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Authorizing Petrarch in Italy

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SOURCE: Kennedy, William J. “Authorizing Petrarch in Italy.” In Authorizing Petrarch, pp. 82-113. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Kennedy discusses Bembo's analysis of Petrarch's poetry in the Prose della volgar lingua and then examines Bembo's application of Petrarchism in his own poetry.]

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH'S LANGUAGE: PIETRO BEMBO'S PROSE DELLA VOLGAR LINGUA

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) could deem himself a citizen of all Italy. As son of the patrician Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo, he spent part of his youth in the embassies of Florence (1475-76, 1481-83), Rome (1487-88), and Bergamo (1489-90).1 As a young adult he studied Greek with Constantine Lascaris at Messina (1492-94). In 1497-99 and 1502-3 he lived at the court of Alfonso d'Este in Ferrara, where he pursued a celebrated love affair with Lucrezia Borgia, and in 1506-12 he lived at the court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro in Urbino, where he participated in the discussions recorded in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. From 1513 to 1519 he served as secretary to the Medici Pope Leo X in Rome, moving afterward to scholarly retirement at Padua. When opportunity promised him advancement in the Church, he took holy orders in 1522, but he relinquished neither his connubial relationship with a young woman, Morosina, who bore him three children at their home in Padua, nor the occasion to serve as official historian of Venice after 1530. He spent the last years of his life as a bishop in Gubbio (1543-44) and as a cardinal in Rome (1544-47). His major literary work includes an Italian dialogue on love, Gli Asolani (1505), dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia; a number of Latin letters and dialogues on humanist themes, notably the De Imitatione (1512), argued in polemic with Giovan Francesco Pico; several volumes of narrative history about Venice (1530 ff); a dialogue on usages of the vernacular, Prose della volgar lingua, dedicated to the Medici Pope Clement VII (published 1525, 1538, 1549); and a collection of Petrarchan Rime printed in 1530 and augmented in 1535 and 1548.

While Bembo's Rime offer a series of overt Petrarchan imitations, sometimes inspired, sometimes moribund, his Prose della volgar lingua presents a vigorous defence of old Tuscan, and specifically the composite Tuscan inscribed in Petrarch's style, as normative for developing the Italian poetic vernacular. That this language is associated with the trecento literary heritage of Florence, and especially that heritage endorsed by Lorenzo de' Medici and his humanist circle, is no accident. Nor is it any accident that Bembo sought to revoke features of contemporary Florentine usage associated with spoken and written forms of the constitutional republic from which the Medici were expelled (1494-1512). Though surely Bembo admitted some current Florentine usage—his own Gli Asolani, composed at Ferrara in 1497-98 and 1502-03, incorporates select popular innovations—his dominant models are the poetry of Petrarch and the prose of Boccaccio, models substantially applied in his revision of Gli Asolani published in 1530.2

Bembo composed most of the Prose in 1511 when Florence was holding to its alliance with France against Julius II's Holy League with Spain and Venice. While the combined strength of the papal and Spanish armies abroad and increasing polarization at home put Soderini's republic at a disadvantage, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici's partnership with the pope and growing support among upperclass families in Florence increased the chances for a Medici restoration. That restoration, along with Giovanni's election as Pope Leo X, would occur in 1512-13. Bembo had no absolute financial need to press the Medici for their patronage, but he did have a great deal of political prestige to gain from promoting their interests. As a close friend of Giuliano de' Medici, whose exile at the court of Urbino coincided with his own residence there, and as an aspirant to high office under Leo X and Clement VII, whom he served in blatant self-interest, Bembo ratified the canon of Florentine literature advanced by the Laurentian humanists of the previous century. If his chief goal was to authorize Petrarch as a Florentine poet, his chief accomplishment was to authorize Petrarch's vernacular as the poetic standard for all Italy. He succeeded beyond all measure.

Bembo's father, Bernardo Bembo, had associated with Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, and other humanists during his ambassadorship at Lorenzo's Signoria, and his learning was justly celebrated by them. It made very little difference that Pietro had spent only part of his adolescence in Florence. Petrarch himself had spent barely ten days there in 1350 and he constructed his Italian poetry in a wholly artificial language that differed greatly from sixteenth-century Florentine usage. Petrarch's texts abound in Latinisms (condutto, fenestra), self-conscious archaisms (belli, dever), poetic reminiscences from Sicilian poets and the Stilnovisti (beltade, disio, fora), intrusive Provençalisms (augello, savere), and distinctive Tuscanisms, themselves no longer current, that had never been accepted in Florence (fera, tesoro).3 Despite its refractory elements, the language of the Rime sparse could nonetheless embody for sixteenth-century Italy the ideals of an earlier age conducive to political harmony. To renew these ideals under the Medici banner, to suggest that the destiny of old Florence bespeaks that of modern Italy, and to encourage widespread acceptance of a Florentine patrimony through a Medicean restoration are charges that Bembo entrusts to himself. His task is to retail Petrarch's language as an inescapable product of Florentine genius.

Pietro Bembo embarked upon this project in 1501 after his brother Carlo offered Aldus Manutius a generous subvention to publish the vernacular texts of Dante and Petrarch at his press in Venice.4 Manutius accepted, eager to recruit an affluent and influential clientele, ever watchful for a good commercial deal, and possessed of an idealism that prompted him to speculate in safe markets such as vernacular poetry for income to finance less popular projects such as the Greek classics. Nor was Aldus above returning favors for help that he needed. In 1495 Pietro Bembo provided him with manuscripts of Lascaris's Greek grammar that he published with great success. Later that year he published Bembo's minor essay De Aetna, perhaps as a token of personal thanks. Four years after his edition of Petrarch, he likewise published Bembo's dialogue Gli Asolani, roundly decried by some contemporaries as unthinkable trash.

Aldus advertised his edition of Petrarch's Cose volgari as a serious and important project. Aimed at a broad readership, it was his inaugural volume in the vernacular. To supervise its editing, he turned to Carlo's brother, Pietro, an avid collector of autograph manuscripts and the inheritor of his father's fourth-century Terence, ninth-century Virgil, and twelfth-century Pindar books. For their copy text, both Manutius and Bembo claimed to use Petrarch's final exemplar, begun by his secretary in 1366 and completed in the poet's own hand the year of his death. Now in the Vatican Library (Vat. Lat. 3195), this manuscript belonged at the time to a Paduan nobleman, although Bembo indeed purchased it in 1544.5 As an editor he perhaps consulted it in 1501, at least cursorily enough to warrant the publisher's boast, but he probably used his father's copy, now also in the Vatican Library (Vat. Lat. 3197), a transcription with some 160 variants from the original. Despite some attempts to regularize Petrarch's orthography, Bembo's Aldine edition offered its contemporaries a more reliable text of the Rime sparse and Trionfi than any available since Petrarch's death, a text largely free from the contaminations of an unruly transmission. Like the Greek and Latin volumes in Aldus's series, it appeared in octavo format as a naked text free from any marginal gloss or accompanying commentary. It was the first vernacular text printed in the Italic type that Aldus had commissioned and used earlier that year for his edition of Virgil.

Aldus printed the volume with an afterword that defends Bembo's selection of the text and his care in presenting it. There Aldus notes that readers might find some lexical choices strange, beginning on the title page (Le cose volgari di messer Francesco Petrarcha … Sonetti et canzoni) with volgari and canzoni rather than vulgari and canzone, and continuing throughout the text with such variants as senonse rather than senon in canzone 22 and bavarico rather than barbarico in canzone 128. Aldus assures his readers that these forms derive not just from Petrarch's handwriting but from a pristine Tuscan archetype that modern usage has corrupted. Aldus refers to the story of Odysseus's homecoming to demonstrate that what seems new and strange can be ancient and authoritative. He compares Petrarch's original text to Ulysses who “vecchio a casa ritornando non fue racconociuto da persona” ‘returning home as an old man, was recognized by no one’ (Biiv). The poet's archaisms encapsulate a journey through history that has scattered and fragmented the language of the past, reducing it to an aesthetic artifice apt to be fetishized for its decorative appeal rather than understood for its signifying potential.

In Aldus's view, Petrarch himself followed the practice of older writers “che nelle loro scritture alcuno antico vocabolo vanno alle volte spargendo tra gli usati; che poi risplendono, quasi vaghe stelle nell'ampio cielo” ‘who in their texts occasionally scatter some ancient diction among current forms, so that they might shine like brilliant stars in the vast heavens' (Biiv). These archaisms force an encounter with history that challenges instead of confirms our understanding of the past and our expectations for the present. If an authentic autograph copy of Virgil should one day turn up, it might differ from the text that we now take for granted, but it would indubitably deepen our knowledge about antiquity:

Ma quando essi a me un Virgilio recheranno inanzi; che di man di Virgilio sia, o pure da quello tolto; quante volte o parola, o sentimento mi verra in esso veduto altrimenti stare, che non ista nel mio; tante m'ingegnero piu tosto d'intenderlo, che di colparo.

(Biiir)

If scholars uncovered for me a copy of Virgil that was written in his own hand or even just copied from it, whenever its words or ideas seemed different from those in our current edition, I would sooner take great care to understand the difference rather than to censure it.

To possess and now to publish an authentic autograph copy of Petrarch is doubly rewarding because it deepens our understanding not only of a proximate cultural heritage but also of our role as its inheritors.

Published nearly a quarter of a century after the Aldine Petrarch, Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua offers a painstaking commentary upon this argument. It dramatizes a humanist's anxieties about linguistic fragmentation and about the possibility of reconstituting a lost language; it records the anguish of an entire generation about Italy's political fragmentation and the possibility of renewing or inventing a shared culture; and it advocates a paradoxical program that endorses literary dismemberment as a way to recuperate an authentic understanding of cultural discourse. In a society beset by factional strife and political dissention, Bembo's interlocutors divide their master texts in order to open up their powers and scatter them abroad. Circulating them among various constituents, they would heal the wounds of every prior disruption.

Civic and academic humanists of an earlier generation understood the Latin language and its literary culture as a common tongue for troubled Europe, a single system of signs able to consolidate rulers and nations, philosophers, theologians, and politicians. The spurious nature of this harmony became evident with the French and Spanish invasions of Italy at the turn of the century. The invasions prompted a turn inward, and cultivating the vernacular became a measure of patriotic defence. At the very least a unified vernacular might facilitate political unity.6 At the end of The Prince (1513) Machiavelli urges a restored Medici party, strengthened by the papacy of Leo X, to confederate Italy and, in a catachresis that fuses the theology of redemption with the economics of power, to redeem it from servitude to the rising nation states of Europe: “Nor has [Italy] at present any hope of finding this redemption [questa redenzione] save only in your illustrious house, which has been so highly exalted both by fortune and by its own merits [fortuna e virtù] and which has been favored by God and the Church, of which it is now ruler” (Bergin trans., p. 76). No less a pragmatic humanist than Machiavelli, Bembo urges the fashioning of a Florentine culture by consensus as a vehicle for Italy's redemption. Supported and encouraged by his Medici patrons, he would try to squeeze out of a two-hundred-year-old Siculo-Tuscan literary idiom the seeds of a factitious cultural and linguistic heritage. Recourse to the “pure” language of a shared past, a wholly artificial language but, for that reason, one untouched by history and the contaminating influences of regional rivalry, coalitional dispute, or foreign invasion, is Bembo's political remedy.

Chaos surrounds the dialogue. Its fictional date is 10-12 December 1502, the year following the publication of the Aldine Petrarch. Evidence suggests that Bembo may have drafted some parts of his argument at this time, but that he composed most of it toward the end of his residence at Urbino.7 In April 1512 Bembo circulated among his Venetian friends two of its eventual three books. Its plan called for an entire book on the principles of Tuscan grammar and syntax, but Giovanni Francesco Fortunio preempted this need in 1516 by publishing the first major handbook of Italian grammar, Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua. Afterwards Bembo took great pains to affect the Prose's composition at an earlier date. Its fictional setting temporalizes the year of Piero Soderini's greatest anti-Medicean political success in Florence, when he was elected gonfaloniere for life (May 1502). It temporalizes, too, the last frenzied months of Pope Alexander VI's pontificate (1492-1503), eight years after the first French invasion of the peninsula (1494), three years after the French appropriation of Milan (1499), and one year after the French seizure of Naples (1501). Ahead were the Spanish takeover of Naples (1503), the belligerent maneuvers of Cesare Borgia (1503) and of Pope Julius II (1503-13) in Romagna and the north, the action of the Holy Leagues of 1511 and 1521 against France, the election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in Germany (1519), and the steady advance of the Ottoman Emperor Suleiman II through the Balkans (1520). The completed Prose, dedicated to Pope Clement VII in November 1524 and published at Venice in September 1525, reverberates with echoes of these public events.

Like Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, also composed in these troubled times (1507-16, 1521-24), and whose publication Bembo would supervise with editorial adjustments in 1528, the Prose reflects its author's personal losses.8 By the time it appeared in print, three of its four interlocutors had died. Foremost is Carlo Bembo, the author's brother, himself a talented scholar and the Prose's major spokesperson for Pietro's ideas. Carlo died in December, 1503, little more than a year after the fictive date of the dialogue. Another is Ercole Strozzi (1473-1508), the noted Ferrarese humanist and statesman, author in Latin of several long poems and two books of elegies and epigrams, brutally murdered in a street fight little more than five years after the fictive date of the dialogue. A third is Giuliano de' Medici (1478-1516), the author's friend at Urbino who took refuge there during his family's exile from Florence (1494-1512). As a surviving heir of Lorenzo de' Medici (his elder brother Piero had died a few months earlier) and the brother of Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, Giuliano became head of affairs in his native city after the latter's election as Pope Leo X in March 1513, but failing health and a disinclination toward politics weakened his rule appreciably before his death in 1516. The fourth interlocutor is Federigo Fregoso (1480-1541), the only participant in the dialogue who survived its publication. Federigo, one of the most active and adventurous of Bembo's friends, took holy orders in 1507 and became bishop of Gubbio, to be succeeded in that office by Bembo himself. His ecclesiastical career notwithstanding, he distinguished himself as a military commander of his native Genoa from 1513 to 1522 when his brother Ottaviano served as Doge of that city. Federigo Fregoso, Giuliano de' Medici, and Pietro Bembo themselves play important roles in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, the first proposing its topic of “forming in words a perfect courtier” (1.12: Meier ed., p. 100; Singleton trans., p. 25), the second endorsing the monarchical directives of François I (1.42) and Isabella of Castile (3.35), and the third presenting a celebrated discourse on Platonic love (4.50-70). In the Prose Federigo and Giuliano provide central supports for Carlo's arguments about fourteenth-century Tuscan language.

Bembo situates the discussion in his native Venice on three cold, windy days in early December. The prologues to each of the Prose's three books narrate how the interlocutors gather before a fireplace in Carlo's apartment. Their common exposure to the north wind functions as a quiet emblem of the social, political, and economic infirmities that harrow all Italy. At first their anxieties focus upon a linguistic issue. When Giuliano complains about the bracing north wind, he uses a word, rovaio, that provokes commentary: “Accostiamvici—disse Giuliano—ché questo rovaio, che tutta mattina ha soffiato, accio fare ci conforta” ‘“Let's huddle together,” said Giuliano, “because this rovaio that has blown all morning encourages us to do that”’ (Dionisotti ed., p. 77). Ercole, who professes greater comfort in speaking Latin rather than the vernacular, construes the meaning of this specific Tuscanism by referring to its usage in context: “Io non ho altra fiata cotesta voce udito ricordare, che voi, Magnifico, Rovaio avete detto, e per aventura se io udita l'avessi, intesa non l'averei, se la stagione non la mi avesse fatta intendere, come ora fa” ‘Never before have I heard this word rovaio that you, Magnifico, pronounced; yet even if I had heard it, I wouldn't have understood it if the weather hadn't made me grasp its meaning’ (78). Ercole's act of interpretation initiates a discussion about language in general and about the Florentine vernacular in particular. This motif recurs at the beginning of books 2 and 3 when on successive days the speakers, “freddo per lo vento di tramontana” ‘cold from the north wind’ (132), reassemble around Carlo's fireplace, until the wind finally dies down: “Ora si tace e niuno strepito fa” ‘Now it is quiet and makes no din’ (186). The image of a community huddled for warmth and protection dominates the Prose, as it does Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, furnishing a metonymy for asylum against the storms that rage in margins of the text. Language provides a resilient medium of exchange and protection, a civilizing force that shelters humanity from tumult.

The challenge is to recognize what may be permanent in this civilizing force. As cultures change, so do their dominant forms of signification. Bembo pays homage to Michelangelo, Raphael, and other artists who labor to preserve their own visual forms while they retrieve from the past yet earlier forms that might instruct future generations: “Tanto più sé dovere essere della loro fatica lodati si credono, quanto essi più alle antiche cose fanno per somiglianza ravicinare le loro nuove” ‘So much the more do they think they should be praised for their labors as they fashion their own new works to compare with ancient ones’ (183). The verb ravicinare ‘draw near to, compare’ implies that Bembo perceives change as part of value itself. Modern works approximate those of the ancients without duplicating them. At the same time the verb s'accostono ‘approach’ implies that for both ancients and moderns perfection may be an unattainable goal: “Sanno e veggono che quelle antiche più alla perfezion dell'arte s'accostano, che le fatte da indi innanzi” ‘They know and see that those ancient works approach the perfection of art more nearly than later ones’ (183).

One can approach perfection only by degrees and with limited success. Bestrewn with ruins and swarming with tourists, sixteenth-century Rome inspires countless artists and sculptors. Its fragments disseminate past culture and challenge the present imagination:

Questa città … vede tutto il giorno a sé venire molti artefici di vicine e di lontane parti, i quali le belle antiche figure di marmo e talor di rame, che o sparse per tutta lei qua e là giacciono o sono publicamente e privatamente guardate e tenute care, … con istudio cercando, nel picciolo spazio delle loro carte o cere la forma di quelli rapportano, e poscia, quando a fare essi alcuna nuova opera intendono, mirano in quegli essempi.

(183)

Every day Rome sees artisans come to her from far and near; carefully seeking out the beautiful ancient shapes of marble and copper that lie scattered here and there or are kept and tended publicly and privately …, they reproduce such forms in the cramped space of their sketchbooks and wax models; and then, when they wish to fashion some new work of their own, they consult these models.

Conversely, this invasion of visitors who study and produce art replicates an earlier invasion of barbarian armies who treated the original artifacts with less kindness, and it figures an ultimate invasion of time itself that tramples everything underfoot. In this whirligig of change Rome remains Rome precisely because its relics survive, “per le sue molte e riverende reliquie, infino a questo dí a noi dalla ingiuria delle nimiche nazioni e del tempo” ‘through its many honored relics now spared for us from the ravages of enemy nations and time’ (183).

Implicit in Bembo's image of Rome is the idea of a plundering that can be either corrosive or beneficent. Barbarian hordes pillage the city's relics in ignorance and confusion, but visiting artists excavate them to improve their art. Time lacerates them all indifferently, but with contradictory effects. Linguistic change is one effect. In his prologue to book 2 Bembo traces the vernacular's development from ancient Latin as a natural and even desirable sequence of events, though one achieved through struggle and conflict. The dominant figure is an agonistic contention inscribed in succedere ‘win,’ a verb that evokes the victorious outcome of combat: “È ora, monsignor messer Giulio, e a questi ultimi secoli successa alla latina lingua la volgare; et è successa così felicemente, che già in essa, non pur molti, ma ancora eccelenti scrittori si leggono” ‘Now, my lord Giulio, in these last centuries the vernacular has won out over Latin, and it has won out so felicitously that already at least some, if not many, excellent writers can be read’ (128). Not all effects, however, bode well. The long discussion of linguistic change in the middle of book 1 discloses a history full of retractions and accommodations that exist side by side in unstable union.

This history unfolds in a dialogue between Ercole Strozzi and Federigo Fregoso. The former recounts a theory proposed by Leonardo Bruni in 1435 and promptly refuted by Flavio Biondo.9 It holds that the grammar and syntax of classical Latin were far too complex for everyone in antiquity to master, and that as a consequence in ancient Rome there existed side by side with Latin a less inflected plebeian speech similar to modern Italian. From this language the vernacular has descended. Ercole is appalled that modern Italians should cultivate a language contemned by ancient writers, “non solamente la meno pregiata favella e men degna da' Romani riputata, ma ancora la rifiutata e del tutto per vile scacciata dalle loro scritture” ‘not only the less valued language deemed unworthy by the Romans themselves, but also rejected and totally expunged from their literature as base’ (81). Worse, modern Italians actually dare to inscribe this language in their literature: “Laonde e di molta presonzione potremmo essere dannati, poscia che noi nelle lettere quello che i romani uomini hanno schifato, seguitiamo” ‘We can be accused of grand presumption since we pursue in our writing what Rome shunned’ (81).

Federigo, following Biondo's argument, tries to refute Ercole's history. The lack of written traces from antiquity only proves that such a language did not exist: “Se ella stata fosse lingua a quelle stagioni, se ne vederebbe alcuna memoria negli antichi edifici e nelle sepolture” ‘If this language had existed at that time, some memory of it would survive in inscriptions on ancient buildings and tombstones’ (84). Federigo defends his claim at great expense. In place of an irenic vision of linguistic and literary history in which Italian has passed with unbroken continuity from ancient times to the present, he offers a savage and turbulent one. The vernacular originated in a moment of violence. It began when barbarians invaded Italy and contaminated Latin with their own foreign tongues: “Ella cominciamento pigliasse infino da quel tempo, nel quale incominciarono i Barbari ad entrare nella Italia e ad occuparla” ‘Its beginning took hold from the time when barbarians began to enter Italy and occupy it’ (86). From this contamination Federigo nonetheless tries to recuperate an ideal, essentialized prototype of the vernacular.

As though to anticipate Federigo Fregoso's conclusion and to forestall its consequences, Giuliano de' Medici protests any need to authenticate the historical foundations of a language. The quest for primary origins leads one to posit a single form, a sole model worthy of emulation. The result would inspire useless contestation among rival heirs who compete for supremacy: “Quella una forma, quell'un modo solo di lingua, con la quale premieramente sono state tessute le scritture, sia nel mondo da lodare e da usare, e non altra” ‘That one form of language and none other, that single style in which writing had first been clothed, would then be considered worthy of praise and emulation throughout the world’ (82). Federigo conversely tracks the logic of his own argument. To assert an originary model may indeed initiate rivalry, but various forms of competition would enrich the model and prevent it from becoming a static and outmoded artifact. The Italian vernacular was born in barbarian invasions that damaged Latin cultural discourse, but it has grown in worth and has acquired an integrity of its own.

Since Federigo acknowledges that the rise of Italian has led to the decline of Latin, he must also acknowledge that among competing dialects the rise of one leads to the decline of another. In the case of Italian, Petrarch's Tuscan has emerged supreme. Its speakers and writers have borrowed diction, syntax, semantic nuances, and grammatical patterns from classical Latin, medieval Provençal, and Italian dialects. At an earlier period and in a different environment, Provençal drew support from other languages until its literature supplanted all rivals. Now Federigo argues that Tuscan has supplanted Provençal as well as Latin. This exaltation of Tuscan over other languages is the final product of a long development, the teleological goal of linguistic history. The Tuscan conquest of Provençal and earlier languages, the scattering and dispersal of Provençal literary traditions become emblems of Florence's manifest destiny in cultural politics: “Ma sì come la toscana lingua, da quelle stagioni a pigliar riputazione incominciando, crebbe in onore e in prezzo quanto s'è veduto di giorno in giorno, così la provenzale è ita mancando e perdendo di secolo in secolo in tanto” ‘But as the Tuscan language, beginning from that time on to gain in reputation, grew in honor and value seemingly from day to day, so Provençal began to diminish and contract from century to century’ (104).

Federigo's argument imposes no logical limits upon the growth of any language or upon the development of its literary discourse. It in fact denies linguistic closure and puts all discourse at risk. Giuliano de' Medici had already noted a blurring of boundaries with the influx of French and Spanish forms into contemporary Italian. This influx first resulted from military interventions summoned by one Italian state against another: “Chiama in aiuto di sé, contra il suo sangue medesimo, le straniere nazioni, e la eredità a sé lasciata dirittamente in quistion mette per obliqua via” ‘Each one calls foreign powers to its own aid against its own very blood, and by indirection puts in question its own patrimony’ (87). Giuliano now calls for a transfusion and intermingling of various lingue cortigiane. His proposal echoes a contemporaneous theory on behalf of eclecticism proposed by Vincenzo Colli, il Calmeta (1460-1508), in a lost treatise Della vulgar poesia and iterated by Castiglione's spokesperson for linguistic decorum, Ludovico da Canossa, in The Book of the Courtier. The theory holds that current usage prevailing at the major courts of Italy, especially the papal court, provides a flexible model for all speech and writing. As Ludovico da Canossa explains in Castiglione's dialogue,

Nor would this be anything new, for out of the four languages of which they were able to avail themselves, Greek writers chose words, expressions, and figures as they saw fit, and brought forth another that was called the ‘common’ language.

(1.35: Maier 142; Singleton 56)

In Bembo's version, however, Giuliano emphasizes that it would be a language distinctly different from that of the common people, a cultured, refined, intra-national language as opposed to popular dialectical forms that will always be local and chaotic, “a differenza di quell'altra che rimane in bocca del popolo, e non suole essere così tersa e così gentile” ‘different from that which remains in the mouths of the people and which cannot be so terse and gentle’ (107). Giuliano advocates an elegant, up-to-date, federated language, one that incorporates current usage and fashionable turns of phrase, Latinisms, Gallicisms, Iberisms, and contributions from elsewhere.

By embracing changefulness and variety as linguistic values, Giuliano de' Medici hopes to preempt linguistic rivalry among the city states of Italy. He also hopes to preempt any suspicion that, as patriarch of the Medici fortunes, he is plotting a dynastic renewal and a resumption of power in Florence with hegemonic ambitions over the rest of Italy. In Castiglione's Book of the Courtier Giuliano offers muted support for the supremacy of Tuscan over other Italian dialects, with a tame acknowledgment that if Petrarch or Boccaccio wrote today, both would adjust their styles to contemporary usage: “I cannot, and in reason should not, gainsay anyone who holds that the Tuscan language is more beautiful than the others. It is true, of course, that one meets with many words in Petrarch and Boccaccio that have been dropped from usage” (1.31: Maier, p. 135; Singleton, p. 51). It is almost as though he recoils from promoting a Florentine cultural dictatorship. In Bembo's dialogue, Giuliano articulates a yet more accommodating position, one that again shelters him from the charge of hatching any designs for Florentine hegemony. If Federigo's argument about unbridled change leaves Italian culture without a clear goal, Giuliano's proposal for an accommodated eclecticism leaves it with an indiscriminate sense of purposelessness. His rhetorical stand seems in fact to slight specifically the Florentine dialect and its proud literary heritage.

Carlo Bembo seeks to articulate a sharper sense of purpose. Federigo's argument and Giuliano's proposal horrify him, and his reaction against them generates the Prose's central thesis. Carlo views hurtling, unbridled change as a threat to linguistic energy. At the same time he views a composite, oleaginous lingua cortigiana as the very emblem of self-mutilation and self-effacement that Federigo and Giuliano seek to avert. To take the papal court as a possible standard, one finds there a mass of changeful and invasive influences that hobble the vernacular. Its irregular succession of popes brings to power old men of vastly different backgrounds and temperaments. Wave after mutinous wave washes away the values set by predecessors: “A guisa di marina onda, che ora per un vento a quella parte si gonfia, ora a questa si china per un altro, così ella, che pochi anni adietro era stata tutta nostra, ora s'era mutata e divenuta in buona parte straniera” ‘Like a sea wave that now swells with a wind from that quarter, now crashes with another from this, so the court that a few years earlier had entirely been ours has now changed and become largely foreign’ (109). Just as its history records the disruption of every foreign power that has threatened Italy, so its language constitutes a repository of those disruptions, a palimpsest of linguistic confusion: “E la cortigiana lingua, che s'era oggimai cotanto inispagnuolita, incontanente s'infranceserebbe, e altretanto di nuova forma piglierebbe, ogni volta che le chiavi di S. Pietro venissero a mano di posseditore diverso di nazione dal passato” ‘The courtly language, which was once hispanicized, would suddenly become gallicized and would take on a new form every time the keys of Saint Peter came into the hands of a caretaker of a different nationality’ (109). To privilege the lingua cortigiana is to privilege chaos.

For Carlo the emblem of true linguistic value is an unlikely ancient text, Virgil's Georgics, “lo specchio e il lume e la gloria de' latini componimenti” ‘the mirror and light and glory of Latin composition’ (120). Carlo's choice of Virgil's least read poem, often dismissed as a versified handbook on agricultural management, seems strange. Why not the many-layered Eclogues or the lofty Aeneid? Carlo's explanation belies any narrowly formalistic preference. Virgil's Georgics addresses every spectrum of the population without limiting itself to one privileged group. It addresses humble farmers as well as proud scholars and its store of practical advice and philosophical wisdom speaks to the present and the future as it did to the past:

Scrive del bisogne del contado il mantovano Virgilio, e scrive a contadini, invitandogli ad apparar le cose di che egli ragiona loro; tuttavolta scrive in modo che non che contadino alcuno, ma niuno uomo più che di città, se non dotto grandemente e letterato, può bene e compiutamente intendere ciò che egli scrive.

(120)

Mantuan Virgil writes about the needs of rural folk and he writes for farmers, beckoning them to learn what he taught them; he always writes in such a way that not only every farmer but also every city-dweller, whether or not learned and literate, can understand well and fully what he writes.

The allegorical mysteries of the Eclogues and the political cunning of the Aeneid may yield only a pale shadow of their original import to postclassical moderns, but the timeless simplicity of the Georgics endures.

Despite the egalitarian fervor of Carlo's argument, a vicious circularity bedevils it. Why Virgil in the first place? If popular language were ever a standard for literary greatness, then common rhymesters would be worthy of more honor than Virgil. Carlo himself concedes this point: “Virgilio meno sarebbe stato pregiato, che molti dicitori di piazza e di volgo” ‘Virgil would have been valued less than perhaps many performers of the marketplace and the rabble’ (118). Nor does the eminent classicist Ercole Strozzi shed much light on the privileging of Virgil. When Carlo defers to his expertise in Latin, Ercole retorts that no one can be sure of what he or she knows about the intricacies and enigmas of Virgil's Latin, or indeed whether any one knows very much at all about Rome's ancient language: “Trovarestemi in ciò di gran lunga meno intendente, che per aventura non istimate” ‘You might find me less knowledgeable by far than what you perhaps think’ (136). Though Ercole maintains a lighthearted attitude and jokes freely about his ignorance of the vernacular, his reply dramatizes a malaise that was beginning to affect the humanist movement in the sixteenth century. As a subtle ironist he confesses his own ineptitude in a striking version of Socratic paradox: “Il quale come che in niune non sia maestro, pure in queste sono veramente discepolo” ‘Since I am master of nothing, even in these matters I am a disciple’ (142). The very technical philological expertise that had sharpened Ercole's knowledge of the language now puts his confidence to the test.

Carlo nonetheless ventures to prove that the Italian vernacular can accomplish for modern culture what classical Latin did for earlier culture.10 To demonstrate that its best texts deserve serious consideration, he moves beyond the claim that they have already acquired a widespread reputation. Instead, he tries to analyze the conditions of worth that determine which texts are best, “che perciò che, come sapete, tanto ciascuno scrittore è lodato, quanto egli è buono” ‘because, as you know, each writer is praised according to how good he is’ (135). His analysis locates the conventional rhetorical labors of inventio, dispositio, and elocutio within a practice of variation and ornament, contrast and decoration. At least initially, however, it rests upon a distinction between matter and form, “la materia o suggetto, che dire vogliamo, del quale si scrive, e la forma o apparenza, che a quella materia si dà” ‘the matter or subject that we intend and about which we write, and the form or appearance that is given to this matter’ (136). By separating matter from form without providing for any necessary link between them, Carlo opens the textual field as a scene of struggle between words and the things that they refer to, or the things that we impute them to refer to. Form becomes a variable independent of matter, while matter becomes another independent variable, an external commodity that individual readers may first acquire and then control as a vested interest.

In the end Carlo is amazed that even the strongest texts manage to circumscribe any decisive meaning. What enables them to do so is an “occult” power, an occulta virtù, that defies analysis and rational understanding. It is an insurgence of difference and otherness that overwhelms and absorbs the reader: “Ma dico quella occulta virtù, che, in ogni voce dimorando, commuove altrui ad assentire a ciò che egli legge, procacciata più tosto dal giudicio dello scrittore che dall'artificio de' maestri” ‘I call it an occult power that, lingering in each word, moves one to assent to what he reads, procured more by the writer's judgment than by workmanlike artifice’ (174). This power derives from natural properties of words, sounds, and even letters of the alphabet on the one hand and their relationship to things that they denote on the other. It in turn reflects the hidden forces and secret sympathies of a Platonic universe uncovered in such texts as Ficino's De vita, which devotes a key chapter to “The Power [Virtute] of Words and Song for Capturing Celestial Benefits” [3.21]: “Certain words pronounced with a quite strong emotion have great force to aim the effect of images precisely where the emotions and words are directed” (Kaske-Clark trans., pp. 354-55).

These possibilities demand that the writer control the text in a powerful way. The stylistic norm that matters is gravità. Its privileging calls for a clear, assertive articulation of words and syllables in euphoniously balanced lines of verse. As Dante's De vulgaria eloquentia still awaited publication in 1529 by Bembo's antagonist, Giangiorgio Trissino, Bembo did not cite its whimsical classification of “masculine” and “feminine” words.11 He instead devised his own classificatory system based on a conception of sounds appropriate to each gender. Writers achieve gravità through clusterings of “masculine” consonants that lend sharp definition to otherwise cavernous and diffuse “feminine” vowels. “Masculine” words that feature jagged consonants like g, b, d, and t (as in “sgombro,” “destro,” “morbidezza,” “sbandito”) impart a lofty quality absent from “feminine” words that overflow with irriguous vowels and liquid consonants like l, r, and n (as in “assalire,” “errore,” “onde,” “aviene”). In Bembo's opinion the best poetry uses explosive “masculine” sounds to disrupt soothing “feminine” ones. The first line of Petrarch's sonnet 1, “Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono” ‘You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound,’ for example, acquires a powerful resonance through its repetition and variation of diverse sounds: “Oltra che Rime, perciò che è voce leggiera e snella, posta tra queste due, Ascoltate e Sparse, che sono amendue piene e gravi, è quasi dell'una e dell'altra temperamento” ‘Moreover, rime, since it is a light and easy word, placed between ascoltate and sparse, which are both full and weighty with consonants, seems to acquire one and the other temperaments’ (143). The consonantal gravity of ascoltate and sparse, closed and masculinized by elision with the vowels that follow each, ascoltate in and sparse il, provides a remedy for the soft feminized vocalic dispersion of rime and suono.

So too the silent masculine reserve of elisions and ellipses provides a remedy for the womanish garrulity of dilation and repetition. Carlo finds it especially appropriate when the topic veers towards immodesty, obscenity, low or contemptible behavior. Dante stands guilty for having left nothing out of his descriptions of vile and degrading actions. He lacks the virile containment and restraint of Petrarch: “Da tacere è quel tanto, che sporre non si può acconciamente, più tosto che, sponendolo, macchiarne l'altra scrittura” ‘One should keep quiet about that part which cannot be properly expressed, rather than mar the rest of the writing in expressing it’ (138). To Ercole's pressing questions about evaluating Dante and Petrarch comparatively, Carlo answers unequivocally. The Divine Comedy deals with more varied and complex thematic issues than the Rime sparse, but its style falters more frequently. Carlo compares it to a broad and capacious field strewn with weeds and brambles. Stylistic heterogeneity diminishes its potency:

Egli molto spesso ora le latine voci, ora le straniere, che non sono state dalla Toscana ricevute, ora le vecchie del tutto e tralasciate, ora le non usate e rozze, ora le immonde e brutte, ora le durissime usando, e allo 'ncontro le pure e gentili alcuna volta mutando e guastando, e talora, senza alcuna scielta o regola, da sé formandone e fingendone, ha in maniera operato, che si può la sua Comedia giustamente rassomigliare ad un bello e spazioso campo di grano, che sia tutto d'avene e di logli e d'erbe sterili e dannose mescolato.

(178)

Frequently using Latin words, foreign words not accepted in Tuscan, old-fashioned words abandoned by everyone, foul and ugly words, the harshest sort, and on the other hand changing and ruining pure and gentle words and without any rhyme or reason forming and fashioning words by himself, Dante has made his Comedy comparable to a spacious, lush field of grain strewn with oats and darnel and poison weeds.

The importance of Dante's topic does not confer excellence upon his style. Among the ancients, Lucan attempted a historical epic whose style proved inferior to Theocritus's humble pastoral. In Carlo's judgment, Petrarch's verse overcomes these deficiencies. It is the invariable model, the single standard for good Italian style.

Despite this unequivocal conclusion, neither Carlo nor any other speaker manages to explore the actual workings of Petrarch's poetry in satisfactory depth. Federigo refers to Petrarch's three “sister” canzoni 71-73, and to the complementary canzoni 124-125 as triumphs of piacevolezza and gravità: “Fuggì non solamente la troppa piacevolezza o la troppa gravità, ma ancora la troppa diligenza del fuggirle” ‘Petrarch not only avoided too much charm and too much gravity, but he also avoided the appearance of trying too hard to avoid them’ (172). From sonnet 303 Federigo quotes a single line as a supreme example of gravità attained through a predominance of masculine consonants that bind and constrain feminine vowels: “Fior', frondi, erbe, ombre, antri, onde, aure soavi” ‘Flowers, leaves, grass, shadows, caves, waves, gentle breezes’ (172). Like Théophile Gautier's touchstone from Racine (“La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae”) ridiculed by Proust when Bergotte utters it in Du coté de chez Swann, the line carries more phonic charm than syntactic or semantic density. It simply designates in a parallel series various aspects of Vaucluse that the speaker summons after Laura's death. Federigo's preference for this line—indeed, his valuing of the entire poem—betokens the préciosité that would dominate a later manneristic poetics.

Commentators after Bembo would cite the same touchstone line. Bembo's unspoken presence dominates these commentaries. Fausto da Longiano, for example, celebrates the line as superior to any in ancient or modern verse: “Questo e'l piu alto verso piu sonoro e piu pieno che si legga tra moderni o antichi” ‘This is the noblest line, more sonorous and full than any among the moderns or the ancients’ (111r). Daniello describes the effects of its combination of harsh monosyllables and soft polysyllables in terms echoing Bembo's: “Si per la quantità, e qualità de le consonanti, ch'in essi vi veggono, e si per essere anchora spogliati de gli aggiunti loro; al quanto duri e aspri; non gli parve di compirne il verso, ma di temperar questa asprezza” ‘Through the quantity and quality of the consonants found in them and through being deprived of their endings, they seem somewhat harsh and bitter’ (156v). Its semantic meaning gets lost in minor controversy. In “O nimphe, et voi che 'l fresco erboso fondo / del liquido cristallo alberga et pasce” ‘O nymphs, and you whom the fresh grassy floor of the liquid crystal shelters and feeds,’ for example, Daniello notes that the periphrasis could refer to fish that swim in the riverbed as well as to niades that inhabit the stream. The lines acquire a trivial ambiguity as one reading tends toward landscape pictorialism, another toward mythic animism, “che s'intendendesse de Pasci bisognerebbe, che s'intendesse anchora per i vaghi habitador de verdi boschi, non i Satiri, Fauni, o Silvani, ma gli animali irrationali” ‘because if it referred to “fish,” then it would mean that it could also refer to the denizens of green woods, not satyrs, fauns, or sylvans, but irrational animals’ (156v). Castelvetro supports the first choice unequivocally, “Et voi) pesci” ‘“And you” refers to fish’ (57*), but commentators through the eighteenth century would prefer the second for surpassing brute naturalism with its elevated imagination.

The only poem from the Rime sparse quoted in its entirety in Bembo's Prose is sonnet 304, recited by Federigo Fregoso (168):

          Mentre che 'l cor da gli amorosi vermi
fu consumato e 'n fiamma amorosa arse,
di vaga fera la vestigia sparse
cercai per poggi solitarii et hermi;
          et ebbi ardir cantando di dolermi
d'Amor, di lei che sì dura m'apparse:
ma l'ingegno et le rime erano scarse
in quella etate ai pensier' novi e 'nfermi.
          Quel foco è morto e 'l copre un picciol marmo:
che se col tempo fossi ito avanzando
(come già in altri) infino a la vecchiezza,
          di rime armato ond'oggi mi disarmo,
con stil canuto, avrei fatto parlando
romper le pietre, et pianger di dolcezza.

While my heart was consumed by the worms of love and burned in an amorous flame, I sought on solitary and wild hills the scattered footprints of a wandering wild creature, and I dared, singing, to complain of Love and of her who seemed so cruel to me; but wit and rhymes came scantily at that age to my new and faltering thoughts.


That fire is dead and a little marble covers it: if it had gone on growing with time, as it does in others, into old age, armed with the rhymes of which today I am disarmed, with a mature style I would speaking have made the very stones break and weep with sweetness.

As a paragon of Petrarch's Italian oeuvre, this text speaks eloquently of the poet's self-conscious artistry. When its octave swells to a stunning admission of defeat, the speaker repudiates his own poetic talent during Laura's lifetime, while in its sestet he speculates that if Laura had lived, he would have forged a mature style, a “stil canuto,” to befit her excellence. Federigo finds here the mature style denied by its speaker. “Stil canuto” refers to a claim in Cicero's Brutus that experience and maturity bring insight and authority to one's style, “when my oratory too had attained a certain ripeness (canesceret) and maturity of age” (2.8). Petrarch's speaker has ripened in age, if not in wisdom, and if his poetry draws tears from stones as he predicted it would, the reason is that it enacts his perseverance. Simply put, the plight of an older man mourning the death of his beloved carries more affective weight than that of a younger man bemoaning her intransigence. The speaker has attained this insight at a terrible cost.

Petrarch's later commentators would draw upon Federigo's evaluation of the poem. Fausto da Longiano, for example, explains stil canuto by referring to sonnet 293 where the speaker articulates his aim “pur di sfogare il doloroso core / in qualche modo, non d'acquistar fama” ‘only to give vent to my sorrowing heart in some fashion, not to gain fame.’ Fausto construes the speaker's avowal as a direct confession, “perche in questo tempo ogni suo studio era sol di sfogare il doloroso cuore in qualche modo, e non d'acquistar fama” ‘since at this time his entire effort was to vent his sorrowful heart in some fashion and not to achieve fame’ (111v). Gesualdo likewise identifies Petrarch's stil canuto with the speaker's refinement, “cio è di meravigliosa dolcezza empiere altrui, e muovere tutti amorosi e gentili affetti” ‘that is, in order to fill another with marvelous sweetness and to move every amorous and gentle affect’ (cccxxviiv). Sylvano iterates it as “la molta differenza delle prime sue rime amorose, e di quelle che scrisse di poi nell'eta piu matura” ‘the great difference between his early amatory verse and the verse that he wrote at a more mature age’ (clxxxixr).

Other commentators would mention specific flaws in Petrarch's youthful writing. Brucioli repeats Daniello's assessment: “Non havendo cosi bei pensieri, ne cosi chiaro ingegno, e alte rime, e cosi buono giudicio” ‘Not having high thoughts, clear wit, noble rhyme, and good judgment’ (197v). Daniello adds that Petrarch acquired competence as he mined his poetic resources throughout the years: “Fu poco, non havendo ne cosi bei pensieri, ne cosi chiaro ingegno, e alte rime, e cosi buon giudicio, il quale suol crescere insieme con gli anni” ‘His art was slender, having neither high thoughts, clear wit, noble rhyme, or good judgment; but it would grow with the years’ (157r). So too with Castelvetro, for whom the speaker's ambition is a constant feature of his poetic career. Now in old age his thought and expression coincide with a ripeness of sentiment: “Si riferisce alla perfezione de' sentimenti” ‘It refers to the perfection of sentiment’ (59*). Petrarch's stil canuto marks the apex of his achievement. Bembo had authorized it as such, and later commentators accepted his judgment.

The Prose's strongest impressions of the Rime sparse, then, and the ones bequeathed to Petrarch's sixteenth-century critical readership and poetic emulators, privilege the gravità and stil canuto of Petrarch's verse in morte di Laura as touchstones of his art. In contradictory practice, however, the same poets and commentators, including Bembo himself in his own Rime, would turn to Petrarch's earlier poetry as a more stimulating model. It is not hard to see why. The turbulent emotions generated by an unstable love during the beloved's lifetime challenge the reader as well as the writer, while the rueful reflections occasioned by Laura's death figure only a dissolution. In theory the latter mode might better catch and express the political dismemberment and ideological malaise of early sixteenth-century Italy, but in practice it forecloses the development of other more versatile or adaptable forms of poetry. Understandably, then, most Petrarchists preferred the style of Petrarch in vita di Laura. For Bembo, however, the espousal of Petrarch's austere manner tallies with his social status as a cleric after 1522. By the time he published the first edition of his own Rime in 1530, the arbiter and advocate of Petrarch's stil canuto had been an ordained priest for nearly a decade.

THE STIFFENING OF MEDUSA: PETRIFICATION AND PETRARCHIFICATION IN PIETRO BEMBO'S RIME

No wonder Ercole distrusts his friends' defense of the vernacular in the Prose. They have argued that the vernacular evolved fortuitously from an ever-changing, forever unstable Latin. If the father tongue, Latin, the language of medicine, science, law, and scholarship, the patrimony of the ancient past, the medium of communication for educated males in the pursuit of knowledge and truth, proves so unstable, how can any vernacular mother tongue, the language of women and children, the fickle masses and the changeable mob, achieve stability? Ercole's masculinist assumptions disclose a bias toward a patriarchal, patrilinear, primogenitural order in society, an order that is inscribed in the grammar, rhetoric, and logic of a male academy. Whatever its particular goals might be, the ultimate goal of any academy is to guarantee an order favorable to the community it serves. Because language provides a classifying system, the work of the academy is to regulate that system.

By all odds Petrarch's language would appear a strange choice to regulate the Italian vernacular. Its chief stylistic feature is changefulness. The transformative powers of its shifting vowels and vocables chart everywhere a landscape of variable wordplay. Chameleonic homophony and polyvalent equivocation mark its character. The Petrarchan speaker seeks only to escape the paralyzing stasis of a routine language and inauthentic thought. An important emblem of this stasis in the Rime sparse is Medusa, the female monster who deprives men of their vital energies by turning them into stone. The myth, especially as Freud analyzes it in a conspicuously two-sided way, epitomizes male fears about being immobilized by terrifying sexual powers.

Freud's analysis of the myth juxtaposes two contradictory effects. One is that “the horrifying decapitated head of Medusa” evokes in the male “a terror of castration” (“Medusa's Head,” Works 18.273). Medusa's mutilated appearance reminds him of the possibility of his own castration. The second is that the sight of her head may nonetheless mitigate this horror by arousing the hero's potency: “The sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him into stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin for the castration complex, and the same transformation of affect! For becoming stiff means an erection” (18.273). The figure's counterphobic or apotropaic effect enables the male, first, to defeat Medusa and, then, to secure her powers for his own. In the case of a cultural anthropology such as Bembo's, the power to stabilize flux, to reduce change to immobility, and to confer permanence upon vicissitude, is at issue.

This myth allows Petrarch to play famously upon the figure of petra ‘stone’ in his own name as he associates it with Laura's ability to petrify him. In sonnet 179 the speaker acknowledges his fear of being reduced to stasis by Laura's stare:

E-cciò non fusse, andrei non altramente
a veder lei, che 'l volto di Medusa,
che facea marmo diventar la gente.

And if it were not so, I would not go to see her otherwise than to see the face of Medusa, which made people become marble.

His ‘scattered’ rhymes inscribe an effort to evade paralysis, as does his verbal legerdemain. The first line of another poem about Medusa, sonnet 197, plays on the words l'aura ‘the breeze’ and lauro ‘laurel’ as variants of the beloved's name: “L'aura celeste che 'n quel verde lauro” ‘The heavenly breeze that breathes in that green laurel.’ The speaker's reference to the petrifying powers of Medusa extends the figure from his own name (Petrarca-petra-selce) to evoke the beloved's name through a play on l'auro ‘gold’:

Pò quello in me, che nel gran vecchio mauro
Medusa quando in selce transformollo;
né posso dal bel nodo omai dar crollo,
là 've il sol perde, non pur l'ambra o l'auro.

It has the power over me that Medusa had over the old Moorish giant, when she turned him to flint; nor can I shake loose that lovely knot by which the sun is surpassed, not to say amber or gold.

The suppleness of language itself provides an escape from Medusa's trap.

Bembo's interest in trying to stabilize this language as his speakers urge in the Prose corroborates his prior interest in trying to stabilize classical Latin. Like other humanists of Ciceronian persuasion, Bembo fears the dismemberment and death of the ancient language. Whereas many late fifteenth-century humanists had celebrated the variety and multiplicity of styles available in classical texts, their sixteenth-century counterparts favored a single artificially prescribed, culturally anachronistic standard for Latin style based on Ciceronian prose or Virgilian poetry. It affords a modicum of stability in the quest for vanished meaning. To Bembo, Latin is an elite discourse, the language of theology, philosophy, the approved professions, law, and politics. To save Latin for this purpose, and hence to save the world that it represents for an elite community, Bembo designates the use of a prescriptive vernacular for the official affairs of a wider community.

A tension between standards urged upon the vernacular by authorized institutions such as the university or the humanist studium and by unauthorized or self-authorized institutions such as the local court destabilizes the idea of a normative vernacular from the very beginning. Bembo can only take refuge in a call for stylistic coherence. That it might encourage a moribund conformity matters less than the linguistic stability that it affords. Instead of fleeing from Medusa, he embraces her. Medusa's powers enable him to gain the fixity that he wants. They threaten to immobilize Petrarch's lover, but they only invigorate Bembo's speaker. As he devises a language to stanch the flux of time, the Medusan gaze becomes an emblem of his art. Its language and style will be single, stable, and immutable, flexible enough to handle any topic in his purview, yet sufficiently steadfast to remain identifiable. Thus Bembo celebrates Petrarch's stil canuto, and when he writes his own poetry, he exercises it in a variety of settings. His Rime offer a diversity of topics ranging from songs and sonnets that celebrate youthful love affairs to occasional poems addressed to valued friends and trusted associates, and finally to poems about the political status of Italy in the author's lifetime. Petrarch's stil canuto governs them all.

The specter of Petrarch's stil canuto hangs over Bembo's Rime with adverse consequences. One is that the idea of a style separable from content counters Petrarch's symbiotic relation of form and content. To prescribe Petrarch's example as archetypal for all kinds of poetry, regardless of purpose, length, function, or intention, hypostatizes the notion of style. The coincidental recovery of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics in Padua and Venice during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries provides an intellectual ground for this conclusion. Predicated upon Aristotle's hylomorphic assumptions, the Rhetoric (translated into Latin by George of Trebizond in 1447-55 and by Ermolao Barbaro after 1480, first printed in Greek in 1508) and the Poetics (translated into Latin by Giorgio Valla in 1498, printed in Greek in 1508, but not popular until the commentary of Francisco Robortello in 1548 and the Italian translation of Bernardo Segni in 1549) apply the categories of form and matter to verbal discourse. Aristotle's technical distinction between them legitimates their autonomy. If formal excellence may exist apart from topical significance, the writer may pursue formal excellence beyond the restraints of a poem's subject matter. In practical terms the writer may appropriate the stylistic features of Petrarch's stil canuto even when they fail to match the poem's content.12 The task is to shape or mold those features to display their stylistic elegance.

A second consequence is that stylish elegance overtakes the poetic rendering of even the most resistant motifs.13 Style becomes a way of denying the pressures of disruption and anxiety figured in the poetry. Bembo's “Sonnet 22,” for example, “Re degli altri, superbo e sacro monte” ‘Proud, sacred mountain, king of the others,’ most likely composed in anticipation of the poet's sojourn at Urbino in 1506, represents an attempt to galvanize his energies in a new environment. The speaker is leaving Ferrara, the site of his much publicized liaison with Lucrezia Borgia. The poem's opening line appropriately echoes Petrarch's sonnet 180, whose speaker addresses the Po river as he travels away from his beloved, “Re degli altri, superbo altero fiume” ‘King of rivers, proud and haughty.’ In Bembo's poem the speaker addresses the Apennine mountain range, “ch'Italia tutta imperioso parti” ‘that imperiously divides all Italy.’ Instead of increasing his amatory fervor, the journey displaces it. That fervor, “de le mie voglie mal per me sì pronte” ‘of my unhealthy desires ever so keen for me,’ comes in fact to be associated with diseased limbs, “non sani parti,” and disordered thinking, “pensieri sparti,” both linked paronomastically with the sense of division, parti, imposed by the mountains: “Vo risecando le non sane parti, / e raccogliendo i miei pensieri sparti” ‘I go paring away those unhealthy limbs, collecting my scattered thoughts.’

The periphrastic designation of Ferrara as a place “a cui vicin cadeo Fetonte” ‘in whose environs Phaeton fell’ now evokes the speaker's ruined aspirations during his residence with Lucrezia Borgia and Alfonso d'Este. Petrarch's canzone 23 refers to the same myth, “allor che folminato et morto giaque / il mio sperar che tropp'alto montava” ‘when thunderstruck and dead lay my hope that was mounting too high’ (52-53). The psychological density of Petrarch's model gives way to direct statement. Bembo's speaker seeks the hills of Urbino only to compose poetry and win the laurel there: “Tu sarai 'l mio Parnaso, e 'l crine intorno / ancor mi cingerai d'edere nove” ‘You will be my Parnassus and you will encircle my locks with young ivies.’ The sense of Petrarchan anguish yields to a foreordained stylistic resolution. Instead of acknowledging his trauma, the speaker tries to cure the wound by referring to Petrarch's Rime sparse. In the end he appropriates Petrarch's style but not its substance.

A third consequence of Bembo's appropriation of Petrarch's style follows from the other two. It is that all the denials and disruptions stored in the writer's unconscious tumble out in the process of composition. Their exposure only generates the speaker's effort to recover or renew his potency, thus extending the process of composition. Not just revision, but prolonged efforts of revision become crucial. In preparing his Rime for press, Bembo collected songs and sonnets composed during a period of more than thirty years and he submitted them to painstaking correction and revision. His work continues through subsequent editions that establish for each poem a palimpsest bearing the record of its own invention. This process of composition requires the poet to redo his own text, paralleling habits that Giorgio Vasari attributed to the great masters of Venetian painting in Bembo's own lifetime.14 In Vasari's judgment, however, these habits are not necessarily beneficial. In his Life of Titian Vasari complained that Giorgione painted “directly with colours, without reference to drawing” and he implied that the artist's original lack of design forced him later to make endless adjustments “to hide under the alluring beauty of colors his inability to draw” (478). So too Titian dashed off his work “with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of colour,” with the result that he needed constantly to retouch his pictures, “going over them with his colours several times” (478). Bembo's poetry is similarly executed, its themes and motifs altered and transformed in the course of revision, its syntax, diction, rhythm, and harmony scattered and dispersed through repeated reworking.

Bembo's allegiance to the Petrarchan model almost compels this dispersal. The poet attempts to deal with the same linguistic currency as Petrarch, extracted whole without being melted down or transformed into any personal style. For Bembo the best way to preserve the exemplary model is to cut it up into little pieces and redistribute it in new syntactic patterns. This fragmentation of the master text gives way to its reassembly in the art of cento. Bembo's poetry suggests this art without strictly constituting it. In “Sonnet 28” every element of the poem's diction and figuration derives from Petrarch, but no aspect of its composition achieves Petrarch's complexity:

          Viva mia neve e caro e dolce foco,
vedete com'io agghiaccio e com'io avampo,
mentre, qual cera, ad or ad or mi stampo
del vostro segno, e voi di ciò cal poco.

My living snow and dear sweet flame, see how I freeze and burn while, like wax, I stamp myself with your mark and you care little about it.

To appropriate the model's elocutionary devices in their pristine purity means that one can vary them at most through syntactic manipulation. Only a distention or contraction of sentence structures can bring acceptable change to the model.

One archetype for this process is the myth of division and reintegration iterated in Neoplatonic philosophy and figured most powerfully in the castration of Uranus and the birth of Venus.15 The sacrificial dismemberment of the Titans' father transforms unity into multiplicity, but not without salutary issue. Uranus's testicles thrown into the sea produce a foam from which Venus emerges. The seed of ideal form is scattered upon formless matter, only to be reassembled in a new creation. Bembo's “Sonnet 61,” “Colei, che guerra a' miei pensieri indice” ‘She who declared war upon my thoughts,’ suggests this transformation of random flux into the concentrated power of poetry whenever the beloved appears:

          Or in forma di cigno, or di fenice,
s'io parlo, scrivo, penso, vado o seggio,
m'è sempre inanzi, e lei sì bella veggio,
che piacer d'altra vista non m'allice.

Now in the form of a swan, now of the phoenix, whether I speak, write, think, move, or sit, she is always before me, and she seems so beautiful that the pleasure of no other face cheers me.

For Bembo's speaker, love generates the self-reflection and self-expression of art. The poetry that ensues reenacts a process of self-division, scattering, and reassembly.

As though to foreshadow the workings of this motif and to exemplify its consequences for poetic practice, “Sonnet 86,” a poem written before 1500, inscribes the act of dismemberment as a metaphor for literary composition. The poem, “Quando 'l mio sol, del qual invidia prende / l'altro” ‘When my sun, of whom the other sun is jealous,’ apostrophizes the decapitated Medusa. Figures of sight dominate the poem, from the emphasis of the penultimate word in its first line, invidia, to the attribution of the beloved's radiant effect, “vago sereno agli occhi miei risplende” ‘it shines charming and serene upon my eyes.’ Invidiousness becomes a consequence of sight, etymologically embedded in the root videre, as envy (in-vidia) results from seeing the other in a more desirable position. With reference to Medusa, one glimpse suffices to immobilize the man who views her even from afar.

Petrarch's figuration of Medusa poses a problem for those who would risk making the beloved unapproachable when she takes on the qualities of this devastating female monster. Thus Petrarch's speaker in his final canzone renounces Laura as a Medusa: “Medusa et l'error mio m'àn fatto un sasso / d'umor vano stillante” ‘Medusa and my error have made me a stone dripping vain moisture’ (366. 111-12). Bembo's speaker, on the other hand, manages to tame the figure by asserting that he suffers more from his beloved's disdain than any of Medusa's victims suffered from the gorgon's hellish gaze. By implication Medusa poses less of a threat to him than his own beloved does:

          Medusa, s'egli è ver, che tu di noi
facevi petra, assai fosti men dura
di tal, che m'arde, strugge, agghiaccia e 'ndura.

Medusa, if it is true that you turned men to stone, you were still less harsh than the one who burns, melts, freezes, and stiffens me.

The final stiffening ('ndura) immobilizes the speaker, undoes his creative powers, reduces him to the impotence of a marble figure: “Passo in una marmorea figura” ‘I turn into a marmoreal fixity.’ The beloved becomes a figure of castrating cruelty. The stiffening brought on by Medusa is not only less harsh but, as in Freud's alternative reading of the myth, may even be associated with sexual potency. Medusa's gaze provokes the onlooker to assert his aggressive masculinity. Only the strongest of men, Perseus or his avatars, Bembo among them, can face her at all and take charge of the situation. He stares into a formless chaos that becomes the birthplace of form. The risk of petrification—in Bembo's case, Petrarchification—becomes positive and productive. Both terrifying and life-giving, it affords entry to the womb of future possibilities while it confers new shape upon the medium of exchange itself.

These possibilities expand Petrarchan discourse through successive acts of conquest. The possession of the Medusan talisman is the sign of a threat that has been overcome, a fragmentation and dispersal of monstrosity along with the appropriation and transformation of its magical properties to work on one's behalf. Fragmentation and dispersal, appropriation and transformation, only replicate what Bembo perceives to be Petrarch's mode of composition. They motivate him to achieve within the vernacular what Petrarch himself had achieved. If Petrarch incorporated slivers of classical antiquity, Provençal troubadourism, and Tuscan stil nuovo into the composite form of his own textuality, so too may Bembo. He may do so, moreover in confidence that humanist philology since Petrarch's day has uncovered many more models to draw upon.

One example is “sonnet 87,” “O superba e crudele, o di bellezza” ‘O proud cruel woman, rich in beauty.’ The poem refers at least in theme, if not explicitly in style or diction, to Petrarch's sonnet 12, “Se la mia vita da l'aspro tormento” ‘If my life can withstand the bitter torment.’ There Petrarch's speaker looks ahead to an indefinite future when Laura's charms will surrender to old age:

Ch'i' veggia per vertù degli ultimi anni,
Donna, de' be' vostr' occhi il lume spento,
e i cape' d'oro fin farsi d'argento.

That I may see by the power of your last years [trans. mod.], Lady, the light of your lovely eyes dimmed and your hair of fine gold made silver.

In Petrarch's version the speaker is remunerated after all these years by the beloved's muted acknowledgment, “alcun soccorso di tardi sospiri” ‘some little help of tardy sighs.’ Bembo's speaker likewise imagines the day when his beloved will greet old age, “quando le chiome d'or caro e lucente / saranno argento, che si copre e sprezza” ‘when your hair of precious shining gold, which now is covered up and tied back, will become silver.’ In this version, however, she will see her transformed features in a cold, uncompromising mirror:

E ne lo specchio mirerete un'altra,
direte sospirando:—eh lassa, quale
oggi meco penser?

And you will see yourself as someone different in the mirror, you will say with a sigh: Alas, what memory remains with me today?

These lines signal Bembo's pride in his own classical attainments as they incorporate a direct translation from Horace's Ode 4.10: “dices ‘heu,’ quotiens te speculo videris alterum” ‘as often as you gaze in the mirror on your altered features, you shall say: “Alas!”’ The intrusion of Horace's complaint into the lexical field of Petrarch's refined and sublimated lament disrupts Petrarch's syntactic and semantic unity. On the one hand it points to Bembo's academic and largely self-conscious view that Petrarch knew less about the classical past than he himself did. On the other it leads to a comprehensive discourse. Though Petrarch refers rather vaguely to Horace's recently recovered Latin odes, Bembo applies their model to his own work with a professional exactitude.

Bembo's claim upon reconstituting a classical discourse through the work of humanists since Petrarch's era gives him an imagined advantage over his literary precursor. It expands his hypothetical resources for self-representation. At the same time it reaffirms that Bembo's deepest allegiance may have been to classical discourse itself. The dismemberment he fears is a division within the ancient language, a dispersal of it threatened by contamination and misuse at the hands of lesser authors. To save that language for the educated few who are the true wielders of power, Bembo recommends a standardized vernacular for the many. This linguistic purging acts out a crisis that displaces Bembo's amatory anxieties from an interior erotic drama to the exterior choice of Petrarch's language. It nudges him in the end toward a tightening and restraint of his emotional repertoire, leading finally to a constriction of mood and diminution of pathos.

The late “Sonnet 94,” composed between 1530 and 1535, exemplifies this constriction. It represents the speaker in a conventional oxymoronic posture “tra due,” but it reduces his beloved to the figure of a wild creature drawn from Roman elegy: “La fera che scolpita nel cor tengo, / così l'avess'io viva entro le braccia” ‘The wild creature that I hold sculpted in my heart, would that I held her so within my arms.’ In the sestet the speaker admits that he cannot curb her freedom. This admission leads to a statement of regret curiously modified by the strong adverb inutilmente ‘uselessly’:

          E so ch'io movo indarno, o penser casso,
e perdo inutilmente il dolce tempo
de la mia vita, che giamai non torna.

And I know that I act in vain, O heavy thought, and that to no avail am I losing the sweet time of my life that will never return.

The adverb virtually cancels the speaker's regret by implying the foolishness of his behavior. Any reasoned consideration of his chances for success will show their impossibility. The word inutilmente appears only once in Petrarch's canon, in sonnet 74, a poem about amatory constraint. Its opening lines echo with chiasmic repetition: “Io son già stanco di pensar sì come / i miei pensier' in voi stanchi non sono” ‘I am already weary of thinking how my thoughts of you are weariless.’ When inutilmente occurs at the climax of the first tercet, it signals a cleft between Petrarch's awareness of the futility of his pursuit and his decision nonetheless to continue, “a seguir l'orme vostre in ogni parte, / perdendo inutilmente tanti passi” ‘to follow your footsteps everywhere, wasting in vain so many steps.’ The speaker's erotic drive is compromised in the process.

The extinction of eros likewise follows in Bembo's art. The epigonic speaker feels the torment inscribed in the Petrarchan model but not the passion ignited by the lover's yearning for completion in a new language. In the absence of any perceived need to invent a different style, the erotic temper melts away. Bembo's speaker has what he wants: the text of Petrarch's poetry reified and marmorealized beyond all possibility of alteration, change, or disfigurement. Bembo's last poems, no doubt coincident with the poet's self-proclaimed seriousness about his ecclesiastical duties and his elevation to the cardinalate (1539), explicitly platonize his love.

“Sonnets 132-137,” composed probably between 1537 and 1539, address Elizabetta Massolo, a sister of Bembo's testamentary executor, in “povera vena e suono umile, a lato / beltà sì ricca e 'ngegno sì sublime” ‘an impoverished vein and humble sound in relation to so rich a beauty and so sublime a spirit as yours’ (“Sonnet 133”). The speaker all but equates his admiration for her with a literary exercise when he claims in “Sonnet 135” that Virgil himself might miss the mark in praising her, “le cui lode, e scemar del vero parmi, / foran al Mantovan troppo alto segno” ‘whose praise, and it seems to me to understate the truth, would have been too high a goal for Virgil to achieve.’ In “Sonnet 137” he explains that the source of her excellence is uncommon virtue and steadfast goodness: “La via di gir al ciel con fermo passo / m'insegna, e 'n tutto al vulgo mi ritoglie” ‘She teaches me the way to heaven with steadfast pace and in every concern she draws me away from the mob.’ For this Platonic sublimity the price that the poet must pay is self-immolation. The extinction of eros obliterates his fears, hopes, longings, and unfulfilled desires for the other.

Something of Bembo's self-effacement emerges at the end of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier.16 If ever Bembo wanted a prince to notice him, it was Giuliano whom he wanted to attract. The Medici heir represented his best hope for security, patronage, and protection, and with Medici support he could attain the literary celebrity he so ardently hoped for. When at a climactic moment in book 4 of Castiglione's dialogue Giuliano virtually ignores him, the slight has a wounding effect. It is tempting to imagine that Bembo responds by overcompensating in his famous discourse on Platonic love. The ineffectual, even rather clownish, Bembo has tried to refine a discussion about virtue and reason when he points out that continence draws upon passion (4.15). Giuliano de' Medici rejoins that “If I have heard aright, signor Ottaviano, you said that continence is an imperfect virtue because it has a part of passion in it” (4.17: Maier, p. 466, Singleton, p. 300). Giuliano has heard the words aright, but he has confused the speaker's identity by attributing the words wrongly to Ottaviano Fregoso. The Medici heir simply fails to acknowledge Bembo's presence. Within moments Bembo speaks again, this time to defend the primacy of republican government after Ottaviano has subordinated it to autocratic monarchies: “I hold that the rule of a republic is more desirable than that of a king” (4.20: Maier, p. 471, Singleton, p. 305). Once more he suffers a rhetorical check as others extol the benefits of rule by a single leader.

Castiglione proceeds to locate Bembo's discourse on Platonic love (4.50-70) in an intensely political context. Ottaviano unequivocally endorses monarchy over the rule of a republic because it is “more like that of God, who singly and alone governs the universe” (4.19: Maier, p. 470, Singleton, p. 303). At the end of his endorsement, Ottaviano painfully admits that Italy lacks a truly powerful prince, a ruler blessed with fortuna ‘good fortune,’ if not with Machiavellian virtù (4.42: Maier, p. 501, Singleton, p. 326). In the awkward fumbling that ensues, Bembo rushes into the breach to defend Ottaviano's remarks about the noble courtier as a lover. By the time he takes center stage, Bembo has become a proponent of the new order and a convert to monarchism. His claim about hierarchical degrees of love asserts “the coherence of an order so precisely constituted that, if things were in the least changed, they could not exist together, and the world would fall into ruin” (4.58: Maier, p. 523, Singleton, p. 343). In this “great fabric of the world,” as Bembo perceives it, the rule of God is best mirrored in society by the rule of one monarch over all.

What motivates Bembo's change of mind in these last pages of Castiglione's dialogue? Has this patrician Venetian humanist traded his convictions about republican civic virtue for an endorsement of the aristocratic well-being prized by his Medici friend? Or has he from the beginning conducted his affairs without regard for political consistency or ideological purity? And what is Castiglione's evaluation: does he show Bembo's contradictions in order to censure them? Or does he fail to notice the retractions and reversals in Bembo's performance? Did neither he nor Bembo, who revised Castiglione's manuscript before its publication, try to edit out the inconsistencies? Or did Bembo approve Castiglione's fictional representation of him because that fiction firmly cemented his dedication to the Medici at all costs?17

Bembo, of course, had everything to gain from a show of loyalty and affection to Giuliano de' Medici. Beyond his youthful ties to Florence during his father's ambassadorship, Bembo seemed a genuinely good companion of Giuliano at Urbino from 1506 to 1512. After the Medici restoration in September 1512, Bembo declared active support. Unusual benefits, however, came from neither Giuliano nor his brother. Though Bembo accepted a secretarial appointment from the latter after his papal election in March 1513, and though he pursued hopes of ecclesiastical advancement by taking holy orders in December 1522, he received no direct recompense in either capacity. Nor did he win recompense from their nephew Lorenzo, upon whom the family's leadership devolved in 1516, nor from their cousin Giulio, later Pope Clement VII (1523-34), to whom he dedicated the Prose della volgar lingua in 1524 as a major effort to certify the cultural hegemony of Florence. By September 1530, when the Medici were again in exile from Florence, he appears to have abandoned his hopes for the family when he became historiographer of Venice. Nine years later at age sixty-nine, he received the cardinal's hat from Pope Paul III, and finally a bishopric in July 1541. Bembo's struggle to be heard in the Book of the Courtier, his efforts to gain recognition by taking the floor with an edifying discourse on love, find their rhetorical correlative in the petrarchification of his own poetry. That Vittoria Colonna famously circulated Castiglione's manuscript in the early 1520s against Bembo's wishes is only a minor blow. He never had full control of it anyway.

Notes

  1. Data from Vittorio Cian, Un decennio della vita di Pietro Bembo (1521-1531) (Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1885); Mario Santoro, Pietro Bembo (Naples: Morano, 1937), pp. 11-70.

  2. For a stronger emphasis on Bembo's evolved thinking, see Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., “Il pane del grano e la saggina: Pietro Bembo's 1505 Asolani Revisited,” The Italianist 12 (1992): 5-23. Notably Bembo composed Gli Asolani at the time of Savonarola's downfall and Soderini's rise, events auguring new turns in the life of Florence. He revised it during the second Medici exile and published it upon the second Medici restoration.

  3. Examples from Bruno Migliorini, The Italian Language, trans. T. Gwynfor Griffith (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), pp. 134-39.

  4. Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 109, 116, 147-50, 175, 223; and Carlo Dionisotti, Gli umanisti e il volgare fra quattro e cinquecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968), pp. 1-14, 123-30.

  5. Gino Belloni, Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo: Studi sul commento umanistico-rinascimentale (Padua: Antenore, 1992), pp. 72-73 and 109-18; Giovanni Pillinini, “Traguardi linguistici nel Petrarca Bembino del 1501,” Studi di filoglogia italiana 34 (1981): 57-76.

  6. Cesare Segre, Lingua stile e società (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), pp. 355-82.

  7. Cian, Un decennio, pp. 46-57.

  8. Wayne A. Rebborn, Courtly Performances (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 183-84; Piero Floriani, Bembo e Castiglione: Studi sul classicismo del cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1976), pp. 104-5.

  9. See Robert Hall, The Italian Questione della Lingua (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages, 1942), pp. 13-15; and Mario Vitale, La questione della lingua (Palermo: Palumbo, 1960), pp. 45-48.

  10. For the development of Latin philology and sixteenth-century efforts to model an analysis of the vernacular on it see Aldo D. Scaglione, Classical Theory of Composition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 126-50; and Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Misure del classicismo rinascimentale (Naples: Liguori, 1967).

  11. Dionisotti suggests that Bembo nonetheless knew De vulgari eloquentia imperfectly in his edition of Bembo, Prose e rime, pp. 128-29, note 1. See also Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 132-37, and R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 434.

  12. For applications to Bembo's own poetry see Dante Della Terza, “Imitatio: Theory and Practice. The Example of Bembo the Poet,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (1971): 119-41, pp. 134-36; Giorgio Santangelo, Il Bembo critico e il principio d'imitazione (Naples: Morano, 1937), pp. 103-9; and Giorgio Santangelo, Il Petrarquismo del Bembo e di altri poeti del 500 (Rome: Istituto Editoriale Cultural Europanea, 1962), pp. 129-62.

  13. James Mirollo, Mannerism and Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 131-32.

  14. David Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 19-21.

  15. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 113-37.

  16. See Guido Arbizzoni, L'ordine e la persuasione: Pietro Bembo Personaggio nelCortegiano” (Urbino: Quattroventi, 1983).

  17. For a reading that plots Bembo's differences from Castiglione along Aristotelian and Thomistic rather than Neoplatonic lines, see Theodore Cachey, “In and Out of the Margins of a Renaissance Controversy: Castiglione in the Second Asolani (1530),” Rivista di letteratura italiana 3 (1985): 253-62.

Primary Texts Cited

Bembo, Pietro. Gli Asolani. Trans. Rudolf B. Gottfried. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954.

Bembo, Pietro. Prose e rime. Ed. Carlo Dionisotti. 2d ed. Turin: UTET, 1966.

Brucioli, Antonio. Sonetti, canzoni, et triomphi di M. Francesco Petrarca con breue dichiaratione, & annotatione di Antonio Brucioli. Venice: Alessandro Brucioli e i frategli, 1548.

Castelvetro, Ludovico. On the Art of Poetry. Ed. and trans. Andrew Bongiorno. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984.

Castelvetro, Lodovico. Le rime del Petrarca breuemente sposte per Lodouico Casteluetro. Basel: Pietro de Sedabonis, 1582.

Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Charles Singleton. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959.

Castiglione, Baldassare. Il libro del cortegiano. Ed. Bruno Maier. 2d ed. Turin: UTET, 1964.

Daniello, Bernardino. La poetica. Venice: Giovanni Antonio de Nicolini da Sabio, 1536. Reprint in Poetiken des Cinquecento. Ed. Bernard Fabian. Munich: Fink, 1968.

Daniello, Bernardino. Sonetti, canzoni, e triomphi di messer Francesco Petrarcha con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello da Lucca. Venice: Giovanniantonio de Nicolini da Sabio, 1541.

Daniello, Bernardino. Sonetti canzoni e triomphi di M. Francesco Petrarca, con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello da Lucca. Venice: Pietro e Gioanmaria Fratelli de Nicolini da Sabio, 1549.

Fausto da Longiano, Sebastiano. Il Petrarcha col commento di M. Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano. Venice: Francesco di Alessandro Bindoni e Mapheo Pasini, 1532.

Ficino, Marsilio. De vita: Three Books on Life. Ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989.

Freud, Sigmund. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-75.

Gesualdo, Giovanni Andrea. Il Petrarcha colla spositione di Misser Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo. Venice: Giovann' Antonio di Nicolini & fratelli da Sabbio, 1533.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Trans. Thomas G. Bergin. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947.

Petrarch, Francesco. Canzoniere. Ed. Gianfranco Contini. 3d. ed. Turin: Einaudi, 1964.

Petrarch, Francesco. Petrarch's Lyric Poems. Ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Petrarch, Francesco. Le rime. Ed. Giosuè Carducci and Severino Ferrari. Florence: Sansoni, 1899.

Sylvano da Venafro. Il Petrarca col commento di M. Syluano da Venaphro. Naples: Antonio Iouino and Matthio Canzer, 1533.

Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Artists. Trans. George Bull. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

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