United States or Costa Rica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
All Ferrara was in an uproar, for she owed her fame to Strozzi, one of the most imaginative poets of his time, the pet of everybody, the friend of Bembo and Ariosto, the favorite of the duchess and of the entire court. On his father's death he had succeeded to his position as chief of the twelve judges of Ferrara. He was still in the flower of his youth, being only twenty-seven years old.
He tells us that Caracciolo received her with great joy; but he is silent on the score of the lady's emotions on that occasion. There you have all that is known of Dorotea Caracciolo's abduction, which later writers including Bembo in his Historiae have positively assigned to Cesare Borgia, drawing upon their imagination to fill up the lacunae in the story so as to support their point of view.
Ariosto and the two Strozzi were there, likewise the Cardinal Bembo who became a somewhat too ardent admirer and Aldo Manuzio, and other men of distinction.
Even Villari and Gregorovius, so unrestrained when writing of the Borgias, discard the extraordinary and utterly unwarranted stories of Guicciardini, Giovio, and Bembo, which will presently be considered.
The truth is, the poet should have attached himself wholly to the Medici. Had he not adhered to the duller house, he might have led as happy a life with the pope as Pulci did with the pope's father; perhaps have been made a cardinal, like his friends Bembo and Sadolet. But then we might have lost the Orlando.
It was not five minutes, however, ere these fellows were gratified. Sydney Ben said to be a runaway Ticket-of-Leave-Man, and for reasons of his own, one of the few who still remained on duty had, for the sake of the fun, gone down with the rest into the cabin; where Bembo, who meanwhile was left in charge of the deck, had frequently called out for him.
Among the more modern writers we find those whose works we have discussed, Petrarch and his friends, Guarini and Perotti, and Valla with his enemy Poggio; among the others we notice Alexander ab Alexandro, a most learned antiquarian from Naples, of whom Erasmus once said: 'He seems to have known everybody, but nobody knows who he is. The chief treasure of the place was a Bible, illuminated in 1478 by a Florentine artist, which the Duke caused to be bound 'in gold brocade most richly adorned with silver. 'Shortly before he went to the siege of Ferrara, says his librarian, 'I compared his catalogue with those that he had procured from other places, such as the lists from the Vatican, Florence, Venice, and Pavia, down to the University of Oxford in England, and I found that all except his own were deficient or contained duplicate volumes. His son, Duke Guidubaldo, was a celebrated Greek scholar; and the eulogies of Bembo and Castiglione on his Duchess, Elizabeth Gonzaga, attest the literary distinction of her Court.
It is the very irony of fate that the poem which has been the subject of severe censure should prove to be a translation from Cardinal Bembo. The standard of the twentieth century is not the standard of the sixteenth, and it is certain that Luis de Leon has not the unfettered liberty of a godless layman. He is restrained by his austere temperament, by his monk's habit, by Christian doctrine.
But if Oviedo, in addressing his letters to cardinal Bembo, thought fit to flatter the taste of a man so familiar with the study of antiquity, Sir Walter Raleigh had a less poetic aim. He sought to fix the attention of Queen Elizabeth on the great empire of Guiana, the conquest of which he proposed.
There are numbers of MSS. from Italy in this bookcase, and, though hardly any of them have Wotton's name in them, it is not to be doubted that they came from him. A good proportion of them, too, can be traced back a step farther, for they have in them the name or the arms or the handwriting of Bernardo Bembo of Venice, the father of the more famous Cardinal Pietro Bembo.
Word Of The Day