Pietro Bembo

Was born in Venice in 1470 and died in Roma in 1547 after having lived in and moved back and forth between Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Urbino, Gubbio and Rome. An eminent figure of Italian culture in the early XVI century, proclaimed cardinal in 1539 by Paul III Farnese, he met Ludovico Ariosto in the early part of his life during the two times he lived in Ferrara, in 1498-99 and in 1502-1503. He was also a friend of the poet’s brother Galasso Ariosto and a great friend of Ercole Strozzi. During his second stay in Ferrara, his passion for the noble lady Maria Savorgnan having ended, he fell in love with Lucrezia Borgia, the wife of Duke Alfonso I d’Este as of 1501. To her he dedicated Asolani, his treatise on love in the vernacular, published in print by Aldo Manuzio in Venezia in 1505, at which he had worked in the years between 1497 and 1502. Ariosto knew about  Bembo’s passion for Lucrezia Borgia and probably favoured the two in their amorous intrigue, without raising the suspicions of Duke Alfonso. Whilst his frequentation of Gregorio da Spoleto contributed to Ludovico’s knowledge of Latin, his youthful but robust friendship with Pietro Bembo proved decisive for his ‘conversion’ to the vernacular. Bembo was indeed the dedicatory of the Satire VI: it was he who the poet asked for advice as to how to best educate his son Virginio in this way reflecting upon the value of a humanistic education. Pietro Bembo appears as the guide for our sweet idiom in Orlando furioso XLVI, 15, 1-4: ‘Là Bernardo Capel, là veggio Pietro / Bembo, che’l puro e dolce idioma nostro, / levato fuor del volgar uso tetro, / quale esser dee, ci ha col suo esempio mostro’. In effect the third edition of the Furioso in 1532, by Ludovico’s own admission, was marked by Bembo’s theories of language expressed in Prose della volgar lingua [1525] (prose in the vernacular) and strongly retrenches the so called Padanian component  in favour of Petrarch’s.

Giovanni Bellini, Portrait (presumed) of Pietro Bembo, Hampton Court, London