Pietro Bembo

madrigal the most important secular music of 16th-century Italy.^[2]

literature of Italy, and erected a monument to Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) in Ravenna.^[3] Bernardo Bembo was an ambassador for the Republic of Venice (697–1797), and was accompanied by his son, Pietro. During his father's ambassadorships to Florence (1474–1476 and 1478–1480), Pietro acquired a love for the Tuscan dialect, from which the Italian language

Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara (r. 1471–1505). For writers and composers, the city of Ferrara was an artistic centre where Bembo met the poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533); later, in the 1497–1504 period, Bembo wrote his first work, Gli Asolani (The People of Asolo, 1505), a poetic dialogue about courtly love, which stylistically resembled the writing styles of the humanists Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) and Petrarch (1304–1374). The poems were later set to music, which Bembo preferred to be sung by a woman to the accompaniment of a lute, an artistic wish granted in 1505 when he met Isabella d'Este (1474–1539) in her response to having received a gift copy of Gli asolani.^[4]

Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara (1476–1534), son of the previous duke. In the event, Bembo left the city of Ferrara when Ercole employed Josquin des Prez (1450–1521) as a composer to the chapel; fortuitously, Bembo left town just as the Black Death plague killed most of the population of Ferrara in 1505, including the renowned composer Jacob Obrecht

San Marco di Venezia.^[6]

Basilica of San Clemente.^[7] At Rome, Cardinal Bembo continued to write, and revised his earlier works, whilst studying theology and the history of Classical antiquity (A.D. 8th–6th c.). Despite having been rewarded for his successful administration of the dioceses of Gubbio and Bergamo, the Church did not promote Bembo to bishop.^[7] In 1547, Pietro Bembo died at the age of 77 years, and was buried in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.^[8]

The Divine Comedy (1321). His works may be considered as an early instance of the Petrarchism movement within the Renaissance literature.^[9] In the book Prose della volgar lingua (The Prose of the Vernacular Tongue, 1525) Petrarch is the model of verse composition, and Bembo gives detailed explanations of the communicational functions of rhyme and stress in the sounding of a word and the cadence of a line to achieve a balanced composition. That the specific placement of words within a line in a poem — based upon the writer’s strict attention to the sonic rhythm of vowels and consonant letters — would elicit from the Italian reader and listener the range of human emotions, from grace and sweetness to gravity and grief.^[10] Bembo’s rules of poetical composition in Prose of the Vernacular Tongue were basic to the development of the techniques of musical composition that made the madrigal Italy’s pre-eminent secular music in the 16th century.^[11] His theories of musical composition were disseminated by the Venetian School, by composers such as Adrian Willaert, whose book Musica nova (New Music, 1568) contains madrigal compositions derived from the linguistic theories of Bembo.^[11]

puritanical tendency to a profane dualistic gnosticism