He remained until 1509, except for the period of his studies in Padua.
In the shadow of the Medici he lived in Rome and Florence. After the assassination of Alessandro de' Medici in 1537 he returned to Belluno. He died in Padua in 1558. He participated in the extreme ideas and enthusiasms of humanism, those that characterized the Rome of Leo X. He always used Latin. By his own choice, the vernacular did not derive from it, but was an inferior language, coeval with it, reluctant to admit that it had now taken its place, or was destined to take its place as its successor. From this humanistic piety, which was also consecrated by his priesthood, there emanated his Italian and Catholic sentiment. In the hymn to St. John the Evangelist there is a moving invocation to the Saint in favor of the Latin homeland. He wrote a short poem *Leucippus*, five books of amorous elegies, *Poemata* (Basel 1538), *Amorum libri quinque et alia poemata* (Venice 1549). The epistle *Studiorum conditio* represents the most notable pre-Aristotelian poetic art after that of Vida. Characteristic for its melancholic accentuation is the work *Contarenus, sive de literatorum infelicitate* (Venice 1620), which is in fact a brief literary history where writers are seen in the perspective of unhappiness. And yet, despite this participation in the enthusiasms of the humanists, what inspired him most deeply and best recommends him to poetry is a sentiment that distinguishes him from them. Ancient rhymes had been loved by Petrarch and by the whole of the fourteenth century; but with a love that might be called romantic and pre-Romantic. The taste for their scientific study, collection, and cataloguing, which would give rise to modern museums, now dawns with Bembo and Pierio. This is the merit of the *Antiquitates Bellunenses*, which V.B. compiled by studying the relics of his native land. Even richer in a sensitivity, then still embryonic among scholars, are the *Hieroglyphica, sive de sacris Aegyptiorum aliarumque gentium litteris commentarii*, 58 books, where, although without original research, he gathers what antiquity has handed down about those ancient symbols. They were soon translated and reprinted many times; they pleased the following century, which, loving erudition for erudition’s sake but skeptically, and as a pastime, believed it recognized a precursor in the author of the *Hieroglyphica*. At the origin of these works, however, was the old humanistic enthusiasm: and one can still sense II.