The Legacy of Pietro Bembo, Ratified and Recast
Venier and his peers grew up under the spell of Pietro Bembo. Until receiving his cardinalate in 1539 Bembo lived in semiretirement at his villa in Padua, so that only a few privileged literati, including some members of Venier's circle, could have managed much contact with him before he departed for Rome. Venier was only twenty when Aretino named him in a fanciful, irreverent account of a dream about a Bembist Parnassus. As Aretino nears the garden he finds Domenico and his brother Lorenzo among a group of callow youth seated at Bembo's feet. In the idyllic excerpt below Bembo is reading aloud his Istorie veneziane to a rapt and adoring audience.
I take myself to the main garden and as I draw near it I see several youths: Lorenzo Venier and Domenico, Girolamo Lioni, Francesco Badoer and Federigo, who signal me with fingers to their lips to come quietly. Among them was the courteous Francesco Querino. As they do so the breath of lilies, hyacinths, and roses fills my nostrils; then, approaching my friends, I see on a throne of myrtle the divine Bembo. His face was shining with a light such as never before seen; sitting on high with a diadem of glory upon his head, he had about him a crown of sacred spirits. There was Giovio, Trifone, Molza, Nicolò Tiepolo, Girolamo Querino, Alemanno, Tasso, Sperone, Fortunio, Guidiccione, Varchi, Vittore Fausto, Pier Francesco Contarini, Trissino, Capello, Molino, Fracastoro, Bevazzano, Bernardo Navaier, Dolce, Fausto da Longiano, and Maffio.[14]
[13] Such references begin in the mid-nineteenth century with Francesco Caffi, Storia della musica sacra nella già cappella ducale di San Marco dal 1318 al 1797, 2 vols. (Venice, 1854), 1:112-13, 121, and 2:49-50, 129. His suggestions were pursued by Armen Carapetyan, "The Musica Nova of Adriano willaert: With a Reference to the Humanistic Society of 16th-Century Venice" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1945), pp. 74-75, and Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:446, and were taken up by (for example) Francesco Bussi, Umanità e arte di Gerolamo Parabosco: madrigalista, organista, e poligrafo (Piacenza, 1961), pp. 36-37, and Dean T. Mace, "Pietro Bembo and the Literary Origins of the Italian Madrigal," The Musical Quarterly 55 (1969): 73. None of these contains more than a few sentences.
It should be mentioned that Serassi assumed more musical activity and patronage in connection with Venier's salon than evidence collected thus far will support — namely, that "nè capitava in Venezia Musico o Cantatrice di conto, che il Veniero non li volesse udir più d'una volta; e se accadeva ch'essi fossero veramente eccellenti, non solo li premiava secondo il merito loro, ma li celebrava ancora co' suoi bellissimi versi" (Rime di Domenico Veniero, pp. xiv-xv). Serassi's view surely contributed to the assumption prevalent in music histories that Venier's was equally a literary and a musical academy.
[14] "Mi lascio menare a l'uscio del giardin principale, e ne lo appressarmici, veggo alcuni giovani: Lorenzo Veniero e Domenico, Girolamo Lioni, Francesco Badovaro e Federico, che col dito in bocca mi fêr cenno ch'io venga piano: fra i quali era il gentil Francesco Querino. Intanto il fiato dei gigli, de' iacinti e de le rose mi empieno il naso di conforto; onde io, acostandomi agli amici, veggo sopra un trono di mirti il divin Bembo. Splendeva la faccia sua con luce non più veduta; egli sedendo in cima col diadema de la gloria in capo, aveva intorno una corona di spirti sacri. V'era il Iovio, il Trifone, il Molza, Nicolò Tiepolo, Girolamo Querino, l'Alemanno, il Tasso, lo Sperone, il Fortunio, il Guidiccione, il Varchi, Vittor Fausto, il Contarin Pier Francesco, il Trissino, il Capello, il Molino, il Fracastoro, il Bevazzano, il Navaier Bernardo, il Dolce, il Fausto da Longiano, il Maffio" (quoted from Lettere sull'arte 1:97-98). The letter is dated from Venice, 6 December 1537. The figures not fully identified are Paolo Giovio, Triphon Gabriele, Francesco Maria Molza, Luigi Alemanno, Bernardo Tasso, Sperone Speroni, Giovanni Francesco Fortunio, Giovanni Guidiccione, Benedetto Varchi, Giangiorgio Trissino, Bernardo Capello, Girolamo Molino, Girolamo Fracastoro, Marco Bevazzano, Bernardo Navagero, Lodovico Dolce, and Maffio Venier.
Aretino's spoof played on the kind of doting admiration he must have observed in Venice. At midcentury Bembo's beliefs in linguistic purity and the imitation of models and his rhetorical principles for writing prose and poetry still formed the near-exclusive stylistic guides for mainstream vernacular writers, especially in the Venetian literary establishment that Venier came to represent. In Chapter 5, I show how volumes of writings on vernacular style produced by Venetian literary theorists of the generation that succeeded Bembo reproduced and gradually transformed his views. For the moment I wish only to point up some contexts in which Bembo's theories were propounded within the academy and the range of mechanisms by which they were transmitted.
Lodovico Dolce, possibly the most dogged Bembist at midcentury and one of Venier's closest adherents, provides a link between Bembist ideology and Venier's literary practice. Dolce was an indigent polymath who earned a meager livelihood off the Venetian presses. In 1550, three years after Bembo's death, he published his Osservationi della volgar lingua as a kind of zealous reaffirmation of official vernacular ideology. Many of its catchiest passages obediently echo the judgments and jargon of Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua. Dolce reinforces his "Venetocentric" view by naming as the best lyric stylists five comrades, including Domenico Venier and at least three other Venetian poets tied to his circle — Molino, Bernardo Cappello, and Pietro Gradenigo.[15] Other writings, seen in juxtaposition with Dolce's, imply that after Bembo left the Veneto, Venier filled the patriarchal void he left behind.[16] The cosmopolitan Girolamo Muzio cast Venier as a kind of literary padron in his verse treatise Arte poetica. Dedicated to Venier in 1551, it exploited the folk rhetoric of didactic capitoli.
Ricorrerò ai maestri de la lingua, I'll apply myself to the masters of language,
Al buon Trifon Gabriello, al sacro To the good Triphon Gabriele, to the sacred
Bembo. Bembo.
Andrò in Toscana al Varchi, al Tolomei, I'll go to Tuscany to Varchi, to Tolomei,
E correrò a Vinegia al buon Veniero.[17] And I'll race to Venice to the good Venier.
[15] Dolce argues that to write the best Tuscan one need not be Tuscan, as proved by Bembo and others in Venice, "who, writing often in this language, produce fruits worthy of immortality, such as [Bernardo] Capello, Domenico Venier, M. Bernardo Zane, Girolamo Molino, Pietro Gradenigo, and many others" (che in essa lingua, spesso scrivendo, producono frutti degni d'immortalità si come il Capello, M. Domenico Veniero, M. Bernardo Zane, M. Girolamo Molino, M. Piero Gradenigo Gentilhuomini Vinitiani, e molti altri); Osservationi nella volgar lingua (Venice, 1550), fol. 9. Compare the protestations of Girolamo Muzio, Chap. 5, n. 32 below.
[16] The view appears repeatedly in sixteenth-century accounts, as well as in modern ones; see, for instance, Flamini, Storia letteraria, p. 180, who calls Venier "l'erede e successore del Bembo."
[17] Arte poetica, fol. 94.
The political prominence of Venier's noble family and his early education at San Marco with the renowned teacher of humanities, Giovanni Battista Egnazio, made him well suited to the role he came to assume.[18] In their correspondence of 1544, Bembo praised the young Venier for "a lovely, pure, and well-woven style" (un bello, casto, e ben tessuto stile), the same qualities championed in the Prose.[19] Indeed, the strands of their relationship were not only literary but included the larger familial web of Venetian patrician society: the manuscript letters of Pietro Gradenigo, Bembo's son-in-law and Venier's literary cohort, reveal that in the mid-forties Venier actually became godfather to two of Bembo's grandsons.[20]
Venier's most explicit advocacy of Bembist canons came in the commemorative sonnets he composed after Bembo's death in 1547 and published in 1550 in the third volume of the famed series of anthologies known as the Rime diverse, or Rime di diversi.[21] Venier adapted the norms of Bembist style to the purposes of a fervid encomium. By stressing in Bembo the traditional virtues of Venice, he fixed his predecessor's fame in the lasting domain of Venetian civic mythology. An especially typical embodiment of this comes in the sonnet Pianse non ha gran tempo il Bembo,[22] a double tribute to Bembo and another patriarchal contemporary (and close colleague of Bembo's), the Venetian poet-scholar Triphon Gabriele, who died in 1549.[23]
Pianse non ha gran tempo il Bembo, ch'era, Not just as much as the sun circles the Adriatic shore,
Scevra l'alma dal corpo al ciel salito, But as much as it turns from morning to evening,
D'Adria non pur, quanto circonda il lito, [Had Venice] wept not long ago for Bembo, who had risen
Ma quanto gira il Sol da mane a sera. To Heaven, his soul severed from his body. 4
[18] See the reference to Venier's schooling by Lodovico Dolce cited in Rime di Domenico Veniero, p. iv. On Egnazio see James Bruce Ross, "Venetian Schools and Teachers, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century: A Survey and a Study of Giovanni Battista Egnazio," RQ 29 (1976): 521-60.
[19] "Ho tuttavia con grande piacer mio in essa vostra lettera veduto un bello & casto & ben tessuto stile: ilquale m'ha in dubbio recato, quali più lode meritino, o le rime vostre o le prose" (Delle lettere di M. Pietro Bembo . . . di nuovo riveduto et corretto da Francesco Sansovino, 2 vols. [Venice, 1560], 2: libro 10, fol. 131). The letter is dated 31 July 1544, from Rome.
[20] Their father, Pietro Gradenigo, one of the poets singled out for mention by Dolce (see n. 15 above), was a nobleman and husband to Bembo's illegitimate daughter Helena. The information comes from a series of letters in manuscript, "Lettere inedite di Pietro Gradenigo Patrizio Veneto Scritte a diversi," I-Vnm, MSS It. Cl. X, 23 (6526), fols. 9 and 13. A letter on fol. 9 of 15 April (no year but probably from 1544 based on the surrounding letters) speaks of the birth of their son Alvise: "ho elletto per compari Domenico Veniero, e Federigo Badoero miei antichi, et cari amici, et compagni, et Signori devotissi mi di Vostra Signora Reverendissi ma oltre ad alcuni altri gentilhuomini" (I have chosen as godfathers Domenico Venier and Federigo Badoer, my old and dear friends and comrades, and most loyal sirs of your Republic, in addition to some other gentlemen). Elsewhere Pietro writes to his father-in-law: "Marti prossimo passato battezzammo il mio bambino, et li ponenimo nome Paolo. . . . I compari che l'hanno tenuta al battesimo sono stati questi, lo eccellen te ms. Giacomo Bonfio . . ., Monsigno r Franco, il Sign or Girardo Rambaldo, ms. Federigo Badoer, ms. Domenico Veniero, ms. Antoni o Moresini, et ms. Marc' Antonio Contarini. Gentilhuomini tutti di gran valore, et miei cari amici et compagni" (Last Tuesday we baptized my baby boy, and named him Paolo. . . . The godfathers who held him at the baptism were the excellent Messer Giacomo Bonfio . . ., Monsignor Franco, Signor Girardo Rambaldo, Messer Federigo Badoer, Messer Domenico Venier, Messer Antonio Moresini, and Messer Marc' Antonio Contarini, all gentlemen of great worth and my dear friends and comrades); fol. 13.
[21] Libro terzo delle rime di diversi nobilissimi et eccellentissimi autori nuovamente raccolte (Venice, 1550).
[22] Folio 197'.
[23] Gabriele was a principal interlocutor of Daniello's La poetica, on which see Chap. 5 below. In 1512 Bembo sent to him the first two books of his Prose della volgar lingua in manuscript; see Mario Marti's preface to his edition Opere in volgare (Florence, 1961), pp. 265-68, and for a reprint of the letter Bembo wrote accompanying the manuscript, pp. 713-15. A manuscript in I-Vmc entitled "Accademie in Venezia" (MS Gradenigo 181) lists Gabriele's circle in Padua under "Adunanze virtuose" (fol. 148'). A few remarks on Gabriele's circle may be found in Paul Lawrence Rose, "The Accademia Venetiana: Science and Culture in Renaissance Venice," Studi veneziani 11 (1969): 200.
Piange te parimente, hor ch'a la vera Now that to the true Fatherland, dying,
Patria morendo e tu TRIFON se gito, You too have gone, Triphon, all of Venice
Venezia tutta, e quanto abbraccia il sito Weeps for you equally, as much as it yet embraces
Qua giuso ancor della mondana sfera. The site of the worldly sphere here below.[24] 8
D'egual senno ambo duo, d'egual bontate Of equal wisdom both, of equal goodness
Foste, a communi studi ambo duo volti, Were you, both turned to common studies
D'una patria, d'un sangue, e d'una etate; From one homeland, one blood, and one age. 11
Nodo par d'amistade insieme avolti An equal knot of friendship wound round both
Tenne sempre i cor vostri alme ben nate, Always held your hearts, well-born souls;
Ed hor ancho v'ha 'l cielo ambo raccolti. And now even Heaven has gathered you both. 14
Here Venier placed the memory of his two mentors in the discourse of Venetian myth by stressing in them qualities attached to traditional conceptions of the state — goodness and wisdom — as well as their derivation from a common race. Though Venier distinguishes between Heaven, the "vera patria," and Venice, the "mondana sfera," his affections seem to lie chiefly with the latter. From the opening image of the sun circling the Adriatic shore (the "lito") he links in a linguistically rich evocation both Venetian geography and the notion of the homeland to the patriotic rhetoric of the Serenissima.[25] The poem's emphasis on the moral content of Venetian mythology ("d'egual bontade") demonstrates that Venier's depiction of Bembo and Gabriele as model figures was not meant to be just literary and scholarly but ethical as well, charged with a moral imperative.
In other poems on Bembo's death Venier made clear the nature of this imperative, as seen in a sonnet that asks Dolce too to mourn Bembo.
DOLCE, possente a raddolcir il pianto, Dolce, powerful enough to sweeten the mourning
Ch'èper alta cagion pur troppo amaro, That from a great cause is all too bitter,
Piangendo il Bembo à tutto 'l mondo caro, Weeping for Bembo, dear to the whole world,
Poi che sua morte ha tutto 'l mondo pianto, Now that the whole world has wept for his death: 4
Perche seco habbia il duol di gioia alquanto, Since grief contains some joy,
Anzi vada il gioir col duolo a paro, Or rather joy goes paired with grief,
Segui 'l tuo stile, e non ti sia dischiaro Follow your style, and let it not displease you
Di lagrimarlo in sì soave canto. To lament him in such a sweet song. 8
[24] For vv. 1-2 Nino Pirrotta kindly offers the alternative "Not just what is surrounded by the Adriatic shore [i.e., Venice], but all the land circled by the sun from morning to evening" as clarification of the distinction Venier later draws between Venice and the "worldly sphere" (private communication).
[25] Bembo used a related lexicon and imagery in his own sonnet, "Questo del nostro lito antica sponda, / Che te, Venezia, copre e difende" (Opere in volgare, ed. Marti, no. 93, pp. 300-301).
Questo farà, che 'l suon de tuoi lamenti This will make the people hear ever more
Gioia non men che duolo altrui recando Eagerly the sound of your laments,
Sempre piu disiose udran le genti. Bearing joy to others no less than grief: 11
Tal che ferendo in un I'alme e sanando, So that at once wounding and healing the souls,
Fama eterna il tuo stil ne l'altrui menti, Your style, like Achilles' lance,
Come l'hosta d'Achille, andrà lasciando.[26] Will leave eternal fame in people's minds. 14
Throughout the poem Venier pursued the Petrarchan opposition of gioir and duolo to develop the poem's thematic strategy, while punning his recipient's name: to make his sadness felt most keenly Dolce should lament Bembo's death in sweet tones. His conceit tempers the sense of both terms, joy and grief, with distinctly Petrarchan reserve, each straining to uphold and assert its meaning in the face of its antonym.
At its surface, then, the injunction for Petrarchan paradox is simply a thematic one. But its stylistic basis finds an explanation in Ciceronian codifications of vernacular style that prevent words from registering too firmly on a single semantic or stylistic plane. By reducing the expression of sorrow through its opposite and exhorting Dolce to a sweet style even for the dark subject of death, Venier thus also claimed for his contemporaries the same canon of moderation earlier urged by Bembo. The road he treads is dutifully narrowed by Bembist precepts. And his insistence in the sestet that a lament is best heard mixed with contrasting sentiments invokes Bembo's advocation of Ciceronian variation and restraining decorum as the vehicles of rhetorical persuasion.
Such reserved expression also recalls the Venetian patriciate's artfully orchestrated self-image and its tendency to insist on well-monitored emotions in the civic sphere. Decorum, in this sense of reserve, formed the literary counterpart of virtù, purity, wisdom, and good judgment. As we have seen, these qualities, basic to Venetian communal identity, were epitomized for Venetians by Petrarch's lyric style. The academic and self-conscious brand of Petrarchism that proliferated in Venier's milieu, in catering to the needs of a highly disciplined state, thus served to reinforce the self-identity that was so emphatically articulated in the political and social rhetoric of the republic.
Yet, paradoxically, the ideological force that suppressed the poet's voice joined blithely with a candid quest for individual public acclaim. And so, ironically, Venier sugars the end of his sonnet with assurances that "Fama eterna il tuo stil ne l'altrui menti . . . andrà lasciando." The Bembist path to literary perfection might be unyieldingly self-effacing, but the promised compensation for taking it was poetic immortality.
[26] Libro terzo delle rime di diversi, fol. 211, in the Newberry Library copy [recte: fol. 195].
Venier was well accustomed to the position of civic literary advisor he assumed in these sonnets. Although he wielded as much power as any vernacular author in Venice, he seems to have eschewed print by and large, publishing little and participating mainly in a manuscript culture that circulated verse by hand, post, perhaps even word of mouth.[27] Publicly he served primarily as a mentor to the many fledglings of the bourgeoisie, aristocratic dropouts, and patrician dilettantes who flocked to his door. Despite the power and esteem he accumulated, Venier resembled other noble literati in producing no canzoniere or other literary opus while he lived. His role instead was that of arbiter of Venetian poetic tastes. Like the printed anthologies to which he sometimes added his prestigious name, his salon and his acquaintance were stepping stones to public status for numerous literary aspirants of backgrounds less privileged than his, striving for acknowledgment or remuneration and a firm place within the active literary discourse of the day.[28] In this capacity Venier appeared as dedicatee of a number of volumes issued from the prolific Venetian presses, and much of the poetry that he and his comrades produced responded indirectly to the new public nature of words.[29] Generated out of the larger fabric of Venetian society, this poetry often transformed the contemplative, soloistic poetics of Petrarchan-Bembist lyric models into the more externalized and explicitly dialogic forms that I identified in Chapter 3 — sonnet exchanges, dedica-
[27] On this phenomenon see Armando Balduino, "Petrarchismo veneto e tradizione manoscritta," in Petrarca, Venezia e il Veneto, ed. Giorgio Padoan, Civiltà veneziana, Saggi 21 (Florence, 1976), pp. 243-70.
[28] Venier's sporadic contributions to the printed literature may be compared with those of several other Venetian poets, highly placed in the social and literary worlds, whose writings circulated in manuscript. Molino, also of noble birth, must have been known primarily in manuscript, since his Rime were printed only posthumously. The same is true of Giacomo Zane, who died in 1560 and whose Rime were issued in 1562; see Taddeo, Il manierismo letterario, p. 101 n. 1. I am inclined to think that there was a tendency among the uppermost crust to emulate aristocratic Florentine manuscript culture (in addition to the Tuscan language) by avoiding a wholesale participation in the culture of printed words as being beneath their station. Poets, including Molino, Celio Magno, Giuliano Goselini, and others, frequently entered into the world of print via musical sources, and only later poetic ones; see Lorenzo Bianconi and Antonio Vassalli, "Circolazione letteraria e circolazione musicale del madrigale: il caso G.B. Strozzi," in Il madrigale tra cinque e seicento, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Bologna, 1988), pp. 125-26.
[29] Among volumes dedicated to Venier are the Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini, et eccellentissimi ingegni scritte in diverse materie (Venice, 1542), with a dedication by the publisher and editor Paolo Manutio; an edition of Ficino's Tre vite entitled Marsilio Ficino florentino filosofo eccellentissimo de le tre vite (Venice, 1548), translated into the vernacular by Giovanni Tarcagnota (pseudonymously called Lucio Fauno in a preface to the readers) and dedicated by the publisher Michele Tramezzino; the Rime diverse del Mutio Iustino Politano (Girolamo Muzio), including the Arte Poetica (Venice, 1551), dedicated by the author; and the Rime di Mons. Girolamo Fenaruolo (Venice, 1574), dedicated by Fenaruolo's posthumous biographer Marc'Antonio Silvio. Venier also figured among the inflated number of dedicatees (loosely so-called) scattered throughout Antonfrancesco Doni's Libraria (Venice, 1550), fol. 16'; on the various editions of the work, two of which date from 1550, see C. Ricottini Marsili-Libelli, Anton Francesco Doni, scrittore e stampatore (Florence, 1960), nos. 21, 22, and 70. In addition, many of the poems in the Libro terzo delle rime di diversi stem from the Venier circle and include a great many encomiastic praises of both Bembo and Venier — for example, Dolce's Venier, che dal mortal terreno chiostro, fol. 184, Giorgio Gradenico's (Gradenigo) Venier, che l'alma a le crudel percosse, fol. 98', and Pietro Aretino's VENIERO gratia di quel certo ingegno, fol. 183'. The Libro terzo was the first of the Rime di diversi series to represent large numbers of poets connected with Venier, including Dolce, Giovanni Battista Susio, Giovanni Battista Amalteo, Parabosco, Giorgio Gradenigo, Fortunio Spira, Bernardo Tasso, Giacomo Zane, Bernardo Cappello, Anton Giacomo Corso, and Venier himself (although a number had already been included in the Rime di diversi nobili huomini et eccellenti poeti nella lingua thoscana. Libro secondo [Venice, 1547] — Corso, Cappello, Susio, Parabosco, and Dolce).
tory poems, stanzas in praise of women, patriotic encomia, and so forth. It thus became fundamentally a poetics of correspondence and exchange, but also of competition, which often took the form of ingenious and ultrarefined verbal games.
One of the works that best reveals the evolving direction of Venier's academy at midcentury is Parabosco's I diporti. First printed (without date) by 1550, I diporti is a colorful, Boccaccesque series of novellas in the form of conversations between various men of letters.[30] The interlocutors are mostly linked with Venier's group: Parabosco himself, Molino, Venier, Badoer, Speroni, Aretino, the scholar Daniele Barbaro, Benedetto Corner (Venier's interlocutor in a dialect canzoniere discussed below), the editor and poet Ercole Bentivoglio, Count Alessandro Lambertino (recipient of Parabosco's capitolo cited earlier), the philosopher and classicist Lorenzo Contarini, and the poets Giambattista Susio, Fortunio Spira, and Anton Giacomo Corso, among others.[31]
During a lengthy digression toward the end of the stories the participants enumerate the requisite qualities of different lyric genres — madrigal, strambotto, capitolo, sestina, pastoral canzone, and sonnet.[32] Madrigals must be "sharp with a well-seasoned, charming invention" (acuti e d'invenzione salsa e leggiadra) and must derive their grace from a lively spirit.[33] They must be beautifully woven, adorned with graceful verses and words and, like the strambotto, have a lovely wit (arguzia) and inventiveness. To exemplify these qualities Sperone recites one of Parabosco's madrigals, applauding its manipulation of a pretty life-death conceit. Corso then recites a witty capitolo (again Parabosco's), full of anaphora, prompting Badoer to effuse on its "begli effetti amorosi."[34] The sestina, Contarini insists, allows the exposition of beautiful things and is a very lovely poem (poema molto vago).[35]
[30] I cite from the mod. ed. in Novellieri minori del cinquecento: G. Parabosco — S. Erizzo, ed. Giuseppe Gigli and Fausto Nicolini (Bari, 1912), pp. 1-199, hereafter I diporti. On the date of the first edition see Bussi, Umanità e arte, p. 77 n. 1. As Giuseppe Bianchini reported, Parabosco mentioned the existence of I diporti in a letter (also undated), which in turn probably stems from 1550; Girolamo Parabosco: scrittore e organista del secolo XVI, Miscellanea di Storia Veneta, ser. 2, vol. 6 (Venice, 1899), p. 394. On this basis Bianchini suggested 1550 as the date of the first edition. Ad[olphe] van Bever and Ed[mond] Sansot-Orland, Oeuvres galantes des conteurs italiens, 2d ser., 4th ed. (Paris, 1907), pushed the compositional date to a slightly earlier time (pp. 219-20), but without real evidence. The hope Doni expressed in the Libraria (Venice, 1550) that Parabosco would soon issue "un volume di novelle" (p. 23) would seem to secure the date of 1550, since Doni's book was published in that year.
[31] The mix of Venetians and non-Venetians overlaps a good deal with other descriptions of Venier's circle, like the one in Parabosco's capitolo cited in n. 11 above. Characteristically, a number of figures (as Parabosco states in the ragionamento to the Prima giornata) are non-Venetians but all spent time in Venice: Bentivoglio and Lambertino from Bologna, Susio from Mirandola, Spira from Viterbo, Corso from Ancona, and Speroni from Padua (I diporti, p. 10). Speroni was also a main interlocutor in Bernardino Tomitano's Ragionamenti della lingua toscana (see Chap. 5, pp. 129-30 below). The towering Aretino, quite fascinatingly, though counted by Parabosco among the non-Venetians, is the only one given no native origin. For further identifications of these and other interlocutors in I diporti see Bianchini, Girolamo Parabosco, pp. 395-98. On Baldassare Donato's encomiastic setting of a sonnet on Contarini's death see Chap. 9 n. 76.
In the decade after I diporti M. Valerio Marcellino published a series of conversations called Il diamerone that were explicitly set among the Venier circle (Venice, 1564); see Chap. 5 below, n. 139.
[32] I diporti, pp. 177-91.
[33] Ibid., p. 177.
[34] Ibid., pp. 179-80.
[35] Ibid., pp. 182-83.
In each genre, then, grace and beauty are paramount. But no less important in their estimation are invention, wit, and technical virtuosity. When they come to the labyrinthine sestina, this stance takes the form of a little apologia, as Corso and Contarini argue that the genre is no less suited than the canzone to expressions of beauty and no more difficult to compose.[36] After more madrigals of Parabosco are recited — and amply praised by as harsh a judge as Aretino — the whole company assembles to assess the formidable sonnet.
Toward the end of their exchange they cite several sonnets of Venier, whose virtuosic verbal artifice won him widespread fame in the sixteenth century. Whereas the madrigals described earlier aimed at a tightly knit and clever rhetorical formulation, these sonnets employ technical artifice in a somewhat different role. To construct the following, for example, Venier systematically reworked corresponding triads of words — no fewer than four of them in the first quatrain alone.
Non punse, arse o legò, stral, fiamma, o laccio The arrow, flame, or snare of Love never
D'Amor lasso piu saldo, e freddo, e sciolto Stung, burned, or bound, alas, a heart more
Cor, mai del mio ferito, acceso, Steady, cold, and loosed than mine, wounded, kindled,
e 'nvolto, and tied
Gia tanti dì ne l'amoroso impaccio. Already so many days in an amorous tangle. 4
Perc'haver me 'l sentia di marmo e ghiaccio, Because I felt marble and ice within me,
Libero in tutto i' non temeva stolto Free in everything, I foolishly did not fear
Piaga, incendio, o ritegno, e pur m'ha colto Wound, fire, or restraint, and yet
L'arco, il foco, e la rete, in ch'io The bow, the fire, and the net in which I lie have
mi giaccio. caught me. 8
E trafitto, infiammato, avinto in modo And pierced, and inflamed, and captured in such a way
Son, ch'altro cor non apre, avampa, o cinge Am I that no dart, torch, or chain opens, blazes, or clasps
Dardo, face, o catena hoggi più forte. Any other heart today more strongly. 11
Ne fia credo chi 'l colpo, il caldo, Nor, I believe, may it be that the blow, and the heat, and
e 'l nodo, the knot
Che 'l cor mi passa, mi consuma, e stringe, That enter, break, and squeeze my heart
Sani, spenga, o disciolga altri, che Could be healed, extinguished, or unloosed by any other
morte.[37] but death. 14
Parabosco's interlocutors submit a panegyric on Venier after the mention of this puzzlelike poem and its sister sonnet, Qual più saldo, gelato e sciolto core. Both poems were well enough known to the interlocutors to forego reading them aloud. Non
[36] Ibid., p. 182.
[37] In addition to its mention in I diporti, p. 190, and its inclusion in the Libro terzo delle rime di diversi, fol. 198, the sonnet appeared in numerous subsequent printed anthologies and a large number of manuscripts. For a partial listing of these see Balduino, "Petrarchismo veneto e tradizione manoscritta," pp. 258-59. I give an early version of the sonnet as it appeared in the Libro terzo delle rime di diversi, to which I have added some modern diacritics.
punse, arse o legò, Spira avows, is one of the "rarissimi e bellissimi fra i sonetti maravigliosi di Venier."
Non punse, arse o legò initiated a subtle shift in the stylistic premises that Venier's circle had maintained for years. Its formal type, dubbed by the modern critics Dámaso Alonso and Carlos Bousoño the "correlative sonnet,"[38] seems to have been Venier's invention, created by extending to their utmost Petrarchan tendencies toward wit and ingegno that appear in earlier cinquecento poetry in far less extreme guises. The essential strategy of the correlative sonnet lies in its initial presentation of several disparate elements ("punse" / "arse" / "legò") that are continually linked in subsequent verses with corresponding noun, verb, or adjective groups ("stral" / "fiamma" / "laccio"; "saldo" / "freddo" / "sciolto," and so forth). Although the high-level syntactic structure is highly syntagmatic, the immediate syntax of the poetic line tends to lack coordination and subordination of elements except that of a crisscrossed, paratactic sort.
Very possibly Non punse, arse o legò and Qual più saldo had even been written some time before 1550, as Spira seems to imply in describing them as the models imitated by another sonnet and the source of Venier's wide renown as a "raro e nobile spirto."[39] They thus represent an early and radical extension of the Petrarchan penchant for witty wordplay, one that was carried out in less systematized forms in Petrarch's own sonnets and imitated in less extreme ways by others in the sixteenth century — Luigi Tansillo, Annibale Caro, Benedetto Varchi, and Gaspara Stampa.[40]
[38] For their analysis of this sonnet see Alonso and Bousoño, Seis calas, p. 56. See also Taddeo, Il manierismo letterario, pp. 57-58, and Erspamer, "Petrarchismo e manierismo," pp. 190-91, who names the basic rhetorical figure with the Latin rapportatio. The sixteenth-century Daniello characterized the phenomenon as "corrispondenze e contraposizioni" in his discussion of Petrarch's sonnet no. 133, Amor m'ha posto come segno al strale; La poetica (Venice, 1536), p. 79 (see n. 40 below and Chap. 5 below on Daniello). For an analysis of the sonnet's correlations see Dámaso Alonso, "La poesia del Petrarca e il petrarchismo (mondo estetico della pluralità)," Studi petrarcheschi 7 (1961): 100-4.
[39] I diporti, p. 190. The two sonnets appear on the same page in the Libro terzo delle rime di diversi. One candidate for the imitations Spira refers to is Parabosco's sonnet Sì dolce è la cagion d'ogni mio amaro; its first tercet reads: "Non fia però ch'io non ringratia ogn'hora / La fiamma, il dardo, la cathena, e Amore / Che si m'arde per voi, stringe, & impiaga" (Parabosco, Il primo libro delle lettere famigliari, fol. 50).
[40] Consider, for example, the more leisurely correlations in Petrarch's sonnet no. 133, "Amor, m'ha posto come segno al strale, / Come al sol neve, come cera al foco, / Et come nebbia al vento," in which two and a half lines (vv. 1-3) are needed to correlate four pairs of elements a single time. The second quatrain brings back their substantive forms ("colpo," "sole," "foco," "vento") just once, and the first tercet correlates only the first three pairs of elements ("saette," "sole," "foco" / "mi punge," "m'abbaglia," "mi distrugge"). The last tercet concludes the whole by turning its final rhetorical point around a reorientation of the last element: the "dolce spirto" of the beloved that becomes the breeze ("l'aura") before which the poet's life flees. Petrarch's four-pronged correlations thus number a total of four for the whole sonnet, as compared with twelve for Venier's three-pronged correlations in Non punse, arse o legò.
For an example in Bembo, see sonnet no. 85, Amor, mia voglia e 'l vostro altero sguardo (Opere in volgare, ed. Marti, p. 497), which structurally resembles Petrarch's Amor, Fortuna e la mia mente (no. 124). Alonso and Bousoño, Seis calas, pp. 85-106, discuss two-, three-, and four-pronged correlations in sonnets by Petrarch, Ariosto, Luigi Tansillo, Vincenzo Martelli, Benedetto Varchi, Gaspara Stampa, Camillo Besalio, Pietro Gradenigo, Annibale Caro, Maffio Venier, Luigi Groto, and Giambattista Marino. A good example, though not as rigorously organized as this one, exists in Stampa's no. 26, which may be significant in view of her association with Venier; see Fiora A. Bassanese, Gaspara Stampa (Boston, 1982), pp. 9-12, 18, 37-38, and nn. 66-75 below. The first quatrain of the poem reads: "Arsi, piansi, cantai; piango, ardo, canto; / Piangerò, arderò, canterò sempre / Fin che Morte o Fortuna o tempo stempre / A l'ingegno, occhi e cor, stil, foco o pianto" (Rime, ed. Maria Bellonci and Rodolfo Ceriello, 2d ed. [Milan, 1976], p. 97). Like Petrarch, Stampa reorders the triad in its different reincarnations.
Though the correlative sonnet represents only one subgenre in the poetry of Venier, it nonetheless presents a vivid example of the growing tendency in the Venetian lyric to invest the sanctioned Ciceronian properties of grace and moderation with greater technical complexity.[41]