times, making readers forget about the second letter by Pico. Of course, this happened because after 1525 Bembo had become the so-called dictator of the Italian language, publishing his treatise… Click to show full abstract
times, making readers forget about the second letter by Pico. Of course, this happened because after 1525 Bembo had become the so-called dictator of the Italian language, publishing his treatise Prose della volgar lingua, and his fame as a humanist and a Latin and Italian writer was recognized throughout Europe. In the meantime, Bembo’s letter De Imitatione was used by Benedetto Varchi in his preface to the posthumous edition of Prose della volgar lingua (1549), when he says that Bembo’s treatise “cleaned the previous century roast in the Florentine language” (see De Imitatione, 128), putting an end to the “questione della lingua” (the issue regarding which Italian language was to be used) with the declaration of the final victory of Bembo’s point of view: Italian writers had to imitate fourteenth-century Florentine authors—specifically, Petrarch in poetry and Boccaccio in prose—just as humanists imitated Virgil’s Latin poetry and Cicero’s Latin prose. This is also why Bembo’s letter is so important and worthy of being not only translated into Spanish but also scientifically edited for Spanish-speaking scholars around the world.
               
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