Bembism on the Terraferma and in the Lagoon

In the second quarter of the sixteenth century, after Bembo's Prose was published, theoretical writers in Venice and the Veneto formed two broad sociogeographic groups. The first consists of teachers and scholars situated in Padua, the second, of popularizing polygraphs based mainly in Venice; in the former group I consider Bernardino Daniello, Sperone Speroni, and Bernardino Tomitano, and in the latter, Francesco Sansovino, Lodovico Dolce, and Girolamo Muzio.^[5] The regional split is significant. Theorizers in each city played substantially different roles, with Paduans oriented in the didactic worlds of the schools, universities, and formalized academies, and Venetians often working as editors, translators, and freelancers for local presses. While Venetians were accommodating a more commercial public, eager to have the mushrooming quantities of vernacular wisdom made readily digestible, Paduans served up many of the same issues in somewhat headier concoctions. Despite these differences, Paduans and Venetians did a good deal of intermixing. It will be useful to sketch their profiles and some of their major contributions.

According to Alessandro Zilioli's manuscript biography, Daniello had come from his native Lucca to Padua, where he taught letters to boys.^[6] While there he composed orations and Italian poetry, translated classical texts (notably the Georgics of Virgil), and assembled commentaries on Dante and Petrarch.^[7] His Poetica,

[5] I should note, however, that the first Italian poetics printed in the region following Bembo's Prose was La poetica (Books 1-4: Vicenza, 1529) by the Vicenzan nobleman Giangiorgio Trissino. Trissino employed a wide reading of both Greek and Latin classics, but his treatise is mainly a handbook on versification. Based in large part on Dante's De vulgari eloquentia and Antonio da Tempo's De rithimis vulgaribus, Trissino's poetics emerged in seeming isolation from those of other theorists of the Veneto who were active at the time. The first edition, including Books 1-4, promised two more; they did not appear until 1562, although they seem to have been written by at least 1549, possibly some years earlier. All six books are included in Bernard Weinberg, ed., Trattati di poetica e retorica del cinquecento, 4 vols. (Bari, 1970-74), 1:21-158 and 2:5-90 (hereafter Trattati ); see also the facsimile of Books 1-4 in the series Poetiken des Cinquecento, vol. 4, ed. Bernhard Fabian (Munich, 1969). Trissino's fifth and sixth books of La poetica are significant mainly as paraphrases of Aristotle's Poetics, whose importance had already begun to be widely appreciated by the time they were published, as discussed below. See Weinberg's discussion of Books 5 and 6 in A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1961), 2:719-21, and in Trattati 1:590-91 and 2:653-54. For a summary of Trissino's importance in this period see Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York, 1968), pp. 10-13.

[6] "Istoria delle vite de' poeti italiani, di Alessandro Zilioli veneziano," I-Vnm, MSS It. cl. X, No. 1 (6394), p. 140. Zilioli was a literary scholar who died in 1650. See also the biographical information on Daniello by M.R. De Gramatica, "Daniello, Bernardino," in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 32:608-10, which fixes his date of birth in the late 1400s and the date of his move to Padua ca. 1525. He died in 1565.

[7] Of special interest is his ed. and commentary of Petrarch, Sonetti, canzoni, e triomphi di Messer Francesco Petrarca con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello da Lucca (Venice, 1541); see Luigi Baldacci, Il petrarchismo italiano nel cinquecento, rev. ed. (Padua, 1974), pp. 66-68.

printed in 1536, is notable as one of the earliest vernacular poetics and the first firmly rooted in the Ciceronian tradition.^[8] Adopting the fashionable dialogue form, it portrays a group of Venetians as visitors to an academic Arcadia in the Veneto with Daniello as schoolmaster.^[9] The scene takes place in the bucolic Bressano on the Brenta in May 1533. There Daniello meets his mentor, Triphon Gabriele — also based in Padua at the time — along with Gabriele's two nephews, Andrea and Iacopo. As the group convenes, Daniello espies a shyly hidden copy of Horace's Ars poetica in Andrea's hand and embarks on a series of impromptu lessons on poetry. Thereafter the dialogue unfolds as a didactic-moral rereading of Cicero, taking Bembo's Prose as its point of departure and hardening it into pedagogic dogma.^[10]

Daniello was a minor scholar-didact, if a skilled linguist, commentator, and theoretician. His prestige paled beside that of Sperone Speroni, who counts as the dominant literary figure on the terraferma in the generation following Bembo.^[11] During the early 1520s Speroni studied with the Aristotelian philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi and by the 1530s had become a major light at Padua. In the year 1540 he helped found and shape the Paduan Accademia degli Infiammati.^[12]

[8] Fabian, ed., Poetiken des cinquecento, vol. 2 (Munich, 1968); repr. in Trattati 1:227-318, which includes the original pagination referred to here. For a useful summary see Ralph C. Williams, "The Originality of Daniello," Romanic Review 15 (1924): 121-22.

[9] On the adoption of Cicero's model of the dialogue by quattrocento humanists see David Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1980). Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge, 1993), approaches sixteenth-century dialogue from the broad perspective of the cultural economy of communicative exchange. For the later sixteenth century see also Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), and Jon R. Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (Stanford, 1989).

[10] Early on in the work, Daniello recounts another conversation heard in Padua, a Platonic defense of poetry involving at least two more Venetians, the poet Giovanni Brevio and the senator and letterato Domenico Moresini. In connection with vernacular arts, it is noteworthy that two of Brevio's ballate were set to music by Rore prior to their publication in poetic eds.; see Chap. 8 n. 10 (and on Parabosco's and Perissone's settings, Chap. 9, esp. n. 17). A prelate at the Roman court after 1542, Brevio reputedly had friendships with Bembo, Pietro Aretino, Giovanni della Casa, and other luminaries. The identification of Moresini comes from Verdizzotti's biography of Molino in Rime di M. Girolamo Molino (Venice, 1573), p. [6]. Moresini is also mentioned in Tomitano's letter to Longo (see the Preface, n. 2 above) as the "magnifico Mess. Domenico Moresini" (p. 386).

On La poetica's Platonic defense of poetry see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 2:721-22, and for an overall prospectus of its content, 2:721-24. See also De Gramatica's article on Daniello in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani, which provides a précis of the Poetica and a list of Daniello's Venetian contacts (including Aretino, Federigo Badoer, and Iacopo Bonfadio) based on his correspondence. Despite these references the extent of Daniello's interaction with Venice remains unclear (see Weinberg, Trattati 1:611). For an attempt to clarify Daniello's relationship with Gabriele see Ezio Raimondi, "Bernardo Daniello, lettore di poesia," in Rinascimento inquieto (Palermo, 1965), pp. 23-69. Daniello was also connected with Parabosco, as revealed in Parabosco's letter to him (first published in 1545) in the first book of the Quattro libri delle lettere amorose, ed. Thomaso Porcacchi (Venice, 1561), fols. 95'-98'.

[11] Speroni lived from 1500 until 1588. For his life see Mario Pozzi, ed., Trattatisti del cinquecento, vol. 1, Bembo, Speroni e Gelli (Milan and Naples, 1978), pp. 471-509 (and the Nota ai testi, pp. 1178-94, with references to earlier biographies).

[12] On Speroni's role in the Infiammati see Florindo [V.] Cerretta, Alessandro Piccolomini: letterato e filosofo senese del cinquecento (Siena, 1960), pp. 23-31 (who fixes Speroni's leadership from November 1541 to March 1542); Francesco Bruni, "Sperone Speroni e l'Accademia degli Infiammati," Filologia e letteratura 13 (1967): 24-71; and Valerio Vianello, Il letterato, l'accademia, il libro: contributi sulla cultura veneta del cinquecento, Biblioteca Veneta, no. 6 (Padua, 1988), Chaps. 3-5, the last of which also deals with Tomitano.

Speroni's Dialogo delle lingue, set in 1530 and composed soon afterward, offered the most probing philosophical response to linguistic issues raised by Bembo.^[13] On the surface it constituted an attempt to arbitrate debates about the choice of a vernacular language and extract a truce from the embattled lines drawn around them. The main sides in the conflicts were represented by Lazaro Buonamici as a hardnosed antivernacular classicist, an anonymous courtier who favors spoken vernaculars, and Bembo as champion of old Tuscan. But the deeper problematic for Speroni stood outside the choice of language. In fact, language hardly constitutes the real site of polemic at all (as Francesco Bruni has noted), for although Lazaro and Bembo take different sides in the discussions, each displays a fundamental methodological faith in Ciceronian rhetorical ideals.^[14] The true conceptual divide emerges in a larger conflict introduced surreptitiously through an interpolation in the latter half of the dialogue, where a new interlocutor recounts a discussion between Pomponazzi (called Peretto) and the humanist scholar Giovanni Lascari. Revealingly, this interlocutor, bearing the quiet epithet "Scolare," boasts himself ignorant of all languages. Introduced not as an expert but as a "disinterested" yet perceptive witness, he narrates a scene of conciliation in which the philosopher and his humanist opponent make two new claims that will now be used to mediate the terms of the initial linguistic dispute: the first is for the pragmatic value of all languages for cognitive and scientific purposes; the second for the ultimate inferiority of any language to philosophy.

Speroni's little Dialogo thus lays out a dialectical tension between rhetoric and philosophy that inevitably arose within the Paduan university elite, where Aristotelianism was the coin of the realm.^[15] In that respect it may seem a departure from the resolutely rhetorical and Bembist themes I have set out to trace in this chapter, as in part it is. But when the conversation comes back to the principal interlocutors the last word goes to Bembo, who reiterates his pro-Tuscan position with the admonition that "if you . . . want to compose canzoni or novelle in our way — that is, in a language different from Tuscan and without imitating Petrarch or

[13] See Piero Floriani, "Grammatici e teorici della letteratura volgare," in Storia della cultura veneta: dal primo quattrocento al concilio di Trenta, vol. 3/2, ed., Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Vicenza, 1980), pp. 175-77; Raffaele Simone, "Sperone Speroni et l'idée de diachronie dans la linguistique de la Renaissance italienne," in History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, ed. Herman Parret (New York, 1976), pp. 302-16; Bruni, "Sperone Speroni," pp. 31ff.; Riccardo Scrivano, "Cultura e letteratura in Sperone Speroni," in Cultura e letteratura nel cinquecento (Rome, 1966), pp. 121-26; and Snyder, Chap. 3 in Writing the Scene of Speaking, pp. 87ff. (on Speroni's dialogues). For briefer mentions see G.A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500-1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar II (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 63-64, and Robert A. Hall, Jr., The Italian "Questione della lingua": An Interpretative Essay, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literature, no. 4 (Chapel Hill, 1942), p. 17.

I cite from the edition of Pierre Villey [-Desmeserets], Les sources italiennes de la "Deffense et illustration de la langue francoise" de Joachim du Bellay, Bibliothèque litteraire de la renaissance, ser. 1, vol. 9 (Paris, 1969), pp. 111-46. Another ed. may be found in Speroni's Opere, 5 vols. (Venice, 1740), 1:166-201, and in Trattatisti del cinquecento 1:585-635.

[14] "Sperone Speroni," p. 32.

[15] For a broad assessment of this theme see Jerrold Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, 1968).

Boccaccio — perhaps you will be a good courtier but never a poet or orator."^[16] This, he adds (reminiscent of Venier's advice to Dolce), may bring you temporary fame but not everlasting glory. Speroni thus accepts the vitality of Bembo's Tuscan for new literary production at the same time as he takes pains to circumscribe it within a limited intellectual domain.

Speroni's Dialogo helps explain some of the motifs and conflicts that arise in other Paduan texts, notably the Ragionamenti della lingua toscana of Bernardino Tomitano, dubbed by Baxter Hathaway Speroni's "Boswell."^[17] Tomitano, to recall my Preface, was a Paduan lecturer in the Aristotelian discipline of logic, as well as a medico. He published his Ragionamenti in 1545, republishing them with further additions from the rhetorics of Aristotle and Cicero the following year.^[18] The dialogues were set during the year 1542 in the house of Speroni, "prencipe & governo" of the Accademici Infiammati. At the outset Speroni is heard proudly announcing their lofty goal: "The occasion for assembling this noble and generous company of men having become known and arrived at by us for no other end than to add some light and beauty and dignity to this language, which we call Tuscan, and not to make a popular fraternity or Babel, I wish we were of no other opinion than to have people read Petrarch and Boccaccio."^[19] Speroni's opener provides a key to the sociointellectual context of the work. Its interlocutors appear as a kind of academic brotherhood, members of a tightly structured fraternity of the sort that was still anathema in Venice. Their mission is twofold: first, to advance trecento Tuscan as the exclusive literary vernacular against the claims of any current spoken tongue; and second, to propose as its sole models the same two authors Bembo singled out for verse and prose, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Tomitano's text thus reconfirms retrospectively that even the more philosophically oriented Speroni accepted Bembo's case insofar as it applied to modern literature. Indeed the Ragionamenti bluntly rebutted those like Baldassare Castiglione and Giangiorgio Trissino who advocated an eclectic composite of modern languages, the so-called lingua cortigiana, exalting instead Bembo's revival of Tuscan by assimilating it to Cicero's cultivation of Latin.^[20]

[16] "[S]e voglia vi verrà mai di comporre o canzoni o novelle al modo nostro, cioè in lingua che sia diversa dalla thoscana, et senza imitare il Petrarca o il Boccaccio, peravventura voi sarete buon cortigiano, ma poeta o oratore non mai" (p. 146).

[17] Tomitano lived in Padua ca. 1517-76. For Hathaway's compelling account of Tomitano's indebtedness to Speroni, especially in the area of poetic imagination, see The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, 1962), pp. 310-15. On their relationship see also Bruni, "Sperone Speroni," pp. 24-31.

[18] Both were printed in Venice. I cite from the later edition, Ragionamenti della lingua toscana di M. Bernardin Tomitano. I precetti della rhetorica secondo l'artificio d'Aristotile & Cicerone nel fine del secondo libro nuovamente aggionti (Venice, 1546).

[19] "Essendo a noi trapelata, & pervenuta l'occasione di adunare questa nobile & generosa compagnia d'huomini non per altro fine, che per accrescere alcun lume & vaghezze & dignita a questa lingua, che noi Toscana addomandiamo, & non per farne una popolaresca frataglia ò sinagoga; vorrei che non fussimo d'altra opinione che di far leggere altro che il Petrarca, & il Boccaccio" (ibid., p. 18).

[20] In Book 3 Tomitano compares Cicero's synthesis of the best in Roman literature to Plato's synthesis of Greek philosophers, likening both to Aesculapius's restoration of the members of Hippolytus's lacerated body and assigning the same synthetic role in Tuscan literature to Bembo. He concludes: "Tra Toscani pochissimi vi sono stati, & per dire meglio un solo; il BEMBO dico, hora la Dio merce Cardinale illustrissimo & signor mio: la cui diligenza si come in tutte le forme del dire è stata non men cara che rara" (Among writers in Tuscan there were very few, and to put it better, only one: Bembo, I declare, now, thanks to God, most illustrious Cardinal and my master, whose assiduousness in all forms of discourse was no less esteemed than rare); p. 269.

All of this may make Tomitano appear more orthodox than Speroni's views in the Dialogo delle lingue would have led us to expect. Yet other passages in the Ragionamenti confirm Tomitano's entanglement in Speroni's philosophical biases. Tomitano's prologue asserts, for example, that "sapere et conoscere" — that is, the cognition of things — is what separates men from beasts, not (as the rhetoricians typically claimed) the faculty of speech.^[21]Res, in other words, sits higher in Tomitano's philosophical conception than verbum, or, as he put it: "Things make a man wise, and words make him appear so. The voice makes us similar to beasts, while thoughts, separating us from them, make us resemble God."^[22]

Tomitano's allegiances, like Speroni's, were thus mixed, exalting Tuscan (and Petrarch) for verbum, but demoting language per se in the larger philosophical scheme of res. Owing to this tension, and to a strong dose of Aristotelian encyclopedism, the Ragionamenti fail to develop along hard and fast Bembist lines. The last two of its three books consist of a prolix treatment of style and rhetoric, applying to Italian all the major rhetorical ideas of Cicero and Aristotle and drawing at various times on virtually every major classical writer on language. Despite obeisances to Bembo, the philosophical interests that Tomitano and Speroni cultivated make them more independent than their counterparts in Venice. (We will see that this is also true of Daniello.)

Once again, different preoccupations correspond to differences of audience. Unlike the Paduans, whose audience would look to them for scholarly, or at least schoolmasterly, erudition, Sansovino, Dolce, and Muzio had to attract an urban market of relatively unsophisticated readers through seductive packaging of rhetorical ideas. Each of them did so with varying degrees of selectivity and different formulas, but recognizing that in the economy of vernacular knowledge that circulated in Venice, greater density meant fewer readers.

Sansovino typified this peculiarly Venetian breed of author. Of Florentine descent, he was born in Rome in 1521 but following the Sack of 1527 moved with his sculptor father, Jacopo, to Venice, where he died in 1586. Although Sansovino had studied law at Padua, Florence, and Bologna from 1536, his attraction to vernacular letters drew him back to his adoptive home in 1542. He spent his days in Venice cranking out poetry, fiction, translations, editions, bizarre catalogues, chronicles, genealogies, and popular histories (what Paul Grendler has called "scissors-and-

[21] Ragionamenti, pp. 3-4. The usual rhetoricians' view may be seen at the beginning of Bembo's Prose, p. 5.

[22] "[L]e cose fanno l'huomo saggio, et le parole il fan parer. La voce con le bestie ci rende communi et simiglianti, il pensiero da quelli separandoci, con Iddio ci rassimiglia" (Ragionamenti, pp. 40-41). For a searching evaluation of Tomitano's attitudes about the conflict between res and verbum, its relation to Speroni's thought, and other aspects of Tomitano's Ragionamenti, see Vianello, "Tra velleità di riforma e compromessi con la tradizione per un'identità di competenza," Chap. 6 in Il letterato, l'accademia, il libro, pp. 107-37, and "Nella prospettiva di una nuova mediazione: l'esigenza della 'letterarietà,"' Chap. 7, pp. 139-72.

paste compilations")^[23] and from 1560 managed to make sizable profits by starting his own press. His Arte oratoria of 1546 is one of the earliest rhetorics of its kind, summarizing and simplifying Ciceronian oratory for application to the archaic Tuscan championed by Bembo.^[24] Much of the Arte oratoria addresses questions pertaining specifically to oratory, such as argumentation and ethics. But Sansovino approaches the issue of persuasion largely through the vernacular poets, in keeping with other contemporaneous rhetorics, and shows the same concern for sound typical of the new poetic theorists.

Sansovino's links to vernacular publishing thus resemble Dolce's, as I characterized them briefly in Chapter 4. By 1550, when Dolce published his popular gloss on Bembo's Prose, the similarly titled Osservationi nella volgar lingua, Bembo's work was already a generation old. Developments between 1525 and 1550 had changed conditions for the reception of linguistic and literary theory even among less-educated readers. In 1535 Dolce had added a vernacular translation of Horace's Ars poetica to the growing Horatian literature — one of the vast number of translations he produced before his death in 1568.^[25] A year later Alessandro de' Pazzi put Aristotle's Poetics into general circulation by publishing it in a respectable Latin translation.

Meanwhile critical reaction to Bembo's views was gaining a good deal of weight. By the late decades of the century his program for the Italian language (if not his poetics as a whole) was to win the day. Still to be reckoned with at midcentury, however, were the feisty Florentines, members of the Accademia Fiorentina like Giovambattista Gelli, Vincenzo Borghini, and Pierfrancesco Giambullari, who rejected Bembo's narrow literary boundaries in favor of spoken Florentine (as Machiavelli had done before them).^[26] On top of that Venice itself was sheltering a more biting variety of polygraph than the likes of Sansovino and Dolce — writers like Doni and Niccolò Franco, who had been satirizing Bembist models in print since 1539.^[27]

[23] For a summary of Sansovino's life with attention to his role as a popular historian see Paul F. Grendler, "Francesco Sansovino and Italian Popular History, 1560-1600," Studies in the Renaissance 16 (1969): 139-80; see also idem, Critics of the Italian World, 1530-1560: Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolò Franco & Ortensio Lando (Madison, 1969), pp. 65-69. Further information on Sansovino's life and an annotated catalogue of his works may be found in Emmanuele A. Cicogna, Delle inscrizioni veneziane, 6 vols. (Venice, 1834), 4:31-91.

[24] The full title of the volume was given as L'arte oratoria secondo i modi della lingua volgare, di Francesco Sansovino divisa in tre libri. Ne quali si ragiona tutto quello ch'all'artificio appartiene, cosi del poeta come dell'oratore, con l'autorità de i nostri scrittori (Venice, 1546) and the internal books as Dell'arte oratoria nella lingua toscana di F. Sansovino. Libro primo [-al terzo]. Reprints were issued in 1569 and 1575 and a variant version called "In materia dell'arte libri tre ne quali si contien l'ordine delle cose che si ricercano all'Oratore" was included in an anthology of orations that Sansovino published called Diversi orationi volgarmente scritte da gli huomini illustri de tempi nostri (Venice, 1561). The Arte oratoria may have been intended as the prospectus for an immense work of twenty-three books on the topic, never completed, as the first paragraph of Sansovino's little manual La retorica of 1543 suggests (see Weinberg, Trattati 1:453 and 631).

[25] La poetica d'Horatio (Venice, 1535), dedicated to Pietro Aretino. See Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 1:101-2.

[26] See Padley, Grammatical Theory, pp. 27-35 and passim, and R. G. Faithfull, "On the Concept of 'Living Language' in Cinquecento Italian Philology," Modern Language Review 48 (1953): 278-92.

[27] Among the earliest such writings are Franco's Petrarchista (Venice, 1539), Le pistole vulgari (Venice, 1539), and La Philena (Mantua, 1547). Doni published his Inferni in Venice in 1553. See Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, passim.

By 1550, therefore, an audience was ready-made for Dolce's handbook. Cobbled together with its simply argued defense of Bembo were remarks distilled from the Prose itself, glosses from Gianfrancesco Fortunio's Regole grammaticali of 1516, paraphrases of Donatus's Latin grammar, and (in Book 4) a superficially Aristotelian poetics, all presented with a plainness and simplicity that transformed Bembo's subtle precepts into a sort of folk wisdom. Bembo of course had died just three years before, and in Dolce's heroic account his stature was that of a modern Cicero. "There are some who don't like Bembo's works," he admitted. "To them one can answer in the way Quintilian once answered those overly severe men of his century who didn't like Cicero's works: let each one know without a doubt that he must take great profit from Bembo's lessons in poetry and prose."^[28]

Where Dolce converted Bembo's Prose into a canon for the common man, Muzio exploited the epistle form to bolster his precepts through familiarizing didactic address to a second-person "lettor." Generically the Arte poetica emulated the verse epistle of Horace, which provided both the formal model and poetic principles through which Bembo's linguistic biases were filtered.^[29] But compared with the droll servility with which Dolce's compilation paid homage to the Bembist tradition, Muzio's endorsement in the verse treatise Arte poetica of 1551 was more equivocal. As a Paduan and cosmopolitan courtier who served numerous princes on the peninsula, often carrying out delicate diplomatic missions,^[30] Muzio virulently opposed the arrogation of linguistic authority that he attributed to the Florentines. His position could at times appear comically contradictory, advocating trecento Tuscan (or what he preferred to call "Italian") in some works, while passionately resenting Tuscan elitism in others.^[31] Yet Muzio's defense of non-Tuscans' right to theorize Tuscan literature nevertheless helps explain the Veneto's curious dominance in the revival and codification of a language that was both foreign to it as well as archaic. In a letter to the Florentine literati Gabriello Cesano and Bartolomeo Cavalcanti he bristled:

[P]erhaps you will laugh that I, a non-Tuscan, want to discourse about Tuscan writers. But laugh on, as I too often laugh at those Tuscan writers who, believing

[28] "[S]ono alcuni, aiquali l'opere del Bembo non piacciono. A costoro si puo rispondere nella guisa, che gia rispose Quintiliano a que glihuomini troppo severi del suo secolo, aiquali non piacevano l'opre di Cicerone: conosca indubitatamente ciascuno di dover dalla lettione cosi de' versi, come delle prose del Bembo ritrar grandissimo profitto" (Osservationi nella volgar lingua [Venice, 1550], fols. 9-9'). Dolce later annotated Cicero's works in Opere morali di Marco Tullio Cicerone: cioè tre libri de gli uffici, due dialoghi, l'uno dell'amicitia, l'altro della vecchiezza, sei paradossi secondo l'openione de gli storici, trans. Francesco Vendramin (Venice, 1563).

[29] Modern ed. in Trattati 2:163-209.

[30] Muzio, known as Giustinopolitano, lived at Ferrara, Pesaro, and Urbino among other places and spent his last years in Rome and Tuscany. He wrote manuals for courtiers, including Il duello (Venice, 1550) on duelling and Il gentiluomo (Venice, 1571). Among various discussions of Muzio, see the Dizionario enciclopedico della letteratura italiana 4:97-99; Benedetto Croce, Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo rinascimento, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Bari, 1958), 1:198-210; and Padley, Grammatical Theory, pp. 40-41.

[31] Muzio voiced his strongest resentment in the late Varchina (Venice, 1573), a retort to Benedetto Varchi's L'Hercolano, which had been published in 1570 (see n. 33 below). Some of Muzio's other late writings on language survive in Battaglie . . . per la diffesa dell'italica lingua . . . (Venice, 1582), in which he took Trissino's part against pro-Tuscans like Varchi and Claudio Tolomei.

only themselves suited to write in this language, know less of it than the non-Tuscans. . . . To me it seems that in Tuscany what may come to pass is what used to happen in those countries where the most precious wines were produced: the foreign merchants, buying the best ones, carried them off, leaving the less good ones to the peasants.^[32]

Muzio's anxieties were not groundless. As late as 1564, when Varchi drafted his L'Hercolano, his interlocutor Count Cesare Hercolano was made to say, "It seems to me a strange thing that a foreigner, however learned and talented, should give the rules and teach the way of good writing and graceful composition in the language of others, and I have heard someone say that . . . [Bembo] was bitterly reproved as both presumptuous and arrogant by I don't know how many of your Florentines."^[33]

Yet as strangers to the dialect of the trecentisti, Venetians needed to make systematic, self-conscious guidelines in order to achieve stylistic and grammatical regularity. Their readiness to adapt themselves to an alien mode sets them apart from those champions of the courtly spoken dialect like Castiglione, whose Cortegiano warned against any kind of linguistic affectation.^[34] Bembo's aspirations to courtly grace, purity, classicism, and restraint did not preclude archaisms that seemed intolerably ostentatious to Castiglione-styled courtiers.^[35] Indeed, this tendency, perhaps more than any other, is paradigmatic for the Venetians' reception and transformation of a foreign musical idiom to their own classicizing ends.