SOURCE: Terpening, Ronnie H. “Mythological Exempla in Bembo's Asolani: Didactic or Decorative?” Forum Italicum 8, no. 3 (September 1974): 331-43.

In the essay below, Terpening examines Bembo's use of mythological stories in Gli Asolani as instructional devices.

Since the publication of Burckhardt's seminal work on the Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), much has been written and said about the relationship of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.¹ The role of mythology in this wide-ranging debate has been of fundamental importance. The Burckhardtian view in which medieval man looked to classical mythology for moral sustenance while the Renaissance individual focused on myths in their purity has been, at least, in part, modified.² Quattrocento Platonists were thoroughly grounded in the allegorical method and as a result pagan mythology served as the vehicle for much of the philosophical thought of the time.³

Among the Humanists the search for allegorical significance in mythology was a...