MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES

Bembo was preeminently a humanist: devoted to the studia humanitatis , a philologist and rhetorician, student of Latin and Greek, a stylist concerned to express wisdom through eloquence. Living during the ascendance of vernacular languages, however, made Bembo a liminal figure with a foot in both camps; he wrote voluminously in Latin and Italian, particularly favoring the humanist genres of letter and dialogue. Erasmus praised Bembo’s Latin style as the best kind of Ciceronianism. In an exchange of letters on literary imitation (1512), Bembo agreed with Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola in distinguishing emulation from imitation; one should attempt to outdo one’s models. But, in contrast to Pico’s eclecticism, he maintained it was necessary to follow a single model, in poetry Virgil and in prose Cicero. When preparing to write his history of the republic, Bembo studied not the Venetian archives but Caesar’s prose style.

In his editorial activities and his own writings, however, Bembo was concerned to establish Trecento authors and the Tuscan dialect as the “classical” standards of Italian literature. For Aldus, Bembo edited the texts of Petrarch (1501) and Dante (1502). These were issued in the same octavo format and italic type as the Aldine classical texts; and, in his reliance on manuscripts and his linguistic scrupulousness, Bembo set new editorial standards. Bembo’s fullest consideration of the vernacular occurs in the Prose della volgar lingua , a Ciceronian dialogue set in Venice in December 1502 on three successive days. The speakers are Federigo Fregoso, Giulano de’ Medici (both, like Bembo himself, speakers in Castiglione’s* Il Cortegiano ), his friend Ercole Strozzi, and his brother Carlo Bembo. Through Carlo emerges the argument that the Tuscan of an earlier age should be the foundation of a vernacular literary style, with Boccaccio as the model for prose and Petrarch for poetry. Bembo’s authority as Petrarch’s foremost advocate was reinforced by the example of his own Rime , sonnets and canzoni that often are Petrarchan to a fault. Indeed, Bembo’s conscious emulation of Petrarch is foreshadowed by his first publication, the dialogue De Aetna (1496), which describes his exploration of Mount Etna in Sicily, evoking Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux.

Spending nearly five impressionable years in Florence undoubtedly germinated Bembo’s veneration of Tuscan and his attachment to the Medici family. It also would have brought him into the milieu of Florentine Neoplatonism; and we know that he met Angelo Poliziano in Venice (1491). Bembo’s most notable literary accomplishment was Gli Asolani , translating Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium, De Amore , from philosophic to imaginative literature. Set in the garden of the palazzo at Asolo, the dialogue occupies three days and three books. Ciceronian in style and Tuscan in language, it consists of long monologues by three speakers, Perottino, a passionate and disillusioned lover; Gismondo, who argues that human love, rightly conceived, can be happy and is indeed necessary to society; and Lavinello, who recounts the lessons he learned from a hermit about the ascent to divine love. The structure of the dialogue itself embodies the ascent pattern by its progression through speakers who exemplify the three kinds of love—sensual, rational, and spiritual. Gli Asolani went through at least twenty-two editions by 1600 and was translated into both French and Spanish.

None of Bembo’s major works were translated into English during the Tudor age. His direct influence would have been limited to humanists engaged in their own skirmishes over the vexed topics of Ciceronianism, imitation, and use of the vernacular. In shades from direct to oblique his championing of Petrarch affected the phenomenon of English Petrarchism; at the direct end, Wyatt* paraphrased one of Bembo’s poems. Later, Bembo’s learning made a literal entrance to England when Sir Henry Wotton, the ambassador to Venice, purchased a large portion of his library (1617–20), now mostly at Eton College. For ordinary Englishmen, however, undoubtedly the most vivid impression of Bembo comes from The Book of the Courtier in Hoby’s* translation, asserting the superiority of letters to arms and discoursing on platonic love even more eloquently than the real man had done. Thus, Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry , extols the poet who was also a cardinal and sheds doubt on his idea that poets “were the first bringers-in of all civility.”