Applied Petrarchism: The Loves of Pietro Bembo
[In the essay below, Braden analyzes conventions of Petrarchan love poetry that Bembo employs in his letters to Lucrezia Borgia and Maria Savorgnan.]
Older historicist studies of literature usually made their points by applying nonliterary information to literary texts, with results that now often seem reductive and constricting. It has been part of the enterprise of recent criticism to reverse that vector, to seek in literary sources paradigms for describing and organizing nonliterary material; and although theory provides for an exchange in both directions, the new practice can easily repeat in its own mode the mistakes of the old. In particular, recent discussion of Renaissance love poetry has generalized some of the conventions of that poetry into an increasingly popular thesis about gender relations in the period, about the lines of power within which nonfictional men and women, in love and otherwise, had to function; but it is a thesis, I think, that has not digested all of the information that we would want it to explain. Some unusually rich documentation from the personal life of a key figure in the history of that love poetry reveals connections between art and life that are different from what the more familiar literary evidence would make many critics expect.
A man perhaps more responsible than any other individual for giving Renaissance literary culture self-conscious definition and direction—“not only the light, but the sun of our age”1—Pietro Bembo is now best known for a text he did not write. A character with his name takes the floor at the end of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, and his speech has become a touchstone for our accounting of the period. A Christianized (and heterosexualized) recasting of Diotima's speech at the end of Plato's Symposium, it has proved indispensable to Renaissance scholars for displaying in clear and elegant form one of the most influential mergers that the Renaissance performed with its own cultural inheritance: the application of the philosophical resources of a rediscovered Platonism to the affective styles of Petrarchan love poetry. Such philosophy can explain with new conviction the point of the extravagant male longing for an unattainable woman that Petrarch shaped into the central subject of Renaissance love poetry: deprived of the physical solace of his beloved, the lover turns his longings inward, replaces her with an imagined beauty, and finds himself, in a famous metaphor, climbing a ladder into a progressively lofty mental and spiritual reality. Although not an accurate gloss on the troubled course of things in Petrarch's Canzoniere, it is a cogent way of idealizing a situation such as the one Petrarch dramatizes. Speakers on a previous day have already attested the cachet that his love story has acquired in their circles; it sounds at times like a mark of rank: “Every one of us has seen very noble youths, discreet, wise, worthy, and handsome, who devote many years to love, and omit nothing in the way of care, gifts, entreaties, tears, in short, everything imaginable—and all in vain.”2 Bembo's speech shows how to think of such a fix as prompting not humiliation and despair but a sense of honor and noble occasion.
The real Bembo was thirty-seven at the fictional time of the dialogue and almost sixty when it was published in 1528—a famous man by then, though not yet a cardinal of the church. The literary character is not identical to the historical one, but the famous speech had Bembo's tacit sanction; Castiglione asked him to read the manuscript and even the Aldine page proofs, and we do not know of Bembo's having lodged an objection to the philosophy that his namesake sets out. Most of its elements can indeed be found in Bembo's own writings, notably his Asolani, a dialogue on love that he published in 1505 and that became, internationally at least, his best-known work.3 The speaker in the Diotima slot of this dialogue brings things to an ascetic and religiously orthodox conclusion that is in fact closer to Petrarch's own, but there is some justice in letting Bembo's ghostwritten speech stand as one synthesis of what his life's work would come to stand for. One might credibly expect such a speech from a man who wanted to refine all aspects of Petrarch's legacy into a high standard for the culture of a new age.
The nuts and bolts of doing so occupied Bembo for forty years or more. While still a comparatively young man, he helped prepare the 1501 Aldine edition of Petrarch's Italian poetry. It not only offered a better text (and a better typeface) than its predecessors but did so in an innovative pocket-sized format, which let that poetry circulate into a kind of early modern mass market; any Renaissance figure who happened to have a Petrarch handy would very likely be pulling out one of its progeny. For Bembo it was only the beginning of a prolonged immersion in Petrarchiana. By the end of his life he owned the two key Petrarchan manuscripts that became Vat. lat. 3195 and 3196; they joined a copy of the complete Canzoniere and Trionfi in Bembo's own famous handwriting, a manuscript that has become, appropriately enough, Vat. lat. 3197. Knowledge from these resources gradually organized itself into a program for comprehensive literary reform, set out in Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (1524, 1538), the third book of which is virtually a draft grammar of trecento Tuscan. The specific proposal on the table is to resolve the dialectal chaos of sixteenth-century Italy by setting up Petrarch as the sole model for vernacular poetry and Boccaccio as the sole model for prose, though the treatment of the former is notably fuller and more fervent (a lengthy section is devoted to showing Petrarch's superiority to Dante). Between editions of this long-gestated work, Bembo published the first edition of his Rime (1530), concrete examples of the prescribed imitation in action; his deviations from specific Petrarchan usage are unusual enough to rate notice in modern annotation, and the poems offer a corporate counterexample to the unrulier Petrarchism practiced by poets such as Serafino and Tebaldeo. Bembo's poems become, after Petrarch's, the most widely reprinted canzoniere of the century, touchstones of a school that gets called Bembismo but casting in fact a longer shadow. That, for instance, vernacular lyric of the next seventy years is so solidly recentered on the sonnet, after some serious flirting with the strambotto (an eight-line form very popular with musicians) and other possibilities, is in great part Bembo's doing; if the Renaissance as a cultural enterprise comes to seem inconceivable without Petrarchan sonneteering, Bembo is the figure who made the most sustained, varied, and articulate effort to have it that way. He is the agent of one of the most deliberate, visible, and successful acts of literary canonization on record.
Outside Italy, however, Bembo has not been a particularly prominent figure in Renaissance studies.4 The embeddedness of his work in the Italian language is certainly one reason;5 another is modern discomfort with the whole legacy. Prescriptive rule giving is a long-discredited style of literary self-improvement; in the contemporary intellectual environment it is hard for a project such as Bembo's not to raise ominous echoes, to sound like “la grammatica del dominio.”6 The wider phenomenon of Petrarchism, unavoidable in almost any area of Renaissance literary study, has proved a tenacious challenge to our powers of historical sympathy; discussions of individual Petrarchan poets usually analyze and celebrate their combative or at least “controversialized” relation to the tradition: “In Scève's turn from the Petrarch of his contemporaries we glimpse new and emergently modern possibilities of rewriting Petrarchan discourse.”7 An especially influential trend has extrapolated the central premise of that tradition into an imputed hostility to expressions of mutual desire generally and to female erotic utterance in particular, as if the dominance of Petrarchism were itself an important reason that the age had so little to show in the way of poetry by women: “First, Petrarch's figuration of Laura informs a decisive stage in the development of a code of beauty, a code that causes us to view the fetishized body as a norm. … And second, bodies fetishized by a poetic voice logically do not have a voice of their own; the world of making words, of making texts, is not theirs.”8 A certain consensus about the authority of that logic has yielded some tortuous scenarios for female lyric achievement.9
It is not a consensus that sorts well with all the data. There is no lack of other factors to explain the low incidence of female literary activity in the Renaissance generally; against a spare background, the premier site of female lyric poetry in the age is found precisely where Petrarch's presence and prestige are the most intense: the northern Italian literary circles of Bembo's day and of the next generation that fell so strongly under his influence.10 This is where Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, Tullia d'Aragona, Laura Terracina, Chiara Martraini, Gaspara Stampa, Laura Battiferri, and Veronica Franco, among others (no other European country has such a list), wrote and were published, sometimes in numerous editions; one male editor was sufficiently impressed to take the unprecedented step of publishing an anthology of poetry by contemporary women (331 poems by fifty-three different writers).11 Early on Bembo himself favored female entry into the literary world and promised women, if necessary, the Petrarchan reward of posthumous fame for it (Asolani 3.1); as a public man in later life he corresponded with Colonna and Gambara, exchanged poems with them, encouraged their work. To stress the maleness of Petrarchism as a movement is to obscure some of what makes it stand out in its own historical context.
Just outside the public sphere, the dossier on Bembo has even more interesting and complex information to offer on what relations could be like between literary Petrarchism and the world around it. Bembo himself appears to have believed that Petrarch's own poems were accurately autobiographical because of their sheer effectiveness as poems.12 Much of his writing on literary matters breathes a sense that, as Baldacci puts it, imitatio stili should be allied with imitatio uitae.13 Modern scholars of the Renaissance are still, at Burckhardt's inspiration, prone to generalize eagerly from the age's ideals to its behavior, but that path is not always a straight one. In Bembo's case, a substantial part of the biography departs markedly from the canonical Petrarchan scenario: marriage in all but name to a woman called La Morosina, whom Bembo loved, he says, for twenty-two years (Rime 159; the dates would then be 1513-35) and who bore him three children. He was living with her, not secretly, when Castiglione wrote his book. By Italian standards the arrangement was not scandalous, just irregolare, and less so than many: though he took holy orders in 1522, Bembo did not become a priest until he became a cardinal, four years after La Morosina's death. (A surviving letter from her to Bembo was edited in 1902 with an affectionate, even admiring, commentary by the Italian scholar who later became Pius XI.)14 Yet their apparently stable and contented bond was for the most part not the stuff of love poetry, at least not of the specific tradition that Bembo put so much effort into fine-tuning. As it happens, we know that Petrarch traveled a similar road: he fathered two children by a woman or women who have never been securely identified and are alluded to, if at all, only with the utmost obliquity in his poetry.15 Bembo is more forthcoming in writing a few sonnets and one canzone about La Morosina, but only when the occasion intersects established Petrarchan precedent; most of them are poems of grief at her death.16 Bembo declines, and perhaps does not even perceive, the challenge of writing the poetry of their domestic history. It is hard for modern readers not to miss that poetry and to feel that its lack measures the oppressive narrowness of Petrarchan lyricism. What gives every sign of having been the happiest, certainly the most durable, love story of Bembo's life barely registers on its radar.
But records with a more intimate sound to them than the poetry warn against overgeneralizing Petrarchan narrowness. Two collections of letters, Bembo's to two women and theirs to him—his show traces of later revision, but the women's are preserved in their original autographs—provide surprisingly direct information as to what applied Petrarchism could be like. The letters show how in his thirties an effort to saturate his affective life with the literary heritage Bembo so cherished prompted a female response in kind and indeed supplied some of the shared language of their clandestine unions.
One collection has acquired a measure of fame and has even been translated into English as The Prettiest Love Letters in the World (the phrase is Byron's).17 As if in some absurdly prescient bid for future celebrity, Bembo between 1503 and 1505 formed an intense bond with none other than Lucrezia Borgia. Married to Alfonso d'Este in 1501, she was commonly referred to as the duchess of Ferrara even before she officially became so with the death of Alfonso's father in 1504. Her rank would have given her the allure of a troubadour's domna; she was also blond, like Laura, and probably gave Bembo a lock of her hair as a love token.18 Bembo dedicated his Asolani to her, but the correspondence is self-consciously furtive: “Take good care not to be seen writing, because I know you are watched very closely” (Lettere 148 [27]); she asks him to refer to her in code, as the still undeciphered “f.f.” (Borgia 2). Within this secrecy, the language is often extravagant and not indifferent to eventual publicity: “As long as there is life in me my cruel fate will never prevent the fire in which f.f. and my destiny have placed me from being the highest and brightest blaze that in our time ever set a lover's heart alight. It will soar by virtue of the place where it burns, bright with the intensity of its own flame, and one day it will be a beacon to all the world” (Lettere 172 [13]).
A significant part of their business is the sending of poems. Bembo's first letter is a response to a Spanish song that Borgia has sent him; he is sending her “two sonnets born to me these last days,” as well as “a little song [also in Spanish] born this very day as rival [a gara] to your own” (Lettere 151 [1]). We know that Borgia did not compose the poem in question, though it sounds as if Bembo might have assumed she did (or wished her to think that he thought so) and were rising to the prospect of poetry as a ground of emulous mutuality.19 So he sends her several poems. References in the letters proper do not allow us to match them all to surviving texts in Bembo's Rime, though some we can. Bembo's “three sonnets upon the loveliest and most gracious dream I had a night or two ago” (Lettere 156 [4]) are almost certainly the first versions of Rime 88-90, which are among Bembo's most famous and influential poems:
Se 'l viver men che pria m'è duro e vile,
né più d'Amor mi pento esser suggetto,
né son di duol, come io solea, ricetto,
tutto questo è tuo don, sogno gentile.
Madonna più che mai tranquilla, umile,
con tai parole e 'n sì cortese affetto
mi si mostrava, e tanto altro diletto,
ch'asseguir no 'l poria lingua né stile.
“Perché,” dicea, “la tua vita consume?
perché pur del signor nostro ti lagni?
frena i lamenti omai, frena 'l dolore.”
E più cose altre; quando il primo lume
del giorno sparse i miei dolci guadagni,
aperti gli occhi e travïato il core.
(Rime 89)
[If life is less hard and vile to me than before, and I repent less at being Love's subject, and I am not the refuge of pain that I used to be, all this is your gift, gentle dream. My lady, calmer and humbler than ever, came to me with such words and such kind affection, and such further delight, that no tongue or pen could follow. “Why,” she said, “wear away your life? Why complain about our Lord? Rein in these laments now, rein in this sorrow,” and many other things; when the first light of day scattered my sweet gains, my eyes were opened and my heart led astray.]
Bembo's development of his theme here deserves comment. His Petrarchan originals are some entries in the Canzoniere about dreamed and imagined visitations from Laura; yet while Petrarch implies that such visitations have long been a feature of his enamorment (250), most of the poems about them (e.g., 279, 283-6, 302, 336, 341-3, 359) come in morte, and the comfort they offer has a moral cast to it:
“Fedel mio caro, assai di te mi dole;
ma pur per nostro ben dura ti fui,”
dice, et cos' altre d' arrestare il sole.
(341.12-4)
[“My dear faithful one, I am much grieved for you, but still for our good I was cruel to you,” she says, and other things fit to make the sun stand still.]20
In Bembo's case, we know that the woman in question is alive and reading the poems a few days after their composition, while the sexual character of the fantasy is, as in much sixteenth-century Petrarchism, more distinct than in Petrarch: the praeteritio—“e tanto altro diletto,” “e più cose altre”—is provocative precisely because it is discreet. Yet the conclusion toward which the poem moves also reasserts Petrarchan limits; the erotic dream stays a dream, and the pleasure of the lady's kind words “and many other things” remains where it is largely located in Petrarch, within the world of hope and fantasy.
We can only guess whether sending such poems was a risky and outrageous act. If Bembo took a chance, the continuation of the correspondence is evidence that it paid off, though we cannot be sure how far. But some important lines were crossed. A few months after the composition and dispatch of his dream poems Bembo writes with fervor of something his lady finally said to him in all reality: “I would not rather have come by some great treasure than hear what I heard from you yesterday, although—as our sworn affinity [conformità] deserved—you might well have let me know it earlier” (Lettere 172 [13]). That is about as specific as he gets, though a few lines later he seems to be talking about something that went beyond words: “The state of grace to which in your great charity you have raised me, whether extended still or now withheld, is such honor that no other woman could ever again enter my thoughts.” Grazia, mercé, and the like are sometimes code words for sexual favors, and if Borgia bestowed them on her grateful but courtly lover on 4 October 1503, he would not necessarily express himself otherwise.
Yet we know enough to suspect that the real tensions in the air have little to do with Bembo himself. The death of Borgia's father and the nearly fatal illness of her brother Cesare in August had made her personal and political situation dangerous, but she could breathe a bit easier with the election in late September of Pius III, a pope without known hostility to the Borgias. Beneath its hyperbole, Bembo's letter may well record Borgia's return to conversation as normal after a time of distraction.21 Another letter to her presents a gift in a way that speaks both of the sensuality of his feelings and of the limits on their physical intimacy: “Out of love for me sometimes please deign to wear at night the enclosed Agnus Dei which I once used to wear upon my breast, if you cannot wear it in the day, so that your precious heart's dear abode, which I should gladly stake my life to kiss but once and long, may at least be touched by this roundel which for so long has touched the abode of mine” (Lettere 148 [27]). In both manuscript and printed sources, this letter is dated early (10 February 1503) but placed late (1505); internal evidence corroborates its placement, which would make the letter the valediction of the intense main phase of the correspondence (Raboni, 98-9). There is a gap of seven months, and when the letters resume, they are sparser and more restrained: “It afforded me infinite pleasure to receive in these days the public announcement of the happy birth of a male child to your Ladyship” (Lettere 213 [28]). Our best guess is that the affair was like the dream: rich in unacted sexual promise.
However, there is little complaining about unresponsiveness on Borgia's part; rhetoric about the cruel fair is not a significant part of the mix. The language of mutual desire, on the other hand, is often fervent; two weeks after the encounter on 4 October, Bembo writes, “The flame of true love is a mighty force, and most of all when two equally matched wills in two exalted minds contend to see which loves the most, each striving to give yet more vital proof” (Lettere 173 [14]). We are not to forget that it is Petrarch's devotee who is writing: “But sometimes far greater than a love which can be freely manifest is the flame of a love which may not reveal itself however deeply it might desire.” What Bembo is building up to turns out to be the gift of another sonnet, probably the famous “L'alta cagion,” a high-minded manifesto of one-sided devotion: “io mi giro / pur sempre a voi, come eliotropio al sole” [I turn myself toward you always, like a sunflower to the sun] (Rime 38.13-4). Yet we also learn that this poem is one of those occasioned by a poem that Borgia has sent him:
I have striven to render into Tuscan your Criò el ciel y el mundo Dios but can discover no means to convey the same sentiment to my satisfaction in this tongue, least of all in the form of a copla and with similar words. Nevertheless I enclose a sonnet which was begun with the intention of treating the same theme and then took a different turn because it could not hold to the same path and still hold true to my ultimate design.
Borgia's poem has not survived; again, Bembo seems to think of it as her composition, and we are in no position to know. We also cannot judge what divergences of style and statement Bembo is talking about, but one significant thing is clear: this sonnet illustrating the nobler situation of “a love which may not reveal itself however deeply it might desire” is written as part of an exchange that more closely resembles Bembo's first category: “when two equally matched wills in two exalted minds contend to see which loves the most, each striving to give yet more vital proof.” The content of the poetry is, as convention dictates, adoration at a distance; but sent on its errand, the poem itself becomes the medium of reciprocal exchange.
I am of course relying almost wholly on Bembo's account; the language of rivalrousness in particular has a male sound to it and perhaps needs to be discounted. An earlier exchange is more balanced in its documentation. On 19 June 1503 Bembo sends a new sonnet—its text is part of the letter—which he describes as the outgrowth of a conversation with Borgia: “Gazing these past days into my crystal, of which we spoke during the last evening I paid my respects to your Ladyship, I have read therein, glowing at its center, these lines I now send to you inscribed upon this paper” (Lettere 155 [3]). The talk may have taken rise from a text in Petrarch, a manuscript book of whose poems—“uno Petrarcha in forma pichola”—Borgia had made a point of bringing with her to Ferrara22:
Certo, cristallo o vetro
non mostrò mai di fore
nascosto altro colore
che l'alma sconsolata assai non mostri
più chiari i pensier nostri
et la fera dolcezza ch' è nel core
per gli occhi, che di sempre pianger vaghi
cercan dì et notte pur chi glie n'appaghi.
(Canzoniere 37.57-64)
[Certainly crystal or glass never showed forth a color from within more clearly than my disconsolate soul shows forth through my eyes the cares and the savage sweetness that are in my heart, my eyes that, always eager to weep, seek day and night only for her who will still their desire.]
Bembo's sonnet expands a passing reference into a conceit:
Poi ch'ogni ardir mi circoscrisse Amore
quel di ch'io posi nel suo campo il piede,
tanto ch'altrui non pur chieder mercede
ma scoprir sol non oso il mio dolore,
avess'io almeno d'un bel cristallo il core,
che quel ch'io taccio, e Madonna non vede
dell'interno mio mal, senza altra fede
a' suoi begli occhi tralucesse fore,
ch'io crederei della pietate ancora
veder tinta la neve di quel volto,
che 'l mio sì spesso bagna e discolora.
Or che questo non ho, quello m'è tolto,
temo non voglia il mio Signore ch'io mora,
ché la difesa è poca, e 'l strazio è molto.
(Rime 7)23
[Since Love circumscribed all my ardor on that day when I set foot in his camp, so that I dare not disclose my grief, let alone beg for the mercy of another, would that I had at least a heart of fine crystal, so that what I am silent about and what my Lady does not see of my inner suffering would without further proof shine forth to her beautiful eyes; so would I hope yet to see the snow of that face colored with pity, such as so often bathes and discolors my own. Since now I do not have the one, the other is taken from me, I fear lest my Lord wants me to die: there is little defense, and much devastation.]
The crystal of which Bembo and Borgia spoke is a heart clear enough to communicate its feelings without speech. The male lover's propensity for aphasia in his lady's presence is a durable convention of Petrarchism;24 here it is part of a principled restraint on all explicit solicitation and expressions of desire. That restraint has an obvious moral component, but it also enhances a sense of the depth and richness of desire; unspoken emotions, Petrarchan poets often affirm, are stronger than spoken ones (“chi po dir com' egli arde è 'n picciol foco” [He who can say how he burns is in but a little fire (Canzoniere 170.14)]). The restraint also sets up the possibility of a higher, speechless form of erotic telepathy, such as Petrarch himself thinks that he may have experienced on a few blessed occasions:
Conobbi allor sì come in paradiso
vede l'un l'altro; in tal guisa s'aperse
quel pietoso penser ch' altri non scerse,
ma vidil io, ch' altrove non m'affiso.
(Canzoniere 123.5-8)
[I learned then how they see each other in Paradise; so clearly did that merciful thought open itself, which no one else perceived, but I saw it, for I fix myself nowhere else.]
Bembo ends with a concession that he does not possess the magic crystal, and the poem does not leave the more ordinary state of Petrarchan solitude; but of course he sends the poem to Borgia, and five days later he has her reply: “Concerning the desire you have to hear from me regarding the counterpart [lo incontro] of your or our crystal as it may rightly be reputed and termed, I cannot think what else to say or imagine save that it has an extreme affinity [conformità] of which the like perhaps has never been equalled in any age. And may this suffice. And let it be a gospel everlasting” (Borgia 2). The counterpart of Bembo's crystal would be Borgia's crystal, but his crystal is already their crystal, presumably because of the extreme affinity of the two. That looks like a tensely awkward but finally exhilarated way of saying, Your hidden thoughts are my hidden thoughts. The poetry of Petrarchan isolation is not necessarily an act of lonely self-display; it can also be a means of reaching someone else with the same secret.
As interesting as they are, the Bembo-Borgia letters illustrate the potential for Petrarchan mutuality more abstractly and decorously than the other, virtually unknown collection from a little earlier in Bembo's life. Borgia's letters to Bembo are brief and few, nine to his forty, but during his affair with one Maria Savorgnan, from 1500 to mid-1501, both parties wrote copiously: we have seventy-seven letters in each direction. Bembo's side of the correspondence (like his letters to Borgia) has been available since 1552 as part of his Letters giovenili; Savorgnan's (which Bembo was rereading and annotating toward the end of his life) was uncovered early in this century and edited from manuscript by Dionisotti as part of a joint Carteggio d'amore that has, however, never been reprinted or translated.25 The lady's name is attested in the letters themselves (Savorgnan 70, 76);26 Dionisotti failed to identify her more precisely, but it now seems that she was the widow of Giacomo Savorgnan (d. 1498), whose cousin Antonio Savorgnan was a driving force in the famous blood feud that broke out in Friuli in 1511. If that identification is correct, she was more Bembo's social equal than Borgia but has a similar uncanny claim on posthumous renown: she would be the mother of the woman who inspired Luigi da Porto's Giulietta e Romeo, a copy of which the author sent to Bembo when it was published.27
In comparison with the Borgia correspondence, these letters feel altogether “più robuste e succose.”28 Savorgnan's declarations of reciprocal passion are extravagant: “Yours, yours and yours and yoursest [vostrissima] I am and ever will be” (37). But early on she and Bembo seem to have decided on di pari [the same on both sides] as their motto: “il nostro dolcissimo di pari” (Lettere 74 [26]); “We will go di pari into love's flame” (Savorgnan 3). There is more in the way of hyperbolic Petrarchan complaint here than with Borgia—Savorgnan has to read of “my torments born of the glaze of your hard and icy heart. Ohimè misero me!” (Lettere 87 [38])—but also more physical contact: “And then when I see you in reality, then, one hearing the other's words, we both read each other's minds, and many times to your dear cheek I bring my own, and kissing your lovely mouth with bashful ardor I feel unmistakably the sweet warmth of our mingled souls” (Lettere 115 [61]). There is little doubt that the affair was consummated, probably in July 1500 (shortly after that “Ohimè misero me”), though not without difficulties of theatrical colorfulness. Some letters are brief notes arranging or canceling assignations. Savorgnan is closely watched by one Bernardino, usually referred to as “B.” (“I can't write, since B. never goes out” [5]); Dionisotti assumed that he was a husband, but he now appears to have been a nephew to whom Savorgnan's in-laws assigned the task of guarding an attractive widow's virtue. She is virtually a prisoner in her home; the lovers have to risk go-betweens, including Savorgnan's maid (“O Donata, Donata, the only one knowing of all our desires” [Lettere 131 (76)]) and a Jewish medaglista named Moise (one letter may have used some of his scrap paper; there is Yiddish written on the back [Savorgnan 75]). In many cases Bembo must await a sign and then enter Savorgnan's house through a window, apparently with the help of a rope ladder that she keeps in her bedroom (a preplatonic scala d'amore). The discovery of the ladder by B. in August 1500 precipitates a crisis (Savorgnan 34), but, though the lover's existence has been attested, his identity stays secret, and the affair continues. These things, it turns out, did not happen only in novelle.
Bembo is somewhat less of a poet in these letters than he is in those to Borgia. His main work in progress, of which we hear a fair amount, is the Asolani; there are also references to what may be early notes for the Prose (“alcune notazioni della lingua” [certain notations concerning language (Lettere 106 [54])]). He transcribes into his letters two strambotti, an unfinished canzone, and seven lines of a Petrarchan sonnet to which he adds three lines of his own; none of these survive in his canonical Rime.29 He writes of sending his “three sisters” (Lettere 123 [70]; see also Savorgnan 65) and the “Lorenzo madrigal” (Lettere 112 [59]; see also Savorgnan 55); these are probably the three canzoni in Asolani 3.8-10 and the poem that becomes Rime 77. We occasionally have foretastes in prose of poems that will be sent to Borgia: “You will see [my heart] in every way more clearly than if I were a crystal” (Lettere 97 [48]); “This night near dawn I seemed to talk with you in my sleep as I lay on my side; and hearing from you some particularly lovely and sweet saying, I rose with a smile to kiss you for it and to have pleasure with you, when sleep broke, as if to say, ‘I don't want you to kiss her.’ I woke up as I was approaching your lovely mouth, and am full of envy for that pleasure” (Lettere 94 [45]).
Savorgnan, on the other hand, is considerably more of a poet than Borgia. Her letters contain three sonnets, which in fact flank the collection (1, 2, 77); two strambotti (8, 60); and an unfinished poem in octosyllabics (75). Bembo takes it as a sign that her love is fading when “you could go so long without writing me a single verse” (Lettere 123 [70]). Between Savorgnan's first and second sonnets Dionisotti detects “an intelligent and surprisingly rapid assimilation of Bembo's style”; he also notes the propensity of even her prose to slip into hendecasyllabic shapes and thinks that the affair may have begun as a literary tutorial.30 Bembo can sound professorial about her work: “Here is your canzone. Keep it close, since in many places it does not satisfy me” (Lettere 62 [16]). She does not, however, seem to have stayed in any submissive position long; several letters offer the master brisk advice on his own efforts: “The canzone is beautiful, but go back and rework it many times to make it better. When you come to me, I will tell you what I don't like in it, and if you are unhappy about that, blame yourself for giving me such passion” (48). Bembo already possessed a prestige that was part of his attractiveness to her—“I feed and nourish myself on your reputation” (47)—but it does not seem to have interfered with business: “You do not want to change that verse, and say that there is a difference: Petrarch says Con questo pensier and you say Col primo. I feel great unannoyance [disnoglia] toward you because you are Messer Pietro Bembo; nevertheless I hope you like it this way, because it does not please me” (55).31 (There is a contemporary American use of the word fine that I think catches Savorgnan's tone.) We find Bembo soliciting such advice, calling it “the sweet file [lima] of your intelligence” (Lettere 101 [62]). Their poetry workshop gives us our most specific, best-documented look at what di pari meant in practice.
What we have of the poems they write, however, is perhaps less interesting than the ones they quote. These are almost all by Petrarch, who is omnipresent in ways still not fully cataloged. Virtually everything Bembo and Savorgnan go through can be traced to Petrarchan precedent: “There was a time when I confirmed in myself that verse, Vivace amor, che ne gli affanni cresce [vigorous love, which grows with suffering (Triumphus Cupidinis 3.37)]. Now I am at the other end, and I firmly hold that it is true Che ben muor, chi morendo esce di doglia [that he dies well who escapes from sorrow (Canzoniere 207.91)]” (Lettere 88 [39]). But then: “Now I return to my first belief: Vivace Amor, che ne gli affanni cresce” (Lettere 57 [11]).32 Here the quotations are straightforward; often, however, they involve turns of phrase that assume a reader's memory of the original to deliver their full force. Contemplating, for instance, the possibility of a new failure in love, Bembo writes that such failure “non suole perdono meritare, non che pietà” [seldom merits pardon, let alone pity (Lettere 104 [52])].33 Petrarch's penitential first sonnet, which Bembo held in particular esteem, says that he hopes to win from his future audience “pietà, non che perdono [pity, not only pardon (Canzoniere 1.8)]. Bembo's allusion both announces a concern with how posterity will judge his behavior in what are currently matters of the highest secrecy and concedes that he has more to be forgiven than Petrarch has: the greater prize of pietà is written off in the awareness than even perdono may be unattainable.34
Savorgnan also practices this style of altered quoting: “There is no other news, except that I desire that you love me very much, as it pleases you; and if not, fia il danno mio e-lla vergogna vostra [mine will be the loss, and yours the shame]” (8). She is revising the last line of Canzoniere 224: “Vostro, Donna, 'l peccato et mio fia 'l danno” [yours will be the blame, Lady, mine the loss]. The obvious gender sign (Donna) is removed, and peccato, “blame” (even “sin”), is softened into the somewhat more sociable offense of vergogna: a dissolve from guilt culture into shame culture that nevertheless remains within the Petrarchan circuit, indeed assigns Bembo precisely the emotion that Petrarch claims three lines after hoping for “pity, not only pardon.” In due course Bembo will respond in kind: “For if you see that I live unhappy and mournful, I do not know anything to say except vostra, Donna, la colpa, e mio fia 'l danno [yours will be the fault, Lady, and mine the loss]” (Lettere 84 [35]; colpa in this context has the sanction of Canzoniere 207.78). So assembled,35 this dialogue seems to have a competitive edge to it, as if Savorgnan and Bembo were contesting possession of il danno, “the loss,” the Petrarchan lover's privileged state of deprivation; but elsewhere Bembo appeals for an acknowledgment that they are on this point in the same boat: “You accuse me, and I am content that you who are my accuser should at the same time be my judge, as long as you first hear me out: in these sorrows I am losing my natural vigor and feeling, which will peradventure be no less your danno than mine” (Lettere 88 [39]).
A more securely attested exchange shows the cooperative nature of the effort more dramatically, amid a flourish of letters that appears to follow upon their first lovemaking. Savorgnan writes, “I tell you that after you left—may the gods keep me in your grace—I never closed my eyes but your noble manner and your sweet kindness [umanità] guide me di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte [from thought to thought, from mountain to mountain]” (15). She quotes exactly the incipit of one of Petrarch's most famous canzoni—indeed, with eerie precision, the poem of his that is the most expansive about the compensatory power of purely solitary erotic satisfaction:
I' l'ù più volte (or chi fia che mi 'l creda?)
ne l'acqua chiara et sopra l'erba verde
veduto viva, et nel troncon d'un faggio
e 'n bianca nube, sì fatta che Leda
avria ben detto che sua figlia perde
come stella che 'l sol copre col raggio;
et quanto in più selvaggio
loco mi trovo e 'n più deserto lido,
tanto più bella il mio pensier l'adombra.
(Canzoniere 129.40-8)
[I have many times (now who will believe me?) seen her alive in the clear water and on the green grass and in the trunk of a beech tree and in a white cloud, so beautiful that Leda would have said that her daughter faded like a star covered by the sun's ray; and in whatever wildest place and most deserted shore I find myself, so much the more beautiful does my thought shadow her forth.]
To remember the original is to remember a remarkable affirmation—one of Petrarch's most distinctive notes—of the adequacy of the unreal:
sento Amor sì da presso
che del suo proprio error l'alma s'appaga;
in tante parti et sì bella la veggio
che se l'error durasse, altro non cheggio.
(129.36-9)
[I feel Love so close by that my soul is satisfied by its own deception; in so many places and so beautiful I see her, that, if the deception should last, I ask for no more.]
Bembo in response copies Savorgnan's text into his own—“Who in the world has ever seen such precious and sweet letters?” (Lettere 93 [44])—salutes her allusion, matches it with a comparable citation of his own, and then turns something more than just a gallant compliment:
You say that you have not closed your eyes when I have left you but di pensiero in pensiero. And I say that always, since I first came to love you, I have kept a vigil for you in the sweetest thought, so that io son già stanco di pensar, sì come i miei pensieri in voi stanchi non sono [I am already weary of thinking how my thoughts of you are weariless (Canzoniere 74.1-2)]. The noble manner and sweet kindness which are there guiding you are your own, which shine out in me as in a mirror; and you see them and believe they are mine.
That mirror is a motif that hovers, sometimes disturbingly, over the whole history of Petrarchism.36 In one of Petrarch's rare moments of reproach against Laura, he attributes her disinterest in him to her infatuation with her own image in the mirror: “più ne colpo i micidiali specchi / che 'n vagheggiar voi stessa avete stanchi” [Most I blame those homicidal mirrors which you have tired out with your love of yourself (Canzoniere 46.7-8)]. The mirror is his rival, and Laura's virtue is really her pride or, in mythographic language, her Narcissism. The reproach is heard again in the tradition, but it jostles with a trope from Petrarch's own literary past; since the troubadours, gazing into a mirror has been an authoritative metaphor for male enamorment with a noble lady:
Anc non agui de me poder
ni no fui meus de l'or' en sai
que.m laisset en sos olhs vezer
en un miralh que mout me plai.
[I have never had the power of myself, I have not been my own man since that moment when she let me look into her eyes, into a mirror that gives great pleasure, even now.]37
Modern commentary has in effect consolidated this history into a severe diagnosis of what Petrarchism comes to: “Laura's eyes … are ‘homicidal mirrors’ in which her narcissistic lover finds spiritual death.”38 Bembo, in the glow of the occasion, makes a happier rearrangement of the same material. Deconstructing his lady's laureate narcissism, for one thing, is his way of celebrating the extent to which she herself has become a writer in the Petrarchan mode; it also intimates how such talent can be the basis of successfully mutual love: they behold their own best selves in one another. The vision is of a shared Petrarchism, joint fantasies interpenetrating. Later in the century Spenser will use a version of Bembo's trope on the way to a more systematic dramatization of such a possibility:
Leave lady in your glasse of christall clene,
Your goodly selfe for evermore to vew:
and in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane,
most lively lyke behold your semblant trew.
(Amoretti 45.1-4)39
I will be your mirror: this some twenty poems before the courted lady, almost uniquely in the history of sequential sonneteering, says yes. She does so, it would seem, at least in part because her lover has given her an idea of how her consent could mean not the surrender of her specular self-regard but its translation into a finer form, which would also be a joint project.
The sensation of a flash forward in literary history is not unique, or exclusively mine. An unidentified earlier reader of the copy of the Bembo-Savorgnan correspondence that I have used adds an impulsive marginalium a few sentences after the passage I have been discussing: “And who knows if the people who come after us, to whom perhaps the memory of our pure and constant loves will come somehow, will not praise us with a sweet envy [dolce invidia]?”40 “See John Donne,” my precursor writes, without needing to be more specific; Bembo's question anticipates in gentler phrasing the boast at the end of “The Canonization”:
by these hymnes, all shall approve
Us Canoniz'd for Love.
And thus invoke us; You whom reverend love
Made one anothers hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage.
(35-9)41
Donne's boast takes its energy from reversing the opening appeal that everybody leave the lovers alone. By the end, the outsiders have been converted into a literally worshipful future audience who will know that we have now what they will desperately need but can never attain on their own in a world gone sour. The aggression is unmistakably Donne's, but the thought has often attracted attention as one of the few places in his love poetry where he has any use for the Petrarchan theme of immortalization through poetry. Donne makes it clear that this is what he is talking about with a pun routed through Italian—“We'll build in sonnets pretty roomes” (32)—and something about the erotic self-presentation in the first stanzas of the poem makes the speaker sound more comfortably Petrarchan than Donne usually does: “What merchants ships have my sighs drown'd? / Who saies my teares have overflow'd his ground?” (11-2). The literalization of the sighs-and-tears rhetoric is comic and mocking, but the real object of mockery is not the emotional extravagance of the lover but the loveless world of trade and agribusiness to which his extravagance is irrelevant. Donne's dealings with his Petrarchan heritage are intricate, but it is a fairly reliable general rule that his scorn for that heritage rises in direct proportion to its insistence on female sexual refusal as the norm:
I am two fooles, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining Poëtry;
But where's that wiseman, that would not be I,
If she would not deny?
(“The Triple Fool,” 1-5)
“The Canonization” is the prime place in the Songs and Sonets where the idiom of whining poetry speaks for sexually consummated love—consummated in this case by the time the poem begins. What both Bembo's letter and Donne's poem offer in their very different but still parallel ways is a look at Petrarchism negotiating and surviving the shift of the pressure traditionally directed toward an unavailing woman into a sense of sweetly invidious triumph over imagined but suddenly very vivid others—over us, in fact, the future readers of these texts. It is the male speaking in both cases, but an accurate taxonomy should note what his crowing precisely is not: bragging about captured female prey. For both Bembo and Donne, the exhilaration of bringing posterity to heel is inseparable from the conviction that first-person speech has become plural; the new and heady power belongs to “that abler soule, which thence doth flow” (“The Ecstasy,” 43). Or, as Bembo puts it, “di pari Amore tutto può” [Love di pari can do anything (Lettere 54 [8]).
I exaggerate Bembo's confidence; in context that last remark is conditional: “Oh, what happiness would be mine, if I could truly say …” I have also followed Dionisotti's punctuation over Travi's; the latter would have it “Oh, what happiness would be mine, if I could truly say di pari. Love can do anything.” The motto ultimately failed him: “And do you say that your flame burns di pari? O torment and comfort of my life, be content when I say this: You are not on fire” (Lettere 120 [68]). The affair seems to have run its course in a few months, though we have little information as to how or why. Bembo complains about “this separation and divorce of these hearts” (Lettere 132 [77]); Savorgnan sends him a sonnet about the end of desire:
Hor ch'è estinta la fiama e sciolto il nodo
e la prigion aperta di martiri,
riposerete o mei stanchi suspiri,
nè più rinforzerete il focho al chiodo.
(77)
[Now that the flame is put out and the knot is loosed and the prison of the martyrs opened, rest yourself, o my weary sighs, and do not rekindle the fire into torment.]
The future cardinal's future loves are of a progressively different character, either less literary or more abstract; one of our last signals from him on the subject comes three years after La Morosina's death, on the occasion of some new love sonnets: “Fingo, per aver da rimare” [I make things up in order to have something to rhyme about] (Lettere 1996). In the long run it is perhaps not unreasonable to think of the letters to Savorgnan as an early point on an arc whose end lies somewhere in the Neoplatonic neighborhood with which Bembo's name has come to be primarily associated.
Yet that arc is in certain obvious ways the arc of one man's long life; the speech in The Book of the Courtier is explicitly about the kind of love appropriate to old men. The tangent I have drawn through a point on the arc has something less familiar to tell us about the possibilities that Bembo's cultural enterprise brings with it. When the time and blood are right, even a highly conventionalized system like Petrarchism can accommodate, if not foster, mutations to which it might logically be thought allergic. We do not have many chances to inspect Petrarchism playing an actual role in Renaissance private life; here, an unusually well documented look into the very seminary of the emergent orthodoxy shows the productions of solitary male lyricism giving focus, color, and voice to the mutual passion of a man and a woman, and doing so without any overt sign from them that this is something strange or incongruous. Literary criticism can of course be quite resourceful in detecting such signs in their unovert form, but in this case I think that to do so would be to cheat the evidence of an important part of what it has to offer. Discussion of Petrarchism tends to display a familiar modern eagerness to perceive the limits of authoritative styles of discourse and to describe the crossing of those limits in transgressive and even violent terms; it is a predilection that can make us miss things.
Notes
-
Francesco Sansovino (the son of the architect), dedication to Le rime di M. Pietro Bembo, ed. Francesco Sansovino (Venice, 1561), sig. A2v. Here and below, unidentified translations are my own.
-
Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 244 (3.41).
-
The lyric in Don Quixote 2.68 is from Asolani 1.14; Unamuno a bit incautiously celebrated it as that “marvelous verse in which the deepest essence of the quixotic spirit is affirmed!” (see Francisco Rodríguez Marín, “El madrigalete de Don Quijote,” in El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, ed. Francisco Rodríguez Marín, 10 vols. [Madrid: Atlas, 1947-49], 10:115-21).
-
A recent flurry of English-language books does give him something like his appropriate stature: Daniel L. Heiple, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 77-102; William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 82-113; Ignacio Navarrete, Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3-14; Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48-63.
-
Apart from some of the correspondence discussed here (see n. 17) and stray rime and letters in anthologies and critical works, I know of English translations only for the Asolani (Pietro Bembo's “Gli Asolani,” trans. Rudolf B. Gottfried [1954; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1971]) and a key section of the Prose (in The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, ed. and trans. David Thompson and Alan F. Nagel [New York: Harper and Row, 1972], 155-71).
-
Giancarlo Mazzacurati, “Pietro Bembo: La grammatica del dominio,” Lavoro Critico 7-8 (1976): 195-235.
-
William J. Kennedy, “The Unbound Turns of Maurice Scève,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 88.
-
Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 107. For a fuller critique of this position see my “Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38 (1996): 115-39.
-
For example, “Unlike the Petrarchan model, [Gaspara] Stampa is clearly (and ironically) articulating both the way women were often perceived—as less able to create ‘exceptional’ verse—and also the way women can rearticulate such a disempowered status, charting another form of literary concern that refuses the totalizing view of metaphysical lack” (Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992], 170).
-
There is an efficient summary, with further references, in Rinaldina Russell, ed., Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994), xvii-xx; for a full list of publications by women writers in Italy up to the mid-seventeenth century see Marina Zancan, ed., Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 1983), 254-64.
-
Rime diverse d'alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime donne (Lucca, 1559). On the contents of this collection see Marie-Françoise Piéjus, “La Première Anthologie de poèmes féminins: L'Ecriture filtrée et orientée,” in Le Pouvoir et la plume: Incitation, contrôle et répression dans l'Italie du XVIe siècle (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Centre Censier, 1982), 193-213.
-
“If Petrarch has not been able to persuade you that he was truly in love with my lady Laura, with so many beautiful and precious works in the vernacular—and especially with his first sonnet, in which it is unbelievable that he is inventing his shame [fingesse a sua vergogna]—and with so many other works in Latin in which he attests to this, I will certainly not presume that I can persuade you myself” (Bembo, Lettere, ed. Ernesto Travi, 4 vols. [Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1987-93], letter 997). Further references to Bembo's letters are to this edition (but see nn. 17 and 25). For Bembo's other writings I use Prose e rime, 2d ed., ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1966).
-
Luigi Baldacci, Il petrarchismo italiano nel cinquecento, 2d ed. (Padua: Liviana, 1974), 51.
-
Achille Ratti, “Una lettera autografa della Morosina a P. Bembo,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 40 (1902): 335-42. Two more of La Morosina's letters, to another correspondent, have since come to light (Ernesto Travi, “Due nuove lettere delle Morosina,” Studi e Problemi di Critica Testuale 20 [1980]: 177-81). No letters from Bembo to her are known.
-
For the known facts and a plausible, if unverifiable, guess at the story behind them see Frederic Joseph Jones, “Petrarch, Philippe de Vitry, and a Possible Identification of the Mother of Petrarch's Children,” Italianistica 18 (1989): 81-107.
-
Toward the end of Bembo's Rime a series of poems (148-62) laments a woman's death; three (148, 151-2) were written before 1535, either as exercises or about unidentified other women, but the rest clearly concern La Morosina. We know that she was seriously ill in 1526, and Rime 111-2 (with an eye on Petrarch [Canzoniere 31-2]) may be the result. Rime 119 is an anniversary poem that definitely concerns her, though in an unhappy way; Bembo changes Petrarch's “sospir trilustre” [fifteen years of sighing (Canzoniere 145.14)] into “prigion trilustre” [fifteen years of prison] and, while crediting God with having shown him the way out, regrets that he cannot free himself from the burdens of the flesh.
-
The Prettiest Love Letters in the World: Letters between Lucrezia Borgia and Pietro Bembo, 1503 to 1519, ed. and trans. Hugh Shankland (Boston: Godine, 1987). I use this translation for the prose portions of the letters but not for the poems in them. Shankland's introduction provides a reasonably conscientious narrative context for the individual letters. There is now a joint edition of the Italian texts: Pietro Bembo and Lucrezia Borgia, La grande fiamma: Lettere, 1503-1517, ed. Giulia Raboni (Milan: Rosellina Archinto, 1989). I cite Borgia's letters from this edition and for convenience add Raboni's number (in brackets) to the Travi number for citations of Bembo's letters to Borgia. Byron's phrase comes in a letter to Thomas Moore (Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. [London: John Murray, 1973-94], 5:123 [6 November 1816]; see also 5:114-5, 116, 118).
-
See Lettere 160 [6]. Tradition identifies this lock with the one still preserved in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, from which Byron stole a strand.
-
The song is actually from a poem by Lope di Estuñiga (Cancionero general de Hernando del Castillo, 2 vols. [Madrid: Impr. de M. Ginesta, 1882], 1:201). See Pio Rajna, “I versi spagnuoli di mano di Pietro Bembo e di Lucrezia Borgia serbati da un codice ambrosiano,” in Homenaje ofrecido a Menéndez Pidal: Miscelanea de estudios lingüísticos, literarios e históricos, 3 vols. (Madrid: Hernando, 1925), 2:299-321.
-
I take text and translation for Petrarch (with occasional minor changes) from Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The “Rime sparse” and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
-
See Shankland's telling of the story (28-30).
-
The list of her books is preserved in a manuscript in the archives of Modena and is reprinted in Ferdinand Gregorovius, Lucrèce Borgia, trans. Paul Regnaud, 2 vols. (Paris: Sandoz and Fischbacher, 1876), 2:425 (the list is not in the German or English edition of the same work).
-
I give (from Travi) the text that has come down with the letter; the final version in Bembo's Rime differs in a few particulars, amounting to a general effacement of the military metaphor (regno rather than campo in l. 2; medicina and languir rather than difesa and strazio in l. 14).
-
See my “Unspeakable Love: Petrarch to Herbert,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 253-72.
-
Carteggio d'amore, 1500-1501: Maria Savorgnan-Pietro Bembo, ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1950); numerous small changes in the text are given by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, “Intorno a Maria Savorgnan I: Per una riedizione delle lettere,” Quaderni Utinensi 5-6 (1985): 103-18, but the prospective edition has not appeared. I cite Savorgnan's letters from Dionisotti's edition; for Bembo's letters to her I add the number in this collection to Travi's number. Critical commentary is sparse. There is an overconfident but sometimes useful reconstruction of the love story in Gildo Meneghetti, La vita avventurosa di Pietro Bembo: Umanista, poeta, cortigiano (Venice: Tipografia Commerciale, 1961), 20-39. Baldacci calls the correspondence “the first distinguished example of Bembo's Petrarchism” (123) and discusses it in reference to Bembo's own poetic development (123-34). Quaglio advances an interesting thesis about Savorgnan's first sonnet in “Intorno a Maria Savorgnan II: Un ‘sidio’ d'amore,” Quaderni Utinensi 7-8 (1986): 77-118. See also Elena Croce, Periplo italiano: Note sui narratori italiani dei primi secoli (Milan: Mondadori, 1977), 89-93; and Marina Zancan, “L'intellettualità femminile nel primo cinquecento: Maria Savorgnan e Gaspara Stampa,” Annali d'Italianistica 7 (1989): 42-65.
-
According to Quaglio, we owe the first name to Dionisotti's silent expansion of “Ma” (“Intorno a Maria Savorgnan I,” 106).
-
See Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 158-9.
-
Maria Bellonci, Lucrezia Borgia: La sua vita e i suoi tempi (Milan: Mondadori, 1939), 357.
-
Lettere 88 [39], 129 [74], 101 and 102 [62 and 64], 123 [70]; the first three are Rime rifiutate 10-2 in Dionisotti, Prose e rime.
-
Dionisotti, Carteggio, 139, xxii-xxiii (“Perhaps in the beginning poetry was their Gallehault”).
-
I assume that disnoglia is equivalent to disnoia; the formation may be in response to Bembo's own disvolere (“ogni vostro volere, ogni disvolere”) of (probably) a couple of months earlier (Lettere 105 [53]). The poem in question is the “Lorenzo madrigal”; Bembo's reply is conciliatory, asking her permission to send the poem to its intended recipient if the bothersome verse is removed (Lettere 112 [59]), though line 10 of Rime 77 still reads “e col primo penser un altro giostra.” Savorgnan apparently thinks it too close to Petrarch: “Ma con questo pensier un altro giostra” (Canzoniere 68.5). In another exchange (Lettere 123 [70]; Savorgnan 65), her suggested revisions heighten the Petrarchan echoes, though not to the point of virtually quoting an entire line (see Dionisotti, Carteggio, 151).
-
Despite the numbers, the second text is almost certainly the later (see Dionisotti, Carteggio, xxxviii). For a deliberately casual appropriation of this Petrarchan citation as self-evident truth (“Ma perché il vivace amore cresce nelli affanni”) see Lorenzo de' Medici, Comento de' miei sonetti, ed. Tiziano Zanato (Florence: Olschki, 1991), 31.16.
-
Bembo writes specifically of a “third failure” [terzo fallire]. Bembo's numbering of his loves is consistent in several contexts: an otherwise unidentified “M. G.” in the 1490s is first; Savorgnan is second; and Borgia is third. The apparent prophecy of the next love story is part of the evidence that Bembo's letters are revised versions from some later date (see Dionisotti, Carteggio, 165).
-
The Petrarchan text occasions telling revision by other poets. Michelangelo, in a late, unfinished sonnet, hopes in his spiritual distress “aita trovar non che perdono” [to find help, not only pardon] (Rime, ed. Enzo Noè Girardi [Bari: Laterza, 1960], 301.7). On the other hand, Gaspara Stampa, Italy's boldest female Petrarchist, announces in her opening poem that she bids to win “gloria, non che perdon” [glory, not only pardon] (Gaspara Stampa 1.6, in Gaspara Stampa-Veronica Franco: Rime, ed. Abdelkader Salza [Bari: Laterza, 1913]).
-
Bembo's own dating puts his letter first, at 8 July 1500, and Savorgnan's two weeks later, at 20 July, but he is seriously unreliable in such matters; Dionisotti does not feel able to fit either letter into the revised ordering he suggests (Carteggio, xxxviii).
-
For a fuller account see my discussion in “Love and Fame: The Petrarchan Career,” in Pragmatism's Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 128-34.
-
Bernart de Ventadorn, “Can vei la lauzeta mover,” in Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History, ed. and trans. Frederick Goldin (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 146-7. Goldin gives the trope book-length treatment in The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967).
-
John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,” Diacritics 5 (1975): 39.
-
I quote from The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), though I obviously do not share Alexander Dunlop's opinion that “the poet here trivializes the concept of the lover's function as mirror” (627). There is a similar revision of the Petrarchan motif in Scève's Délie 229, which may well have been on Spenser's mind. An idealized female response is imagined by Catherine des Roches at the end of her Charite-Sincero sequence, when the heroine looks into her lover's heart: “Ouvrez donc s'il vous plaist: ha mon Dieu! je me voy!” [Then open it if you please; oh my God! I see myself!] (Madeleine des Roches and Catherine des Roches, Oeuvres, ed. Anne R. Larsen [Geneva: Droz, 1993], 281).
-
The same sentiment, along with the phrase dolce invidia, occurs in Bembo, Lettere 115 [61].
-
I quote from The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967). Donne's dealings with Petrarch have been the subject of two books—Donald L. Guss, John Donne, Petrarchist: Italianate Conceits and Love Theory in the “Songs and Sonets” (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), and Sylvia Ruffo-Fiore, Donne's Petrarchism: A Comparative View (Florence: Grafica Toscana, 1976)—and have been given extensive attention in Theodore Redpath, ed., The “Songs and Sonets” of John Donne, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), 47-88 and passim. My own feel for the topic, however, has been most strongly influenced by Theresa M. DiPasquale's recent work, most of it as yet unpublished (but see “Donne's Catholic Petrarchans: The Babylonian Captivity of Desire,” in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993], 77-92).
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
Introduction: Bembo, Petrarch, and Renaissance Belatedness
From Scribal Publication to Print Publication: Pietro Bembo's Rime, 1529-1535