SOURCE: Gottfried, Rudolf B. Introduction to Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani, translated by Rudolf B. Gottfried, pp. vii-xx. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954.

In the following excerpt, Gottfried relates Gli Asolani to events in Bembo's life—notably his three love affairs—and minimizes the influence of Platonism on the conception of love propounded in the poem.

If any readers of Gli Asolani visit Asolo itself, they will find that the topography of the region dramatically reveals one difference between the age of Pietro Bembo and their own. Bembo carefully describes the garden in which his dialogues take place: the steps descending from the palace of the Queen, the formal pattern of arbor, hedge, and wall, the two marble windows opening on the wide Trevisan plain below, the fountain around which his gentlemen and ladies gather in the laurels' shade; and as a pendent scene he later shows the little wooded...