Paradigms of Historical Development: The Raccolta Aragonese, Landino, and Bembo's Prose

Abstract

This article analyses the relationship of Pietro Bembo's Prose with the introductory Epistola of the Raccolta Aragonese and Cristoforo Landino's proemio to his Comento sopra la Comedia, with regard to their views of the previous vernacular tradition and in particular the more or less comparable paradigms applied to past literary history. The question of whether Bembo knew Poliziano's Epistola is investigated, and the similarities and dissimilarities between the different narratives concerning cultural development and the ways in which these narratives are elaborated in the three texts are evaluated. In Martin McLaughlin's formulation, Pietro Bembo's Prose "proceed to transfer Bembo's Latin Ciceronianism to the volgare. The written works of Boccaccio and Petrarch, the vernacular equivalents of Cicero and Virgil, are for Bembo the sole models in the new language. But Ciceronianism underlies the Prose in another way too. Bembo notes that the full cycle of Golden Age (the Augustan era), Decline (the Middle Ages), and Revival (Bembo's lifetime) has taken place in Latin, leading to the triumph of Ciceronianism, whereas the vernacular after the Golden Age of Petrarch and Boccaccio has only reached the stage of Decline. . . . Here Bembo is imposing the humanist Latin model of Golden Age-Decline-Revival on the literature of the Italian vernacular, and making each of those stages correspond respectively to the three centuries, Trecento, Quattrocento, and Cinquecento. This influential model replaces the previous paradigm established in the Quattrocento by Bembo's predecessors, Landino, Poliziano, and Lorenzo, who had purveyed