Cardinal Pietro Bembo's accomplishments as a poet, linguist, philologist, and historian are well known, but his activities as an art collector have been comparatively little studied. In his writing, he directed his attention to the past via texts--Ciceronean Latin and Petrarchan Italian--for their potential to transform present and future ideas. His assembly of antiquities and contemporary art served an intermediary function parallel to his study of texts. In this dissertation I investigate Bembo as an agent of cultural exchange by offering a reconstruction of his art collection and, in so doing, access his thinking in a way not yet accomplished in previous work on this writer. Chapter One offers a historiographic overview of my topic and collecting as a subject of art historical study. Chapter Two maps the competition and overlapping interests of collectors who bought from Bembo's heirs. Chapter Three calls upon anthropological methodology for treating the study of material culture and applies it to Bembo's mission as a collector. Chapter Four concludes with a statistical analysis of subjects and object types to which Bembo was drawn. In the extensive Object Catalog individual works are examined in conjunction with one another and considered for what they reveal about Bembo's theoretical strategy. Appendix A is a timeline outlining Bembo's life. Appendix B is a chronologically ordered selection of accounts describing Bembo as a collector and descriptions of his collection and his properties. Appendix C is a Bembo family tree. Appendix D presents by location known repositories for traced objects that can be connected to Bembo's collection. The recovery of Pietro Bembo as a collector illustrates that his wide-ranging ambitions were intertwined. His museum was not a place fixed in geography but, rather, a dynamic mechanism for transmitting the analytic power and poetic potential he located in the visual. / Art History
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TEMPLE/oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/1993 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Nalezyty, Susan |
| Contributors | Cooper, Tracy Elizabeth, Hall, Marcia B., Bolman, Elizabeth S., 1960-, Lukehart, Peter M., 1955- |
| Publisher | Temple University. Libraries |
| Source Sets | Temple University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation, Text |
| Format | 468 pages |
| Rights | IN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/1975, Theses and Dissertations |
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