Pietro Bembo was an Italian humanist, poet, and historian, the most influential man of letters during the High Renaissance in Italy.
Background
Bembo was born in 1470 in Venice to an aristocratic family. While still a boy he accompanied his father to Florence, and there acquired a love for that Tuscan form of speech which he afterwards cultivated in preference to the dialect of his native city.
Education
Pietro Bembo studied Greek for two years under the Greek scholar Constantine Lascaris at Messina, and afterwards went to the University of Padua.
Career
In Florence Pietro Bembo knew Lorenzo il Magnifico, the most famous of the Medici ruler-patrons. He also served as secretary to popes Leo X, Hadrian VI, and Clement VII.
This work influenced many subsequent authors of love treatises by the predominantly literary way in which it dealt with philosophical questions about love.
Many of Bembo's concepts were based on Marsilio Ficino's Commentary (1469) on Plato's Symposium, and Bembo continued Ficino's tendency to Christianize Plato's theory of love.
Even more important were the six years, 1506-1512, passed at Urbino, where he met, among many other important persons, Count Baldassare Castiglione and Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici.
In 1520 he withdrew to his villa near Padua, where for twenty years he lived with his books and many friends.
The Prose della volgar lingua (1525; Prose in the Vernacular), in which Bembo again employed the dialogue form, is perhaps the earliest Italian grammar.