who, as a letter of 3 January 1536 (III, no. 1739) shows, helped him in this period to copy out his letters and compositions, including poems sent to friends. In a letter of 13 June 1535 (no. 1692), he said he had had to dismiss his previous scribe for bad behaviour, and that his current one had no Latin and made more errors than Bembo would like. In looking for a replacement, he stipulated only that the new scribe should have a good hand and some smattering of learning.

A second advantage of having the Rime printed would have been control over their physical appearance. Bembo had already demonstrated his interest in such matters in 1501-02 when he used the manuscripts he prepared as printer's copy for his Aldine editions of Petrarch and Dante to indicate the mise en page to be followed by the compositors, and in 1525 when he had his Prose della volgar lingua printed by Giovanni Tacuino in a presentation of which the aesthetic form helped to reinforce his intellectual approach.31 In the letter of 1538 to Gualteruzzi mentioned above, he showed outrage at the ‘ingiuria e villania’ done to Vittoria Colonna by the recent unauthorized Parma edition, which had published her Rime not only ‘incorrettissime’ but also ‘di pessima e forma e carta’. Print gave Bembo a guarantee that his own verse would circulate in an elegant and exclusive dress that would be appreciated by his peer group, and at the same time would put the poems out of the reach of other readers for reasons of cost and taste. The Nicolini brothers' edition used a large italic fount, and its quarto format gave pages with ample margins and with a printed area of 152 × 80mm, similar to the written area of the Urbino manuscript, 160 × 100mm.32 The effect is one of great elegance, certainly not inferior to the high standard set by Trissino's Rime of 1529, a volume Bembo would not have wanted to overshadow his own Rime.33 Bembo was no doubt responsible for a very unusual feature of the 1530 edition: the first three pages are blank, so that the title appears only on the verso of the second leaf. This arrangement seems intended to hark back to the earliest years of printing, when the first leaf or the first page might be left blank, but even then it was very rare to delay the start of the text until after the second recto.34 Another old-fashioned feature of the 1530 edition is the absence of foliation, in spite of the fact that the index of first lines refers to leaf numbers.

In order to have his poems published as he wanted, Bembo would have had to come to a contractual arrangement with the printers, agreeing to pay at least some share of their costs in return for a share of the copies printed. He chose not to seek any reward by addressing the work to a dedicatee. But a third aspect of the control print allowed was the prospect of some financial reward for publication. Sales of his copies would have allowed him to recoup at least some of his investment and perhaps even to make a profit. We know from his letters that he had a financial interest in the sale of the Rime, possibly in conjunction with the bookseller-publisher Niccolò Zoppino: a letter of May 1530 shows him arranging for copies of this and other works to be stocked by booksellers in Rome, and in another letter of June he remarked with irritation that the delay in sending copies south had caused him to lose money.35 A statement at the end of the volume claims that Bembo had applied for and had been granted privileges that would protect him for unspecified periods against the sale of rival editions in most of the states of northern and central Italy (see the Appendix). But Bembo did not use his stock of printed copies solely as a source of income for himself; he also derived another kind of advantage by presenting some of them as gifts to friends. He sent copies directly to Iacopo Sadoleto (though he thought they would not be to the bishop's taste), Pietro Pamfilio, and Agostino Lando, and he asked Flaminio Tomarozzo to take at least one copy to be presented as a gift in Naples.36 Printed copies, then, were not just destined to bring an author's works to a wider public but could, like manuscript copies, be used by an author to cement his or her personal relationships with others.

The impact of Bembo's Rime of 1530 on the publication of verse by other poets can be gauged by the imitation of its physical appearance in Bernardo Tasso's Libro primo de gli Amori, printed by the Nicolini press in the following year. The Rime must also have been a success in its author's eyes, since Bembo soon wanted to follow the first edition with a second. He began to make plans for this as early as May 1532, though it did not appear until 1535. New poems were added and some existing ones were revised.37 Although, as has been suggested, Bembo would have appreciated the fixity that print offered within a single edition, the habit of continuous revision was one that scribal publication had allowed and encouraged, and it remained deeply engrained among Italian lyric poets throughout the sixteenth century.38 In preparing the second edition of his Rime, Bembo was as exacting as ever about their visual appearance. He wanted to use the same typeface as in 1530, but it appears that the fount would have had to be recut and recast. In the event, the type used was very similar to that of 1530 but gave a printed area slightly taller and narrower (see the Appendix). It was particularly important to him that the type should be fresh and that the paper should be of good quality, if possible better than that of 1530. He turned again to the services of the Nicolini company, but the identity of the printer does not seem to have mattered greatly to him; the Nicolini were never mentioned by name in his letters, Bembo always negotiated with them through intermediaries, and in 1533 he seems to have been considering using another printer if Nicolini would not or could not replicate the 1530 fount. Bembo controlled the accuracy of the compositors' work by having each sheet of quarto proofread as it was set in type daily, following what appears to have been the standard rhythm for the output of a press in this period. He had to make (or more probably chose to make) a contribution towards printing costs: a letter to his nephew Gian Matteo Bembo asked him to conclude negotiations with the printer and said he would send the necessary payment. He would therefore presumably again have received a number of copies to sell on his own account. He also continued to take advantage of the opportunity to present several gift-copies to friends in Rome and elsewhere.39 The note at the end of the volume asserts that he was protected by privileges in the same states as before, but it is not clear whether these were fresh privileges, and an anonymously printed octavo edition did appear without his consent in 1539.40

Bembo's Rime constituted, then, a decisively influential instance of the printed publication of a collection of Italian lyric verse under the supervision of its author, after several decades in which print had scarcely been used for this purpose. Bembo's innovative use of the press did not mean, in this transitional period, that he stopped using the methods and habits of scribal publication. It was still normal for him, as for others, to make public a newly composed lyric poem in the first instance on its own and in manuscript, a medium perfectly suited to a form of composition that was still conceived as an act of social communication. Even after the poems had appeared in print, Bembo continued to present copies as gifts and to revise his poems with an eye to fresh publication. Using print publication was not an easy matter: the author needed to be wealthy and influential enough to make his own investment in the production and diffusion of an edition, and he needed to be determined enough to become involved in detailed negotiations about the quality of type and paper and the practicalities of the distribution of the resulting books. Nevertheless, in 1529 Bembo decided that if he was to achieve due recognition as a lyric poet, it was also necessary for all his poems that passed muster to be published, under his strict control, in printed form. Although by no means all poets wished to or were able to follow Bembo's example, its influence on younger poets such as Bernardo Tasso and Bernardo Cappello, and also on editors and anthologizers of the poetry of others, meant that the publication of lyric poetry began to move towards a dual system, in which manuscript still played an important complementary role but in which in the longer term print was destined to become increasingly powerful.

APPENDIX

THE 1530 AND 1535 EDITIONS OF BEMBO'S RIME

1530 RIME DI M. PIETRO ❙ BEMBO

common 4°: A-D8 E10

A1r-A2r blank, A2v title page, A3r-E7r 114 poems by Bembo, E7v-E9v index, E9v ‘Per concession del Pontefice, della Signoria di Vinegia, del Duca di Milano, del Duca di Ferrara, & della Rep. Fiorentina si uieta sotto alcune pene a tutti altri il poter quest'opera stampare ne uendere per gli lor dominij.’, E10r ‘Errori, che fatti si sono stampando.’, E10v blank

152 × 80mm; italic 105

Printed in Venice, before 14 March 1530, by Giovanni Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio.

1535 DELLE RIME DI M. PIETRO ❙ BEMBO. ❙ SECONDA IMPRESSIONE.

common 4°: A-F8

A1r blank, A1v title page, A2r-F4r 138 poems by Bembo, F4v-F6v index, F7r-F8r 5 sonnets addressed to Bembo, F8v ‘Per concession del Pontefice, della signoria di Vinegia, del duca di Milano, del duca di Ferrara, et della rep. Fiorentina si uieta sotto alcune pene a tutti glialtri il poter quest'opera stampare ne uendere per gli loro dominij. Stampati in Vinegia per Giovann' Antonio de Nicolini da Sabio. Nell'anno MDXXXV.’

156 × 78mm; italic 108

Notes

  1. See Pietro Bembo, Opere in volgare, ed. by Mario Marti (Florence: Sansoni, 1961), p. 451.

  2. Neither of the two other poems of Bembo's printed before 1530 seems to have been printed at his request. They were the capitolo ‘Amor è, donne care, un vano e fello’, which appeared in a Fioretto de cose nove nobilissime et degne de diversi auctori printed in Venice in 1508 and again in 1510, and the Stanze composed in Urbino in 1507, which were included in the editions of the Asolani produced in Venice by Nicolò Zoppino (1522) and Gregorio de Gregori (1525): see Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani e le Rime, ed. by Carlo Dionisotti-Casalone (Turin: UTET, 1932), p. 300. Bembo had excluded all sonnets from the 1505 version of the Asolani: see Gli Asolani, ed. by Giorgio Dilemmi (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1991), pp. xliv-xlvi.

  3. See Carlo Dionisotti's introduction to his edition of Pietro Bembo, Prose e rime, 2nd edn (Turin: UTET, 1966), pp. 48-49.

  4. The lack of printed editions of the collected verse of living authors in the first few decades of printing is discussed by Walter Ll. Bullock, ‘Some Notes on the Circulation of Lyric Poems in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, in Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York: New York University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 220-41 (especially p. 222), and in the very useful surveys of Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, ‘La tipologia del libro di rime manoscritto e a stampa nel Quattrocento’, and Nadia Cannata Salamone, ‘Per un catalogo di libri di rime 1470-1530: considerazioni sul canzoniere’, both in Il libro di poesia dal copista al tipografo, ed. by Marco Santagata and Amedeo Quondam (Modena: Panini, 1989), respectively pp. 25-33, 83-89.

  5. Bembo, Prose e rime, pp. 607-08; Veronica Gambara, Rime, ed. by Alan Bullock (Florence: Olschki; Perth: Department of Italian, University of Western Australia, 1995), no. 36.

  6. For these events, see Pietro Bembo, Lettere, ed. by Ernesto Travi, 4 vols (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1987-93), III, no. 1065, 26 March 1530, to Soranzo, apparatus criticus, line 32; no. 1072, 1 April 1530, to Gambara; no. 1099, 31 May 1530, to Francesco della Torre. Soranzo's letter of 8 June 1530 is quoted by Carlo Dionisotti in ‘Appunti sul Bembo e su Vittoria Colonna’, in Miscellanea Augusto Campana, 2 vols (Padua: Antenore, 1981), I, 257-86 (pp. 262-63). On Soranzo, see Annotationi nel Dante fatte con M. Trifon Gabriele in Bassano, ed. by Lino Pertile (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1993), pp. lxxxv-lxxxvi. Gambara's relations with Bembo are studied by three scholars in Veronica Gambara e la poesia del suo tempo nell'Italia settentrionale: atti del Convegno (Brescia-Correggio, 17-19 ottobre 1985), ed. by Cesare Bozzetti, Pietro Gibellini, and Ennio Sandal (Florence: Olschki, 1989): Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Elia Capriolo e Veronica Gàmbara’ (pp. 13-21); Giorgio Dilemmi, ‘“Ne videatur strepere anser inter olores”: le relazioni della Gàmbara con il Bembo’ (pp. 23-35); Guglielmo Gorni, ‘Veronica e le altre: emblemi e cifre onomastiche nelle rime del Bembo’ (pp. 37-57).

  7. In this period see, for example, Lettere, III, no. 992 to Soranzo (27 June 1529); no. 1000 to Bernardo Cappello (15 July 1529); no. 1104 to Carlo Gualteruzzi (10 June 1530); no. 1125 to Soranzo (19 July 1530); no. 1299 to Gualteruzzi (6 November 1531): on the identity of the recipient, see Dionisotti, ‘Appunti sul Bembo’, p. 266; nos 1722 (23 October 1535) and 1724 (29 October 1535) to Cosmo Gheri.

  8. Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino, ed. by Teodorico Landoni, 2 vols (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1873-75), I, 326-28, 19 September 1536; Gambara, Rime, no. 51. On 26 October she sent a copy to Aretino at his request (I, 330, n. 1).

  9. Thus in this period Bembo tactfully suggested revisions to Bernardo Tasso (Lettere, III, no. 973, 27 May 1529), Vettor Soranzo (Lettere, no. 1207, 6 March 1531, and no. 1310, 2 December 1531), Veronica Gambara (no. 1683, 11 May 1535), and Bernardo Cappello (no. 1728, 11 November 1535 (see Roberto Fedi, La memoria della poesia: canzonieri, lirici e libri di rime nel Rinascimento (Rome: Salerno, 1990), pp. 70-72).

  10. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 35-46.

  11. Examples can be found in two letters to Soranzo: Lettere, III, no. 904 (26 September 1528), sending revised versions of four of his poems plus a new one, ‘de' quali ne farete il piacer vostro’, and no. 999 (11 July 1529), sending new versions of two sonnets on the death of Navagero so that Soranzo could correct the earlier versions and give these two to Giovan Battista Ramusio, ‘il che fatto, potrete poscia dargli a chi vi piacerà’. For examples of the use of uscire, see Lettere, III, nos 1726 (31 October 1535) and 1771 (10 August 1536).

  12. Thus two sonnets of his were sent to Ramusio via Soranzo, and another was forwarded to Soranzo via Gualteruzzi (Lettere, III, no. 1097, 30 May 1530).

  13. Prose e lettere edite e inedite (con due appendici di altri inediti), ed. by Cecil Grayson (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1959), pp. 3-4, 16; see also page 38 for another comment on the ephermeral fame bestowed by print.

  14. See Guglielmo Gorni, ‘Le forme primarie del testo poetico’, in Letteratura italiana, ed. by Alberto Asor Rosa, Vol. III: Le forme del testo, Part 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 439-518 (pp. 504-18).

  15. See my Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 48-52 (Bembo), 77-78 (Vellutello), 93-94 (Fausto).

  16. See Claudio Vela, ‘Il primo canzoniere del Bembo (ms Marc. It. IX. 143)’, Studi di filologia italiana, 46 (1988), 163-251.

  17. Dal sonetto al canzoniere: ricerche sulla preistoria e la costituzione di un genere, 2nd edn (Padua: Liviana, 1989), p. 15.

  18. For more details on the composition of these poems, see the annotations of Carlo Dionisotti in his edition of Bembo's Prose e rime, pp. 632-34, 649.

  19. La civiltà veneziana del Rinascimento (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), pp. 125-76 (pp. 152-53). Historians of English Renaissance verse have also stressed the close ties between lyric poetry and the social world of its authors: thus Lauro Martines has described such verse as ‘a form of practical action’ (Society and History in English Renaissance Verse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 20), and Arthur F. Marotti has written of the composition of lyric poems as ‘part of social life’ (Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 2). Two very instructive studies of the importance and functions of scribal publication in seventeenth-century England are those by Harold Love (see note 10) and Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

  20. Lettere, II, no. 906 (26 September 1528) to Ventura Pistofilo (‘rime […] nate sì di fresco che a pena è ancor rasciutto il loro inchiostro’) and III, no. 1104 (10 June 1530) to Carlo Gualteruzzi (a sonnet ‘nato questi dì in Villa né ancor ben rasciutto’).

  21. For example, Bembo sent a sonnet addressed to Cardinal Farnese via Gualteruzzi (Lettere, IV, no. 1991, 11 December 1538) and sent sonnets to Vittoria Colonna via Paolo Giovio (Lettere, III, no. 1094, 29 May 1530) or via Gualteruzzi (Lettere, no. 1299, 6 November 1531) because she had used an intermediary when sending a sonnet to him; see also Dionisotti, ‘Apunti sul Bembo’, pp. 261-66. Bembo himself acted as an intermediary when Benedetto Lampridio wished to send a Pindaric ode to Colonna (Lettere, III, no. 1526, 23 October 1533).

  22. In this period Bembo received a sonnet of Colonna via both Giovio and Soranzo (Lettere, III, nos 1077 and 1078, 7 and 9 April 1530), a sonnet of Colocci via Gregorio da Fiume and then via Antonio Tebaldeo (Lettere, III, no. 1281, 10 September 1531), an exchange of sonnets between Colonna and Gambara via Marcello Palone (Lettere, III, no. 1385, 5 July 1532), and an ode of Garcilaso via Girolamo Seripandi (Lettere, III, no. 1707, 10 August 1535).

  23. In Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, MS It. IX. 109 (= 6743), fols 39r-44v.

  24. Such publication would include improvisation, on which see James Haar, Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renaissance, 1350-1600 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 76-99. The spontaneity of this act was probably sometimes only apparent. Castiglione cast doubt on whether a sonnet supposedly recited by the courtly poet Bernardo Accolti (l'Unico Aretino) was really improvised (Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Vittorio Cian (Florence: Sansoni, 1947), I. 9). Marin Sanudo also doubted the authenticity of a public ‘improvisation’ given in Venice on 10 May 1518 by Cristoforo ‘l'Altissimo’; see Vittorio Cian, Un decennio della vita di M. Pietro Bembo (Turin: Loescher, 1885), p. 239.

  25. Serafino also sang Petrarch's verse to a lute accompaniment (Calmeta, p. 60). Two of Calmeta's other references to ‘citaredi’ are more critical: elderly ones are rebuked for singing emotionally about love rather than performing serious compositions (p. 35), and courtiers, by means of ‘alcuni ignoranti citaredi’ or others, ‘vanno mendicando chi le sue rime celebri e in volgo proferisca’ (p. 40). Longer poems were not suitable for sung performance, in Calmeta's view: he warned that an elegy should not exceed twenty-five to thirty tercets, ‘perché, avendo cum la musica conformitade, quando li citaredi vengano a cantarla, a li ascoltanti per la prolissitade non abiano fastidio a generare’ (p. 54).

  26. Bembo, Lettere, III, no. 1385, 5 July 1532 (on Palone); Domenico Venier, Rime di Domenico Veniero senatore viniziano, raccolte ora la prima volta ed illustrate dall'ab. Pierantonio Serassi Accademico Eccitato. S'aggiungono alcune poesie di Maffeo, e Luigi Venieri nipoti dell'autore (Bergamo: Lancellotto, 1751), p. xxix.

  27. On 21 September 1529 (Lettere, III, no. 1015) Bembo was expecting to see the first printed sheet in two days' time. There are some further allusions in the Lettere to the production of the edition: on 25 September 1529 (no. 1017) Bembo told Soranzo not to worry if the apostrophes (‘quelle apostrofi che V. S. chiama vergole’) were not all in place; on 17 December 1529 (no. 1035) he mentioned that Cola Bruno was in Venice ‘a fare imprimere alcune mie cose e volgari e latine’; on 14 March 1530 (no. 1059) he asked Bruno to have a printed copy of the Rime bound for him, presumably so that he could use it as a gift.

  28. Trissino's printer was Bartolomeo Zanetti, operating under the pseudonym of Tolomeo Ianiculo (Giordano Castellani, ‘Da Tolomeo Ianiculo a Bartolomeo Zanetti via Giovangiorgio Trissino’, La Bibliofilia, 94 (1992), 171-85, and ‘Da Bartolomeo Zanetti a Tolomeo Ianiculo via Guillaume Pellicier’, La Bibliofilia, 96 (1994), 1-13). The pioneering nature of editions such as Trissino's and Bembo's was stressed by W. Ll. Bullock (pp. 222-23).

  29. For example, Bembo asked Soranzo to remove a capitolo if he and Trifon Gabriele agreed, which they evidently did (Lettere, III, no. 1016 (23 September 1529)).

  30. On MS 251 of the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, see Claudio Vela, ‘Un manoscritto bolognese di rime di Pietro Bembo’, Studi di filologia italiana, 39 (1981), 121-57. This manuscript contains ninety-one poems, including seven excluded from the 1530 edition. Vela makes the interesting suggestion that the copying of the poems, from a source close to Bembo himself, may have been linked with the gathering of many men of letters in Bologna for the meeting between Charles V and Clement VII in November 1529 (p. 157).

  31. On the Aldines, see Paolo Trovato, ‘Per un censimento dei manoscritti di tipografia in volgare’, in Il libro di poesia, pp. 43-81 (p. 48); on the Prose, see Mirko Tavoni, ‘Scrivere la grammatica: appunti sulle prime grammatiche dell'italiano manoscritte e a stampa’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 3rd series, 23 (1993), 759-96 (pp. 784-90).

  32. We know that, at least as far as one of his other works was concerned, Bembo did not like the idea of his own writings being printed in octavo, a format that in some contexts could be of lower status: see Lettere, III, no. 1591 (18 July 1534), referring to the Asolani. Writing of another work, he considered that an ample margin above and below the text ‘importa assai alla bellezza dell'opera’ (Lettere, no. 1474 (8 March 1533)). Octavo was used in two Venetian editions of the Rime printed in 1540, outside Bembo's control, by Comin da Trino and Giovanni Andrea Valvassore.

  33. Trissino had had his poems printed in octavo in 4s but on royal paper, and with a type page measuring 150 × 88mm; Bembo's quarto gave a leaf similar in height but about 15 to 20mm wider, and his type page was of similar dimensions. At 131mm for twenty lines, Trissino's italic type was rather larger than Bembo's.

  34. The old-fashioned nature of this feature is highlighted by Paolo Trovato, ‘Per la storia delle Rime del Bembo’, Rivista di letteratura italiana, 9 (1991), 465-508 (p. 466). A survey of the output of twelve sample presses from Venice, four from Rome, and three each from Florence, Milan, and Naples as represented in the Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the British Museum, 9 vols (London: British Museum, 1909-49) turned up only three editions with this feature: the undated Terence printed in Venice by Windelin of Speyer (V, 165); Antonius Guainerius, De febribus, printed in Naples by Bertholdus Rihing, 1474 (VI, 860); a translation of Flavius Josephus, De bello Judaico, printed in Florence by Bartolomeo de' Libri, 1493 (VI, 649-50). It seems unlikely that Bembo left blank space with the intention of adding a dedication: the title always preceded the dedication, and the title page would therefore have been followed by one or more blank pages, as in some copies of the Asolani of 1505, where the title appears on fol. a1r but the dedication is missing from fols a1v and a2r. Discussions of this case are summarized in Dilemmi's edition of Gli Asolani, pp. xvi-xviii.

  35. The sale of books is mentioned in Lettere, III, nos 1095 (30 May 1530) and 1110 (18 June 1530). Since Bembo enquired whether Zoppino could send copies to Rome, Trovato suggests that Bembo could have been sharing copies and printing costs with him (‘Per la storia’, p. 466).

  36. Lettere, III, nos 1107 (11 June 1530, to Sadoleto); 1117 (27 June 1530, to Pamfilio); 1224 (23 April 1531, to Lando); 1097 (30 May 1530, to Tomarozzo and Gualteruzzi). On this last letter, see Dionisotti, ‘Appunti sul Bembo’, p. 261. On authors' use of contracts with printers, privileges, and gift copies in this period, see my own Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Chapters 3 and 4.

  37. See Dionisotti in Bembo, Gli Asolani e le Rime, p. 301, and Pasquale Sabbatino, La ‘scienza’ della scrittura: dal progetto del Bembo al manuale (Florence: Olschki, 1988), pp. 103-41 (pp. 107-09).

  38. On the encouragement that scribal publication gave to authorial corrections, to the extent that the activity of revision could be more important than its outcome, see Love, pp. 52-54. On the careful collection of his variants that Bembo made in about 1546, see Trovato, ‘Per la storia’. For the example of Bernardo Cappello, a follower of Bembo who constantly revised his poems both before and after their printing in 1560, see Enrico Albini, ‘La tradizione delle rime di Bernardo Cappello’, in Studi di filologia e letteratura italiana offerti a Carlo Dionisotti (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1973) and Armando Balduino, ‘Petrarchismo veneto e tradizione manoscritta’, in Petrarca, Venezia e il Veneto, ed. by Giorgio Padoan (Florence: Olschki, 1976), pp. 243-70.

  39. On the preparations, see Lettere, III: on 27 May 1532 (no. 1369) Bembo told Veronica Gambara he was about to have his Rime printed again and asked her for a copy of a sonnet of hers he wanted to include with his reply; on 28 January 1533 (no. 1457) he asked Gian Matteo Bembo for one or preferably two copies of the 1530 edition to correct for printing; on 6 February 1533 (no. 1458) he told Gian Matteo he did not like the fount the printer, presumably Nicolini, had proposed and asked him to provide printed samples from other printers unless the first one recast the fount; on 7 February 1533 (no. 1459) he asked Gian Matteo to send a sample of the fount a new printer had proposed, so that he could see if it was the same as the 1530 fount, but he warned his nephew (and did so again on 12 February 1533, no. 1465) to get a sample that had been freshly printed, in case the type had since become worn; on 24 February 1533 (no. 1480) he informed Gian Matteo that the ‘stampa’ he had sent was the right one but the ‘lettera’ seemed rather large, perhaps because it was either new or old (here ‘stampa’ seems to refer to the design of the type and ‘lettera’ to the individual letters, which, as one can see from the Appendix, are slightly larger in the 1535 edition); on 27 February 1533 (no. 1484) he urged Gian Matteo together with Giovambattista Ramusio to conclude ‘il mercato’ with the printer; on 26 November 1534 (no. 1638) he asked Gian Matteo to keep him informed once printing began and to see to proofreading. On the gift copies, see Lettere, III, no. 1674 to Gualteruzzi (9 April 1535), accompanying twelve copies of the volume to be given or sent to others including Vittoria Colonna, and no. 1683 to Veronica Gambara (11 May 1535). The edition is rather less old-fashioned than that of 1530 in that the title page is on fol. A1v and it has arabic foliation from gathering B onwards.

  40. Le edizioni italiane del XVI secolo: censimento nazionale (Rome: Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico, 1985-), B1190.

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Applied Petrarchism: The Loves of Pietro Bembo

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