Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist

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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
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).

Review :
Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist makes an indispensable contribution to our understanding of Venetian humanism, while paving the way for future explorations of Renaissance literature at the intersection of classical antiquity, print technology, and transformations in spatiality and visual culture. Pietro Bembo on Etna is an ambitious book that accomplishes a great deal. Classicists and early modernists alike will benefit from Williams's brilliant rendering of De Aetna, his meticulous tracing of the "Etna Idea," and his impressive leveraging of several scholarly literatures to excavate the poetic, scientific, and historical layers of meaning in Bembo's brief but riveting dialogue. Anchored in scholarly authority and...masterfully argued with extraordinary sagacity... Essential for those who love the Italian Renaissance and want to know more about one of its fundamental figures. Williams ... moves deftly from one episode or argument to the next. He nails down each with a philologist's precision, while still offering a critic's imaginative interpretation. [Williams'] volume is a carefully-crafted delight which interweaves rigorous scholarship on the Classical intertexts and Humanist influences of Bembo's De Aetna with a beautiful thread detailing the painfully human relationship between Bembo father and son. In both presentation and content, then, this volume deserves whole-hearted recommendation. [Williams] demonstrates a magisterial command of a wide range of scholarly concerns, from the history of mountaineering to the complex political and scholarly landscape of Quattrocento Venice. Set against this broad backdrop of interests, the volume is also clearly rooted in a deep and confident command of the extensive and multi-lingual literature concerning Pietro Bembo in particular. Part-biography, part-critical edition, interspersed with surveys of art, printing and Classical volcanic literature, this volume is sure to become a well-thumbed reference for students and researchers across a range of fields. this rich and intelligent study uses [De Aetna] as a consistently enticing way into Bembo's intellectual world. ... This is unquestionably the definitive work on the De Aetna in any language, but it is also indispensable for readers with interests in any aspect of Bembo's own achievement or the early-16th-century cultural innovations in whose development and promotion Bembo played such a vital part. A valuable resource for scholars interested in Italian, neo-Latin, and/or Renaissance literary and cultural studies. ... Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. This book offers the fullest reading available of De Aetna, a dialogue in which Pietro Bembo, an important figure in the history of Italian Renaissance literature, recounts an ascent that he had made of Mount Etna in Sicily. In clear, engaging prose, Williams shows how this often-misunderstood work marks both a turning point in the development of Italian Renaissance humanism and a key step in the self-fashioning of its famous author, in which Bembo presents to the world the image of himself that he wanted to have disseminated. Highly recommended. This captivating, wide-ranging study of Pietro Bembo's volcanic dialogue takes us from one end of Italy to the other, from the canals of Venice to the edge of Mount Etna's perpetually smoking crater, moving deftly through subjects that range from the history of mountaineering, the history of print, and the beginnings of empirical science, to a sensitive, sympathetic portrayal of the complex relationship between a remarkable father and a remarkable son. A reader's delight! Williams's volume is a carefully-crafted delight which interweaves rigorous scholarship on the Classical intertexts and Humanist influences of Bembo's De Aetna with a beautiful thread detailing the painfully human relationship between Bembo father and son.