Pietro Bembo Research Articles

Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna by Ramie Targoff

Reviewed by: Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna by Ramie Targoff Marjorie Och Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna. By Ramie Targoff. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. Pp. x, 342. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-374-14094-6.) The title of Ramie Targoff's biography of Vittoria Colonna, Renaissance Woman, alludes to Jacob Burckhardt's celebration of the Renaissance Man. And as Targoff reminds the reader, Burckhardt considered Colonna "the most famous woman of Italy" (p. 8). Vittoria Colonna's fame today rests, for the general audience of this biography, with her friendship with Michelangelo. Targoff goes beyond that expectation and places Colonna within a Renaissance society that identified greatness in family connections and personal accomplishments. Burckhardt would recognize the Vittoria Colonna we meet in these pages and delight in the details of her Renaissance life. But writing the life of an early modern woman is problematic. Like most women of her time, Vittoria's life is known to us primarily through connections her family made for her for the family's profit. It was the death of her husband, Ferrante Francesco d'Avalos, in 1525 that allowed Vittoria to engage as an individual in her own right, or at least as much "right" as a woman could then possess. [End Page 547] Targoff presents Colonna as a significant member of notable courts and ecclesiastical centers. Colonna came of age when it was more likely for a female child to receive some level of education. One gathers from Colonna's later accomplishments as a poet praised by humanists Pietro Bembo and Paolo Giovio that the young Vittoria voraciously consumed biblical and classical texts and developed a critical ear for language. Further, Colonna's friendship and correspondence with Michelangelo suggests her eye was no less cultivated, and Targoff's analysis of their correspondence suggests that Colonna was a demanding as well as discerning patron. The location of Colonna's coming of age was equally auspicious. The heart of Christian Europe, Rome, had long been the center of Colonna family power. Colonna was aware of the secularism of early sixteenth-century popes and was deeply engaged with compatriots who sought Church reform. Targoff presents Colonna as boldly writing of her Christian faith and desire for directness of communication with God. Colonna's writings on the importance of faith combined with good works support Targoff's view that Colonna not only promoted the teachings of her close friends, Bernardino Ochino and Reginald Pole, but also was surely aware of the work of Martin Luther and Juan Valdés. Targoff compellingly presents Colonna as more emotional and sensitive, and hence more human, than the figure we encounter in traditional academic texts. One example stands out. While Colonna shared her poetry with friends in manuscript form, as was customary in the sixteenth century, her sonnets were not printed until a "pirated edition" of 1538 (p. 161). As the first published female poet, Colonna could have responded with trepidation to her sonnets receiving public scrutiny. According to Pietro Bembo, Colonna felt she deserved "'the injury and villainy . . . for worrying about vain things'" (p. 166). Targoff accepts Bembo's account as accurately representing Colonna's response, writing that it was "an act of self-flagellation" to have taken personal joy in her writing. According to Targoff, "the printing of the poems seemed to her a just punishment for wasting her time in the first place" on "'vain things'" (p. 167). But Bembo wrote what his culture expected: that Colonna felt some shame or guilt in being presented in such a public manner. We have no record of Colonna's response to this publication, but she did not stop sharing her sonnets even as it became clear they would be published. The first and still essential biography of Colonna in English is Maud F. Jerrold's Vittoria Colonna, with some account of her friends and her times (1906), which, like Julia Cartwright Ady's Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475–1497, a study of the Renaissance (1899) and Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, 1474–1539, a study of the Renaissance (1903), raised public awareness of great women in history for a British...

The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity by Johanna Hanink

204 PHOENIX with the image of the mountain itself. As Williams argues at the beginning of Chapter Six, Etna’s role may be compared with the status of the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s novel (221–222). Even as it looms over the entirety of the work, the symbol varies in its meaning for different characters. For Pietro, the volcano is violent, sublime, and poetic, “a self-projection” (223) that strengthens his identification with wild spaces outside the Venetian cursus. Pietro’s Etna contrasts sharply both with the more rationalist profile of the volcano of Bembo père and with the tidy, ordered space of Bernardo’s villa. This reading of Pietro’s volcanic self-fashioning is persuasive. Hence it comes as a slight surprise, when, in the final sentence of the chapter, Williams asks: “does he not in a sense violate the Etnean topography by injecting his own dream into what is, simply, there?” (268). The query seems to back away from the book’s otherwise robust recognition of the plasticity of Etna’s topography, and of how Pietro’s self-projection imposes itself, not on some opaque, pre-representational terrain that is simply “there,” but on the dense matrix of prior representations Williams has hitherto deftly unpacked. The complaint is a minor one, however, given that the book’s study of Pietro’s “fusing of philology and topography” (264) and the framing of both within the broader Venetian spatial turn are so rich and compelling. Similar praise is due to the closing discussion of collecting practices (Chapter Seven), as exemplified by the memory-legacy of the Bembo collection and Pietro’s residence at Padua, which, as Williams suggests, might be seen as an architectural portrait of its owner (272). The Bembo collection can be read as a visual corollary for the De Aetna’s storehouse of textual memories and naturalist knowledge, its implicit self-portraiture, the antiquarian travel it represents, and the aesthetic refinement of its typeface. In a broader perspective, Williams considers both collecting practices and (post-)classical literary texts in terms of the increased possibilities for print dissemination and the expanding horizons of travel and communication in early modernity (292). Williams’s monograph encompasses spatiality, the materiality of books, and interactions between the textual and the visual within a holistic vision that is at once scrupulously rigorous on the level of scholarly detail and audacious in scope of inquiry. Instances of individual argumentation are meticulously laid out with diplomatic transparency in a chiselled prose whose stylistic qualities cohere nicely with the elegant Bembo font appropriately selected for the book’s publication. Williams’s study offers a striking example of what can be done by classicists in the field of Renaissance studies, where philological training and familiarity with sub-fields such as codicology, combined with an up-to-date critical vocabulary and conceptual framing, hold strong potential for powerful new insights . Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist makes an indispensable contribution to our understanding of Venetian humanism, while paving the way for future explorations of Renaissance literature at the intersection of classical antiquity, print technology, and transformations in spatiality and visual culture. Memorial University Luke Roman The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Par Johanna Hanink. Cambridge, Mass. et Londres : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2017. Pp. 337. L'ouvrage de Johanna Hanink pose la question de la dette collective de l’Occident à la Grèce ancienne. En retraçant 2500 ans d’évolution, l’auteure s’interroge sur l’impact BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 205 qu’eut la Grèce sur la constitution des idéaux démocratiques, philosophiques ou artistiques au sein de nos sociétés européennes ou nord-américaines. D’entrée de jeu, The Classical Debt met en évidence la place de choix de l’imagerie issue de l’Antiquité dans nos modes de représentation occidentaux. Le scandale et l’effroi causés par les destructions d’antiquités par le groupe armé État Islamique, la polémique sur une éventuelle rétrocession des frises du Parthénon par le Royaume-Uni, le souvenir d...

Ariosto’s Pathway to Posterity

Ariosto’s Pathway to Posterity Ann E. Mullaney Ludovico Ariosto faced a cultural landscape peppered with explosive issues, yet he managed to pursue a path to posterity. In the mid-nineteenth century, statesman Vincenzo Gioberti extolled Ariosto’s praises, declaring him divine, the prince of heroic poetry second only to Dante.1 How Ariosto attained his status as the best-known poet of the Italian Renaissance has been explored by Daniel Javitch, who traced how the Orlando Furioso became legitimized throughout the sixteenth century. Here, I would like to explore aspects of Ariosto’s writings, which would seem to create impediments to his glory but do not. The focus will be on matters of religion, and language as it relates to the burlesque code so popular in its day; I will cite other writers of the era, Pietro Bembo, Teofilo and Giovanni Battista Folengo, to provide context for the positions taken by Ariosto. Religious matters One could say that in the fictional realm of the Orlando Furioso, Ariosto took a traditional stance on religion: he set his epic in the time of Charlemagne when Moors had invaded France and throughout the work Christian knights battle pagan knights. The author insists that Christian knights should try to win back the Holy Lands, which are in the hands of dogs (OF 17.73.8; OF 15.99.7–8). These Christian knights [End Page 100] should not be fighting other Christians in Europe which is already Christ’s domain. Exhortations to Christian warriors reach a crescendo in Canto 17, where the authorial voice asks succinctly: Se Cristianissimi esser voi volete,e voi altri Catolici nomati,perché di Cristo gli uomini uccidete?Perché dei beni loro son dispogliati?Perché Ierusalem non riavete,che tolto è stato a voi da’ rinegati?Perché Costantinopoli e del mondola miglior parte occupa il Turco immondo? (OF 17.75) The authorial voice may be intended to be humorous: when the pagan Dardinel seeks to avenge his bosom friend he prays to Mohammed, and the narrator comments, “s’udir lo puote,” (OF 18.55.2). This deafness on the part of Mohammed is alluded to again during the battle of Biserta. The Christians troops, led by Astolfo and Orlando, first warn the inhabitants that their city will be besieged in three days, then begin a pre-battle fast. Meanwhile the Muslim priests of Biserta join their flock in prayers asking for deliverance; they beat their breasts and weep copiously, and call out to their Mohammed who hears nothing: “chiamano il lor Macon che nulla sente” (OF 40.13.1–4). However, in the midst of the stupendous description of the assault on Biserta, Ariosto tempers the smugness of his Christian audience: first, he compares the onrush of Christians through the breached walls of the North African city to the haughty river Po flooding Mantuan plains and taking with it fields and huts, shepherds and dogs (OF 40.31). So, in this comparison, the invading Christian soldiers are portrayed as neither better nor worse than a river running riot. Next, in describing the devastation caused there by the Christians the poet uses words for criminal activities: “Omicidio, rapina e man violente / nel sangue e ne l’aver” (OF 40.32.5–6). Christian soldiers burn palaces and porticoes and mosques. They steal silver taken from the ancient pagan gods. What is worse, they rape [Muslim] children and mothers. Both Orlando and Astolfo know about these rapes (stupri) but cannot prevent them (OF 40.32–4).2 [End Page 101] The authorial voice of Ariosto shines a light on serious crimes committed by Christian soldiers, and is also heard lightly mocking basic Christian beliefs. For example, there is an amused scoffing at the traditional image of hell when Astolfo chases off harpies who enter a grotto, and hears cries and yells there and thus recognizes the place as hell: “da pianti e d’urli e da lamento eterno: / segno evidente quivi esser lo ’nferno” (OF 34.4.4–8). Contrast this with the fate of Lydia, who, in an extended parody of a Dantesque encounter, tells how she has been condemned to infernal smoke by the loftiest judgment of God for...

Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist by Gareth D. Williams

Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist by Gareth D. Williams

The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning by Christopher S. Celenza

Reviewed by: The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning by Christopher S. Celenza Margaret L. King The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning. By Christopher S. Celenza. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2018. Pp. xvi, 438. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-107-00362-0.) In The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance, Christopher Celenza provides a priceless vademecum for the study of Italian humanism. It rolls up in a delectable ball all that has come before: Garin and Kristeller; Burckhardt, Baron, and Martines; Fubini and Vasoli; Hankins, Allen, and the others. It presents in depth and with exquisite clarity the major works of nine leading humanists from Petrarch to Poliziano (plus many others introduced in discursive "parentheses"), culminating with the writer and critic Pietro Bembo, who translates the humanist heritage into a new language of art, a Latinized Tuscan. The lucidity of the explication [End Page 544] de textes is matched by the precision with which Celenza profiles his cast of characters, who are presented with full dimensionality in their psychological, social, and cultural contexts: the careerist Poggio, the brawler Valla, the self-made man and Medici servitor Poliziano. Celenza's work offers more than a series of text summaries and intellectual portraits, although these would be sufficient. It unravels a complex of interlocking themes, with three in particular rising to prominence. The first is the nature of philosophy as it is transformed by the humanists, who energize its study with new translations from the Greek of Aristotle and Plato, reject the metaphysical preoccupations of the university-based professionals, and, as philologists rather than as logicians, crossing disciplinary and cultural boundaries, seek a mode of living more than a theory of being. The second is the humanist understanding of Christianity, which is not slighted but affirmed, most notably by Petrarch, Ficino, and Valla, by its integration with the classical tradition on the one hand and philosophy on the other, even as doctrinal technicalities are avoided. The third and predominant theme is that of language, also central to Celenza's earlier volume The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy (2004). Celenza explores the departure from the vernacular stream initiated by the "three crowns," Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio (all three of whom wrote also in Latin), through the honing of Latin prose by the Ciceronian whetstone, to the eventual triumph of a reinvented Italian vernacular, disciplined and polished by humanist Latinity, and equipped to reach a national and even international audience for whom the specialized Latin of the humanists was inaccessible. Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Galileo, the inheritors of this language revolution, employed the Latinized Tuscan Bembo crafted, the gift of humanism to the early modern era. But does the title work? Celenza gives a nod to "vernacular classicism" and the "polyphony" of Florentine culture, which featured a rambunctious Pulci alongside a complaisant Poliziano. But many corners of "the intellectual world of the Italian Renaissance" do not register here: Florence massively dominates, and while some scope is given to Rome, virtually none is given to Venice, Milan, and Naples, let alone Ferrara, Mantua, or Urbino, in which centers humanism thrived; learned women are mentioned, but not one makes it to the index; devotional works, memoirs, and private letters, all vigorous and important genres, are invisible. But though the title overreaches, we may let it pass. It is in the sub-title that we find a better key to Celenza's objective: he is concerned with the "language, philosophy, and the search for meaning." He has searched for the meaning of the humanist episode—the Latin "parenthesis" in Italian history, the long fifteenth century in which intellectuals captivated by classical texts devoured, circulated, and imitated them—and presents it in this volume. Five generations of humanists achieved, in effect, Rome's final conquest of Europe, synthesizing and structuring that continent's civilization as it was about to leap forward on the next five hundred years of unparalleled productivity; and they achieved, as well, the final conquest of Rome by the barbarians, completing the advance begun in the first five centuries of the Christian era, absorbing, appropriating, and exploiting...

War, Grammar and Philology: From Leonardo to Bembo via Fortunio

This essay focuses on the context of Fortunio's Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua. It traces the origins of this work back to 1502–03, against the background of the wars of Italy and the dramatic changes taking place in Italian culture in those years. The sudden loss of a generation of humanists and the threat that war posed to Italy's cultural identity came as a shock to men of letters such as Pietro Bembo and Fortunio. Their humanistic background prompted them to see philology and grammar as a means to withstand chaos and to preserve Italy's cultural legacy. In the same years (1508–10) when Fortunio and Bembo were elaborating their ideal language based on that of the Tre Corone, Leonardo da Vinci was reflecting on the perennial evolution of language, and on how war affected it. Language was thus, in Leonardo's view, a mirror of the infinite creative power of Nature.

The Creation and Reception of Fortunio's Regole Grammaticali (1516)

The first printed grammar of the Italian vernacular, Fortunio's Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua (1516) responded to a need for guidance in imitating Tuscan authors of the Trecento, in line with the doctrine whose most authoritative proponent was Pietro Bembo. The Regole emerged on the fringes of the cultural mainstream. Fortunio conceived the work in Venice but he came to be suspected of treachery against that state. The structure of the Regole does not follow slavishly that of the Regulae grammaticales used to teach Latin. Fortunio owes much to the work of Bembo, but he does not follow him in every respect. The Regole appeared in a relatively minor centre, Ancona, where shortly afterwards Fortunio died violently. The nature of the Regole, and indeed its very existence, did not meet with universal approval. However, it was reprinted frequently in the Cinquecento and had a formative influence on the early study of Italian grammar.

Repetition, Variation, and the Idea of Art in Renaissance Italy

When Pietro Perugino completed his altarpiece for Santissima Annunziata in Florence in 1507, he was criticized by local artists for having simply repeated old motifs and compositional formulas. The moment has always been recognized as marking an important transition, the emergence of an idea of art in which inventive originality plays an essential role. Yet the distinction between repetition and variation was contested and might even be creatively thematized in artistic practice. Raphael, especially evidently in his early Madonna pictures, developed an inventive technique involving maximally efficient variation – variation just sufficient to inflect meaning – that was appreciated as such by patrons and understood to be a “poetic” strategy, similar to the kinds of variations admired by Pietro Bembo in the poetry of Petrarch. Raphael’s approach helps to explain the “canonical” or “classical” quality admired even in his monumental narrative pictures.

Renesansowa relacja z wejścia na wulkan w De Aetna Pietra Bemba. Nowatorstwo czy kontynuacja tradycji?

A RENAISSANCE ACCOUNT OF CLIMBING THE VOLCANO IN DE AETNA BY PIETRO BEMBO. INNOVATION OR CONTINUATION OF THE TRADITION? This article presents how Pietro Bembo described his journey towards the summit of Mount etna, focusing specifically on the journey’s Renaissance connotations and the way that Petrarch’s Epistolae Familiares 4.1 influenced Bembo. there are similarities and differences between Petrarch’s account of climbing Mont Ventoux and Bembo’s text. the aim is to present two sides of Bembo’s descriptions: the innovation, which is that of empiricism, or, rather, illusory empiricism (called as such because of the unlikely probability of an authentic etna explosion, allegedly seen by the author), and the continuation of the literary tradition of writing about etna.

Il canone linguistico boccacciano, non senza dissenso

Autor da maior obra-prima em prosa da literatura medieval em língua vulgar, Giovanni Boccaccio foi determinante para a definição do cânone linguístico italiano, sobretudo a partir da codificação proposta por Pietro Bembo no século XVI. Mas não sem divergências, uma vez que, logo após Bembo publicar seu Prose della volgar lingua, surgem as primeiras teses contrastantes que apoiam o modelo linguístico apresentado por Machiavelli

Eyes and Heart, Eros and Agape: Forms of Love in the Renaissance

This article reflects on the centrality of the senses of sight and hearing in the birth of romantic love. It explores the treatment of two forms of love, natural and divine, in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy, tracing the initial movements of the former and shifts in the latter. Making use of two literary works, by Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) and Pietro Bembo, two paintings, by Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, and several treatises on marital obligation and the “marital debt”, it charts the emergence of the idea that sensual love was legitimate in marriage and the impact of affective mysticism on the concept of divine love.

Plato’s Hermaphrodite and a Vindication of the Sense of Touch in the Sixteenth Century

AbstractThis essay considers readings of Plato’sSymposiumin sixteenth-centurytrattati d’amore(love treatises) — especially Francesco Patrizi’sL’amorosa filosofia— that offer an alternative to Marsilio Ficino’s pervasive interpretation as presented in hisDe amore. Against the backdrop of a larger debate concerning the role of the lower senses (touch, in particular) and the relationship between body and soul, these alternative readings of theSymposiumattempt to redeem the role of tactility in love matters. Whereas Ficino and his most influential followers — Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, and Baldassare Castiglione — center their exegesis on Diotima’s speech and privilege sight as the most noble sense, Patrizi’s reading — to a large extent preceded by those of Sperone Speroni, Agnolo Firenzuola, and Flaminio Nobili — focuses on Aristophanes’s myth and the figure of the hermaphrodite as the model for a different kind of human love that is both sensual and spiritual.

Il Dialogo della Rettorica di Sperone Speroni e la sua traduzione in portoghese

Neste artigo apresentamos ao público brasileiro, interessado na história da língua italiana, um texto inédito em língua portuguesa escrito por um dos personagens que participaram da “questione della língua” entre o século XV e o século XVI na Itália. Trata-se do Dialogo della Rettorica de Sperone Speroni. Parece-nos relevante destacar que, ainda que muito estudada e citada, a “questione”sempre é abordada fazendo referência somente a alguns de seus protagonistas, ou seja, Pietro Bembo, Giangiorgio Trissino, Baldassar Castiglione e Machiavelli, esquecendo-se, porém, que envolveu todos os principais intelectuais da época (e não somente, se pensarmos que até Gramsci muitos intelectuais italianos escreveram sobre a “questione”) e que redundou numa série de textos interessantes e de grande qualidade linguística, histórica e literária. Por essa razão, no intuito de preencher essa lacuna, apresentamos aqui o texto traduzido para o português inserindo-o no mais amplo debate acerca da língua.

Alla scuola di Omero: Costantino Lascaris e la traduzione latina dell’Odissea nel De Aetna di Pietro Bembo

Previous articleNext article No AccessAlla scuola di Omero: Costantino Lascaris e la traduzione latina dell’Odissea nel De Aetna di Pietro BemboRoberto NicosiaRoberto NicosiaTulane University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance Volume 17, Number 2Fall 2014 Published for Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/678330 Views: 54Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Raffaella Viccei Raffaello e Omero (da Urbino alla Stanza della Segnatura), Antike und Abendland 65-66, no.11 (Sep 2020): 208–231.https://doi.org/10.1515/anab-2019-0010

Artifice and Stability in Late Mantegna

This essay examines Andrea Mantegna's later stylistic preoccupations in light of late fifteenth -and early sixteenth- century debates both on the arts (the paragone) and on literary language (the questione della lingua). It is argued that the particular hardness or sculptural quality remarked upon by his contemporaries, as well as by later critics and historians, may be seen as both an affirmation of art's capacity to endure, and as a deliberately artful (artificial) pictorial language. In this way it is comparable in function and effect to the classic model of Tuscan prose advocated by Pietro Bembo. The visible artifice of Mantegna's style thus places it in opposition to the universally pleasing, 'natural' language of art advocated by Leon Battista Alberti in the earliest years of Mantegna's life, and by Leonardo da Vinci during his final decades.

Las «Cortes de Casto amor» de Hurtado de Toledo y la prosificación de la «Octava rima» de Boscán. Hacia el neoplatonismo amoroso en la literatura española

In this article, we show that the Cortes de Casto Amor (Toledo: Juan Ferrer, 1557), published under the name of Luis Hurtado de Toledo, include a prose version of some sections of Juan Boscán’s Octava rima, a poem in which, as it is well known, fragments of Pietro Bembo’s Stanze are translated and imitated. Apart from the task of transforming in prose some lines of the Octava rima, Luis Hurtado de Toledo in his Cortes modifies the ending of Boscan’s poem and proposes an articulation of the conflict of love in the author-protagonist pointing to an intellectual love and, in the end, the love of God.

Una corrispondenza “a tre”: Della Casa, Gualteruzzi, Bembo (e tre stanze piacevoli di Della Casa)

From September 1544 to January 1547, Giovanni Della Casa (who was “nunzio apostolico” in Venice) and Pietro Bembo (then Cardinal in Rome) held a peculiar correspondence through Carlo Gualteruzzi. They exchanged thoughts, greetings, pleasantries, facetiae and rumors, in addition to some famous poems. Given the almost total absence of correspondence between the two great authors, this is an important document. The issue thoroughly follows this “threesome” correspondence, disclosing historical and literary informations and lesser-known but fascinatig features of the two characters: in particular, the tendency to facetiae and mockeries. Furthermore, it proves Della Casa’s authorship of three “stanze piacevoli”, so far considered as spurious.

The Accademia della Crusca in Italy: past and present

An informal organisation that is becoming quite influential in the spread of Italian in Italy, as well as abroad, is the Accademia della Crusca which began its activities during the Renaissance, under quite different auspices. Founded in Florence in 1582–1583, this Academy was inspired by the theories of Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian who felt that the best models for literary works were those of the old Tuscan writers of the Trecento. In 1590 its members set out to select and define the words and norms in the works of the great Tuscan writers, especially in Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. This project led to the compilation of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612), the first modern language dictionary. It was produced to provide the models of the literary language: a rationale due to the paradoxical condition of Italian, a language with a great literature but without a nation state. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Accademia exercised an editorial role on the linguistic qualities of literary texts for publication, based on the puristic distinction between those forms and words which could be included, and those considered impure which were to be excluded. The last Presidents have secured for the Accademia the new role of leader of national awareness on issues of corpus and status planning with regard to the contemporary Italian language, both in Italy and abroad. In addition, they have engaged the Accademia for the first time in language-planning activities, sometimes in support of Italian in Italy, sometimes in defence of Italian in Europe.

La renaissance du nu antique à Venise : Pietro Bembo et le Titien

The nude appears in Renaissance painting and literature on several occasions, in the wake of the recovery of many ancient masterpieces both literary and visual, as well as the resulting humanist reappraisal of the body. Its natural splendour resurfaced with special acclaim in Venice, most particularly in the painted works of Titian. Pietro Bembo's Carmina also shed new light on the topic of nudity. Comparison of these poems and Titian's art unveils a series of shared commonplaces, namely, Cupid as the naked child, the female nude bathing (Diana, Galatea) or in the privacy of her room (Danae, Venus) and the male nude in the form of both a Christian martyr (Saint Stephen, Saint Sebastian) and a pagan divinity (Pan, Dionysos). At once in their written and painted manifestations, these nudes correspond closely to the aesthetic precepts explicated by two contemporary theoreticians of art and literature, Lodovico Dolce and Pietro Aretino. The essential precepts are : softness, delicacy and strength, terribilith and grace.

Uncovering beauty: Titian's Triumph of Love in the Vendramin collection

An allegory of the power of love by Titian painted about 1543–46 was originally made as a cover for a female portrait in the collection of Gabriel Vendramin (1484–1552) in Venice. This is a rare instance of the survival of a documented canvas cover (timpano) linked to a specific image. My article considers the visual and literary contexts for such covers, and the cultural setting of the Vendramin collection, where sociable viewing involved shared aesthetic and haptic experiences. I suggest that the lost portrait depicted the Venetian patrician Elisabetta Querini Massola (d. 1559) whose virtue and beauty were celebrated in poems by Pietro Bembo, Pietro Aretino and Giovanni della Casa. I link the imagery of the cover to two sonnets by Della Casa in praise of Elisabetta. For reasons of decorum a timpano would have been appropriate for a noblewoman's portrait, but Titian's inventive allegory was designed both to evoke Vendramin's celebrated collection and to recall qualities associated with the image it concealed.