Bembo's Maneuvers from Virtue to Virtuosity in Gli Asolani
[In the essay below, Delaney argues that while Gli Asolani is ostensibly a philosophical examination of the nature of virtuous love, the work evolves into an experiment in the art of rhetoric, as each speaker presents his or her view of love. This shifting emphasis from a work's content to its formal characteristics, Delaney maintains, significantly anticipates ideas expressed in Bembo's later writings on language, notably Le Prose della volgar lingua.]
… queste sono spezialissime licenze, non meno degli amanti che de' poeti, fingere le cose molte volte troppó da ogni forma di verità lontane.
Gli Asolani
Pietro Bembo's most notable contribution to the literature of his time was the justification of form as a primary component of a work of art. Giorgio Santangelo has written, “Col Bembo si pone prima che con altri critici del Rinascimento, il valore della forma come realtà essenziale del fatto artistico.”1 Bembo did not stress form as a manner of simple ornamentation; rather he invested the “external” features of a text with a power equal, if not superior, to content. While the development of formal technique is elaborated more fully in Bembo's later writings such as Le Prose della volgar lingua of 1525, his preoccupation with stylistic and linguistic prowess can already be seen in one of his first works, Gli Asolani. Published in 1505, this trattato reveals an early stage in Bembo's theory of artistic idealism. Poetic form takes on a transcendental nature in Bembo's writings, where art can be seen as a means to maneuver around problems of ethics. As we see by the moral dilemmas posed in Gli Asolani, Bembo suggests that such problems may be solvable only through an “ascension” to an activity that will allow for the peaceful existence of paradoxes: the realm of pure art.
What ties Gli Asolani to Bembo's essays on writing is the way the author adds to the book's ostensible thematic interest in a philosophy of virtuous love by underpinning it with a secondary “plot” concerning the power of rhetoric and poetic expression. In the treatise, Bembo presents the speeches of three gentlemen of the court of Asolo, whose earthly concepts of love are challenged in the final chapter by the Platonic teachings of a mystical hermit. The figure of the hermit quickly became a cliché for Bembo's philosophy, to such an extent that twenty years after the publication of Gli Asolani, Castiglione had Bembo introduce himself in Il Cortegiano as a disciple of “il romito di Lavinello.” Most modern readers have likewise taken Lavinello's hermit to be the implied spokesman for Bembo's supposedly Platonistic lesson in Gli Asolani. Yet, as we hope to show, the value of this text is not to be found in its guise as a love treatise. Gli Asolani is a Humanistic rather than a Neoplatonic work, for it unites a tolerant and syncretic approach to questions of morality with an inquiry, also common to the Humanist endeavor, into the nature and role of poetry. It is Bembo's discovery of the possibility of an artistic sublimation of the ethical quandaries raised within the pages of Gli Asolani that creates a link between this early essay and the author's later writings.
… nel peregrinaggio di questa nostra vita mortale, ora dalla turba delle passioni soffiato e ora dalle tante e cosí al vero somiglianti apparenze d'openioni fatto incerto, … ho sempre giudicato grazioso ufficio per coloro adoperarsi, i quali, delle cose o ad essi avenute o da altri apparate o per sè medesimi retrovate trattando, agli altri uomini dimostrano come si possa in qualche parte di questo periglioso corso e di questa strada, a smarrire cosí agevole, non errare.2
From the opening pages of Gli Asolani Bembo's didactic purpose seems clear. He offers his dialogue as a guide for overcoming the uncertainties of life, and for determining the nature of “good” and “bad” love:
Ma perciò che tra le molte cagioni, le quali il nostro tranquillo navicar ci turbano e il sentiero del buon vivere ci rendono sospetto e dubbioso, suole con le primiere essere il non saper noi le piú volte, quale amore buono sia e qual reo … ho voluto alcuni ragionamenti reccogliere.
(P. 4)
In order to resolve this ethical problem, the author has gathered three young gentlemen, “tre nostri avedenti e intendenti giovani,” whose discussions on the subject are intended to be of profit to the reader. In the brief introduction to Book I Bembo establishes that the purpose of his work is to go beyond the deceit of appearances (“le tante e cosí al vero somiglianti apparenze d'openioni”) and to arrive at a true knowledge of virtuous love.
In these same first pages, however, there are already indications that such a discovery may not be made possible in Gli Asolani. The narrator, writing after the discussions have occurred, and therefore surely in a position to evaluate their moral correctness, surprisingly does not take the opportunity to assure his readers that by the end of the book one of these discussants will have offered a definitive version of “good” love (notably Lavinello, the bearer of the hermit's Platonic message in Book III). Bembo seems instead to draw no distinction among any of the speakers. He calls each as wise as the others and claims that he had received both profit and enjoyment from hearing all three of their speeches. For all his proclaimed didacticism, Bembo is remarkably noncommittal in his evaluation of the young man, implicitly bestowing as high a value on the lessons in amorous pleasures offered by Gismondo and Perottino as on the more ascetic existence described in Lavinello's discourse.
In many other ways the apparent Platonism of Gli Asolani is rendered problematical by the author. By announcing that the main theme of the book is to be an examination of the nature of love, and by using as his format an intellectual discussion among a small group of cultured gentlemen, Bembo could not have failed to invoke Plato's Symposium in the minds of contemporary readers. The narrator himself underlines the banquet-like nature of his work:
Senza che infinito piacere ci porgono le diverse lezioni, delle quali gli animi d'alquanti uomini, non altramente che faccia di cibo il corpo, si pascono assai sovente, e prendono insieme da esse dilettevissimo nodrimento.
(P. 5)
Gli Asolani is thus presented as an intellectual “feast” of ideas continuing the Socratic form of its parent text. Yet certain aspects of the classical work have been altered by Bembo. The occasion of the feasting at the castle of Asolo, for instance, is not a pagan gathering but a Christian wedding, an earthly celebration of love, and one that is hardly in keeping with the most elevated form of Platonic love soon to be proclaimed by Lavinello's hermit. Furthermore, the narrative design of Gli Asolani, in addition to its dialogic similarities with the Symposium, harks back as well to the Decameron, particularly in the format calling for three men and three women to exchange stories for three days. This literary ancestry injects a medieval spirit into a nominally classical genre. Finally the presence of the women, notably absent from Platonic texts, is also a strikingly modern element. Not only do the ladies attend the discussions conducted among the gentlemen, but it is the female characters, especially the Queen of Asolo and Madonna Berenice, who provide key insights into the questions of ethics and rhetoric raised, as we shall see, in the later part of the text.
Indeed the figure of the Queen is vital to Gli Asolani in that she embodies the eclectic mix of spirituality and epicureanism that Bembo's text conveys despite its outward trappings of idealism and a unified morality. She furnishes the supposedly intellectual setting with its sensual pleasures:
[La Reina] in suoni e canti e balli e solennissimi conviti l'un giorno appresso all'altro ne menava festeggiando.
(P. 6)
She is a lover of poetry, and enjoys all of three of the young maidens' diverse poems on love which precede the main discussions, poems ranging in theme from the sensual to the spiritual, thereby reflecting the narrator's similar unwillingness to give special favor to any one of the speakers. She presides over the wedding and provides the physical pleasures of the feast, and yet also attends the third and most idealistic of the three discussions. The actions of the Queen represent the seeming confusion of religious, earthly and philosophical purposes of the events. These different currents are united by Bembo in one courtly figure who partakes of all without exhibiting any desire or need to choose among them according to a hierarchy of virtues.
It soon becomes evident to the reader that Gli Asolani is far from the single-minded treatise on Platonic love one might at first assume it to be. Each of the characters' attitudes are represented by the author with such an egalitarian tone that the reader discerns no single dominant perspective. Moreover, as seen above, the discussants' quest for a philosophy of love takes place in a problematical setting which merges religious, sensual and intellectual values. At times, in fact, the syncretistic nature of Gli Asolani gives the impression of a work out of control. There is a contradiction between the stated belief in a transcendental truth (“quale amore buone sia e qual reo”), and the author's ability to organize his world, or his text, in order to arrive at that truth. Bembo's didactic purpose is weakened by so much mixing of values and points of view. He opens his book with confident metaphors: “col segno della indiana pietra ritrovare la tramontana” and “incontrare che loro la diritta insegni, sí che essi possano all'bergo senza errore … pervenire.” (P. 3) Yet the path of virtue (“il sentiero del buon vivere”) is obscured by the sheer variety of the activities taking place and the styles of love being proclaimed.
Gli Asolani is remarkable not so much for the philosophy it claims to seek, but for the way in which Bembo's treatise avoids espousing any one ideology at all. Instead the many different viewpoints represented in the book are fused harmoniously by an author who seems to savor their confrontation:
ho voluto alcuni ragionamenti raccogliere, … affine che il giovamento e pro che essi hanno a me renduto, da loro che fatti gli hanno sentendogli, che nel vero non è stato poco, possano eziandio rendere a qualunque altro, cosí ora da me raccolti, piacesse di sentirgli.
(P. 4)
Bembo's ideological open-mindedness becomes more apparent throughout the discussions of Perottino, Gismondo and Lavinello. Although the plan of the book seems designed to carry the reader away from the carnal pleasures expressed by the first two speakers and toward a more ideal definition of love finally stated by Lavinello's hermit, the privileged status of the last speech is denied to a great extent by the strength of the arguments preceding it. Perottino's and Gismondo's analyses would ordinarily have to be proved false in order to give way to Lavinello's more “truthful” portrait of love, but there is no evidence that their arguments are unconvincing. As Rudolf Gottfried has observed, “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 III.”3 Gottfried goes on to show that Lavinello's Platonism is itself insufficient, for his poems on ideal love never fail to envision a lady whose virtues are seen in concrete human terms.4 It should be pointed out as well that in the last section the hermit himself, praising Lavinello and his companions for having undertaken this quest for virtuous love, begins his own discourse with an unexpected disclaimer:
Tuttavolta, se a te giova che io ancora alcuna cosa ne rechi sopra e piú avanti se ne cerchi, facciasi a tuo sodisfaccimento, pure che non istimi che la verità sotto queste ginestre piú che altrove si stia nascosa.
(P. 141)
Later the hermit refers to the multitude of human beliefs, and to the difficulty in distinguishing truth from falsehood, another example of the curious intellectual reserve of this holy man who is supposed to possess the ultimate solution to the problem of love.
When all the speeches are completed, none of the three men and not even the hermit has presented a convincing enough argument to invalidate any of the other philosophies of love. The lack of moral authority culminates in the book's ending: at the close of Lavinello's discourse in Book III the reader finds a firm narrative voice to be strangely absent. The original narrator disappears, as if unwilling to attempt to sort out and draw a moral from the discussions he had presented. Gli Asolani remains in the end a work without the single, unifying ideology it had claimed as its goal.
Bembo's biography perhaps allows us to understand the incongruities of Gli Asolani; that is, the way its idealistic goal is undermined by the author's philosophical liberalism. Carlo Dionisotti points out that although Gli Asolani claims to portray the Neo-Platonic conception of love, there are contemporaneous letters written by Bembo which seem to deny any such spiritual or philosophical preoccupations on his part. As a result, writes Dionisotti, “la conclusione mistica, che è, questa, chiaramente espressa, non risponde in tutto all'animo dello scrittore, … è dubbio che volesse e potesse elevarsi con intensa fede alla contemplazione divina.”5 Dionisotti also calls attention to the separation of the hermit's discourse from the rest of the text, noting that it takes place away from the castle and is not spoken by one of the three young members of the court but by a medieval ascetic. Removing the hermit from the courtly setting, suggests Dionisotti, underscores Bembo's probable lack of interest in abstract theories or the rigours of a demanding spiritualism. Gottfried makes this biographical interpretation of Gli Asolani even more concrete by tracing the writing of the book over the course of ten years and three love affairs in Bembo's life, each of the affairs leaving its stamp on the style and intention of the various parts of the book.6 Finally both Gottfried and Francesco Flamini also point to Bembo's Stanze—composed at about the same time as Gli Asolani but written in a less esoteric, more erotic vein—as further indication of the improbability of any authentic interest in Platonism.7
The accumulation of ideological inconsistencies in Bembo's writings make it difficult to read Gli Asolani as the simple essay of Platonic love it was long held to be. A far better “label” than trattato d'amore would be the broader trattato umanistico: an essay whose apparent lack of philosophical focus is in effect the reflection of the tolerant and inquisitive Humanistic tradition of the times. Plato's influence on Gli Asolani can only be seen as minimal, appearing more as a formal element than a philosophical one. Gli Asolani conveys not an ideology per se but rather a synthesis of the many systems of love found in contemporary writers and thinkers: Platonic and Christian as fused by Ficino; hermetic and inspirational from a thinker like Pico; Petrarchan, courtly and epicurean following the medieval and early Renaissance traditions.
As with many Humanistic texts, Gli Asolani remains more “Socratic” than Platonic, in the sense that it forestalls the preaching tone that it might have fallen into, and adopts instead a format permitting a free and unprejudiced confrontation of several points of view. Bembo's sophistication is especially evident if one compares his work to that of Symphorien Champier, perhaps the earliest French Humanist. In 1503, just two years before the publication of Gli Asolani, Champier also undertook a “translation” of Plato's teachings (via Ficino's commentaries) in Le Livre de vraye amour. In this text, the dispassionate reasoning of the early passages borrowed from Ficino gradually degenerates into moralizing exhortations where all question of free thinking or philosophical quest is denied.8 This sermonizing reveals the lingering medievalism in France compared to the relatively well-developed liberalism of Bembo's Italy, a liberalism which allows Gli Asolani to run the whole gamut of philosophical, Christian and earthly love.
Indeed it is quite plausible, as several critics have suggested, that Bembo intentionally undermined the original Platonic quest with which he began his dialogue. Edouard Meylan has written that, “while validating natural desires on the one hand and exalting a life of contemplation on the other, Bembo revealed precisely his aspirations as a worldly cardinal: on the outside a vague but impressive idealism; on the inside, a discreet epicureanism.”9 In similar fashion, Flamini explained the success of Bembo's work despite its lack of philosophical seriousness: “l'aulica società italiana dilettavasi nel vedervi rispecchiato quel suo contemperamento singolare d'idealità platonica e di sensualità boccaccesca … Ecco perchè fu tanto ammirata, imitata, tradotta e ristampata un opera come gli Asolani che in fondo ha scarso valore filosofico.”10 Benedetto Croce recalls that Sannazaro, older than Bembo but still an admirer of his poetry, “avrebbe desiderato che egli non avesse mai pubblicato gli Asolani, une delle molte teorie dell'amore che si ebbero nel cinquecento e delle piú deboli e pallide. In verità, il Bembo non era filosofo e pensatore.”11
Toward the end of Gli Asolani Bembo seems to reveal his awareness that the book has not succeeded in producing the kind of unified ethic that its early pages had promised. The opening passages to Book III are a far cry from the optimism seen in the introduction to Book I:
Non si può senza maraviglia considerare, quanto sia mal agevole il ritrovare la verità delle cose, che in quistion cadono tutto 'l giorno … Il che diede per aventura occasione ad alcuni antichi filosofi di credere, che di nulla si sapesse il vero e che altro già che semplice openione e stima avere non si potesse di che che sia … senza che si suole egli eziandio non so come alle volte avenire che, o parlando o scrivendo d'alcuna cosa, ci sott'entra nell'animo a poco a poco la credenza di quello medesimo, che noi trattiamo.
(Pp. 119-120)
The last phrase is revealing. It suggests that Bembo, in the very act of writing his book, has come to realize not only the impossibility of its philosophical task but also the reason for his failure: any discourse can be convincing, and, as an almost inevitable result, each type of love presented in the course of the dialogues has been proved justifiable through the speakers' persuasive arguments. The implication is that the author, too, as he was writing the book, came to believe in the variety of opinions he was transcribing and is unable to validate any one of them over the others. Rhetoric, writes Bembo, impedes the search for objective truth.
The analysis quoted above, however, is not the first time the disruptive power and untruthful nature of language has been called forth to become part of Gli Asolani's thematic focus. At the end of Book I, for instance, the author reveals that Perottino's appealing discourse on love had elicited sympathy from the other listeners, an unexpected reaction to the least noble, least Platonic of the three expositions of love. In protest, Gismondo criticizes the inappropriateness of Perottino's eloquence, accusing his companion of creating only the “appearance” of truth: “E certamente, riguardevoli donne, egli ha in uno canale derivate cotante bugie, e quelle cosi bene, col corso d'apparente verità” (p. 59). At the end of his own speech, Gismondo is in turn criticized by Madonna Berenice for his own exaggerations, and he ironically advises Lavinello, whose speech is to follow the next day, that his phrases should aim to bring pleasure rather than convey truth:
[Madonna Berenice] disse: Come che ora il fatto si stia, Gismondo, del tuo avere a bastanza ragionato o no, siam pure molto ben contente che di Lavinello abbia a dovere essere il ragionar di domane; il quale se noi non conoscessimo piú temperato nelle sue parole, che tu oggi nelle tue non sei stato, io per me non so quello che io mi facessi di venirci.—E che ho io detto, Madonna, rispondea Gismondo. Ho io detto altro, che quello che si fa, e ancor meno? Perchè, se io cotanto spiaciuto vi sono, ben ti so confortar, Lavinello, che tu di quello ragioni, che non si fa, se tu le vuoi piacere.
(P. 117)
Madonna Berenice's wish to hear Lavinello's “temperate words” and to put an end to Gismondo's passionate disputation (however grounded in reason it may be, she acknowledges) suggests that language's lack of necessary affiliation with truth can nevertheless have a positive result: to transcend moral disharmony.
Another potent message on aesthetics is inserted in Book III during the hermit's remarks on the union of the Platonic world of love and the “spiritual” world of art:
sí come fai tu, il quale, mentre ancor bene l'arte del verseggiare e del rimare non sapevi, sí l'amavi tu assai, sí come cosa bella e leggiadra che ella è, e insieme la disideravi; ma ora che l'hai e usar la sai, tu piú non la disideri, ma solamente a te giova e etti caro di saperla e amila molto ancor piú, che tu prima che la sapessi e possedessila non facevi.
(P. 142)
Coming as it does just after the passages mentioned above where the conflict between instructive, rational discourse and pleasing rhetoric has been so clearly presented, the hermit's analogy carries special importance. The transcendental goal of Gli Asolani, originally expressed as a quest for understanding Platonic love, is transferred to another arena, that of an “ideal” art. As Dionisotti has observed, “[Il romito] insiste sulla necessaria elevazione oltre il mondo sensibile … Che è insomma il mondo platonico delle idee, effigiato realisticamente, e, per il Bembo scrittore, il mondo che l'arte compone, umano eppure durevole e puro.”12
With this series of comments by the narrator, Madonna Berenice and finally the hermit, the relationship of Gli Asolani to Bembo's later works on language becomes much clearer. Even though (or perhaps even because) its ethical pronouncements prove to be questionable at best, Gli Asolani can still stand as a kind of experiment on the nature and goals of the art of rhetoric. Bembo's characters reveal the risks of speaking and writing on any subject, for their language often portrays immoral practices in a beautiful and quite persuasive light. The solution suggested by Bembo in this and other essays is to surpass—indeed almost to disregard—the very question of content and to concentrate one's attention instead on mastering the domain of formal literary expression.
Bembo's oeuvre verifies the author's preoccupation with linguistic domination of restrictive morality. Readers are often surprised to find that Bembo could write the sensual Stanze and the more intellectual and modest Gli Asolani during the same period of his life. Yet it is precisely this counterpoint of rakishness to asceticism which marks the beginning of Bembo's movement toward a literary “transcendence” of moral values. Dionisotti sees in the simultaneous composition of these two works, “la riprova di quella liberazione dall'amore, inteso come turbamento dell'animo, che impedisce la chiarezza dell'arte.”13 Bembo's theory of artistic sublimation culminates in Le Prose, where, writes Dionisotti, art is shown to exist for its own sake, independent of its subject matter: “la sicura, serena passione del gioco.”14
Dante Della Terza echoes Dionisotti's interpretation of Bembo's creative process, and the shift in his works from moral to stylistic concerns. In a study of the De Imitatione (the exchange of letters between Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola on the subject of writing, which follows Gli Asolani by about a half dozen years), Della Terza writes:
A time-consuming dilemma centered around the contrast deeply felt by the Italian Humanists between Cicero's stylistic excellence and the weakness of his private life. Bembo, ill at ease with debates involving ethical coherence, appears always very skilled in bringing to light those aspects of the literary experience of the models which can become useful tools for the imitator.15
By this time in Bembo's life, writing had become a formal exercise, an act where the artist takes refuge from thematic disturbances by turning to the security and ethical neutrality of language. This theory opened the passage from virtue to virtuosity, from preoccupation with the morality of content to the value of art alone. From the higher vantage point of poetry or other literary genres the writer could give aesthetic unity and meaning to the often insolvable moral dilemmas raised within a written text.
This theory of artistic transcendence is nascent in Gli Asolani and it provides a solution to the problem of ethical disparity raised by the work. Again, as earlier, it is the character of the Queen who seems best to embody the work's underlying message of poetic sublimation. Just as her presence at the early festivities conveys the combined sensual, philosophical and Christian interests of Bembo's text, her reappearance in Book III underscores the second thematic concern of Gli Asolani; that is, the power of literary form. In the middle of Lavinello's discourse, the Queen, having learned of the entertaining discussions being conducted in the garden and deciding to attend, interrupts the young man and asks him to recite some poetry:
la Reina, soavamente alquanto sopra sè recatasi, cosí a lui con sereno aspetto cominciò, e disse: Bene avete fatto, Lavinello, per certo a sovenirci ora di quello, poeti e versi ricordandoci, di che per aventura la vaghezza de' vostri ragionamenti, tacendol voi, ci arebbe tenuta obliosa. Perciò che avendo i vostri compagni, sí come noi abbiamo inteso, tra gli loro ragionamenti di questi dí cotante e cosí belle rime mescolate, che le vostre donne udite hanno, non volete ancor voi ora alcuna delle vostre mescolare e tramettere in questi parlari, che noi eziandio ascoltiamo, poscia che le loro non abbiamo ascoltate?
(P. 131)
The Queen's request for another poetry reading is not surprising, for she had already displayed a fondness for verse purely as amusement when she listened with equal pleasure to the three very dissimilar poems recited by the maidens at the beginning of the feast. More recently the Queen had revealed her interest in aesthetic matters by choosing to attend the garden discussions not on the basis of their subject matter but because of their “pleasing” nature:
pervenne la novella di bocca in bocca agli orecchi della Reina, la quale ciò udendo e sentendo che belle cose si ragionavono tra quella brigata, ma piú avanti di loro non sapendole perciò alcuna ben dire.
(P. 122)
Nel vero, disse, egli si suole essere di diporto e di piacere assai.
(P. 123)
The Queen's presence at Lavinello's speech is therefore not to be read as a validation of his ideas; on the contrary, she delights more in his poems than in his theories:
Detta questa canzone, volea Lavinello a' suoi ragionamenti ritornare, ma la Reina, che del suo dire di tre canzoni nate ad un corpo non s'era dimenticata, essendonele questa piaciuta, volle che egli eziandio alle altre due passasse.
(P. 134)
As she had in Book I, the Queen serves to unify the polemical nature of Gli Asolani's discussions. Her aesthetic appreciation of poetry, coupled with her unquestioned sovereign status, reduces the dialectical nature of the gathering to a moment of peaceful contemplation. As she temporarily interrupts the philosophical talks in order to prolong the sheer pleasure of Lavinello's rime, we clearly see Bembo's confidence in the ability of poetry—or of artistic beauty in general according to the hermit's Platonic vision of art—to transcend moral controversies and to engage in an ideology of pure rhetoric.
To seek the separation of art from worldly events was indeed the focus of Bembo's treatises on writing such as the Prose and the De Imitatione. Della Terza has pointed out a recurring aesthetic of disinterest in Bembo's later poems as well: “his stressing the distance between emotion and writing, decisively pointing toward a transposition of feelings into verbal textures objectively significant.”16 Yet we need not turn only to Bembo's more mature texts in order to observe the writer's concept of literary power, for this theory can already be discerned in Gli Asolani. In fact we might surmise that it was because of writing Gli Asolani, and perhaps experiencing first-hand the effects of its ethical and rhetorical confusion as well as the harmonious and neutralizing effect of its verse, that Bembo realized the need for the concrete treatises to which he soon turned.
Notes
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Giorgio Santangelo, Il Bembo critico e il principio d'imitazione (Firenze: G.C. Sansoni, 1950), p. 100.
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Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani, introd. Carlo Dionisotti (Torino: UTET, 1932), p. 3. Page numbers of all further references to this work appear in the text.
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Rudolf Gottfried, Introd., Gli Asolani (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Pub., 1954), pp. xvi-xvii.
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Gottfried, p. xvii.
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Dionisotti, Introd., Gli Asolani, pp. xi-xii.
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Gottfried, p. x-xii.
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Gottfried, p. xvi; Flamini is cited by Dionisotti, p. xxix.
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See James B. Wadsworth's Introduction and Notes to Symphorien Champier's Livre de vraye amour (The Hague: Mouton, 1962).
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Edouard Meylan, “L'Evolution de la notion d'amour platonique,” Humanisme et Renaissance, V (1938), 432. The translation is my own; the original reads: “au fond, en justifiant d'une part les désirs naturels et exaltant de l'autre la contemplation, Bembo a indiqué exactement ce à quoi tendaient ses aspirations de cardinal mondain: pour la forme, un idéal vague mais impressionnant; pour le fond, un épicurisme discret.”
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Francesco Flamini, Il Cinquecento (Milano: Vallardi, 1902), p. 377.
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Benedetto Croce, Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo rinascimento, vol. 3 (Bari: Laterza e Figli, 1952), pp. 57-58.
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Dionisotti, p. xii.
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Dionisotti, p. xxx.
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Dionisotti, p. xxxiii.
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Dante Della Terza, “Imitatio: Theory and Practice. The Example of Bembo the Poet,” Yearbook of Italian Studies (1971), p. 126.
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Della Terza, p. 128.
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