Renesansowy poemat "Sarca" jako "aemulatio" z autorami antycznymi

The aim of this article is to analyse the Renaissance poem Sarca, whose authorship is attributed to the Italian humanist Pietro Bembo, and to indicate the ancient inspirations of the work. The main model for the work is Carmen 64 by Catullus, although the author also refers to other Roman poets. The intertextual relations between Sarca and the hypotexts are presented on various levels. The analysis focuses on showing parallel elements of the setting and takes in consideration the few similarities at the linguistic and stylistic level. Genre-wise Sarca is classified as an epithalamium of an aythiological character. Its characteristics typical of the Renaissance era are also highlighted. The article also brings up the history of the poem and the topic of its attribution, presenting an extensive state of research.

A Future Bride

The story begins in Venice in the last decade of the fifteenth century with the unhappy marriages of Antonia Bembo, sister of Cardinal Pietro Bembo and mother of Marcella Marcello. Drawing upon Pietro’s abundant correspondence, we learn of unfaithful husbands and faithful wives, the mal francese (syphilis), marriage strategies, dowries, and the special significance of brides in Venice. Marcella is married in 1519 to Gian Matteo Bembo, an up-and-coming young patrician. They start a family in Ca’ Bembo, the family palace at Santa Maria Nova. With the birth of their daughter Giulia in 1531, they establish a bloodline that will run through the book.

Retrenchment

In 1587 Girolamo sells Palazzo Torriani to Antonio Marchesi, a rich merchant, to satisfy some of the creditors. Marchesi, who has noble aspirations, embellishes the palace with luxurious furnishings, including a ceiling painting by the workshop of Paolo Veronese, and builds new structures on the site. Girolamo ties up loose ends. He verifies the family’s titles and investitures and puts his financial house in order. Mindful of the litigation over Gian Matteo’s estate, he executes a notarized document, dividing his property, and his debts, equally between his three surviving sons, Sigismondo, Giulio, and Giovanni, ‘so that everyone would know his share’. Girolamo’s brother-in-law Pietro Bembo, Bishop of Veglia, dies in 1589. The pope gives the office to Girolamo’s son Giovanni over Venetian objections. Girolamo drafts his testament, reaffirming the property division of 1587. He dies in Venice in March 1590 at the age of eighty-five.

The Venetian Bride

A true story of vendetta and intrigue, triumph and tragedy, exile and repatriation in early modern Venice, this book focuses on the marriage between the feudal lord Count Girolamo Della Torre and Giulia Bembo, daughter of a powerful Venetian senator and grand-niece of Cardinal Pietro Bembo. Exiled to Crete for pursuing vendetta to avenge the murder of his father, Girolamo marries Giulia with the aim of enlisting her father as a powerful ally. Thus begins a challenging itinerary that leads from the Mediterranean back to Venice and its mainland territories in the Veneto and the Patria del Friuli. It plays out against a backdrop of the birth of ten children, the Council of Trent, papal and imperial politics, the rise of Girolamo’s brother Michele to the cardinalate, the Ottoman threat, and the golden age of Venetian art. Once a pawn in a marital strategy that failed, Giulia is celebrated after her death with the first independent biography of an ordinary woman published in Italy. The fortunes and misfortunes of the Della Torre bloodline, which survived the end of the Venetian Republic in 1797, are emblematic of a change in feudal culture from clan solidarity to individualism and intrafamily strife, and ultimately redemption. This epic tale opens a precious window into a contentious period in which Venetian republican values clash with the deeply rooted feudal traditions of honour and blood feuds of the mainland.

Grace and Labour

This chapter discusses the work and poetic correspondence (1538–1547) of Michelangelo and Colonna. It shows that both eschew the kind of grace espoused by Castiglione and Pietro Bembo and perfected by Raphael and Ariosto. Instead, Michelangelo and Colonna cultivate an image of the artist as hardworking and intense. Their desire to reveal — rather than conceal — the labour behind their art can be compared in the Pietàs through which the artist and the poet articulate an alternative aesthetics of grace: one that resists humanist connotations, criticises courtly abuses of the term, and promotes a more Christian vision of the artist as the receiver rather than the giver of what is essentially God's gift. Restored here to the domain of religious experience, grace acts as a reminder that art and literature should praise God, not the artist, and in so doing reflects an age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Italy.

Sul Fondo Dionisotti: criteri di catalogazione, interventi di conservazione e linee di ricerca future

L’articolo descrive la composizione del Fondo Dionisotti della Biblioteca universitaria Lugano e le attività di gestione dei libri antichi, dedicando uno specifico approfondimento agli interventi di conservazione preventivi e ai criteri di catalogazione adottati. La varietà dei temi contenuti nel fondo consente una serie di riflessioni sugli interessi di studio di Dionisotti e, di conseguenza, sulle possibili linee di ricerca future, volte a ricostruire la sua figura di studioso e il suo operato nella prospettiva dei volumi che compongono il fondo. Il confronto tra l’editio princeps delle Prose della volgar lingua di Bembo e l’edizione moderna delle Prose, curata da Dionisotti nel 1931, si pone come caso di studio, che può testimoniare in maniera esemplare il modus operandi dello studioso. Keywords: Carlo Dionisotti, Fondo Dionisotti, Biblioteca universitaria Lugano (BUL), Pietro Bembo, catalogazione.

Formal Imitation

This chapter returns to the debate about the imitation of Cicero between Pietro Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico in the early sixteenth century, and shows how these two writers’ different approaches to imitatio encouraged subsequent authors to imitate the ‘form’ of earlier texts. This could be a quasi-Platonic abstract idea of an earlier author, or it could encompass the structures of sentences or arguments. This theme was developed by later sixteenth-century Northern European writers on imitatio, principally Philipp Melanchthon and Johannes Sturm. They encouraged imitating authors to attend to the rhetorical structure of the works that they imitated, rather than borrowing their language. Through Roger Ascham these German rhetoricians had a profound influence on later sixteenth-century English writing. The chapter concludes by arguing that their thinking encouraged imitating authors in that period to engage in what is here called ‘stylism’. Many later Elizabethan authors sought not only to imitate a distinctive ‘form’ of an earlier author, but also to establish that they had a ‘form’ or style of their own, which could be identified by their readers, and which subsequent authors might imitate.

Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia (b. 1480–d. 1519) is well known as the much-loved daughter of Pope Alexander VI, affectionate sister of the cleric-turned-soldier Cesare Borgia, unfortunate wife of Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro, distraught widow of Alfonso, duke of Bisceglie, and esteemed consort of Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara. Outside the bonds of close family she is similarly defined by relationships with men, whether that be in terms of the passionate devotion of Pietro Bembo or the no less eloquent admiration of Ludovico Ariosto. It is therefore little wonder that recent authors have sought to present her as a person of substance and interest in her own right. As usual, students should begin with Reference Works. Biographies provide a popular format for conveying information about elite women of the Renaissance period and should be read early in any research process, but they often require padding with contextual material. Contexts therefore appears as the next section of this article. There is an ample number of published Primary Sources, though contemporary Archives and Diaries do not delve beneath outward formalities and the writers of Poetry and Letters necessarily or habitually idealized their subjects. Easily the best option for discovering more about Lucrezia is to set aside her Roman origins and concentrate on Lucrezia in Ferrara, which is precisely what happened in 2002 when the city of Ferrara celebrated an “Anno di Lucrezia Borgia” to mark the 500th anniversary of her arrival there as the bride of the future duke. Some of the lasting consequences of that celebration can be found among the Collections of Papers. Other article-length pieces can be accessed via Journals. The final section of this article charts the process by which the figure of Lucrezia Borgia has evolved From Fact to Fiction during the centuries since her death.