The Italian humanist, poet, and historian Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) was the most influential man of letters during the High Renaissance in Italy.Pietro Bembo was born in Venice. His learned father, Ber...
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In the following excerpt from a letter to his friend Thomas Moore, Byron praises the correspondence between Bembo and Lucrezia Borgia as “the prettiest love-letters in the world.”
Ver...
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In the excerpt below, Navarrete argues that the Prose della volgar lingua “contains the first overt application of imitation theory … to the vernacular.” In the process of applyin...
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In the essay below, Braden analyzes conventions of Petrarchan love poetry that Bembo employs in his letters to Lucrezia Borgia and Maria Savorgnan.
Older historicist studies of literature usually m...
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In the following essay, Richardson traces how Bembo circulated his poems in manuscript while at the same time he “set about using the resources of the Venetian printing industry in order to con...
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In the following excerpt, Gottfried relates Gli Asolani to events in Bembo's life—notably his three love affairs—and minimizes the influence of Platonism on the conception of love...
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In the essay below, Terpening examines Bembo's use of mythological stories in Gli Asolani as instructional devices.
Since the publication of Burckhardt's seminal work on the Cultur de...
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In the following excerpt, Nichols judges “Benacus” one of Bembo's finest poems in Latin.
The most influential figure of the generation of Latin poets which reached its literary...
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The following excerpt is taken from the introduction to Salemi's English translation of the erotic poem “Priapus.” The critic focuses on the lascivious imagery to demonstrate that...
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The following excerpt is taken from the introduction to Salemi's English translation of six of Bembo's poems dealing with the god Faunus. Salemi provides background on the mythological f...
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In this excerpt, Kilpatrick introduces his English translation of De Aetna, Bembo's first Latin dialogue, which was originally published in 1496. Kilpatrick stresses the work's demonstra...
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In the essay below, Delaney argues that while Gli Asolani is ostensibly a philosophical examination of the nature of virtuous love, the work evolves into an experiment in the art of rhetoric, as each ...
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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 po...
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Pietro Bembo
Letter by Lord Byron
