Background
Pietro was born on 20 May in 1470 in Venice. His father, high in the Venetian foreign service, provided Pietro with the best humanistic education, even sending him to Messina for the newly fashionable study of Greek, but only reluctantly permitted his further study at Padua. Towards 1498 Pietro spent a brief but influential period with his father at Ferrara; his interest in and respect for Italian, as opposed to the Classics, seem to have been kindled at this cultural center. 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. When in 1512 the Cardinal was elected Pope Leo X, Bembo, an accomplished Latinist, became his secretary. In 1520 he withdrew to his villa near Padua, where for twenty years he lived with his books and many friends. The assumption of orders in 1522 brought him many benefices; however, it prevented the legalization of his relationship with the mother of his three children. After his appointment as cardinal in 1539, Bembo returned to Rome, where he lived, wealthy and honored as few have been in their lifetime, until his death in January 1547.
Career
Bembo's first published work was Gli Asolani (1505), three dialogues whose languid prose is interspersed with lyrics in imitation of Petrarch. The first dialogue accuses love as the cause of unhappiness, the second exalts it as the cause of joy; these views are reconciled in the third dialogue, which distinguishes between sensual and spiritual or platonic love. Thus was initiated a long series of sixteenth-century love treatises and a vogue of Neo-Platonism, which was convenient in courtly society but less than secure in its philosophical basis. Also in dialogue form is Bembo's most important work, the Prose Della vulgar lingua (1525), which crystallized sentiment in favor of the vernacular instead of Latin. Italian, according to Bembo, is the natural medium of expression for Italians. Applying to Italian literature the humanistic principle of imitating a Classical model, he held that poets should follow Petrarch and the prose writers should emulate Boccaccio, who was himself often an imitator of Cicero.
By his intensive study of early Italian literature and his rediscovery of its ProvençalProvencal origins, Bembo initiated a revival of interest in both literatures. He was largely responsible for purging the Italian lyric of the defects of taste into which it had fallen, and his Canzoniere (1530) furnished a model of exquisitely polished Petrarchism. This and certain similarities of life and temperament have won for him the title of "Miniature Petrarch."