Last week’s post on the quintessential Venetian humanist Andrea Navagero (1483-1529) connected Navagero to an important network of intellectuals. One of these was Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), who mourned the loss of his friend and commissioned a bronze medal with his bust and the same vignette included in the collection of Navagero’s works, ‘Impraessum Venetiis amicorum cura’. No series on Venice would be complete, however, without one that addressed Bembo himself, and his exceptional contribution to Italian language and literature.

Valerio Belli, Cast bronze medal for Pietro Bembo, 1532. British Museum, London, 1875,1004.10. © The Trustees of the British Museum; CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Pietro Bembo was born on 20 May 1470, into an old noble family that had been among the first to establish themselves in Venice in the middle of the fifth century. The family was dedicated to the city and active in its growth, with numerous members of the Bembo family being included in Sabellico’s History of Venice, published in 1504 (see a fine copy of Sabellico’s Rapsodiae historiarum Enneadum, printed by Bade in 1513/16, here).

Pietro’s father, Bernardo, was a humanist who collected manuscripts, including those of Dante and Petrarch. He was also a successful diplomat and statesman who, as Venetian ambassador to Florence, grew close to, among other notable figures, Lorenzo de' Medici and Marsilio Ficino along with his Neoplatonic circle.

Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man with a Roman Medal (possibly Bernardo Bembo), c. 1480. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen. Public domain.

It was on his second assignment in Florence in 1478 that Bernardo brought along his young son Pietro, then eight years old. He wanted his son to learn Tuscan, and the move would ultimately have enormous consequences for the Italian language.

Much of Pietro’s studies were thereafter split between Padua and Venice, and he went to Sicily to work on his Greek in 1492. There he met Nicola Bruno (known as Cola), who would become his private secretary and lifelong companion, and he began his literary career by translating an important text of the Greek rhetorical tradition, Gorgias’s Encomium to Helen, into the generally more readable Latin.

At the end of a strenuous 14-month period of study, Bembo also climbed Mount Etna. This provided the basis for his first written work, composed upon his return in 1494: a short account of his stay in Sicily and ascent of Etna written in Latin, in a dialogue format between him and his father. It was published by Aldus Manutius in 1496 (1495 by the Venetian calendar) and signals the beginning of an extremely important friendship and collaboration between the two men.

Manutius had arrived in Venice in 1493 and established a Greek-speaking, intellectual circle that met together and would become the New Academy in 1501. Upon his return from Sicily, Bembo became a member of the Academy, as indeed would Navagero. Bembo also gave Aldus Lascaris’s Greek grammar, which Aldus published in February of 1495.

De Aetna was the first book published by Manutius in the Latin alphabet, and with it he introduced a new roman typeface called, appropriately, Bembo. The typeface was created for Manutius by Francesco Griffo (1450-1518), who was also responsible for creating the famous Aldine italic. In 1499, Griffo modified the Bembo typeface slightly and it is this modified version that was used in the celebrated Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

In 1501, Manutius revolutionized book printing with his libri portatiles in formam Enchiridii: classical texts issued in the highly portable octavo size and printed in Griffo’s small italic type that allowed for more compact text that was both highly clear and highly legible. The series was inaugurated with the celebrated edition of Virgil, printed in April 1501, soon followed by editions of Horace (May 1501), Juvenal (August 1501), and other Greek and Latin writers.

The octavo format can in fact be traced back to the Bembo library. Prior to this, the format had been used mainly for religious books. In his address to Bembo in the 1514 edition of Virgil, Aldus remarks how he was inspired to expand its use by the smaller format manuscripts of classical texts in the Bembo library. Indeed, Bembo can rightly be defined as a sort of alter ego of Manutius, and it was he who showed Aldus a Roman coin with a dolphin and anchor carved on one side, an episode that marks the ‘birth’ of Aldus’s anchor and dolphin device, the most famous emblem in the history of printing.

The Bembo family also provided manuscripts of Petrarch and Dante that helped bring about Aldus’s next revolutionary publications: pocket-sized editions of Le cose volgari di Messer Francesco Petrarca, published in July 1501, and Dante’s Commedia, untraditionally titled Le Terze rime di Dante, which appeared in August 1502 and whose publication had been announced by the printer in his postscript to Petrarch. Both works were edited by Bembo who, for the first time in the history of philology, based his editorial work on the collation of different manuscripts rather than on the authority of a single codex, as had previously been the case.

The decision to include two masterpieces of Italian literature in the new octavo series along with works by classical authors was extremely significant. For the first time two Italian vernacular writers were elevated to classical heights, and their works were edited with the same degree of care and scrupulousness as that given to the antique texts. Now not only could classical texts be read as easily as prayer books, but so too could these modern classics, and in new, more accurate versions than had previously been available.

Raphael, Portrait of Pietro Bembo, ca. 1504. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Public domain. — Raphael, *Portrait of Pietro Bembo*, ca. 1504. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Public domain.

The collection of Petrarch’s Italian poems – including the Canzoniere (or, as the poet himself referred to them, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta) and the Trionfi – which came to light in July 1501 ‘nelle case d’Aldo Romano’ – was especially groundbreaking, being the first of the octavo vernacular works set in italic type and employing the new punctuation invented for De Aetna.

The Petrarch edition also represents Bembo’s desire to unite the values of humanist scholarship with the pinnacle of the vernacular literary tradition, stressing uniformity in both language and spelling. He had been writing Petrarchan lyric poetry and it was to Petrarch that he turned in advocating a new standard for literary Italian.

In the Middle Ages, texts were written in Latin and various local vernaculars were spoken throughout the Italian peninsula (aswas the case throughout Europe). With the fourteenth century, great variety developed in literary languages. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio all influenced the language of contemporary authors, but so too did popular local or regional forms, and Latinization was also mixed in to elevate style. By Bembo’s time, the idea of vernacular literature was gaining in importance, and with the rise of the book, a more consistent language was needed if publishers were to create books for people across different regions (cf. B. Richardson, “The diffusion of literature in Renaissance Italy,” Literary Cultures and the Material Book, London 2007, p. 177.)

While figures like Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), who portrayed Bembo in his Libro del cortegiano, felt local vernaculars needed to be considered in creating the new standard, others, first and foremost Bembo himself, felt that the literary classics—specifically the verse of Petrarch and the prose of Boccaccio—should provide the language basis of the canon moving forward. Bembo’s position proved most influential, and his edited texts of Petrarch and Dante were fundamental in shaping new editorial standards for the vernacular.

We present here the Aldine Petrarch in the exceedingly rare Lyonnais counterfeit, in its first issue. This is one of the three earliest of all Aldine counterfeits, alongside those of the Virgil and Juvenal, and offers a testament to the importance of the Bembo-Aldine editions in the dissemination of Petrarch’s works (see a post that considers the importance of this counterfeit edition in more detail here.)

In layout and content, the counterfeit Petrarch is nearly identical to the genuine Venetian edition, although the Lyonnais replica lacks Aldus’s address to the reader, the errata, and more importantly the colophon bearing the printer’s name.

Importantly, the closely contemporary Lyonnais piracy represents the first appearance in print of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) in France, and significantly contributed to the growth of the poet’s popularity outside of Italy. The first ‘true’ French Petrarch would only be published in 1545.

Bembo edited the Petrarch while working on Gli Asolani, another milestone in Italian Renaissance literary history. In 1504 the Venetian Senate had granted Manutius a ten-year privilege for printing Bembo’s work, and the Asolani appeared in March 1505.

Written by the Venetian patrician between 1497 and 1504, the work is divided into three Books and presents a philosophical dialogue on the nature of love. The fictional conversation is set at Asolo, near Treviso, in the villa of Caterina Cornaro, the former queen of Cyprus. After having examined various conceptions of love, Bembo proposes the idea of neo-platonic or spiritual love, as a contemplative desire for an ideal and divine beauty.

Bembo, Pietro (1470-1547). Gli Asolani di Messer Pietro Bembo. Venice, Aldo Manuzio, March 1505. See the full description of this copy here. — Bembo, Pietro (1470-1547). *Gli Asolani di Messer Pietro Bembo*. Venice, Aldo Manuzio, March 1505.
See the full description of this copy here.

Significantly, Gli Asolani is written consistently in imitation of the fourteenth-century literary Florentine Bembo would advocate, and alternates between prose and verse, based on the model of Dante’s Vita Nuova.

This wide-margined copy of the first edition, in its first issue, was also once held in the library of Count Leonardo Vitetti (1894-1973), Italian Ambassador to the United Nations.

The first edition, especially in its rare first issue, was a ‘must’ for the great nineteenth-century book collectors, as the fine copy presented here, magnificently bound by the Parisian binder Bozérian the Younger, well shows.

In its first issue the Asolani was introduced by Bembo’s dedicatory epistle to Lucrezia Borgia, wife of Duke Alfonso I d’Este, dated Venice, 1 August 1504 (fols. a1v-a2r). Bembo had met her during his second stay in Ferrara in 1502-03. It was also in Ferrara that he met Ludovico Ariosto, who proclaimed Bembo’s influence in the language of his Orlando Furioso.

This address to Borgia was almost immediately suppressed, and the two pages left blank. The reasons for its removal so shortly after the publication have continually been discussed, and some scholars have suggested that Bembo and Duchess Lucretia may have been lovers. Copies that include – as in the present volume – the final leaf n1, with the errata (‘Errori fatti nel stampare’), are of the greatest rarity.

Gli Asolani enjoyed enormous popularity in the Cinquecento, and already in July 1505 was reissued by the Florentine printers Giunta, despite Aldus’s ten-year privilege.

In April 1515, immediately after the privilege had ended, Alessandro Paganini published it again in his innovative and compact 'long 24mo' format, with text closely following that of 1505.

This publication – along with an edition of Petrarch’s Rime and one of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia – inaugurated Paganini's celebrated 24°-format series of literary masterpieces in Italian vernacular, which, like the Aldine octavo volumes, never failed to attract the attention of collectors and bibliophiles. And, like the Aldine editions, they helped further establish Bembo’s authoritative position on the literary vernacular.

The 1515 edition is dedicated – like the Aldine edition of 1505 – to Lucrezia Borgia, and Paganini now added his own dedication to Bembo himself.

Dante's Commedia followed in 1516, standing as an exemplary achievement of Paganini ‘vernacular library’. Bembo may well have contributed to this effort as well.

The last three leaves contain a double-page and three full-page woodcuts, all appearing here for the first time. The double-page woodcut, showing the plan of Hell, is signed by the engraver 'I.A.', possibly the Venetian artist and cartographer Giovanni Andrea Vavassore, also known as Guadagnino.

“It is believed that Bembo was active with publishers in Venice at his time. According to his friend Trifon Gabriele, Bembo was responsible for the analysis of the structure in Paganini's 1515 edition of Dante and therefore, presumably, of the structural analyses of all three realms in Aldus's Dante, also of 1515. It has been suggested that Paganini pirated the tree of sins which Bembo drew for Aldus. However Bembo and Paganini seem to have been on good terms since Paganini republished Gli Asolani in 1515, in his new and elegant pocket book size collection of Latin and Italian classics [...] Although his copyright had expired after ten years, Aldus reprinted Gli Asolani himself, also in 1515” (C. Kidwell, Pietro Bembo. Lover, Linguist, Cardinal, Montreal-London 2004, p. 183).

Indeed, by this time the Bembo-Aldine collaboration had long ceased, and his interests had generally moved further afield from Venice. Bembo had moved around, spent time in the court of Urbino, and in 1508 had embarked on an ecclesiastical career; he moved to Rome in 1512, and was appointed papal secretary to Leo X in 1513. There he travelled in the same distinguished circles as Raphael and Vittoria Colonna, and fell in love with Morosina della Torre. The couple moved to Padua in 1522 and ultimately had three children together.

In 1513, he also published De imitatione, advocating a standard for Latin based on the work of Cicero, and in 1525 he published his Prose della volgar lingua (Prose in the vernacular tongue), advocating the Tuscan basis for Italian literary language long ago promoted through the works he published with Aldus some two decades earlier.

Having left the papal service in 1519 due to poor health, he turned to collecting art and books, and his household in Padua became a meeting place for various cultural figures. He also began writing the history of Venice in 1530, which was finally published in 1551, and was appointed librarian at St. Mark’s Cathedral shortly thereafter.

Bembo was made cardinal in 1539, Bishop of Gubbio in 1541, and received the diocese of Bergamo in 1544, the same year he was called back to Rome.

Titian, Portrait of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, ca. 1540. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Public domain.

In fact he had little interest in theology, and had long shown an openness to thoughtful discussion about Luther’s views, but his status was a reflection of his great contribution to culture and scholarship. In later years he did however grow more invested in these appointments. Working ceaselessly, it was also during these final years that he completed his history of Venice.

A portrait by Titian, preeminent painter of the Venetian Renaissance, is an apt image to end with. Painted shortly after he was made cardinal in 1539, it shows Bembo in the red biretta and cape of that appointment. Aged and grey, he stands tall with intent eyes, a giant of the Renaissance, still intrigued with the world around him and open to intellectual exchange and debate.

How to cite this information

Julia Stimac, "Pietro Bembo and the Literary Vernacular," 5 May 2021, www.prphbooks.com/blog/bembo-venice. Accessed [date].

This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.