Lecture | Writers and Lovers in the Renaissance: 2 Lectures

Lecture one by Marco Faini, University at Buffalo, SUNY:

Writers and Lovers, Writers as Lovers
Pietro Bembo may not have invented the Renaissance, as the title of a 2013 exhibition claimed. Yet, no other character epitomizes the splendor and decline of the Italian Renaissance as Bembo does. Born in 1470 to a noble Venetian family, as a boy he followed his father Bernardo to Lorenzo de' Medici's Florence. He later gained a reputation as a philologist, a writer of dialogues and poems, and an innovator in the field of the printing press. His Prose della volgar lingua set the standard of the Italian written language for the centuries to come. Appointed cardinal in 1538, Bembo remained throughout his life an avid collector of works of art as well as a lover, friend, and companion of outstanding women. Women play in fact a central role in Bembo's biography: from Maria Savorgnan whom he trusted with revising his poems to Lucrezia Borgia, from Caterina Cornaro, in whose gardens he set the Asolani, to other key figures of the Renaissance such as Isabella d'Este and Vittoria Colonna. When Bembo died in 1547, the world he had known had long entered a deep political, religious, and cultural crisis. Yet, he managed to remain a leading and inspiring figure for literati and writers. This talk will highlight some key moments in Bembo's biography and literary career, emphasising the role of women therein and Bembo's literary influence, both as a model and as a polemical target.

Lecture two by Paola Ugolini, University at Buffalo, SUNY:

Court Ladies and Courtesans, Lovers and Beloveds: Women in Early Modern Italy
This talk intends to set the relationship between Maria Savorgnan and Pietro Bembo within the larger context of the role of women in early modern Italian society. Starting from the debate on the nature and the role of women, it will analyze the different opportunities that women could have in the context of early modern Italian court culture, and in the Republic of Venice (where both Savorgnan and Bembo lived), focusing on two very different figures: the respectable court lady, and the scandalous courtesan. It will also highlight how the satiric language used by male writers to mock and attack courtesans was employed within a court context to lament the condition of the early modern literatus living at court. Finally, it will explore the Petrarchist lyrical model set by Bembo in gendered terms, with a specific attention to the case of Gaspara Stampa, a woman poet based in Venice.