Pietro Bembo

Life

Pietro Bembo was born on 20 May 1470 to an aristocratic Venetian family. His father Bernardo Bembo (1433–1519) was a diplomat and statesman and a cultured man who cared for the literature of Italy, and erected a monument to Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) in Ravenna. Bernardo Bembo was an ambassador for the Republic of Venice (697–1797), and was accompanied by his son, Pietro. During his father's ambassadorships to Florence (1474–1476 and 1478–1480), Pietro acquired a love for the Tuscan dialect, from which the Italian language developed.

Under the tutelage of the neo-Platonist scholar Constantine Lascaris (1434–1501), Pietro Bembo studied Greek language for two years at Messina, and then studied at the University of Padua. His later travels included two years (1497–1499) at the Este court at Ferrara, during the reign of Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara (r. 1471–1505). For writers and composers, the city of Ferrara was an artistic centre where Bembo met the poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533); later, in the 1497–1504 period, Bembo wrote his first work, Gli Asolani (The People of Asolo, 1505), a poetic dialogue about courtly love, which stylistically resembled the writing styles of the humanists Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) and Petrarch (1304–1374). The poems were later set to music, which Bembo preferred to be sung by a woman to the accompaniment of a lute, an artistic wish granted in 1505 when he met Isabella d'Este (1474–1539) in her response to having received a gift copy of Gli asolani.

In the 1502–1503 period, Bembo again was in Ferrara, where he had a love affair with Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519), wife of Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara (1476–1534), son of the previous duke. In the event, Bembo left the city of Ferrara when Ercole employed Josquin des Prez (1450–1521) as a composer to the chapel; fortuitously, Bembo left town just as the Black Death plague killed most of the population of Ferrara in 1505, including the renowned composer Jacob Obrecht (1457–1505).

In the 1506–1512 period, Bembo resided in Urbino, where he wrote Prose della volgar lingua (Prose of the Vernacular Tongue, 1525), a treatise about composing and writing poetry in the vernacular language of the Tuscan dialect. He accompanied Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici (1478–1534) to Rome, where Bembo was later appointed Latin secretary to Pope Leo X (r. 1513–1521), and was also made a member of the Knights Hospitaller, in 1514. At the death of Pope Leo X in 1521, Bembo retired, with impaired health, to Padua and continued to write. In 1530, he accepted the office of official historian of his native Republic of Venice. Shortly afterwards, Bembo was also appointed librarian of the basilica of San Marco di Venezia.

On 20 December 1538, Pope Paul III (r. 1534–1549) made Bembo a cardinal in pectore (in secret). In 1538, Bembo received Holy Orders as a priest. Afterwards, Bembo's secret nomination as cardinal was published, and he then received the red Galero hat in a papal consistory on 10 March 1539, with the title of Cardinal Deacon of the church of San Ciriaco alle Terme Diocleziane, which occasion Bembo marked by commissioning a portrait from Titian (1488–1576), the most important painter of the Venetian school. In the event, Cardinal Bembo was advanced to the rank of Cardinal Priest in February 1542, with title to the church of San Crisogono, changed two years later to that of the Basilica of San Clemente. At Rome, Cardinal Bembo continued to write, and revised his earlier works, whilst studying theology and the history of Classical antiquity (A.D. 8th–6th c.). Despite having been rewarded for his successful administration of the dioceses of Gubbio and Bergamo, the Church did not promote Bembo to bishop. In 1547, Pietro Bembo died at the age of 77 years, and was buried in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.