Introduction to Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani
[In the following excerpt, Gottfried relates Gli Asolani to events in Bembo's life—notably his three love affairs—and minimizes the influence of Platonism on the conception of love propounded in the poem.]
If any readers of Gli Asolani visit Asolo itself, they will find that the topography of the region dramatically reveals one difference between the age of Pietro Bembo and their own. Bembo carefully describes the garden in which his dialogues take place: the steps descending from the palace of the Queen, the formal pattern of arbor, hedge, and wall, the two marble windows opening on the wide Trevisan plain below, the fountain around which his gentlemen and ladies gather in the laurels' shade; and as a pendent scene he later shows the little wooded mountain-top where Lavinello meets a hermit. Today, though the garden and much of the palace have not existed for more than a century, it is still possible to reconstruct that setting while one is standing on the spot; and the imagination may even identify Lavinello's mountaintop with the Colle di San Martino, the highest point on the line of foothills along which the scattered town is built. But these recognitions are not so telling as another, the discovery that Bembo's Asolo faces southward, across the plain to Venice, and that Bembo turns his back on the dominant feature of the landscape, the great wall of the Alps, and in particular on the towering front of Monte Grappa which rises only a few miles to the north. What he omits from the scene is precisely what a modern eye selects as its most striking element.
In a similar way, modern Asolo is dominated by the Grappa of Victorian enthusiasts, Robert Browning; and one must resolutely turn his back on that familiar outline if he would discuss, however briefly, the human setting, writing, publication, and literary significance of Gli Asolani.
Caterina Cornaro, who is the presiding figure on Bembo's stage, became Queen of Cyprus and Lady of Asolo through a series of tragic circumstances. The daughter of an aristocratic Venetian family, in 1472 she was married, for reasons of state, to Giacomo II, King of Cyprus. Within three years both her husband and her infant son had died; nevertheless, in spite of revolution and dynastic conflict, she contrived to govern the island until the beginning of 1489, when the rulers of Venice, again for reasons of state, decided that it would be expedient for her to abdicate her crown if not her title. A few months later, after her return to Italy, she received the lordship of Asolo as a recompense; and there she maintained her court until 1509, a year before her death.1 Bembo, her younger kinsman, visited her at Asolo in 1495 while she was celebrating the marriage of a favorite maid of honor, one Fiammetta; and this may well have been the occasion which supplied the initial inspiration for Gli Asolani.2
Bembo's own career, aside from domestic losses like that of his brother Carlo, seems to have been peculiarly fortunate. Born in 1470, he belonged to a large and powerful Venetian house. Although he was only eight years old when his father became ambassador to Florence, the two years which the boy spent in that city probably contributed to his later zeal for the literary heritage of the great Tuscan writers. As he grew older, he received a thoroughgoing humanistic education, meeting Politian at Venice in 1491, in the next year studying Greek at Messina under Lascaris, and, again at Venice, joining the Filelleni group which gathered around Aldus when he began to publish in 1493. Yet Bembo also participated in the court life of the period, not only at Asolo but at Ferrara, where his father served as Venetian co-ruler in 1497, and at Urbino, where the social and cultural refinements of the age were carried to their apogee during the very years of Bembo's stay (1506-1512). With the accession of Leo X in 1513, the already well-known courtier-humanist became a Papal secretary and formed a liaison with a young woman named Morosina, who eventually bore him three children. Meanwhile, having departed from Rome in 1519, he spent a number of years in scholarly retirement near Padua; there, in his capacity of Historiographer of Venice, he prepared a Latin account of the city's recent history and in 1525 published one of his two most important Italian works, Le Prose della Volgar Lingua, a treatise which argues that the Italian writers of his time should use the Tuscan of Petrarch and Boccaccio rather than the various contemporary dialects. In 1538, three years after Morosina's death, his attainments were at last rewarded by election to the College of Cardinals; and before his own death in 1547 he was also preferred to the Bishopric of Gubbio.3
Bembo had what is surely one of the richest careers of the Italian Renaissance. To have lived in the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Venice of Aldus, and the Rome of Leo X; to have been portrayed in youth by Bellini and in old age by Titian; to have known Raphael, Vittoria Colonna, Politian, Erasmus, and Pietro Aretino; to have been chosen by Castiglione as his mouthpiece when he reached the climax of The Courtier; to have written two of the most famous treatises and the best Petrarchan verse of the sixteenth century; to have experienced first physical and romantic passion, then the responsibilities of parenthood through a liaison which resembled marriage, and finally the spiritual honors belonging to a bishop and a cardinal:—it is not an exaggeration to say that Bembo both had his cake and ate it several times.
Gli Asolani belongs to the early period during which Bembo repeatedly succumbed to physical and romantic passion. Between 1495, the date at which he probably, as we have seen, began to frame his work, and 1505, the year of its first publication, he must have fallen in and out of love with at least three women.4 With the first of these, an unidentified Venetian, known as “M. G.,” who was probably of lower social rank and without Bembo's literary interests, he seems to have been involved in 1497 and 1498.5 The second love affair produced a series of seventy-seven letters which Bembo wrote to another Venetian woman in 1500 and 1501 and which his executors published five years after his death; quite recently her side of the correspondence, preserved and annotated by Bembo himself, has been discovered and published; it reveals that this second inamorata, named Maria Savorgnan, was a married woman of the upper middle class who cultivated the Petrarchan aspects of her relation, equivocal as that relation was, with the young man of letters.6 In the third place, Bembo engaged in his well-known amour with Lucrezia Borgia, already married to Alfonso d'Este and soon to be Duchess of Ferrara; their passion, which ran its course between 1502 and 1505, is shown by their surviving letters to have been warm, though it may not be true, as Will Cuppy notes, that while her husband was away, “Lucrezia would slip on something comfortable and curl up with a good author.”7 Each of these love affairs, it is well to add, has its bearing on Gli Asolani.
In a letter dated from Ferrara on December 11, 1497, after writing that he spends the hours before dawn as well as most of his mornings in work on Gli Asolani, Bembo speaks of the wound from which he suffers, presumably his separation from the first of his three mistresses; and it seems clear that the tragic view of love which Perottino expounds in the opening dialogue of the book embodies Bembo's dissatisfaction with this first affair.8 At any rate, his correspondence with Maria Savorgnan shows that he later assumed the name of Perottino in wooing his second mistress and that she followed the composition of Gli Asolani with keen interest; in a letter dated May 30, 1500, but probably written some months later, he refers to Book Two, and on January 4, 1501, he sends her Lavinello's canzoni from Book Three, although only the first of them is yet amended; on two occasions the desire to read “el vostro libro” together seems to have served as Maria's excuse to her husband for being closeted with her lover; and there is an intimate stylistic similarity between their correspondence and Gli Asolani.9 That work must, in any case, have been substantially completed by December 24, 1502, when Bembo asks to have a friend return the manuscript with suggested changes.10
Meanwhile, however, he had met Lucrezia; and by July, 1503, she appears to have known at least part of Gli Asolani.11 When he left Ferrara at the end of 1503, he promised to send her the whole; but the death of his brother Carlo on December 30 threw all his affairs into confusion, and it was not until August 1, 1504, that the work was dispatched to her with the dedication which was printed in the earliest editions. This is a revealing document. It compares his loss of Carlo to the two blows which Lucrezia has lately suffered, one of them undoubtedly the death of her illustrious father, Pope Alexander VI, on August 18, 1503, and the other perhaps that of her child on September 5, 1502.12 Bembo goes on to mention the recent marriage of her maid of honor Nicola which is parallel to that of Caterina Cornaro's maid of honor in Gli Asolani, just as Angela Borgia (whose flirtations later caused a bloody quarrel among the brothers of the Duke) corresponds to Caterina's ladies and the courtiers Tebaldeo and Strozzi to Perottino, Gismondo, and Lavinello; thus Asolo becomes Ferrara.13 But it is an even greater shock to read, in the final sentences of the dedication, that Lucrezia is a miracle of inner virtue as well as of external beauty, though the novelty of the idea is softened if we may assume that Bembo is alluding to their hidden love when he speaks of the pleasure she enjoys within her mind.14
In the following months, it is evident, Lucrezia urged that Gli Asolani should be published;15 yet it was March, 1505, according to the colophon, before Aldus issued the book in Venice. Its steady, if not immediate popularity is revealed by the fact that it was reprinted at least seven times during the next seventeen years. Then, at some date not earlier than 1525, Bembo undertook a complete revision of the text; and in 1530 this was published by Sabbio in Venice as the so-called “second” edition. The revision included an infinite number of small verbal changes and one important addition, a discourse on the Thomist distinction between love and desire; but its most striking feature is the omission of certain considerable passages, namely, the dedication to Lucrezia, four poems containing a total of 111 lines, and, in prose, a five-page account of a conversation in which Gismondo asked his lady how she would act if he were dead, a description of the ring she gave him, a refutation of the charge that love causes bitter memories, and a long reference to the story of Cimon in Boccaccio (Decameron, V, 1). These changes, which are improvements for the most part, were followed in three reprints issued during Bembo's lifetime; but before he died, he made more than 150 further revisions in this text, revisions which were included in Scotto's Venice edition of 1553 and in at least nine other reprints before the end of the sixteenth century.16
By 1600 there were thus at least twenty-two Italian editions of Gli Asolani. A Spanish version appeared at Salamanca in 1551; and the French translation of Jean Martin which was first published in 1545 was later reprinted at least six times.17 Therefore, even though it does not seem to have been translated into English, we are justified in calling Gli Asolani one of the influential books of the Renaissance and in considering the direction of that influence.
Those who know Bembo's name but not his work are apt to think of him as he is described by his friend Castiglione in The Courtier, a book of deeper insight and more human interest than anything which Bembo ever wrote. Castiglione, writing some years after the event, recounts, or pretends to recount, what was said during four evenings at the court of Urbino in March, 1507; Bembo, who is present throughout the dialogues, takes a leading rôle only at the very end of the last evening when the Duchess assigns him the task of telling the others what kind of love is suitable for the Courtier. In what follows he reveals that he is a master of the art of raillery and too much a man of the world to take himself over-seriously; nevertheless Castiglione has Bembo deliver a highly serious, at times almost mystical exposition of the Platonic doctrine of love as understood by the Renaissance: the divine origin of beauty, the distinction between the worlds of sense and intellect, the various steps by which the sensual love of one lady is finally transformed into the spiritual love of God. And a reference to Lavinello's hermit clearly relates this passage to the second half of Book Three, the corresponding climax of Gli Asolani.
Is Castiglione right in placing this emphasis on Bembo's Platonism? That he was right might be argued from the fact that Bembo read and apparently criticized the manuscript of The Courtier before it was published by Aldus in 1528.18 But in 1528, when he was fifty-eight years old, he may very well have been contented to appear more Platonic than he had really been when he was thirty-seven; and there is evidence to support this deduction. For the Carnival at Urbino in 1507, celebrated at almost the very moment which The Courtier describes, Bembo composed certain “Stanze” which he and Ottaviano Fregoso, disguised as ambassadors from Venus, recited to the Duchess and Emilia Pia before the assembled court.19 The poem is a graceful plea for natural love, the kind of love which, as we are told, made Catullus write of Lesbia and Ovid of Corinna; it contains nothing which is distinctively Platonic; in fact, it expresses the point of view of the hedonist Gismondo rather than of Lavinello.
If we turn to the still younger Bembo who produced Gli Asolani, his Platonism appears to be an even more doubtful quantity than in 1507. The three love affairs which nourished his treatise could hardly, at best, evoke a sincere devotion to heavenly beauty; and it is not surprising to find him writing to the Duchess of Urbino on March 20, 1504, that the thought of heavenly things had never occupied him much and did not occupy him now at all.20 When Gli Asolani was published a year later, it revealed, in spite of appearances to the contrary, that this was true. Both Perottino's eloquent attack and Gismondo's warm eulogy on earthly love carry a tone of conviction which it is hard to catch in Lavinello's Platonic resolution of the problem in Book Three. That book is shorter than the other two; and the first half of it, in which Lavinello denies the validity of his friends' positions and recites three canzoni in honor of his lady, is only distantly Platonic (the lady, for example, remains an individual throughout the poems). The second half, the report on his conversation with the hermit, brings us to the kind of Platonism which Bembo was given to explain in The Courtier, and Castiglione clearly owes a debt to the ideas expressed in these concluding pages of Gli Asolani; but a comparison also reveals that in some things (as, for example, in explaining how love ascends from individual to universal beauty) The Courtier is much closer to Plato than Gli Asolani is. It becomes evident that the Platonic tradition, however distorted and diluted by the Renaissance, had a more genuine representative in Castiglione than in Bembo.
This conclusion is borne out by Bembo's revisions in Gli Asolani of 1530. The considerable omissions previously noted all occur in Books One and Two, the non-Platonic portion of the work; but they seem to have been made chiefly in order to render the three books more nearly equal in length: that is, for a literary rather than a philosophical reason. Thus, the only considerable addition is made in Book Three, the shortest of the books; and the added passage, in which the hermit draws the Thomist distinction between love and desire, is actually a correction of what Lavinello has already said and an intrusion in the Platonic context.
Platonism is, on the whole, a literary rather than a philosophical element in Gli Asolani; it contributes more to the form than to the substance of the treatise. The real content of most of Bembo's pages is derived from experience, from the courtly framework of the Decameron, and from the modified Petrarchan tradition which also appears in his correspondence with Maria Savorgnan, a tradition which subordinated philosophical ideas to the various and often contradictory moods of earthly love. From his study of the Dialogues, on the other hand, Bembo gained not merely the arguments of Lavinello's hermit or an occasional reference like Gismondo's to the myth that every pair of lovers was at first a single creature, but a perception of what might be done with the dialogue as a literary form. He is indebted to Plato, not so much for the arguments of Lavinello's hermit as for the use of that curious figure, on the model of Diotima, to secure an almost supernatural climax; and Plato's influence is even more significantly revealed in Bembo's constant effort to develop ideas through conversation and to give his discussions as much dramatic variety as possible. Gli Asolani is, therefore, the artistic rather than the intellectual fruit of those Platonic studies which the Florentine Academy had made a generation earlier. Not that Bembo plays an unimportant rôle: without his dialogues we might never have had the finer art of Castiglione.
Notes
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See Roberto Cessi, “Caterina Cornaro,” Enciclopedia Italiana (Istituto Giovanni Trecanni, 1929-49).
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D. Carlo G. Bernardi, Guida Storico-Turistico-Sentimentale di Asolo (Milan, 1949), Part I, p. 40.
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See Mario Santoro, Pietro Bembo (Naples, 1937), passim.
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Santoro, pp. 15-24.
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Pietro Bembo, Opere (Venice, 1729), III, 102.
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See Opere, III, 343-75; Maria Savorgnan and Pietro Bembo, Carteggio d'Amore, ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Florence, 1950).
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The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (New York, 1950), p. 104. See Opere, III, 309-17, 375-80, 501-4; IV, 174-5, 345-6.
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Opere, IV, 165; Dionisotti in Carteggio, p. xxiv. Another letter shows that the work was half completed by December 3, 1498; for this and other data on composition see Gli Asolani e le Rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti-Casalone (Turin, 1932), pp. 297-300.
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Carteggio, pp. 133, 65, 124, 6, 26, xxiv. That Gli Asolani was woven on the warp of reality is further indicated by Bembo's references to a boy called “Lavinello” (Opere, III, 98-9) and his attempt to secure a medal representing the real woman who is introduced as Berenice in the book, apparently a certain Berenice Gambara (Carteggio, p. xx; Opere, III, 221, 502).
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Opere, III, 99.
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Maria Bellonci, Lucrezia Borgia, La Sua Vita e i Suoi Tempi (Verona, 1947), pp. 391-4, 427; Opere, III, 502.
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Bellonci, p. 378.
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Bembo was on very friendly terms with Nicola (Opere, III, 501).
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Bellonci, p. 427.
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Opere, III, 312-3.
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For the material in this paragraph see Opere, II, 68 (of Asolani section); Dionisotti-Casalone in Gli Asolani e le Rime, pp. 297-300; and the catalogues of the British Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale, and Library of Congress.
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A French translation was already being made in 1508 (Opere, III, 117).
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See Opere, III, 119.
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Opere, II, 37-40 (of Rime section); III, 201-2.
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Opere, III, 320.
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