Bembo, Pietro

BEMBO, PIETRO. - I. LIFE. - Born in Venice on May 20, 1470 to Bernardo, a politician of the Venetian Republic, who knew how to appreciate good studies and took his son with him on embassies to the courts and cities of Italy. Pietro became passionate about the literary life of his time and made himself an excellent connoisseur of Latin, and in order to learn Greek from Constantine Lascaris he traveled as far as Sicily. At the court of Ferrara he met Lucrezia Borgia, and at Urbino in 1507 he gave proof at that court of his courtly accomplishment and at the same time of his skill as a man of letters. Then, together with Jacopo Sadoleto, he was papal secretary to Leo X; and a part of the letters he wrote at that time he published later, revised in style, in the collection of his Epistolae. In Rome he lived with a Roman woman whom he designated by the name Morosina, whom he then kept with him and by whom he had children, and among them was that Torquato who attended to the edition of his father's works. B. had obtained benefices in the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, in which he had to take religious vows, though reluctantly. Having left Rome in 1521, he withdrew to live in Padua and in a villa of his on the Brenta which he called Noniano, with long stays in Venice, holding a literary circle with friends, collecting precious manuscripts mostly of a literary character, and art objects. In 1530 his Republic elected him official historian; and indeed he compiled in Latin, and then translated into Italian, the Historia Veneta, as a continuation of that of M. Ant. Sabellico, which covers the period from 1487 to 1513. The high esteem that B. had acquired throughout the cultured world of that time induced Paul III, despite the opposition of the most austere men of his court, to create him cardinal in the Consistory of Dec. 20, 1538 and to publish him on the following March 19. B., who was 68 years old, greatly welcomed this long-awaited appointment, went to Rome in Oct. and also received the sacred orders. He received the diocese of Gubbio on July 29, 1541, then on Feb. 18, 1544 that of Bergamo, and he also thought of the possibility of becoming Pope; he died instead in Rome on Jan. 19, 1547, equally admired both for his Latin writings (epistles and poems) and for those in the vernacular.

Pio Paschini

II. THE MAN OF LETTERS

The question of how one should write represented for Bembo the "labor vitae" then, as it would three centuries later for Manzoni: and the two of them spent roughly the same number of years, the one in constructing the theory of the illustrious style, the other in dismantling it. The Prose della volgar lingua are a treatise in dialogue form (as were all treatises of that time, for that matter) imagined as being held in Venice over three successive evenings in December 1512, in which Carlo Bembo, the author's brother and his spokesman, Giuliano de' Medici and Ercole Strozzi take part. There is an extreme humanist right, represented by the latter, which flatly denies the vernacular the right and the possibility of rising to the status of a literary language, inasmuch as it is not a language but the debris of a language, and there is an extreme left still grosso modo faithful to the Dantean theory of the illustrious vernacular. Between the two extremes Bembo claims the rights of Tuscan, or rather of Florentine, usage. And it is a thesis that matters in the history of the Italian language, provided one is not misled about its meaning, or rather its scope; Bembo arrived at this so romantic and Manzonian theory by arguments anything but romantic and Manzonian, and instead of the rights of spoken Florentine or of the people he endorsed those of written Florentine and of men of letters. But on the point of style Bembo's humanism regained the upper hand in theory and in practice. After conceding so much to the dignity of the vernacular word, he conceded nothing to the genius of the vernacular word; and thus from the conviction that it too must harmonize with the forms of classical, that is Latin, rhetoric, he derived a kind of vernacular Ciceronianism, that is, that Latinate or elevated manner of writing. The only one who, thanks to Bembo, managed to escape from the meshes of Bembism was the lyric Petrarch. By the humanists he had been disdained as Provençalizing and barbarous; but now, raised to the status of a classic of the vernacular by Bembo's authority, the right or the obligation to imitate him in place of Horace and Catullus established itself of its own accord. The book of his apotheosis and therefore of the full classicization of the great fourteenth-century vernacular literature, in spirit and form, was the famous treatise on love in the form of a vernacular dialogue, Gli Asolani, written before 1502 and published in 1505. Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus, holds court at Asolo for the marriage of one of her ladies-in-waiting and, over three days, three Venetian noblemen and three gentlewomen debate love, the source of every sorrow for Perottino and of every good for Gismondo. But Lavinello recognizes in the former's love sensual love, in the latter's Platonic love; and to this the moving hymn of the epilogue is devoted. For this philosophizing a good knowledge of Petrarch sufficed, along with that measure of spurious Platonism which had perpetuated itself in courtly circles since the days of Andreas Capellanus. Not for nothing are Gli Asolani dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia. The tone is grave and forever announces profound things; but the content is easy and almost frivolous, with an effect of contrast that intentionally does not reach irony; yet for all that it grazes it. A true Petrarch in the eighteenth century, he too suspended between leisure and business, between the love of solitude and that of worldly successes, between temptations and the need for God, Bembo does not write masterpieces, but he never neglects the "labor limae" and is a marvelous versifier. They say the sense of harmony is a gift of Italians; but he possesses it in a particular way. He transfused it in Petrarchan fashion into his life as well.

Giuseppe Toffanin