Gareth D. Williams

Pietro Bembo on Etna (eBook, ePUB)

The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

This book is centered on the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), on his two-year stay in Sicily in 1492-4 to study the ancient Greek language under one of its most distinguished contemporary teachers, the Byzantine émigré Constantine Lascaris, and above all on his ascent of Mount Etna in 1493. The more particular focus of this study is on the imaginative capacities that crucially shape Bembo's elegantly crafted account, in Latin, of his Etna adventure in his so-called De Aetna, published at the Aldine press in Venice in 1496. This work is cast in the form of a dialogue that takes place between the young Bembo and his father Bernardo (himself a prominent Venetian statesman with strong humanist involvements) after Pietro's return to Venice from Sicily in 1494. But De Aetna offers much more than a one-dimensional account of the facts, sights and findings of Pietro's climb. Far more important in the present study is his eye for creative elaboration, or for transforming his literal experience on the mountain into a meditation on his coming-of-age at a remove from the conventional career-path expected of one of his station within the Venetian patriciate. Three mutually informing features that are critical to the artistic originality of De Aetna receive detailed treatment in this study: (i) the stimulus that Pietro drew from the complex history of Mount Etna as treated in the Greco-Roman literary tradition from Pindar onwards; (ii) the striking novelty of De Aetna's status as the first Latin text produced at the nascent Aldine press in the prototype of what modern typography knows as Bembo typeface; and (iii) Pietro's ingenious deployment of Etna as a powerful, multivalent symbol that simultaneously reflects the diverse characterizations of, and the generational differences between, father and son in the course of their dialogical exchanges within De Aetna.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 336
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. Juli 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780190683368
• Artikelnr.: 48632298

Autorenporträt

Gareth D. Williams is Violin Family Professor of Classics, Columbia University. His previous OUP publications include The Cosmic Viewpoint (2016) and Roman Reflections (with Katharina Volk, 2015).

Inhaltsangabe

* Contents
* Preface
* Abbreviations
* List of Illustrations
* Introduction
* Chapter 1. The Etna Idea
* I: Pindar, Pythian 1
* II: Virgil and Lucretius
* III: Seneca, Ovid and the Aetna Poet
* IV: The Open-Ended Etna Idea
* Chapter 2. From Memory to Modernity
* I: Mnemonic Topography
* II: Antiquarian Travel before Bembo
* III: Urbano Bolzanio
* IV: Etna as an Island, Noniano as a Memory Place
* V: Petrarch on Mont Ventoux
* VI: De Aetna and the History of Mountaineering
* VII: Banishing Hellish Myth and Legend
* Chapter 3. From Venice to Sicily: Bembo's Greek Education, His
Teachers,
* His Inspirers
* I: Poliziano, the Bembine Terence, and Bembo's Sogno
* II: Bembo's Greek Studies in Messina
* III: Absent Presences: Giorgio Valla and Ermolao Barbaro
* IV: The Half-Story So Far
* Chapter 4. De Aetna in the Context of Quattrocento Venetian Humanism
* I: Ermolao Barbaro, Born for Letters, Bred for State-Service
* II: The Evolution of Quattrocento Venetian Humanism
* III: Pietro's Peers, Gli Asolani, and the Leggi della Compagnia degli
Amici
* (i) Angelo Gabriele
* (ii) Gli Asolani, and Pietro's Correspondence with Trifone Gabriele
* (iii) Vincenzo Quirini and Tommaso Giustiniani
* Chapter 5. Physical Form and Textual Meaning in the Aldine Book: The
Symbolic
* Significance of Typeface
* I: Venice, the Rise of Printing, and the Aldine Press
* II: The Aldine Octavo Hand-Book
* III: The Interrelationship of Physical Form and Textual Meaning
* IV: Bernardo Bembo, Petrarch's Laura, and Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra
de'
* Benci
* V: End-Point, Start-Point
* Chapter 6. Activations of Landscape in De Aetna
* I: Venice, the Veneto, and Villa Culture
* II: Father and Son in Pietro's Early Verses
* III: The Recalibration of Perspective Through Contrasts of Landscape
* IV: Shaping Etna's Landscape Through Poetic Inscription
* Chapter 7. The Bembo Collection, and Evocations of Noniano
* I: Pietro Bembo the Collector
* II: Coins, Medals, and Valerio Belli's Bembo
* III: Titian, Bembo, and Evocation of Sweet Noniano
* IV: De Aetna and Naturalist Collecting
* V: Bembo and Giovanni Bellini
* Text and Translation
* Bibliography
* Index of Passages
* General Index
* Index of Latin Words
* Index of Greek Words